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Korean scientists clone cats that glow in the dark!

This is a-mewsing. (Photo Credit: Gyeongsang National University) When Genetic Savings and Clone shut their doors it looked like wishful cat owners were going to be out of luck and short of kittens. Never fear, the South Korean scientists at Gyeongsang National University have come to the rescue. I couldn't find all the details in the news articles but it appears that they inserted a gene for red fluorescent protein into a somatic cell from a cat, transplanted the cell into an egg cell, put the egg into a female cat's womb and a few weeks later, voila!, lovely white Angora cats that…

Darwin Quotes

I believe from what I have seen Humboldts glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind ... The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. -- I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another Sun illumines everything I behold. - Charles R. Darwin, Support The Beagle…

Tough Love for Fat Hamsters

With water on tap and plentiful food pellets, hamsters live seemingly carefree lives... But there is a darker side to the hamster experience: hamster obesity. The first step is admitting to yourself that your hamster is a fat-ass and should be ashamed of her appearance. The second step is purchasing this awesome Japanese hamster-wheel pedometer. Now when you get home from work and little ScrapScrap claims to have gone to the gym, you can check the pedometer and make sure she's telling the truth. If you read Japanese, maybe you can figure out how to buy one here... If she's lying, a good…

Creepy Crawly Brain Banners

We got an exciting new banner today from Len the creator of Monster-by-Mail! Head over to his website for some absolutely phenomenal pieces of monster art! (Ohh... and make sure you buy stuff or order your own monster. Len's banner is now going to randomly rotate with our wonderful old banner done by my cousin Erin (click refresh a couple time to see them both up top). Here they are :) The Marauding Omni Brain was created by Erin Higgins who can be reached @ higgsmax2000 -at- hotmail -dot- com And this wonderful banner (as well as the image above) was created by Len over at Monster by Mail…

Another children's science book

We need more of these, and here's another: Great Adaptations: A Fantastical Collection of Science Poems. It contains short rhyming summaries of scientists' work on adaptations, all nicely illustrated. Here's one from Sarah Hrdy's work on empathy and cooperation. Doesn't that make you want to run out and buy it right now? How much would you pay? $5? $10? $25? Well, you can't. Instead, you have to go to this website and download it for free. Writing the book was a labor of love, so I hope you love it too! Lastly, because our objective is to get as many people reading and learning about…

What are we *really* like? (Thoughts on meeting people you know from online in real life.)

In the aftermath of the ScienceBloggers' assault on Manhattan, Mark Chu-Carroll put up a nice post on the ways in which bloggers' real-life manner seemed to match or depart from their online personae. Maybe philosophy's to blame, but I think there's a deep and interesting question here. Mark writes: It's quite an odd experience in its way; between our blogs, and our back-channel forums, we've become a tight-knit community, and the people there were my friends, even though I'd never seen them before. And yet, as is clear from Mark's blogger-specific observations, there are ways in which a…

In memoriam: lilady

As I write this, I am sadder than I have been for a long time. I recently learned that a frequent commenter here, a woman whose efforts on behalf of children's health I admired greatly, has passed away. I'm referring to the commenter who went by the 'nym lilady and sometimes signed her comments with her first name, Connie. Although I knew her real name and approximately where she lived, I don't want to risk having antivaccine trolls try to contact her family in their time of sadness; so this tribute will refer to her by the online pseudonym by which she became known, lilady. The first…

De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum

I've always read cookbooks the way one reads novels, not only for recipes but for plots, stories and bits of detail, and one of the details I always look for are acknowledgements of particular tastes in my cookbook authors. The reason I look for this is that cookbooks are usually a uniquely authoritative genre - one that purports to tell you THIS IS GOOD. And yet, of course, one's tastes are particular - most cookbooks that don't originate in restaurants are fundamentally about a particular person's sense of what tastes good and is appealing. Some acknowledge this, most don't, but it is…

Can Social Security Numbers Be Hacked?

