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Your galaxy stinks!

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all. Fry: Oh. What's it called now? Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Urrectum. Here, let me locate it for you. Fry: No, no, I, I think I'll just smell around a bit over here. Too bad that Futurama's smell-o-scope doesn't actually exists. Why is it too bad? Because space is filled with many different types of atoms, including Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Hydrogen: the elements essential to terrestrial life. In space, these sometimes appear in isolation, they sometimes appear…

Weekend Diversion: Is Your School Prepared for H1N1 Zombies?!

There's nothing quite like a Bob Dylan song performed to perfection by someone other than Bob Dylan. All Along the Watchtower and Knockin' on Heaven's Door are the most common ones, but a little further off the beaten path is Girl from the North Country, which is knocked out-of-the-park here by Sam Bush. Now, the college I'm at has issued warnings about the symptoms of both swine and regular flu, and what to do in case of infection. But they've said nothing about that disease that turns you into a zombie. Thankfully, the University of Florida has come to the rescue, outlining a six-page…

How old is the Sun in Galactic years?

The Moon goes around the Earth, the Earth goes around the Sun, and the Sun goes around the center of the Milky Way. We know the Moon takes about 4 weeks to make its trip around the Earth, and that causes the Moon phases: We also know that the Earth takes one year to go around the Sun, and that causes the seasons: We also know that the Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, which means it has gone around the Sun about 4.5 billion times. Well, now I ask the question(s): How long does it take the Sun to go around the Milky Way? How many times has it done that so far, and how many…

On that chilling law suit against the environmental groups

... which I've posted on before ... there are new developments, summarized at Inside Climate News: Invoking the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a federal conspiracy law devised to ensnare mobsters, the suit accuses the organizations, as well as several green campaigners individually and numerous unidentified "co-conspirators," of running what amounts to a giant racket. "Maximizing donations, not saving the environment, is Greenpeace's true objective," the complaint says. "Its campaigns are consistently based on sensational misinformation untethered to facts or…

James Bond Incarnations In Order

Roger Moore just died, and you will hear that he was the third, or second, or fourth, "James Bond." He wasn't. Here is the list of James Bond actors: Barry Nelson, who played in "Casino Royale" in 1954. This was an episode in the "Climax!" TV anthology series, like they used to do a lot. Sean Connery is often regarded as the "original" or "first" James Bond, and in a way he was, since he was the first to repeat the role in several movies. But he was actually the second actor to play the role in front of a camera. He did seven Jame Bonds. David Niven, who played also in "Casino Royale," a…

Heartland Institute BS Book

I had the immense pleasure and great honor of joining Molly, Nick, and Tim on the Geeks Without God podcast to talk about the recent mailing of a book and some other material about climate change to science teachers, by the Heartland Institute. This mailing was an effort to sow seeds of doubt about climate science, but the way they pulled off this little caper will probably have the opposite effect. The Heartland Institute does not survive this conversation. No kittens or puppies were harmed, though. Go Here To Listen To the Podcast, and Support Geeks Without God (not safe for work,…

Weekend Diversion: Preparing for Winter

It's something we take for granted in our modern, civilized world, but a really severe winter brings a lot of challenges with it. Dar Williams, in her song February, sings a beautiful piece about living through the worst of it: Some places have it far worse than others. For instance, in many places of the world relatively close to the equator, the dead of winter still brings tremendous amounts of daylight: In other places closer to the Arctic/Antarctic circles, the winter solstice barely brings any daylight at all, making for an incredibly dreary, depressing time: But some people thrive in…

A Question of Why: The Analemma

I'm trying something new here: I'm going to give you a little bit of information and a teaser, and we'll see -- in the comments section -- whether any of you can figure it out. Imagine that you went outside, each and every day at the same time, and mapped the position of the Sun. What would you see? Image credit: Astrosurf. Doing this -- taking a snapshot of the Sun at the same exact time from the same exact place on different days -- gives you what's called an analemma. Now, on Earth, the top of the analemma happens during the Summer Solstice, the lowest point of the analemma happens…

Weekend Diversion: How to Argue

Sometimes, things happen that either: I don't agree with, I have different information than other people (sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes just different), or need to be spoken out against, and that's when it's time to argue. Sometimes, there's no way around it, and I need to put myself out there, and make the best argument I can for one side of an issue based on what I know. So this week, I have a conciliatory song from one of my favorite bands that you've probably never heard of, Storyhill, and this song is called Continents Collide. If I was near Dearwood, MN, I'd definitely…

Weekend Diversion: Web vs. Image Test!

