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Grading the news: Metal ion complier edition.

So I'm looking around at news stories and I find one on Eurekalert about neurodegenerative disease entitled "Researchers link metal ions to neurodegenerative disease". My first thought: "Wow." Then I read the article. Then I thought: "Wow. Eurekalert screws it up (again)." According to the news snippet: researchers from Emory have found that a certain way that metal ions bind to amyloid fibrils in the brain appears toxic to neurons. (The build up of Amyloid fibrils in the brain is linked primarily to Alzheimer's but also to Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome and Parkinson's disease.) So I'm thinking…

2008 Resolution No. 1: Raise My Prices

I've been trying to think of some New Year's Resolutions that are germane to living in our modern world (this is just a polite way of saying "Grow up! You can't spend your entire life living like you did when your were fifteen"). Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed being a teenager, but am even happier that I am now old enough to reflect on how to refine my delicate existence on Mother Earth, rather than just worry about where my next pizza is coming from. It's time to abandon any hope of salvaging 2007 from the savages of our critics. Those of us who have not used this year wisely, who have…

Learning The Truth About Cancer

The American Cancer Society has released its summary of a telephone survey of 1000 Americans in which they were asked whether twelve statements about cancer were true or false; the paper will be published in the September 1st edition of Cancer. The top five responses given as "true" are listed below; the percentage of adults who thought that the statement was true is in parentheses: 1. The risk of dying from cancer in the United States is increasing. (68) 2. Living in a polluted city is a greater risk for lung cancer than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. (40) 3. Some injuries can cause…

The Five Deadly Sins of Doctors, Part II: Sloth

Sloth...Myopia...Nihilism...Hypocrisy...Ennui... Just to pronounce them reveals the ugliness within. God forbid anyone should ever have a doctor who worships such character flaws...which reminds me of something: What better way to illustrate how these faults perform a disservice to patients than by giving examples where yours truly has committed them? Say, maybe this will lead to an invitation to appear on one of those television shows where folks are goaded into self-flagellation! Let's gather 'round kiddies and listen as the C. O. reads chapter seven of How to Be a Fantastic Doctor ,…

Calling All Enthusiasts of Sesquipedalian Neologisms!

My, but the folks who think up names for pharmaceuticals have been busy lately! Here is just one example of a new compound from the promising world of translational research and now approved for usage. Just please don't ask me to pronounce it - I said it fast three times last night and conjured up the ghost of Tatanka Iyotanka. "FDA Approves Vectibix (panitumumab) for Advanced Colorectal Cancer" Those of us who follow the latest developments in colon cancer research (and don't you dare call us a bunch of nerds) are thrilled with the approval of panitumumab. Is it possible to translate this…

Poetry in Nature

Looking at the rhythmic repetition of forms in nature, it is easy to imagine the influence of some creator, a poet who fixes each line with exact meter and measure. Yet, upon closer examination, we can see how these forms are self-creating, born from simplicity. Nature writes its own poetry. Take, for instance, the tendency of water to form branching veins. We begin with an aspen leaf, which landed on a bed of new fallen snow. Weeks of gentle sun warmed the dark leaf and melted the surrounding snow. In that tiny pool of water, the softer parts of the leaf began to decay, revealing an…

Friday Fractal XXX*

Many things in nature seem to catch our eye, simply by hovering between a turbulent, chaotic mess, and a vacant, serene sense of order. Art tends to reflect these dichotomies in nature, even when it is fairly abstract in nature. Some say it stems from a fascination from good and evil, or light and dark, or lightness and weight. But I suspect we just enjoy exploring the point in between. This is the draw of fractal art... the edge of the fractal itself, the border between the "inside" and the "outside" of the shape, can be followed endlessly. To our eye, the wonders and variation never seem to…

A Nerd's Scrapbook

Ok, people, it's on. If you haven't heard, we are in the midst of a nerd-off, triggered in response to the Hottest Science Blogger list.At first, I was reluctant to join in. (Actually, I was too busy playing adventure games on my beloved computer, while singing along to "the Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas" by They Might Be Giants.) Then, after my nerd score put me in the upper half of the ScienceBlogger rankings, I figured I shouldn't bother to hide it. So, without further ado, here is my entry into the battle of the nerds: My Nerd Scrapbook I've always been a nerd. It probably started…

