gregladen | January 7, 2009The government of Iran sucks.
Doctor Arash Alaei and Doctor Kamiar Alaei are two Iranian physicians who have reportedly been detained in Iran by Iranian authorities. The physicians, who are brothers, were apparently arrested at the end of June, 2008 and their current whereabouts are unknown. Physicians for Human Rights calls on the government of Iran to disclose their whereabouts, provide them access to lawyers and family, and either to charge them with an internationally recognized crime or release them immediately.
Doctor Arash Alaei and Doctor Kamiar Alaei have played a role in putting…
gregladen | January 7, 2009Hey, my outgoing mail server is borked, so the only way I can communicate with the outside world is via my blog. So here are some critically important messages for several individuals.
Rick McPhearson: Yes, thank you so much for taking the initiative. I'll do whatever you want, as always. Just don't let PZ hurt me.
Erin: OK, we're doing it on Friday, I'm looking forward to this, it will be great. Good luck to Tim. Two questions: What do I tell my readers, and are we going to re-visit the bar on the right side?
Robert: I love a good script, go for it, man!
Skepchick: What? What? You…
gregladen | January 7, 2009As I'm sure you already know, you can type this into a google search box:
time Minneapolis
and you can put lots of different words in there and get the time.
What you may not know is this. If you look at the page you get back, there is a little clock graphic next to the time. The time on the clock graphic is correct. Like this:
Cool.
gregladen | January 7, 2009As you know, Senator Elect Barack Obama appears to have chosen neurosurgeon, former policy wonk, and CNN medical/health correspondent Sanjay Gupta to be surgeon general. There is an overwhelming display, on the science blogosphere, of diversity in opinion about this choice. My opinion: WTFC? He is not clearly unqualified, and the exact nature of the surgeon general position is poorly defined and ever changing. He is a communications guy, so maybe his thing will be about science communication. That would be interesting. The point is that every surgeon general has either picked up on a…
gregladen | January 7, 2009Consider Super Ubuntu. It is a version of Ubuntu that includes additional extra stuff that many people install anyway.
Here is a wiki page about it.
And you can download an ISO here. (That web site might make a little noise.)
I have not tried it. If you do, let me know how it goes.
gregladen | January 7, 2009And other Republican Hypocrisy.
The long term plan is to keep Franken out of the Senate forever. Not likely to work. The short term plan is to "taint" Franken, so that morons like Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan (MSNBC) and Ann Coulter can constantly refer to "Franken" and "Tainted" in the same sentence again and again and again.
Which will not be a big problem, really, because this is an old and tired strategy that no on cares about any more. But it is their strategy.
Now, about the law suit: We have the Republicans hitting all the same exact issues that have been hit before. Of these issues…
gregladen | January 6, 2009Activists from Texas who call themselves the Austin Informant Working Group have added their voices to the chorus denouncing Brandon Darby, who gave information to the FBI while posing as a protester to infiltrate groups planning demonstrations against last November's Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.....
Read the rest here.
Here's the Brandon Darby Information site. Very interesting reading.
gregladen | January 6, 2009When Woody Allen was little, and his mother told him to clean his room, he countered that he had no room to put his stuff. So he was waiting for the universe to expand for a while, then it would be possible to clean his room.
Since then, cosmologists have admonished that expansion of the universe does not really work that way. Of course, it DOES work that way, and Woody Allen was partly correct. But other factors we need not discuss here would come into play and ruin his plans.
Anyway, I've been going to the gym a lot lately, and I noticed yesterday that my weight had gone UP instead of…
gregladen | January 6, 2009The Wall Street Journal published an editorial yesterday called "Funny Business in Minnesota" which is so full of inaccurate innuendo and fallacious factoids that when I read it I thought I was reading a piece of junk mail from Ann Coulter.
Well, the honorable web site Five Thirty Eight has torn the WSJ a new one with a brutally accurate deconstruction of the editorial. There really is virtually nothing in this editorial that can be salvaged from the bright light of actual truth. Shame on the Wall Street Journal.
Read the commentary from Five Thirty Eight here.
Thanks Mike for the tip.
gregladen | January 6, 2009Details are just coming in now.
LIVEBLOGGED
They are suing regarding: the missing ballots from Minneapoilis (that won't go anywhere, already settled); Double counting (that issue was killed off already, it will go no where) and absentee ballots (they have a small chance that this may develop into something).
They state that they will win in state court but have federal level issues to argue as well.
The won't and the don't. But it looks like they will continue to press.
We are being told that several Coleman lawyers are not being dispersed around the state to depose, under oath,…
gregladen | January 6, 2009It turns out that a recently discovered population of land iguanas on the Galapagos is probably a new species that represents the basal (original) form of Galapagos land iguana. Moreover, this iguana is found in an unexpected place, according to a paper just coming out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
And it's pink.
In 1984, Hickmann and Lipps said the following about the various pieces of evidence giving age estimates for the Galapagos islands:
... all are less than about 2 million years old. This age, together with independently determined geologic ages,…
gregladen | January 5, 2009This is my favorite web carnival, and this is the best version of it yet, owing to the outstanding submission we have this month!
Welcome to the 15th Monthly edition of the blog carnival Linnaeus' Legacy. I thought about being cute and fancy for this edition of the carnival, but instead, I decided to be very systematic.
(de - dum - dum)
So we will work our way from foundations to theory to taxonomy, and within the taxonomic sphere we will sort out all the organisms by type and deal with them as such appropriately. And then, we will have one little item related to extinction. The place…
gregladen | January 5, 2009Heath and Deborah Campbell had three children. They named them:
JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell
Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell
Adolf Hitler Campbell
That, right there, would be child abuse. Do you not agree?
The story is making the rounds (h/t: McDuff) because it is little Adolph's third birthday and the local shop-rite (supermarket) refuses to provide the family with a cake enscribed "Happy Birthday Adolph Hitler."
The story can be found here and here.
gregladen | January 5, 2009This important story was broken by the Minnesota Independent.
The agency that runs the airport refused an apparently serious offer to buy the men's room stall made famous by Craig's 2007 conviction for disorderly conduct in a sex-solicitation sting operation by the airport police. The Metropolitan Airport Commission (MAC) spurned the $5,000 offer, which arrived by certified mail, according to MAC spokesperson Patrick Hogan.
Details are here.
And here is some related video content. Includes explicit demonstration of gay sex solicitation toe tapping.
gregladen | January 5, 2009As many of you have already heard, the recount process in Minnesota to determine the outcome of the Senatorial race is over, and Al Franken has been certified as winner.
There is now a review period of seven days during which any voter in the state of Minnesota. Including me, Al Franken, whomever, can sue for an Election Challenge. Although both Secretary of State Ritchie and I have expressed the opinion that Norm Coleman, who lost the race, is unlikely to issue such a challenge, the press and even Coleman's lawyers have suggested that a challenge will in fact be filed by three o'clock…