One of the great things that comes along with warm weather is outdoor concerts! Click "play" below to hear one of the greatest live performances of All Along The Watchtower ever recorded. Any idea who that is, rocking out on the guitar? Sounds a bit like Carlos Santana, doesn't it? Sounds talented like Hendrix, but the sound is too clean to be him. Who is it? Let's have you take a guess (before you scroll down). Time for the answer? The guitarist who's rocking this song so hard is Jerry Garcia. Seriously, who knew the lead singer of the Grateful Dead was such a fantastic, talented…

Cheney's "Hunting" and Political Poses

Everyone knows by now that Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter during a quail hunt in Texas over the weekend. No big deal there, it's a risk you take and no one is going to suggest it was anything but an accident. But the fact this was not real hunting but a "canned hunt", where farm-raised game are released as little more than targets for lazy "sportsmen" to kill. These farm-raised animals aren't even afraid of humans, having been raised by them, so they just sit there while you kill them. According to this letter, 500 pheasants were released on this ranch in Texas…

The Insanity Continues

As if we needed more evidence of the absolute lunacy of Islamic fundamentalism, here's the latest: Furious Syrians set fire to the Danish and Norwegian embassies on Saturday as protests over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad showed no signs of abating despite calls for calm... Chanting "God is Greatest," thousands of protesters stormed the Danish embassy, burned the Danish flag and replaced it with a flag reading "No God but Allah, Mohammad is His Prophet." They set fires which badly damaged the building before being put out... Demonstrators also set the Norwegian embassy ablaze. It was…

Ed's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1

Many of the other ScienceBlogs authors are posting "greatest hits" links so that new readers can get acquainted with some of their previous writings. I figured I'd do the same, since I know I've picked up a lot of new readers in the last few weeks. These links will open up the original post from the archives of my old blog, but I ask you not to leave comments there because the main page of that blog is no longer accessible and no one will notice. If you want to leave comments, please do so here. Here are some of my favorite posts on various subjects. On Intelligent Design Dembski's Designed…

The Importance of Islamic Modernism

A potentially important meeting took place last month in Mecca, a meeting involving the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of leaders from 57 predominately Muslim nations. It was important because it was the largest and most important gathering of Muslim leaders to unequivocally condemn terrorism and extremism, and to call for an Islamic renaissance. The statement issued at the end of this conference could be the seed out of which grows a serious and global Muslim resistance to the forces of extremism and terror. The Mecca Declaration, read out at the end of the summit's final…

Frightening New Legislation

A friend sent me this item in the news this morning, which is appropriate given the recent discussions of using noms de plume on the internet. Under a new law signed by the President last week, sending any email or posting any messages that are "annoying" to others without revealing your identity is a crime. This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison. "The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly…

Hypocrisy Alert

Jason links to this at PL and I had to comment here: An executive committee member of the Southern Baptist Convention was arrested on a lewdness charge for propositioning a plainclothes policeman outside a hotel, police said. Lonnie Latham, senior pastor at South Tulsa Baptist Church, was booked into Oklahoma County Jail Tuesday night on a misdemeanor charge of offering to engage in an act of lewdness, police Capt. Jeffrey Becker said. Latham was released on $500 bail Wednesday afternoon. Latham, who has spoken out against homosexuality, asked the officer to join him in his hotel room for…

Pentagon Spies on Gay Rights Groups

I got into a conversation the other day with someone who doesn't understand what the big deal is when it comes to the NSA spying on Americans. He gave what I'm sure is a common response from Americans, which is essentially that he trusts the government not to abuse such power. He said, "Do you really think they're using that power to just go after people they don't like? They're using it to go after terrorists so the only people who should be concerned about it are terrorists." It's a common argument, but it is breathtakingly naive and betrays a serious ignorance of history. The US…