Topology and Men with Thick Facial Hair

Grisha Perelman recently crawled out the woods with the solution to the Poincare conjecture, and snuck back. There was talk of his love for mushrooms. ...er... Well, it turns out he was correct, so we probably shouldn't question his inspiration. Since I'm about to hit the road, I can't get into as much detail as I'd like. I've quoted Henri Poincare a number of times (here and here) and reffered to him as a grandfather to chaos theory. (I think... if I haven't, I should have.. he is.) His conjecture, which Perelman managed to prove, was that any object, in any dimension, could either be…

Acidic oceans threaten corals

Across our planet, ecosystems are changing, big and small. While I've been compiling my thoughts on small, local changes (check back next week for a series on the subject) I found a bit of news about some very drastic changes to large areas. According to an article in this week's Washington Post, coral reefs may be greatly affected by an increase in the acidity of the oceans, which correlate with the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Scientists are estimating that the acidity level will be sufficiently deadly by the end of this century: Scientists expect ocean pH levels to…

"Seeing Eye Horse" - Good Morning America Segment on Non-Canine Service Animals Misses Key Issues

Today, in their segment called "Seeing Eye Horse Shocks Store Patrons," Good Morning America featured a woman riding her full sized "Seeing Eye horse" through the grocery store (pictured left). In doing so, it made one of the most common media mistakes: focusing on the quirk factor (woman riding horse in store!) at the expense of the issues involved.  The result is a classic oversimplification of a complex story that's pretty misleading about the use of horses as service animals:  Most non-canine service animal users are not, in fact, people who ride horses through stores.  As far as I…

Study Finds Egg In The Face Can Be Dangerous

Here's some good solid (and useful) science for you: Researchers in Liverpool have announced that "being pelted by a raw egg may result in eye injury." How they know: They studied the medical records of 18,651 patients who'd gone to an eye unit over the course of 14 months. Thirteen turned out to be egg attack victims. As the BBC reported: "The researchers warn that egg hurling, sometimes used as a form of protest or prank, is far from harmless. They point out, in the Emergency Medical Journal, that an egg has the same dimensions as a squash ball but carries even more weight when lobbed.…

Patients affect us in this way

I spent the afternoon today in the office of Dr. Leaky, a neurologist who takes care of people with movement disorders. One of the patients we saw was a man in his late fifties with amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease). ALS is a devastating illness that slowly drains muscle strength until a person is unable to feed themselves, bathe themselves, or even breathe for themselves. The course of the illness varies, but affected people usually die of respiratory failure within five years of the diagnosis. This patient had been seeing Dr. Leaky for a year, ever…

The amazing generosity of geoscience readers

Jess is looking for posts about outreach that we've done. I'd like to talk about outreach that other people have done. This month, many of the bloggers here at Sb have been participating in Donors Choose, a campaign to raise money for schools. October is a crazy month for anyone who goes to the Geological Society of America meeting, so I teamed up with Highly Allochthonous and Eruptions in the hope that, between the three blogs, we'd be able to scare up some support for K-12 geoscience education. October's over tomorrow, and the geobloggers' challenge has raised more money than any other…

Survey: women geoscientists and blogs

Geoscientists: we (Anne Jefferson, Pat Campbell, Suzanne Franks, and me) are looking for participants in a survey about the ways in which women geoscientists use blogs (both as readers and as writers). Here's the official request: Over the past several years, the geoscience blogosphere has blossomed so much that this fall, the Geological Society of America (GSA) will be convening a Pardee Keynote Symposium called "Google Earth to Geoblogs: Digital Innovations in the Geosciences." Kim Hannula started wondering how blogs serve women geoscientists. Kim recruited the rest of us and we decided…

Hello World

Welcome, Gentle Reader, to my new series of Internet tubes. You'll notice that I haven't completely unpacked - there's no pretty banner at the top, the blogroll is woefully incomplete (it's probably even missing your blog!), and my profile page is not nearly as verbose as it could be. It'll get there in time. You can expect to see this space filled in the future with rocks, water, progressive identity politics, primal screams of terror associated with my master's thesis (due in May) and/or my upcoming wedding (September), and maybe some lolcats. Oh, and pie - I am quite keen on pie. If you're…

Landscapes = Circuits?

