j7uy5 | August 12, 2007I am now sure this is a ladderback. The photos are not very
sharp, having been taken through a window screen, but it still was fun.
The cat was going nuts. That's how I knew there was something
outside.
j7uy5 | August 12, 2007
src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_VbG-d6SeGuA/RePVVb_nxrI/AAAAAAAAAD8/6QbLROwzDEk/s400/anandita-tamuly-eats-bhut-jolokia.jpg"
align="left" height="344" width="238">
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">I had not seen this when
I first posted about the
href="http://spectre.nmsu.edu/dept/academic.html?i=1251"
rel="tag">bhut jolokia -- the world's hottest
chile pepper. There is a woman, Annindita Tamuly, in India
who can eat 60 of them in two minutes. And she smiles while
doing it (
href="http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/videos.aspx?id=5897">video).
There is also a 17-month-…
j7uy5 | August 11, 2007
The headline:
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/10/AR2007081001204.html">Federal
Deficit Sharply Lower.
The text: The lower year-to-date
deficit was the
result of a record of $2.12 trillion in revenues. Spending, however,
was higher -- $2.27 trillion, which also marked an all-time high.
So we spent more than we brought in, but the deficit is lower?
No,
the rate of increase in the deficit is lower.
The deficit is still getting bigger. Last year the
deficit went up $239 billion. This year it is
was projected to be "only" $205 billion. I say was…
j7uy5 | August 10, 2007
That, by the way, is a cobra's head in the man's mouth.
Courtesy
of
href="http://news.sky.com/skynews/picture_gallery/0,,70141-1279060,00.html"
rel="tag">Sky News "We've scoured the globe for
some of the best, strangest and most dramatic photographic images..."
They quipped that snake charming is "a dying profession."
j7uy5 | August 10, 2007It is
reasonably well established that treatment with bright light is
effective for
href="http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/07/seasonal_affective_disorder_th_1.php">seasonal
affective disorder (SAD). The standard treatment is
to have someone expose their face to 10,000
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux">Lux
of bright light every morning, for 30 minutes, preferably at the same
time each day. Early studies indicated that it is the
intensity,
not the color, that matters.
This is all very good, but bright light treatment sources are
necessarily big, fragile, and use a lot of…
j7uy5 | August 10, 2007A
while back, Shelly wrote a nice introduction to
title="Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder">ADHD
at
Retrospectacle:
href="http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/07/the_neuroscience_of_adhd_1.php">The
Neuroscience of ADHD. Read that first, for
background, then consider this to be a minor addendum. There
are still people who believe that
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention-deficit_hyperactivity_disorder"
rel="tag">ADHD is not real. This is a
good example of the scientific findings to the contrary. It
is an open-access article (there is one every
month)…
j7uy5 | August 10, 2007Since
the last one of these I did was kind of scary, I decided to do
one that is not so scary. It is just plain weird.
But there is an interesting story to it.
The
female is on the left; the male is on the right. These are
the genitalia of mallards:
href="http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Anas_platyrhynchos.html"
rel="tag">Anas platyrhynchos.
The photo is from
href="http://www.livescience.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display.php?pic=070430_duckgenital_evolu_02.jpg&cap=The+genitals+of+the+mallard+%28Anas+platyrhynchos%29%2C+female+vagina+…
j7uy5 | August 9, 2007When
unemployment is high, there is more penetrating trauma (bullets,
knives). When employment is high, there is more blunt trauma
(automobile crashes).
href="http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Health/2007/08/09/unemployment_predicts_hospital_trauma/5157/">Unemployment
predicts hospital trauma
Published: Aug. 9, 2007 at 9:48 PM
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 9 (UPI) -- A University of Tennessee study found a
link between unemployment rates and a type of trauma seen in hospital
emergency rooms in pre-Katrina New Orleans.
Atul Madan of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and
colleagues…
j7uy5 | August 7, 2007The
problem, specifically, is that patients with insurance
have higher copays and deductibles. According to an article
on Medscape (free registration required):
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/560983">U.S.
Hospitals Struggle Over Who Can Afford to Pay
By Kim Dixon
CHICAGO (Reuters Life!) Aug 06 - For-profit hospitals, which are
blaming unpaid medical bills for tamping down profits, are struggling
with a simple question: Which patients have the ability to pay their
hospital bills? ...
HMA and LifePoint Hospitals are among the major chains that posted
falling profits in…
j7uy5 | August 7, 2007
This
is featured at the
title="Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences">PNAS
site. It appears to not have a permanent link, but it
currently is the PNAS Featured Image on their
href="http://www.pnas.org/misc/news.shtml">PNAS in the News
page. The caption:
The
intromittent organ of male seed beetles is armed with sharp spines that
puncture the genital tract of females during copulation. This form of
sexual conflict has led to coevolution between these harmful male
structures and female defense morphologies in this group of insects. Photo
courtesy of Johanna Rönn…
j7uy5 | August 7, 2007This
is an interesting exercise. Go to a site and state your
position are various issues that are major themes for next year's
Presidential election. Also rank the importance of each issue
to you.