The A-bomb

Oregon looks to have an interesting senate primary race, with two excellent Democratic candidates, Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick, vying for the chance to give the boot to two-faced Republican Bush booster Gordon Smith. I think it's great that more progressive candidates are being drawn into loftier tiers of the political arena, and that good wholesome sparring in the primary is going to help them both out, no matter who wins the nomination. Why, though, should this Minnesotan care? Aside from having lived in Oregon for 9 years (and loving it!), it was brought to my attention that there's a…

A Special Happy Birthday

Tomorrow is the 81st birthday of a fascinating man that Sandefur and I have had the great privilege to get to know over the last couple years. His name is Mark Perakh. He's a retired physicist from CSU, the owner of the TalkReason site and the author of many articles and at least one book on the intelligent design movement. He's also a contributor to the Panda's Thumb. And to say he has lived an interesting life is to provide new meaning for the word "understatement". He was born in the Soviet Union shortly after the revolution that swept the communists into power. He fought in World War 2,…

Miers Withdraws, Ed Wins, Film at 11

As I predicted last weekend, Harriet Miers has withdrawn as a nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. This paves the way for someone competent to be named to the court. But far more important than that, it wins me another dinner from my buddy Dan Ray. And that's what really matters, right? In his statement accepting her resignation, Bush of course had to spread a little manure around that even a 10 year old would know is nonsense: I understand and share her concern, however, about the current state of the Supreme Court confirmation process. It is clear that senators…

With Friends Like These...

The Ku Klux Klan has received permission to hold a rally in Austin in support of the proposal to outlaw same-sex marriage in the Texas Constitution, and the planned demonstration has managed to unite forces on both sides of the debate heading into the Nov. 8 election. "I hate to say that we don't need friends like that, but we don't need friends like that," said state Rep. Warren Chisum, a Pampa Republican leading the push to pass Proposition 2, which would define marriage in the constitution as a union between one man and one woman. "I want nothing to do with the KKK," he said... Officials…

David Brooks on Miers

The conservative columnist David Brooks has been looking up all of Harriet Miers' past writings and isn't happy with what he sees: Of all the words written about Harriet Miers, none are more disturbing than the ones she wrote herself. In the early '90s, while she was president of the Texas bar association, Miers wrote a column called "President's Opinion" for The Texas Bar Journal. It is the largest body of public writing we have from her, and sad to say, the quality of thought and writing doesn't even rise to the level of pedestrian. Nothing excuses sentences like this: "More and more, the…

The Mind of the Zealot

I haven't written much about the (former) Judge Roy Moore situation in Alabama, but as an interesting postscript, I find this incredible. Judge Moore's supporters are now asking President Bush to withdraw the nomination of Mark Pryor for the federal bench. Pryor is the Alabama Attorney General who enforced the federal court ruling taking Moore's monument out of the courthouse. Now mind you, Pryor is a prominent religious right supporter and publicly favored Moore's position - until Moore defied a binding federal court order to remove it. Then, as state attorney general, he simply had to take…

The JoMo Creationist Challenge, Take 4

It seems I can't get away from this amusing little story. Thanks to one of my readers for reminding me that JoMo and Karl Priest's challenge was featured about a year ago in an article by Richard Dawkins about why he doesn't bother to debate with creationists. He even reprints the e-mail he was sent, which was of course identical to the one that all of the others have been sent. Though I'm not exactly a fan of Dawkins, I did find his article quite amusing. Since it was sent by Karl Priest "on behalf of Dr. Joseph Mastrapaolo, Dawkins muses, Who, I wondered, was "Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo"?…

Star Trek: Discovery's 'Choose Your Pain' Finally Feels Like Star Trek; Season 1 Episode 5

"You are... six years old. You are weak and helpless! You cannot... hurt me!" -Captain Picard, a badass, while being tortured Star Trek has always been a way for us to look at the best and worst aspects of humanity, often through our confrontations with alien races. Different aspects of our fears, our personalities, and our sense of ethics play out on the stage of futuristic science fiction. Our frailties are exposed, and the crew is challenged to rise to the occasion, and to demonstrate the best of humanity, often in the worst situations. For the first time in five chances, Star Trek:…