Here's an interesting story from Northern Arizona U. A researcher named Brian McRae, a recent forestry graduate who used to be an electrical engineer, used his knowledge of circuit theory to craft a new model for gene flow through landscape corridors: McRae had been struggling with how to predict genetic effects of landscape pattern while working with Beier on a study of cougars in the southwest United States. "We had maps of cougar habitat and genetic samples spread across four states," he said, "but no way to predict how habitat pattern was driving gene flow across the region." Using…

Using Molecular Biogeography to Analyze Biodiversity

Glaciation opening new niches? The bushbuck, Tragelaphus sciptus, is sure to fill them. I finally had the chance to this paper on molecular biogeography, an interesting method of analyzing the biodiversity of widespread populations of organisms, their core habitats and their interconnectivity. The bushbuck is a perfect model; it populate most of Sub-Saharan Africa. Genetic data - from mitocondrial DNA and cytochrome b complimentary data - was contextualized and integrated with geomorphologic and climatic history. For those keeping track of the ecology basics posts, this is a perfect example…

The Amazing Adventures of Escherichia coli

Escherichia coli is a superstar of the microbe world. Like Zelig, E. coli has been on the scene of some of the most important discoveries of biology. For example, Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod deciphered gene regulation using E. coli's Lac Operon. Roger Kornberg discovered DNA polymerase using E. coli. Even E. coli's parasites (phages) are better known than the vast majority of living things. The story of E. coli is an amazing one, so it is puzzling that E. coli does not have its own biography. That is, until now: Microcosm. And I couldn't think of a better biographer than science writer…

Isopropyl Ether (Into the high, explosive, ether)

I love old bottles of chemicals, and I've spent many a diverting hour perusing the shelves of old university faculty members' labs. Bottles used to come in pounds (or giant "ONE MOLE" sizes). Faded typewritten text, "For medical, pharmaceutical compounding, or research use" labels, yellowed paper - Korean war-era bottles are about as romantic as bottles of chemicals get. When it's old ether, though, I get away and make a note to warn someone (and not come back anytime soon). Ethers - chemicals of the general formula R-O-R', can form peroxides (R-O-R'-OOR'') at the carbon adjacent to the…

UCS response to my piece in SciAm

On Thursday, I had a post published on Scientific American's guest Blog about claims that genetically modified food crops could contain allergens. In it, I am critical of the Union of Concerned Scientists (a science advocacy and policy organization), for what I read as misplaced opposition to genetic engineering: The UCS’s concern about the dire state of our food system is well-founded, and I applaud their efforts to get out in front of the policy debate. There’s just one problem: they oppose using all of our technology to help combat this problem. Specifically, I’m talking about genetic…

Dr. Strangebacteria or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Using my Gut Instinct

A male fly walks into a bar and orders cornmeal-molasses- yeast. A pretty female fly comes and sits next to him. They look at each other, he starts to say hello, but then she orders some starch. He turns away. She looks at his glass of cornmeal- molasses -yeast and gets up to leave. A recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that mating preference of fruit flies (the ones you see swarming near a piece of rotten fruit) is dependent on their diet because it changes the composition of bacteria that live in their gut (gut microbiota). This intriguing…

Are the Tonga Earthquake and Eruption Related?

On Monday, airline passengers were the first to observe the eruption of the just-barely-above-the-water volcano that forms the islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha'apai, in Tonga. Three days later, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake occurred on the Tonga trench. Was the timing of these two events just coincidence? Yes. Why do I think the events were unrelated? Well: Earthquakes happen all the time. Thankfully for Tongan residents, I am using a geological definition of "time" here, but still: A major earthquake on a major plate boundary does not require any special explanation. The earthquake was a…

The Science of Deliciousness

It might be Labor Day, but summer isn't really over until the blackberries are gone. Since it's harvest season and I'm still on leave from the workforce, I've been spending my time figuring out clever things to do with the bountiful produce of my neighborhood's back alleys. (Tonight: lemon verbena drops and blackberry meringue pie.) Hoping to bring a little more order to the proceedings after a failed blackberry fish sauce, I cracked open Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking, written by one of the gurus of high tech haute cuisine, Hervé This. This explains with charming prose…

Friday Rock Blogging: Oil Shale

This is a thin section from some Colorado shale. It's part of the Green River Formation, which is a series of rocks laid down about fifty million years ago when the West was wet. The shales come from a set of lakes that occupied part of what is now Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. If you look carefully - behind the white blotches, where the contrast is too blown out to say much but they might be grains of sand or bits of shell that fell into the lake where this was forming - you'll see that the shale was deposited in alternating layers of dark stuff and light stuff. The dark stuff is organic…