Apparently so. And that should give everyone pause, since SSN has become the de facto national identification system. From PNAS: We demonstrate that it is possible to predict, entirely from public data, narrow ranges of values wherein individual SSNs are likely to fall. Unless mitigating strategies are implemented, the predictability of SSNs exposes them to risks of identify theft on mass scales. Any third party with internet access and some statistical knowledge can exploit such predictability in 2 steps: first, by analyzing publicly available records in the SSA Death Master File (DMF) to…

Swapping bird flu war stories. Time to share.

In the old days doctors traded clinical pearls and experience face to face at medical meetings. With the internet and online publication we sometimes forget how important those personal information exchanges can be and often still are. Canadian Press's Helen Branswell (still the world's best flu reporter) now tells us that about 100 doctors with the most experience actually treating H5N1 infections will be meeting this week in southern Turkey to swap experiences: Doctors who have treated H5N1 avian flu patients are meeting in a Turkish seaside town to try to find answers to the myriad…

Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow

Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack computers, commit vandalism, and thwart law enforcement, it gives them detailed instructions on the best ways to do those things. It even comes with two afterwords and a bibliography pointing them to even more resources on how best to subvert the political order. If-- oh, who am I kidding, when Little Brother is challenged and banned from school libraries, it will richly deserve it. And when that happens, you should go buy five copies and hand them out to…

Upgrading Ubuntu Linux is Risky

Hear me, Ubuntu-using brothers and sisters! Never use the on-line upgrade option to switch to a newer version of the operating system! In little more than two years, it has trashed my setup twice, once killing the machine outright, and the last time (yesterday) making it impossible to boot from the linux partition. When the time comes to upgrade, copy all your files to somewhere else, re-format the linux partition and install the new Ubuntu version from scratch. Then copy all your stuff back onto the partition. There is no safe way to upgrade an existing installation. A corollary of this is…

Google Definitions

I was musing about how haphazardly I learned about certain indispensable software and information sources. Then it struck me -- maybe there are people who don't know about Google Definitions? OMG! I've got to tell them! I use Google Definitions daily. It's an on-line meta-dictionary, collecting definitions from all over the web. To use it, just type "DEFINE:" into Google's search box and then whatever it is you need defined. And it knows everything, not just the sort of straight-laced stuff you find in printed dictionaries. define: myrmecology Myrmecology is the branch of entomology dealing…

No More Pocket Calendar

Two weeks ago I left my pocket calendar on my desk at the Academy of Letters where I only work one day a week. This was inconvenient as I rely entirely on the calendar to remember what I'm supposed to do apart from my weekly routine. When I finally got my hands on it again last Thursday, it calmly informed me that I was due to give a talk that same evening. The mishap made me decide to switch to an on-line calendar instead. I spend hours every day using on-line computers, and my smartphone allows me to call the site up when I'm moving about. So, though the new year is approaching, I'm…

Jonathan Drori: Why we're storing billions of seeds

Drori encourages us to save biodiversity -- one seed at a time. Reminding us that plants support human life, he shares the vision of the Millennium Seed Bank, which has stored over 3 billion seeds to date from dwindling yet essential plant species. Jonathan Drori has dedicated his career to media and learning. As the Head of Commissioning for BBC Online, he led the effort to create bbc.co.uk, the online face of the BBC (an effort he recalls fondly). He came to the web from the TV side of the BBC, where as an editor and producer he headed up dozens of television series on science, education…

Literature request fulfilled

Thanks to those who sent me a copy of the article I requested. Sadly, the library at my university has some rather large holes in its online collection. Even some fairly common journals are not represented. I'll have to read it this weekend. You'll all get personal e-mails from me later today, after I finish rounding on our service. As for finding the paper online at the author's website, personally, I find that to be a very uncommon situation, although I have had some luck in the past e-mailing corresponding authors. This is much the same as in the old days, when we old geezers would…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Extra Gene Copies Were Enough To Make Early Humans' Mouths Water: To think that world domination could have begun in the cheeks. That's one interpretation of a discovery, published online September 9 in Nature Genetics, which indicates that humans carry extra copies of the salivary amylase gene. Humans have many more copies of this gene than any of their ape relatives, the study found, and they use the copies to flood their mouths with amylase, an enzyme that digests starch. The finding bolsters the idea that starch was a crucial addition to the diet of early humans, and that natural…