The Four Ways The Earth Will Actually End

"The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently, we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return." -Carl Sagan Here on Earth, we hear every so often about a conspiracy of how the world will come to an end. The end of the Mayan calendar; Y2K; an encounter with Nibiru; or a biblical prophesy come true are only a small selection of what people “predict” will bring a demise to our world, and soon. Yet even most of the…

Now is absolutely the time to politicize Hurricane Irma and other natural disasters

"Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this." -Michael Eric Dyson Hurricane Irma has, as of this morning, knocked out power to more than 6 million, caused the evacuation of millions more, and has caused flooding and extreme wind damage across hundreds of miles across Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. When Irma first made…

Goodbye, Planet Nine! New And Better Data Disfavors A Giant World Beyond Neptune (Synopsis)

"Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there." -Konstantin Batygin Last year, scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown made a huge splash when they announced that the Solar System likely contained a super-Earth-sized object beyond the orbit of Neptune. They dubbed the world ‘Planet Nine,’ and claimed that it was responsible for the orbits of the longest-period Trans-Neptunian Objects ever discovered. The fact that…

Hitchens on Rose

Christopher Hitchens' appearance on the Daily Show was a disappointment—largely because Hitchens seemed to be half in the bag, and Stewart kept stepping all over his words trying to make them funny, and the short format was not to the favor of a fellow who tends to speak in complete sentences and paragraphs. So how about a half hour interview with an alert Hitchens, with an interviewer who's interested in hearing what he has to say, and gives him the opportunity to speak at more length? Here's Hitchens on the Charlie Rose show. Much better, even if I disagreed strongly with Hitchens on much…

Taking Bachmann Out of Congress

Minnesota's 6th congressional district is represented by Michele Bachmann, who moved from the Minnesota Senate where she was one of the first legislators in the US to introduce academic freedom legislation to silence professors at the University of Minnesota who were lecturing on climate change and evolution, to the United States Congress a few terms back. Bachmann rode on her national popularity as a major co-founder of the Tea Party to secure re-election against a series of reasonable opponents. But last year, four things happened. First, Bachmann's unrelenting over the top craziness…

Sexual Politics of Meat

Usually I don't mention books unless I've read them, but I thought a lot of my readers would be interested in a volume I have only heard about: Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and the Sexual Politics of Meat. Here is the description: When The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams was published more than twenty years ago, it caused an immediate stir among writers and thinkers, feminists and animal rights activists alike. Never before had the relationship between patriarchy and meat eating been drawn so clearly, the idea that…

Language Rules

That title is ambiguous but only if one admits to vernacular usage. Which is legit. Huxley is consonantly making grammatical errors that primarily serve to prove how stupid adults are. English has a typical way of marking past tense, for instance, and he uses it all the time, correctly. So he might have hided himself behind the couch. Or, so he sayed. I see-ed him in the bedroom so maybe he hided himself there. The thing is, we have language rules that are based on nothing more than historical quirkiness and BS, and language rules that are based on the particular system a language morphology…

How to draw birds

Tired of merely watching birds? Ever consider trying to draw them? There's a method to do so. John Muir Laws is very good at this and he's written a book that can help you get started, maybe even become good at it yourself:Laws Guide to Drawing Birds . In case you were wondering, Laws' name does not connect him genealogically to the famous John Muir; his parents named him that. But apparently, there is a connection between names and what people do, and John Muir Laws is in fact a naturalist. This book covers all the usual methodology of illustration but with birds. There are a gazillion "…

Cosmic Events

An exoplanet smaller than the Earth may have been identified in some far away solar system. Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have detected what they believe is a planet two-thirds the size of Earth. The exoplanet candidate, called UCF-1.01, is located a mere 33 light-years away, making it possibly the nearest world to our solar system that is smaller than our home planet. Exoplanets circle stars beyond our sun. Only a handful smaller than Earth have been found so far. Spitzer has performed transit studies on known exoplanets, but UCF-1.01 is the first ever identified with…