Nature special issue on personal genomics

In addition to the African and Asian genome studies I discussed in my last post, Nature's latest issue is completely dominated by the topic of personal genomics. Erika Check Hayden has a nice piece on methods to squeeze the most out of your own personal genomic data, including a profile of the Promethease analysis tool developed by SNPedia's Mike Cariaso and Greg Lennon, which allows personal genomics customers to match their own genetic data against the SNPedia database. Hayden also gives me my first ever mention in Nature - unfortunately, it's in the context of the unflattering comments I…

Happy One Year Blogiversary to The Scientific Activist

(...and to ScienceBlogs.com, which was coincidentally launched on the same day.) Today marks the one year anniversary of my first post on The Scientific Activist, back at the old scientificactivist.blogspot.com site. The first post, which laid out fairly accurately what this site would be about, can be read here. In fact, if you read down to the bottom, the very first comment on my site came from Tara Smith of Aetiology, who I later ended up joining on ScienceBlogs.com. ScienceBlogs.com has certainly been the story in science blogging this last year, and it has been quite an honor to be a…

Want to Erase the Gender Gap? Elect Female Politicians

Photo source. Gender gaps are a persistent challenge in cultures across the globe, whether it is a gap of income or educational achievement. Is it a dream that the gap can be erased? Researchers at Harvard, MIT and Northwestern University have just published an extraordinary study in Science reporting that this is achievable, using a case study in India. How did they do they study? From June 2006 to November 2007 we surveyed a random sample of 495 villages throughout the 165 village councils in Birbhum district in West Bengal as part of a large-scale study of the effects of political…

Goodbye, Google Labs

Google has announced that it will "wind down" Google Labs. This is disappointing given the power of these tools for teaching and research, not to mention that using these applications is just plain fun. I hope that Mr. Coughran at Google honors his statement that "we'll incorporate Labs products and technologies into different product areas." It is particularly important that these applications be available freely to the public. From PC World: During the company's most recent earnings conference call, co-founder Larry Page, who took over as CEO in April, said that the company was in the…

Afghanistan, Iraq, Now Libya? Consider the Human Cost

Source. Casualties in time and space. The seasonal rhythms and shifting battlefields of the war emerge in this view of the 8131 Afghan civilians killed or injured over the past 2 years, recorded in a military database called CIVCAS. (No data were available for the first 5 months of 2010 in the Southwest region.) CREDIT: GEORGE MICHAEL BROWER I am at a loss for words with today's news of a missile strike in Libya. PARIS -- American and European forces began a broad campaign of strikes against the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi on Saturday, unleashing warplanes and missiles in the…

First Sign of Spring: Our Cells' Beauty In Bloom

SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURE 22. Three-color multi-harmonic SI mode rendering of nuclear histones (blue), the nuclear membrane (red), and the actin cytoskeleton (green) in a fixed LLC-PK1 cell. Histones are labeled with mNeptune / H2B; the nuclear envelope is labeled with mEmerald / lamin B1; and the actin cytoskeleton is labeled with Alexa 568 / phalloidin. Scale bar: 10 micrometers. I live in the Northeast region of the US, and around this time of year am yearning for the sight of a blossum - any sign of impending Spring. And this morning - pop! - one reveals itself in a surprising place - the…

Your Brain On Music: Pure Joy

Figure 2: Evidence for dopamine release during pleasurable music listening. Listening to music invokes our emotions, ranging from pleasure to disdain. It is one of our most human experiences, sometimes so profound that words cannot convey the intensity. One of my closest friends, a professor of musicology, once asked me in a moment of self doubt, "You're a scientist, you do important things...what good is music?" Like many creative souls, he had no idea how important the contribution of art is to our very being. Canadian scientists have documented in a study published in Nature…

23andMe contributes to longevity GWAS controversy

As an addendum to my previous post on the controversial "longevity genes" study, you should go and check this out. It's a post on the blog of personal genomics company 23andMe, and it's a pretty impressive piece of scientific dissection of the longevity GWAS paper - in addition to detailing a variety of methodological problems with the study, the authors actually used the 23andMe database to look at the predictive value of the longevity GWAS algorithm on their own customers: We took a preliminary look in our customer data to see if the proposed SNP-based model described in Sebastiani et al.…