From the Archives: Getting a job 2.0

During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from October 10, 2008. It provoked a bit of angst out in the library student blogosphere, which is kinda what I was hoping. ===== It's interesting times in the world out there. And not surprisingly, the world of the internet is thinking about the implications. One of the big implications is that it's going to be harder to get a job, and that's going to be true librarians as much as anyone else. As it happens, I've been collecting some…

Nobody Resembles Their Internet Caricature

I've seen a bunch of re-shares of this Vox profile of a "Men's Rights Activist" on various social media channels, with reactions varying from "This is fascinating" to "Boooo-ring." I thought it was sort of interesting, but not really in the way it was intended to be. The thing I found most striking the way the author, Emmett Rensin, introduces "Max": In the popular imagination, Men's Rights Activists are "neckbeards": morbidly obese basement-dwellers with a suspect affection for My Little Pony. But Max is remarkably unassuming in appearance, handsome enough and normally tall; equally…

Mortgage Basics (part 1)

One thing that I've been getting a lot of requests about is the ongoing mortgage mess in the US. I wrote a bit about it a while ago, explaining what was going on. But since then, I've gotten a lot of people asking me to explain various things about how mortgages work, and what kinds of trouble people have gotten into. Mortgage Basics The basic idea of a mortgage is very simple. You want to buy a house, but you don't have enough money to buy it up front. So you borrow money to pay for it. A mortgage is a loan that provides you with money to purchase a house, using the house itself as the…

Commenting on scientific papers

There have been quite a few posts over the last few days about commenting, in particular about posting comments, notes and ratings on scientific papers. But this also related to commenting on blogs and social networks, commenting on newspaper online articles, the question of moderation vs. non-moderation, and the question of anonymity vs. pseudonymity vs. RL identity. You may want to re-visit this old thread first, for introduction on commenting on blogs. How a 1995 court case kept the newspaper industry from competing online by Robert Niles goes back into history to explain why the comments…

Plain-language research for patients: patientinform.org

While I was guest-posting over at Collective Imagination last month, I suggested that while better public access to peer reviewed research articles is a priority for the scientific community, knocking down firewalls may not be sufficient to help many patients, who lack the scientific background to plow through a Nature article. To get there, we may need efforts to provide plain language, accessible, searchable summaries of the research that clearly signpost the articles' relevance to patient needs. In addition to many interesting comments on the post, I got an email from the people behind…

Farhad Manjoo defends Gmail

So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It: So if Gmail is as good as the power grid, the phone network, and home broadband, why does its failure spark such surprise and outrage--and always make national headlines...An online service's outage, though, is sudden, inexplicable, and communal. Gmail goes down for everyone at the same time, none of us knows why, and because we're all online and gabbing, the news spreads fast. Many people also spend a lot more time on Gmail and other Web services than we do on the phone or watching TV; even if you don't really have any pressing reason to be on e-mail or IM,…

Students Debate "Internet & Community," Part A

This semester in the sophomore-level course I teach on "Communication and Society," we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter the nature of community, civic engagement, and social relationships. (Go here for reading list.) For many college students, having grown up "online," it's easy to take for granted the "virtual" society we live in, seldom pausing to consider how it might be different from more traditional forms of community life. Therefore, one of the goals of the course was to encourage students to think systematically…

Never Say Goodbye: Ocelot

tags: Ocelot, Leopardus pardalis, Joel Sartore, National Geographic, image of the day Ocelot, Leopardus pardalis. 195 animals remaining (Estimated U.S. population is fewer than 100 wild, 95 captive). Image: Joel Sartore/National Geographic [larger view]. The photographer writes; Wild ocelots are gone from all U.S. states except Texas, driven out by human development. The elusive cats still roam the wilds of Central and South America, but there's little reliable data on their true numbers. Joel Sartore has shared some of his work on this blog before, so I am thrilled to tell you that…

Physics Drawing Games

I have two physics-based games to plug: Crayon Physics and Fantastic Contraption. Crayon Physics is, well, just watch the demo: Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo. Cool, huh? The promo trailer reminds me of Line Rider (an online/iPhone doodling game) crossed with Fantastic Contraption (an online physics puzzle game, soon to be on the iPhone as well). I once spent an afternoon trying to figure out Fantastic Contraption, but it confused the heck out of me. Still, it's free, addictive, and makes people stop and say "what are you doing?" Line Rider is more my speed, and since I can…