How to Follow Curiosity

The NASA Curiosity Rover will land on August 5th. NASA has provided a way to follow along with the show, using a special web based plugin which is set up for Mac and Windows, but not Linux. As NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity prepares to land on Mars, public audiences worldwide can take their own readiness steps to share in the adventure. Landing is scheduled for about 10:31 a.m. PDT on Aug. 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT on Aug. 6), at mission control inside NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Martian fans can help NASA test-drive a new 3-D interactive experience that will allow the public…

Comedians and Society

George Carlin was ahead of society. He led freethinkers, skeptics, others. Think of all those clips from George Carlin routines that we play today as reference to important, vibrant, current ideas. Those clips are always years old, sometimes decades. Something similar could be said of Louis Black. Ellen. There are others. Recently we have seen a rash of something very different happening. The comedian who offended everyone at an atheist conference in Australia earlier this year comes to mind. Recently, when Daniel Tosh suggested that it would be really funny if a woman in his audience…

Many Duluth Zoo Animals Dead In Floods

Duluth, a second tier Minnesota city on Lake Superior, has been flooding. This is a little unusual; heavy rains following a period of saturation have caused a local river that is usually not even heard of to grow very large and cause flooding that a lot of people haven't seen before. The polar bear and the seal were able to leave their enclosures in the high water. The bear was darted and is safely put away somewhere, the seal is said to have taken a stroll around the neighborhood. But the barn animals, apparently including cattle, ovicaprids, and donkey have all perished in the flood. This…

Liars and Outliers

Tonight, on Skeptically Speaking, Desiree Schell will interview Bruce Schneier, author of Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive. From the Amazon page, the author notes: "This book represents my attempt to develop a full-fledged theory of coercion and how it enables compliance and trust within groups. My goal is to rephrase some of those questions and provide a new framework for analysis. I offer new perspectives, and a broader spectrum of what's possible. Perspectives frame thinking, and sometimes asking new questions is the catalyst to greater understanding.…

Judy Scotchmoor gets Darwin Award

No, not THAT kind of Darwin Award. The other one .. the "Friend of Darwin" award: Master Educator, Young Activist, Honored By NCSE It's an age-old story--the master and the newcomer. The expert who has devoted decades to keeping students on the right path. And the new kid who throws himself into the battle for truth, beauty, and the sheer joy of challenging the status quo. The master--and a winner of NCSE's 2012 Friend of Darwin award--is Judy Scotchmoor, Assistant Director for Education and Public Programs at the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP). Scotchmoor is a…

How long can a fly fly?

That is the title of a book by Lars-Åke Janzon, with the subtitle "175 Answers to Possible and Impossible Questions about Animals". Oddly, that particular question appears to be evaded in the book itself, but most of the 175 questions seem to be addressed accurately. This is one of those books you keep around and read bits from now and then...perhaps you bring it on a trip and the tweens use it to create a game show or perhaps you keep it in your Life Science classroom and use it to generate discussion or test questions, or perhaps you just thumb through a fifth of it or so before going to…

Can we please have a scientific cormorant policy in Minnesota?

After hundreds of studies, it has been difficult to link fish predation by cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) to the reduction of fishing quality in Minnesota lakes. It appears that game fish such as walleye and northern pike make up from less than 1% to nearly 3% of the bird's diet. They eat only small fish. Many of the fish they eat are perch, which prey on walleye, and it is even possible that by culling small walleye or northerns, they increase the growth rate for those fish in two way. One is by reducing competition between fish for food, and the other is by exerting selective pressure…

It is important to vote

If you had a friend or relative who didn't vote at all, and for that reason someone you didn't like got elected, then, naturally, you would run them over. Like this: Upset over the result of last week's presidential election, an Arizona woman ran over her husband with her car, believing him to be directly responsible for Obama's reelection because he didn't vote. According to police in Gilbert, 28-year-old Holly Solomon of Mesa and her husband Daniel argued loudly in a local parking lot before Holly got in her Jeep SUV and began chasing Daniel around. She eventually managed to pin him…

NASA reports some totally uninteresting things happening with a small amount of space snow of no consequence

It is called Comet Elenin. Latest indications are this relatively small comet has broken into even smaller, even less significant, chunks of dust and ice. This trail of piffling particles will remain on the same path as the original comet, completing its unexceptional swing through the inner solar system this fall. "Elenin did as new comets passing close by the sun do about two percent of the time: It broke apart," said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office in Pasadena, Calif. "Elenin's remnants will also act as other broken-up comets act. They will trail along in a debris…

... and the envelope please ...

