Chatter
j7uy5 | August 23, 2007
alt="ALT"
src="http://images.forbes.com/media/2007/03/15/labels_6.jpg"
border="1" height="280" width="400">
Product: Midol
Menstrual Complete
Label: Ask a doctor
before use if you have difficulty urinating due to an enlarged prostate.
Sound advice from Merck. But should sufferers of
premenstrual syndrome really lose sleep over enlarged prostates?
That's from a collection on the
href="http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2007/03/15/apple-merck-teflon-ent-law-cx_mf_0315liability_slide.html?feed=rss_entrepreneurs">Forbes
website. At first glance, it seems senseless. But I
suspect…
tfk | August 20, 2007After much planning and coordinating, our munificent overlords at Seed arranged to bring a substantial fraction of the gang here at Scienceblogs together in New York last weekend. Beyond the drinking, the carousing, and the karaoke, it was a great chance to see the other Sciblings and talk science, blogging, and to trash the Sciblings who didn't show up.
I'll have pictures online in a few days, but for now, Bora has some photographic evidence that I moderated a discussion about science and politics. Rob Knop and PZ Myers sat at a table and got along marvelously. The word "framing" even…
goodmath | August 16, 2007 This post is quite thoroughly off-topic for this blog. But as someone who is openly religious and who
has written a number of posts that criticize Christian institutions, I get a fair bit of mail from cretins
who make demands that I speak up to defend their pathetic insistence that all religious people
must support discrimination. In the hopes that I can get these jackasses to leave me alone by
demonstrating that I'm so far beyond the pale that pestering me is a waste of time, I present this
post.
I do not "support" homosexuality - because I do not believe I have the right to an opinion on…
j7uy5 | August 12, 2007
src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_VbG-d6SeGuA/RePVVb_nxrI/AAAAAAAAAD8/6QbLROwzDEk/s400/anandita-tamuly-eats-bhut-jolokia.jpg"
align="left" height="344" width="238">
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">I had not seen this when
I first posted about the
href="http://spectre.nmsu.edu/dept/academic.html?i=1251"
rel="tag">bhut jolokia -- the world's hottest
chile pepper. There is a woman, Annindita Tamuly, in India
who can eat 60 of them in two minutes. And she smiles while
doing it (
href="http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/videos.aspx?id=5897">video).
There is also a 17-month-…
tfk | August 10, 2007Break from heat not expected soon:
Lawrence’s high temperature reached 100 degrees Thursday for the second day in a row, and triple digits are expected to stick around. Wednesday’s rainfall accumulation, .77 of an inch, wasn’t enough to ward off a heat advisory that is in effect in Douglas County until 7 tonight.
It is currently 65º and sunny in Oakland, and they expect a high around 78º. That is slightly warm for the area; the average temperature for early August is 73º. I'm wearing long pants, and no one seems to have air conditioning in their homes.
Yesterday was about the same, and as I…
tfk | August 6, 2007August 1, 2004 was an auspicious day. From the hot, humid hills of eastern Kansas, a voice cried out and invited his nonexistent readership to "Check out my ActBlue list." The next day, this bloggish neophyte expressed his disgust at the rape, sodomy, and general abuse which went (goes?) on at Abu Ghraib.
Later that day he expressed his concern that global warming was killing sea birds, and speculated about how natural selection might factor into their ultimate response.
Two days later, on August 4, 2004, that young blogger's "Oy" signaled the beginning of a fight over evolution which…
tfk | August 6, 2007I'm still getting moved in and catching up on email and other stuff, but this photo from NCSE HQ confirms what I already knew.
j7uy5 | August 4, 2007Separation
of Church and State often is controversial. Sometimes I worry
about this in the USA, but I have never seen anything as bad as what
they are doing in China:
href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2194682.ece">China
tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate
From The Times
August 4, 2007
Jane Macartney in Beijing
Tibet's living Buddhas have been banned from reincarnation without
permission from China's atheist leaders. The ban is included in new
rules intended to assert Beijing's authority over Tibet's restive and
deeply Buddhist…
j7uy5 | August 4, 2007This
little devil gets a rating of over one million
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale" rel="tag">Scoville
heat units.
It's
the Bhut
Jolokia (ghost chile), also called the
href="http://www.fiery-foods.com/dave/sagajolokia.asp" rel="tag">Naga
Jolokia.
According to the
href="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/articles/2007/08/01/1185647946289.html"
rel="tag">Brisbane Times, the
growers hope it will replace the sagging tea farming in northeast
India...
Researchers
at the renowned
href="http://spectre.nmsu.edu/dept/welcome.html?t=chile"
rel="tag">Chile…
tfk | August 3, 2007On the assumption that I'm in California, some happy music for your Friday:
"ELT" by Wilco from the album Summerteeth (1999, 3:46).
"Walls (Circus)" by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers from the album She's the One (1996, 4:25).