Online Visual Cognition Experiments

The Visual Cognition laboratory at Harvard is looking for your help! These aren't the usual ho-hum surveys - these are some pretty cool visual cognition experiments (I'm biased of course since that's what I study). Head on over and participate in a short study! From Josh: Web-based experiments are becoming very common. Putting surveys online is not that new and is already reasonably common, but it was generally thought that you couldn't put cognitive psychology and perception experiments online because they require careful controls in timing, display, etc. Well, increased bandwidth has helped…

There's organic, and then there's....organic

Organic foods from your supermarket may comply with the requirements of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Organic Program, but are you really buying what you think you're buying? Many people "go organic" because they want to buy family-farmed, locally-operated produce. But as Steven Shapin points out in the New Yorker, most organic food sold in grocery stores is anything but. Earthbound Farm, a major organic produce supplier for Whole Foods, has projected revenues for 2006 of more than $450 million, and farms more than 26,000 acres. Doesn't sound so quaint anymore, does it. What'…

It's because we can't tax it, stupid

Remember the good old days when being a conservative meant arguing that government should stay out of peoples lives? Those days are long gone. On Tuesday, the House plans to vote on a bill that would ban credit cards for paying online bets and could padlock gambling Web sites. The legislation would clarify existing law to spell out that it is illegal to gamble online. To enforce that ban, the bill would prohibit credit cards and other payment forms, such as electronic transfers, from being used to settle online wagers. It also would give law enforcement officials the authority to work with…

The Worst Thing About Privatization Is...

...that it kills a great punchline. You see, companies are actually trying to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. That's what <Business Week says, anyway. Ian Welsh, at the Agonist, comments: I don't understand why this is even considered. You don't put basic infrastructure like this in private hands, because it allows monopoly pricing. They will squeeze the most money out of it they can, and that will be the majority of the surplus value produced by the roads. Since they will set the cost to maximize profits, it will be above what a proportion of the population and a proportion of businesses can…

Sunday Sermon: Your Moment of Duh! (Of Course, Government Is the Spender of Last Resort)

It is still astonishing the extent to which radical deficit reductionism still rules our political discourse, even as there are six people looking for work for every job opening. Robert Reich describes how you fix this: So why is unemployment and underemployment so high, and why is it likely to remain high for some time? Because, as noted, people who are worried about their jobs or have no jobs, and who are also trying to get out from under a pile of debt, are not going do a lot of shopping. And businesses that don't have customers aren't going do a lot of new investing. And foreign nations…

Ridiculous School Funding Drives

A perennial annoyance for me as a parent is the many odd ways in which schools force parents to organise the funding for trips and stays at camp collectively. The general idea is sound: it would not be fair to make the parents pay up front, because then the poorer families might not be able to send their kids. But our specific cases are ridiculous, because my kids' schools cater to some of the most affluent communities in the history of the world. I'm by far the poorest of the parents involved, and I can easily afford to pay for my kids' trips and camp stays. What's particularly silly is that…

Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science

Back in May, the DAMOP keynote address was delivered by a DoE program officer who basically chided scientists for being politically active, in a "you have only yourselves to blame if your funding gets cut" sort of way. Obviously, she hasn't read The Republican War on Science, or she'd understand why 48 Nobel laureates publically endorsed John Kerry in 2004. (Full comments below the fold.) I didn't read this book when it first came out because I'm a scientist and I follow the news, and I figured I already knew the story. Why buy a book to make myself depressed? I generally buy books to make…

Using eBay to set up a molecular biology lab: costs less than $1000!