The Research Blogging Editor's Selectionies are out! Hosted by Krystal D'Costa, this award is roughly similar to the Academy Awards, but for blog posts about peer reviewed research. And I won one!!! My post "A word or two about tobacco, and some neat and new research." It was said of this post "At Greg Laden's blog, readers are treated to a bit of botany related to tobacco and we learn that physical evidence has been found linking the Maya to tobacco use." I am truly humbled. Four other posts won the same award. From Krystal's post: Is there a relationship between language density…

Will Global Warming Induced Weather Whiplash Strike The Northeast Next Week?

There is a storm (this one) moving across the southern part of the United States that forecasters predict will turn north over the Atlantic and menace the east coast somewhere between Northern New England and Washington DC or Virginia, possibly much of that area. The storm may develop, forecasters say, into a Nor'easter. I looked at the predicted Jet Stream configuration for next Wednesday and I noticed that is will be all curvy-durvy like it has been so often lately. This curvy jet stream is so much more common these days because, climate scientists think, of the phenomenon of Arctic…

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines

You probably already know about Michael Mann's book, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines." The ongoing assault on climate science in the United States has never been more aggressive, more blatant, or more widely publicized than in the case of the Hockey Stick graph -- a clear and compelling visual presentation of scientific data, put together by MichaelE. Mann and his colleagues, demonstrating that global temperatures have risen in conjunction with the increase in industrialization and the use of fossil fuels. Here was an easy-to-understand graph that, in…

Twin Cities Experiences Mini-Boulder: #WeatherWhiplash

Over the last 48 hours or so a weather system slowly moved across the southern Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota. It was in part shaped and positioned by the jet stream, and it was so slow moving because of the unusually curved nature of the jet stream. This is very much like what happened a few weeks ago in Colorado, but with less of an effect. Nonetheless, there was a damage and injury causing tornado in Nebraska and Iowa, and nine inches of rain in Winona, where there was some very inconvenient flooding. The huge multi-foot snow storm in the Dakotas was part of this system. People…

Things Are Heating Up in the Tropical Atlantic

There are at present two systems in the Atlantic that have a good chance of producing tropical storms and possibly, eventually, hurricanes. One is east of the Yucatan, the other is very near the coast of West Africa. Here's the report from the National Weather Service. I've used a rough routine to convert case so it is not screaming at you (the NWS has not yet implemented the rumored policy of not using ALL CAPS FOR EVERYTHING. 1. The broad area of low pressure in the northwestern caribbean sea is moving toward the west-northwest at 10 to 15 mph. Cloudiness and showers associated with…

Sometimes simple is best

You just never know where the next insight is going to come from. An observation that surfers with cystic fibrosis (a genetic disease that results in mucus build-up in the lungs leading to an increased susceptibility to infection) reported breathing easier after spending time out on the water led researchers to test salt water as a treatment for the disease. A new study inThe New England Journal of Medicine shows that it worked in their pilot studies. Patients were given either a 7% or a .9% saline solution to inhale twice a day for 48 weeks. A number of outcomes were measured,…

December Pieces Of My Mind #1

OK so Google Inbox is excellent and I use it all the time. Takes so much of the stress out of e-mail. But I wonder, when are we getting Google Imbolc? Hehe. This Swedish author intends to talk about the actions of the Medieval aristocracy, instead puts "their acting". And his language reviewer does nothing about it. Story germ: we discover the existence of alien visitors when one is found as a piece of mangled, semi-decomposed roadkill on a major highway. Google Maps knew that I was near Vienna. Then it got confused and teleported me to St. Pölten. Yay Rausing Foundation! Now we'll see what…