gregladen | February 26, 2008... And Mike Huckabee is not standing for it...
Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has endorsed an amendment to Colorado's constitution declaring that a fertilized egg is a person.
"This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception," Huckabee said in a statement backing the Colorado Human Life Amendment.
"With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value.
This is not good enough, because it does not cover unfertilized eggs. Menstruaters are Murderers! This…
gregladen | February 26, 2008My wife, a biology teacher, gets crazy in the biology classroom. She is famous for her interpretive dance renditions of numerous cellular processes. The students in the first class of the day reportedly stare in disbelief and roll their eyes, but the students in the other classes throughout the day seem to love it. Several of her students have taken to filming her pedagogical paroxysms, and you know that some day, Amanda will be a YouTube Star.
But this brings up the interesting and difficult mixture of students, personal technology in the classrooms, teachers, schools, school…
gregladen | February 26, 2008So a few weeks ago, we were over at Amy and Danny's for dinner, and somehow Lipitor came up (no, it had nothing to do with the dinner Amy was cooking!). Anyway, Amy said "Why is Jarvick a good person to promote a drug. I mean, that heart didn't work, right?"
Hmm.... Good point, I thought.
And now, today's news makes it all the more interesting...
WASHINGTON -- Pfizer Inc said on Monday it was voluntarily withdrawing advertising for its Lipitor cholesterol drug featuring Dr. Robert Jarvik, inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart, because its ads led to "misimpressions."
The ads involving…
gregladen | February 26, 2008Hunting Wolves; Killing Elephants
The Bush administration on Thursday announced an end to federal protection for gray wolves in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, concluding that the wolves were reproductively robust enough to survive.
"Wolves are back," said Lynn Scarlett, the deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior, in a telephone conference call with reporters. "Gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains are thriving and no longer need
A coalition of wildlife and environmental groups dismissed the government's claims and announced plans for a lawsuit to reverse the decision, which is…
gregladen | February 26, 2008Rick Perry, Eagle Scout, has written a book about the boy scouts, defending their homophobic and anti humanist activism.
An Eagle Scout and the father of an Eagle Scout, Perry stresses the importance of Scout values such as being "courteous and kind." (He is fond of phrases like "gosh" and "jiminy cricket.") He has received the Silver Antelope Award for outstanding service to the Scouts.
Asked in a recent interview if being gay was a choice (I presume the interview pegged Perry for gay, otherwise why ask him this question), he replied:
I'm not a social scientist. I can't answer the…
gregladen | February 26, 2008According to the New York Times, "An
Errant Satellite Is Gone, but Questions Linger" ...
Should the people of the world be breathing a sigh of relief that the risk of a half-ton of frozen, toxic rocket fuel landing who knows where has passed? Or should they be worried about the latest display of the United States' technical prowess, and see it as a thinly veiled test for a shadow antisatellite program?
gregladen | February 26, 2008
Angst-ridden teens have different brain structures: study from PhysOrg.com
It turns out your mother was right: angst-ridden teens really do have something wrong with their heads.
[...]
Who benefits from antidepressants? from PhysOrg.com
A new study published today in PLoS Medicine suggests that antidepressants only benefit some, very severely depressed patients.
[...]
A Quick Comparison of the Clinton and Obama Health Care Plans is at The Scientific Activist.
gregladen | February 26, 2008Well, the Face Book Thing seems to be going fairly well. Scienceblogs.com fanclub now has hundreds of members. My own site has a paltry ten or so, but growing. I hope soon to have eleven. I've been going through the Scienceblogs.com fan club list and begging folks from my old home town (Albany, NY), or who are in Minnesota to be my friends. So far most of them are ditching me. I can see that the life of a stalker would be a depressing one.
Anyway, I think something will happen soon. We'll be notified by the organizers and I'll pass the information on. I think we are all supposed to…
gregladen | February 26, 2008A new genetic analysis of people from around the world adds further confirmation to the African origin of humans. The study of genetic details from 938 individuals from 51 populations provides evidence of how people are related and different, researchers led by Richard M. Myers of Stanford University report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
[Read it at the New York Times]
gregladen | February 25, 2008Microsoft has paid the Library of Congress a huge bribe so that they will adopt some of their software, and use hardware running Vista in public areas. This is, of course, a travesty. As Boing Boing says, "Library of Congress sells itself out to Microsoft for a mere $3 mil" ... You know this is George Bush's fault.
For Microsoft's part, this is a move on Google (because it will involve a major search facility) and on The Gutenberg Project and all other open access publication projects (because this is a bald faced effort to control access to key, old, not copyrighted documents such as the…
gregladen | February 25, 2008During the 2006 holiday shopping season, in a desperate attempt to boost weak sales of their totally sucky operating system, Microsoft engineerd the branding of zillions of PC's with the slogan "Windows Vista Capable."
Those computers were only able to run a very stripped down version of the senselessly bloated operating system, called, laughingly and absurdly, "Vista Home Basic."
People bought the computers, and felt ripped off (because, well, they Microsoft had really stuffed it to them) and somebody sued.
Now, the suit is elevated to the level of a class action suit.
At a hearing…
gregladen | February 24, 2008That's the sound of a statistician or scientist laughing because s/he has some really cool software and didn't pay a dime for it, because it is open source.
Since we are talking about R, I thought I'd point you to a couple of screen shots. Here it is running on a Mac, and here it is running on a Linux box.
These images are about 200 K or so in size, and they come to us courtesy of The R Project for Statistical Computing
gregladen | February 24, 2008Here they are, in all sizes for all blogs, sidebars, and other places on the web. Or blow it up and put it up on your lawn next to your Obama or Clinton sign! Or use it as the template for a tattoo. ...
gregladen | February 24, 2008Well, the oscars have just started, and the stars, the women in their fancy dresses and the men in their tux, are all talking to Regis on the red carpet....
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...
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Oh, man, this is boring, I'm going to do something else. Haven't seen any of the movies anyway....
gregladen | February 24, 2008Our worst fears have been realized. We finally have a chance to boot the Republicans out of the White House, and now Ralf Nader has announced his insane plans to do whatever he can to make sure that a Democrat does not take that position.
Nader announced his quixotic and potentially destructive plan, in which he will abuse his name recognition, manipulating legions of mindless, moronic Nader-Simps, and get his jollies telling us all how much the system is broken while he single handedly guarantees eight more years of economic strife and bloody warfare ... in a Sunday interview on Meet the…
gregladen | February 24, 2008We are busy watching Florida, and the ICR's new "degree" in "life science education" in Texas, and whatever crap is happening in our own back yards, and we may be missing a dramatic development at the K-12 level in Texas: Social conservatives are poised to take over the Texas State Board of Education.
There is a primary in on March 4th, in which Barney Maddox, a conservative creationist, may take over the run against incumbent Pat Hardy for the District 11 (Fort-Worth) seat on the school board. This would shift the balance of power in the Lone Star (read Libertarian Fundamentalist Yahoo)…