Science scout twitter feed I'm doing a bit of research for book chapter, and one of the things I was looking into, was how much exactly would it take for a layman to set up a functional molecular biology lab. With respect to this query, there are a few things to keep in mind: 1. Most molecular biology research is driven by the use of plastic ware, and various biological reagents. These are the sorts of things that need to bought fresh or brand new. Fortunately, most of it is also quite affordable from a layman point of view, and as previously demonstrated, you can easily purchase this…

Montpellier Beachs and Traveling to Brussels

Posting will be slow for a couple days, as I hop on the Eurail tomorrow and travel to Brussels. Yesterday I decided to go to the beach, which is a few miles to the south of Montpellier. It was a bit more of a hassle that I expected, as it involved getting on the subway, then getting on a bus. Futhermore this involved knowing exactly what stop I wanted to get off at, and I found this out while face-to-face with the bus driver. After a bit of confusion, the first stop name she said (ended up being Gau de le Roi) I just nodded emphatically and hoped it was correct. (Hopefully, it was!) The line…

She's Such a Geek Blog

Calling all geek girls: The She's Such a Geek blog is up and running. And is it ever good! Please do check out Kristin's post Show and Tell. You have not lived until you've seen a bra with a voltmeter-ammeter panel. I mean it. In theory I am also blogging over there but in practice I have been barely keeping up with blogging here so I have not yet posted to the SSAG blog. But I promise you will love what the other contributors to the book have put up there so far! And you can BUY THE BOOK now! Or buy it here. Here's the publisher's comments: Geeks may be outcasts in mainstream…

Repeat after me: I don't need an iPhone

For some reason I can't resist watching Steve Jobs' Apple keynote speeches. I watched six years ago when he introduced the iPod, and I watched again last night when he introduced his latest "revolutionary" product. People were amazed when the iPod was introduced -- but a little shocked by the price. I didn't buy an iPod then, but I finally did break down and buy a $99 shuffle when it was released a year or two back. So what about the iPhone? By all accounts, it's an amazing device, offering not only a telephone, but also email, messaging, a beautiful web browser, and of course, iPod…

AMA Healthcare Campaign

Health care is shaping up to be one of the big issues in the upcoming elections.  No big surprise there, it was a highly -ranked issue in the last election, too.  It's just that last time, voters failed to see how health care is more likely than terrorism to affect their health.   Perhaps this time around, people will have a more rational perspective.   In an effort to keep our perceptions in such a rational perspective, the American Medical Association is starting a massive advertising campaign.  The gist of the message is that they want health insurance for all. At first glance, that…

How To Buy a Computer

I get email... In this case, virus-like but funny email. Pass it on... COSTELLO CALLS TO BUY A COMPUTER FROM ABBOTT ABBOTT: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you? COSTELLO: Thanks. I'm setting up an office in my den and I'm thinking about buying a computer. ABBOTT: Mac? COSTELLO: No, the name's Lou. ABBOTT: Your computer? COSTELLO: I don't own a computer. I want to buy one. ABBOTT: Mac? COSTELLO: I told you, my name's Lou. ABBOTT: What about Windows? COSTELLO: Why? Will it get stuffy in here? ABBOTT: Do you want a computer with Windows? COSTELLO: I don't know. What will I see when I…

SBC - online participation

Through blog posts, via e-mail, and via our feedback form (have you filled it yet?) we are already getting tons of feedback on the way Conference ran, what was good about it, what not so much, and what can be done differently next time. We are carefully reading all of it and will certainly address all of your feedback as we start organizing the 3rd meeting (give us a week or so to rest, will ya, please?!). One of the things that we get a lot is feedback from the people who were not able to attend in physical space and were very happy we made it possible to participate from the distance (see…

Online prayer benefits breast cancer patients?

Online prayer benefits breast cancer patients? At least that's what they were saying a couple of days ago on the Internets: NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Praying online in a support group may help women with breast cancer cope with the disease more effectively, a new study shows. Dr. Bret Shaw of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found that breast cancer patients who used a higher percentage of religion-related words in their communications with an Internet support group had lower levels of negative emotions, better functional well-being, and more confidence in their ability to…

Birth Control Without Barriers (Or Hormones, Either)

Couples who find the pill problematic and condoms cumbersome may be interested in a study out today in the journal Human Reproduction. The report, lead authored by Petra Frank-Hermann, a professor in the Department of Gynecological Endocrinology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, followed 900 women who practice a form of natural family planning called the symptothermal method (STM). Frank-Hermann's team concluded that perfect use of STM resulted in unintended pregnancy rates of 0.4 percent, making for a highly favorable comparison in rates of effectiveness between STM and the…