When you do this, you are not seeing the names of any of the
candidates.
The site then shows you which candidate most closely matches you on the
issues.
I'm not saying that you should choose your vote based only upon logic,
but I suggest that you at least consider what would happen if you did.
Pick Your
Candidate.
j7uy5 | August 7, 2007The
US Army Crops of Engineers accidentally dumped hundreds of unexploded
pieces of ordnance on the beach at Surf City.
Now, they want the city to help pay for the cleanup.
"If
they're talking about getting any money out of Surf City to pay for
their mistakes, they can forget about it," Mayor Leonard T. Connors
told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Apparently they conducted a 71 million dollar reconstruction of the
beaches, unknowingly using sand from a World War I dump site.
(
href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070806/ap_on_fe_st/odd_beach_ordnance_found;_ylt=ApKG5AWHHB5FyhKu.…
j7uy5 | August 6, 2007Donald
Rumsfeld
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6930197.stm">revealed
the identity of the star witness in the Abu Grhaib case.
The guy who blew the whistle had been promised anonymity.
In
2004, the Bush Administration
href="http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/07/bush-admin-may-be-responsible-for.html">blew
a Pakistani intelligence operation
by revealing sensitive intelligence information. In 2005, there was the
Libby-Plame Leak. In April 2006, the Bush Administration blew
rel="tag"
href="http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/2006/04/leaker-in-chief-reduxoffered-…
j7uy5 | August 6, 2007Put
this near the top of things you don't want to do to yourself.
This woman developed fever and abdominal pain, but did not
disclose to her physician what she had done. That was her
second mistake.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
The oval darkish thing near the top of the CAT scan (marked by arrow)
is not supposed to be there. That white round thing in the
photo on the right is not supposed to be there. It looks like
a caseating granuloma, but is rather large for that...
Surgery
was performed, obviously. It was discovered that she had
inserted a plastic bag of cocaine…
j7uy5 | August 5, 2007At
least in mice, that is: rendering the
href="http://neuro.fsu.edu/%7Emmered/index.htm">vomeronasal
organ inactive by deleting the gene
href="http://www.informatics.jax.org/searches/accession_report.cgi?id=MGI%3A109527">TRPC2
(transient receptor potential cation channel, subfamily C, member 2)
results in profound behavioral changes. This was reported on Nature
News:
href="http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070730/full/070730-13.html">Nose
goes, gender bends. They include a video (link
below the fold) of mouse sexual behavior (which may not be safe for
work, depending on the…
j7uy5 | August 5, 2007
There is an article in the Christian Science Monitor about the history
of tainted consumer goods. The author, Jane Whitaker, points
out that the USA has a history of problems ever bit as bad as what we
are seeing now from China, and makes the point that we should not be so
quick to judge. That is a fair point, but there is another
equally fair point to be made.
href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0803/p09s01-coop.html">America's
history of tainted consumer goods
Critics of Chinese products shouldn't be so quick to judge.
By Jan Whitaker
from the August 3, 2007 edition…
j7uy5 | August 5, 2007Unexploded
ordinance: the legacy of modern warfare.
href="http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/DD5ACEEF-42DC-4FA0-82CE-7C053457C9E1.htm">Reportedly,
Laos has the undesired distinction of harboring the most UXO's of any
country. Courtesy of Uncle Sam, of course.
It's hard to imagine they have more than Iraq, but maybe nobody has
gotten around to estimating the number in Iraq.
Anyway, in Laos, there is a UN-sponsored team clearing the ordinance.
Unfortunately, at the rate they are going, they estimate it
will take 400 years to finish the job.
Even
children are learning new…
j7uy5 | August 5, 2007
href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-pod-pix,1,4514127.photogallery?coll=chi_business_promo&index=3">LA
Times photo by Stephen Osman
Buddy,
a 4-year-old Jack Russell terrier, catches a wave while surfing Rincon
Point in Santa Barbara County, north of Ventura, Calif.
j7uy5 | August 4, 2007Separation
of Church and State often is controversial. Sometimes I worry
about this in the USA, but I have never seen anything as bad as what
they are doing in China:
href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2194682.ece">China
tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate
From The Times
August 4, 2007
Jane Macartney in Beijing
Tibet's living Buddhas have been banned from reincarnation without
permission from China's atheist leaders. The ban is included in new
rules intended to assert Beijing's authority over Tibet's restive and
deeply Buddhist…