Links for 2010-11-05

"Here's the five close-approach images of Hartley 2 captured today, November 4, 2010, by the Deep Impact spacecraft, collected into one file. Boy, do these images reward close examination!"

"The urgency is always there, and the fact that it gets masked sometimes by the "right" candidate getting elected is what puts so much of our society to sleep.  Bitching on the web about how stupid people are is not political engagement.  You're not part of anything when all you do is lob insults.  If you're interested in more than just having people know that you voted and are aware of your political leaders' names, you'd do well to look at Tonya's response [to the mayoral election in Toronto]"

"See what happens when you wallow in hollow disappointment, trudging all over your liberal arts campus and refusing to vote in a rather important mid-term election, all because your pet issues and nubile ego weren't immediately serviced by a mesmerizing guy named Barack Obama just after he sucked you into his web of fuzzyhappy promises a mere two years ago, back when you were knee-high to a shiny liberal ideology?

Well, now you know. This is what happens: The U.S. House of Representatives, the most insufferable gaggle of political mongrels this side of, well, the rest of Congress, reverts to GOP control like a brain tumor reverts to a more aggressive form of cancer, and everything gets bleaker and sadder and, frankly, a whole lot nastier."

"We can now answer the question: "Where do new drugs come from?". Well, we can answer it for the period from 1998 on, at any rate. A new paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery takes on all 252 drugs approved by the FDA from then through 2007, and traces each of them back to their origins. What's more, each drug is evaluated by how much unmet medical need it was addressed to and how scientifically innovative it was. Clearly, there's going to be room for some argument in any study of this sort, but I'm very glad to have it, nonetheless. Credit where credit's due: who's been discovering the most drugs, and who's been discovering the best ones?"

""Right now, there are only three major role models in American society for black children to aspire to: the gangsta rapper, the pro basketball player, and the president of the United States," the statement concluded. "And that is just sad.""