The Half-Million Dollar Man: Inventor of implantable computers wins Lemelson-MIT prize

When the judges sat down to award this year's $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize for innovation, there were a slew of fantastic inventions to choose from. Implantable computers, ultra-low-cost cameras, a revolutionary solar panel design. Luckily for the judges all three were invented by one man: Dr John A Rogers. Seemingly cut from the same cloth as previous Lemelson-MIT recipient and Renaissance man Erez Aiden (see Ed Yong's excellent piece here), Roger's creations have spanned a disparate collection of sciences, and he himself credits his success to an appreciation for both science and the…

The Mass Libel Reform Blog - Fight for Free Speech!

This time last year I sat in a small room at the Law Society surrounded by far more luminary individuals such as Simon Singh and Dara à Briain for the launch of the report Free Speech is Not for Sale, which highlighted the oppressive nature of English libel law. In short, the law is extremely hostile to writers, while being unreasonably friendly towards powerful corporations and individuals who want to silence critics. The guests heard from scientists, comedians, and journalists who had been gagged by these laws. The English libel law is particular dangerous for bloggers, who are generally…

Navy adapts laser cannons to chat with stealth subs

Talking to submarines is a very a tricky business - most communication systems are based on radio or acoustic signals, but neither travel very far in water. This means that to pick up radio signals, submarines must surface or raise communication buoys very close to the surface, neither of which are appropriate for nuclear-powered stealth submarines that remain deep underwater for months at a time. Radio operators can overcome the problem of poor signal penetration by using giant arrays broadcasting in extremely-low frequency ranges, but these are expensive, difficult to build, and…

Gobble, Gobble! A Thanksgiving Science Roundup

Ah, Thanksgiving. A day full of turkey, cranberries, pie, and, of course, SCIENCE! After you fill your stomach with gravy and stuffing, stuff your mind with all this great Thanksgiving science. What's any good Thanksgiving feast without some turkey? Emily Anthes of Wonderland starts the meal off with an offering of thanks for the turkey's contribution to cancer research. But wait! That's not all the science of turkeyhood to be consumed. Feast your minds on my contribution at the Scientific American Guest Blog: the social-cognitive abilities of turkeys. And in case you're feeling particularly…

Phylogeny Friday - 22 September 2006

We've been working our way across through the tree of life in the past few editions of Phylogeny Friday. Last week we took a look at the evolutionary relationships of the animals, and we realized that many of the branching orders are extremely difficult to resolve. Today we're going to zoom in on one of those branches: the vertebrates. Why? Because we're vertebrates and we want to know about ourselves. Also, we know more about this taxon than any other taxon. These are the same rules than have governed us throughout our journey. After last week's disappointingly unresolved tree, I have a…

Dolly is 10 Years Old

I've missed the last two Ask A ScienceBlogger questions. My lack of answers were due to a combination of being busy and apathy toward the questions -- more busy with the science education question and apathy for the science policy question. But this week's question is on cloning, so I kind of feel obligate to post a response (being a genetics blog and all) despite not really being interested in the topic. So, they're asking us: On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to? Ten years ago, I was in…

Why there is no point in applying to the NSF

Excerpts from the individual and panel reviews on my latest proposal: The proposed work is very well motivated, well organized, with clear plans and goals. There is also: Guaranteed access to the CTIO 1.5 m, and an established track record with WIYN 3.5 m observations, add to the strength of the proposal. Preliminary work from both telescopes are presented, indicating that the proposed aims for the project are achievable. And, indeed, in another one: This is a well written proposal (though I found unnecessary details in places such as section 4). I should note that the stuff I put in…

Election 2008: Against Whom Shall We Discriminate?

No one wants to talk about it, but apparently some people might not vote for Obama because he is black (a phenomenon I could indeed feel when I recently visited my home state Ohio). At this point, addressing the topic of race is sort of like having to argue against the Earth being 10,000 years old: it's stupid and boring. But, if you can still stomach trying to understand U.S. dunderheads, this column in the Philadelphia Inquirer analyzes the role Obama's father's darker skin could play in November. The sad reality in the U.S. is that many citizens (and, in particular, union members) are…

Grunting, breathing hard and sweating makes you smarter

Grunt pant exhale grunt uugh grunt exhale. Pump that iron! That's all you really need to know. So get with it! Get to the gym and start exercising! Actually, it seems that aerobic exercise was the beneficial form of physical activity. The researchers next step is to determine what forms of activity are the best for avoiding memory loss. Here's some details from the CNN article: Exercise boosts brainpower by building new brain cells in a brain region linked with memory and memory loss, U.S. researchers reported Monday. Tests on mice showed they grew new brain cells in a brain region called…

Religion: The Methamphetamine of the Masses...