Eminent Domain and Just Compensation

The 5th amendment guarantees that property may not be taken for public use without just compensation. Radley Balko has a textbook example of how governments play games with compensation in eminent domain cases. A government agency in Tacoma, Washington is trying to buy up land for a parking lot. For one particular property, they initially offered $439,000, about $8 a square foot. That's what they paid for an adjacent piece of land from another owner. But the owner of this property balked and filed a suit to try and stop the takeover of the property. After losing that court case, the offer for…

Thursday at the Bell

Since somebody asked, I will confirm that I will be at the showing of Flock of Dodos tomorrow. That's going to be at 7:00pm in the Bell Museum auditorium ($7 admission). Randy Olson won't be there (rumor has it he's busy flitting from showing to showing, but Minneapolis just isn't good enough for him…too far from the ocean or something), but Steven Miller, the executive producer of the movie, will be—so really, you'll be able to ask in-depth questions about what went into making the movie. It's a great opportunity. Argue with him, too! A movie and a discussion about how to communicate science…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, Black Friday Edition

Today is "Black Friday," the semi-ironic name given to the day after Thanksgiving when major retailers roll out Incredible! Deals! to draw shoppers in at an ungodly early hour. Personally, I don't plan to come within a mile of a mall today, but if that's what floats your boat... Of course, if you're thinking of gifts for a person interested in science (and if you're reading this, you ought to be...), you could do a lot worse than to look at this list from GeekDad at Wired, which I'm sure you'll be shocked to notice includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If your holiday shopping takes you…

'Tisn't the Season

I needed to buy a few things for the house and yard yesterday, so I packed the kids into the car and headed off to the store. What I saw when I got there didn't make me feel very jolly, and I'm afraid that I said a few things that were naughty, not nice. One of the things that I said seemed to be a common refrain - I heard minor variations on it from at least two other people who walked in behind me: "You've gotta be shi--ing me! It's not even Halloween yet!" I apologize for the poor quality on the pictures. The camera phone isn't great to start with, and I was still trying to figure out…

The Intersection in 2008

[The Intersection in LA, plotting world domination.] Well what better way for two cobloggers to ring in the new year than from the same coast and time zone? We're blogging together from L.A.--catching up on framing science, sea cucumbers, hurricanes--and plans for The Intersection. We've got some BIG ideas for 2008! This year we'll be writing about the upcoming election, the stormy world, conservation, the environment, and the intersection of science with art, literature, history, and more. Now and then Sparticus Maximus the Great will take over and provide his birdbrain perspective, too…

What does the insula do?

I'm sure you remember all the articles last week telling us how people with strokes causing damage to the insula have reported that they no longer feel the urge to smoke. In this weeks New York Times health section Sandra Blakeslee explores the insula in depth, examining both the possible treatment options as well as the many other functions it serves. Here's a good snipit from the article: If it does everything, what exactly is it that it does? For example, the insula "lights up" in brain scans when people crave drugs, feel pain, anticipate pain, empathize with others, listen to jokes, see…

More on the Falwell-Moon Connection

I've written before about the connection between Jerry Falwell and Reverend Moon, particularly that Moon gave $3.5 million to Falwell to bail out Liberty University from impending bankruptcy in 1995. Now comes an article by Robert Parry that shows that the connection goes even deeper than I knew. Contrary to the claims of some of Falwell's defenders, who have claimed that Falwell didn't know the money came from Moon because he had given it to foundation controlled by Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas rather than to Falwell directly, Parry shows evidence that Falwell had actively solicited the money…

More on the Politics of Healthcare Mandates

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks mandating the purchase of private health insurance is a political train wreck (not to mention overpriced and inefficient). Dave Johnson writes: But Hillary says her plan will have a mandate to buy health insurance. FORCING people to give money to greedy, corrupt corporations? This is political suicide. Readers know how I feel about insurance companies. I will never vote for someone with the brilliant idea of forcing me to give my money to greedy corporations so their CEOs can buy bigger jets. This shows that Hillary now (correctly) feels it is…