Or maybe even PCP... If religion was merely an opiate, that would be cool. There would be a lot of stoned people waking around. But it could be argued that religion is a harder drug, one that makes people do harder, more unsavory things than just sitting around bleary eyed and happy. Like killing people. A new book addressing the horrors of religion is in press. This is Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World by Bob Avakian. Avakian takes an explicitly Marxist approach to examine the question of what harm can come from believing in god (any god).…

You People Don't Know What You Are Missing ...

... by not having a blog that gets lots of spam. The following items were trapped in my spam filter over a period of several minutes, this morning. Each from a different IP address, each signed by a different author, each has a different fake email (provided), each points to a different web site (not provided) and each has a slightly different set of grammatical mistakes but all of the messages are of the same form. rubber mulch [Frierson147506@yahoo.com] says: Can I just say what a reduction to find someone who actually knows what theyre talking about on the internet. You positively know…

Will your gun help you in the case of a home invasion?

Statistics and various studies show that yes, it might, but they also show that having a gun in the home is also potentially very dangerous, so the net aggregate outcome (and economists have strong armed us into thinking that net aggregate outcomes are the only criteria that are acceptable, bless their pointy heads) of having a gun in the home is that someone in your home is more likely to be shot and possibly killed than that the gun will be used to thwart a home invasion. But enough about facts, let's look at two very current anecdotal cases and argue about them for a while: Thwarting a…

Collins on Fresh Air

Francis Collins was on Fresh Air this afternoon, and I listened. I was not bedazzled. Collins seems like a very nice fellow and he sounds sincere, but sweet jebus, what a load of tedious platitudes. He made excuses for religion and how it can be accommodated by science, but wasn't convincing to anyone who thinks at all beyond the superficial. Terry Gross tried to draw him out on why he believes, but we only got the same old tiresome nonsense. He claims that science is only valid in investigating nature, and that it is inappropriate for examining ideas beyond nature … which begs the question…

Evolutionary enamel loss linked to molecular decay of enamel-specific gene

The evolutionary history of mammals can be reviewed as the evolutionary history of tooth loss. The early mammals had many teeth, and every now and then in evolutionary time, a tooth is lost wiht subsequent species arriving from that n-1 toothed form having that smaller number of teeth. With ver few exceptions, no mammals have added a tooth during the history of mammals. (Excepting maybe the very very earliest period, but probably not.) Well, the loss of enamel itself is also an evolutionary trend in mammal history, and recent research published in PLoS Genetic associates genetic changes…

Hate Crimes are OK in OK

Or at least that is what we may infer from the recent legislative activity in one of America's most socially backwards states, Oklahoma. The Oklahoma State Senate passed a bill Thursday that would limit what authorities can do when prosecuting hate crimes. The bill would prohibit local and state law enforcement agencies from sharing information about hate crimes with federal authorities if the state of Oklahoma did not recognize the crime as a hate crime by its own statutes. The Oklahoma Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender community condemned the bill's passage. source, whole story I…

Replacing the DSCC with the Blogosphere?

A few days back, the phone rang and I stupidly answered it. I usually don't unless I know who it is, but lately I've been getting a lot of phone calls from health insurance adjusters and therapists and whatever-whatever, so I've taken to actually answering the damn thing sometimes. So this lady is on the other end of the phone line telling me that she is a "professional fund raiser" and "this call may be recorded" and all about how the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is gonna use my money to make sure there are more Democrats in the Senate, yadda yadda. I interrupted her. I said…

A little wine with your Linux?

Wine is the software that runs in Linux which, in turn runs Windows programs. I have experimented and I could not believe how incredibly well it worked. At the time, I was able to achieve greater stability and performance, and an easier install, for Microsoft Office and Endnote on my Linux computer than on a comparable Windows computer. The down side in that case was that I had to run an older version of Office than currently (at that time) available. Also, the increase in reliability and performance was almost certainly in the system itself. The Linux computer simply worked (as they…