"Blue Eyed Soul" by Wilco from the album A.M. (1995, 4:05).
"Hesitating Beauty" by Billy Bragg & Wilco from the album Mermaid Avenue (1998, 3:05).
"The Happy Song (Dum Dum)" by Otis Redding from the album Very Best of Otis Redding (1992, 2:43).
"Opportunity" by The Jewels from the album One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds, Lost & Found (2005,…
tfk | August 2, 2007"Humble Me" by Norah Jones from the album Feels Like Home (2004, 4:36).
"I'm Goin' Down" by Bruce Springsteen from the album Born In The U.S.A. (1984, 3:31).
"Dancing In The Dark" by Bruce Springsteen from the album Born In The U.S.A. (1984, 4:05).
"I Wanna Be Your Man" by The Beatles from the album With The Beatles (1963, 1:58).
"Hummingbird" by Wilco from the album A Ghost Is Born (2004, 3:13).
"I'll Cry Instead" by The Beatles from the album A Hard Day's Night (1964, 1:47).
"Fingertips [15 - I Just Don't Understand You]" by They Might Be Giants from the album Apollo 18 (1990, 0:27).
"The…
tfk | August 1, 2007It will be a bit days before I can spend time writing anything thoughtful, so enjoy the music and reposted material for a little longer.
"Monty Got A Raw Deal" by R.E.M. from the album Automatic For The People (1992, 3:17).
"Devil In Her Heart" by The Beatles from the album With The Beatles (1963, 2:27).
"Wreck On The Highway" by Bruce Springsteen from the album The River(1980, 3:54).
"Mysterious Ways" by U2 from the album Achtung Baby (1991, 4:03).
"Something" by The Beatles from the album Abbey Road (1969, 3:02).
"Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" by Bruce Springsteen from the album The Wild…
tfk | July 31, 2007Because you need some music to go with your posts from the archives:
"(Was I) In Your Dreams" by Wilco from the album Being There (1996, 3:30).
"Fingertips [21 - Darkened Corridors]" by They Might Be Giants from the album Apollo 18 (1990, 1:01).
"Red Right Ankle" by The Decemberists from the album Her Majesty (2003, 3:29). Probably my favorite Decemberists song. "And how it whispered 'Oh, adhere to me/ for we are bound by symmetry.'"
"The E Street Shuffle" by Bruce Springsteen from the album The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Band (1973, 4:26).
"Not A Second Time" by The Beatles from…
tfk | July 31, 2007It isn't Passover right now, but several people recently commented that this is one of our better posts from the old blog, so enjoy.
On all other nights, we may eat either leavened or unleavened bread; on this night, only unleavened bread.
On all other nights, we may eat any vegetable; on this night we are required to eat bitter herbs.
On all other nights, we are not bidden to dip our vegetables even once; on this night we dip them twice.
On all other nights, we eat our meal in any manner; on this night we sit around the table in a ceremonial fashion.
The unleavened bread is the bread of our…
tfk | July 30, 2007Randomly selected from my "driving" playlist in iTunes. It's like you're in the car with me right now, as I drive across the western US.
"How to Fight Loneliness" by Wilco from the album Summerteeth (1999, 3:52).
"Fingertips 18 - The Day That Love Came to Play" by They Might Be Giants from the album Apollo 18(1990, 0:08).
"Gotta Serve Somebody" by Bob Dylan from the album Slow Train Coming (1979, 5:21).
"State Trooper" by Bruce Springsteen from the album Nebraska (1982, 3:17).
"Help!" by The Beatles from the Ed Sullivan Show (1965, 3:01).
"Julia" by The Beatles from the album The…
tfk | July 29, 2007That title is not an homage to Kerouac, but to Cormac McCarthy and to John Buass, who I finally met on Friday and who tried hard to convince me, Mike Silverman, and anyone else in earshot, that The Road is not that dark.
The title is also an accurate description. By the time this post publishes, I should be somewhere past Topeka, following roughly the route shown in the new temporary banner. I'll only have intermittent 'net access, so may or may not check the comments to get your advice, but feel free to suggest brief diversions the parents and I might encounter as we wend our way westward…
tfk | July 27, 2007iTunes spins the wheels and reveals:
"Midnight Rider" by The Allman Brothers Band from the album Dreams (1989, 4:26). I'm compiling this post at midnight. Does that make me a Midnight Writer?
"Dinner Bell" by They Might Be Giants from the album Apollo 18 (1990, 2:11). Lunch yesterday: Ribs and brisket at Kansas City's famous Arthur Bryant's. Trillin is right, it is the world's best restaurant.
"Hymn 43" by Jethro Tull from the album Aqualung (1971, 3:18).
"Ed Is Dead" by Pixies from the album Come on Pilgrim (1987, 2:29).
"I'll See You In The Evening" by Mazarin from the album We're…
tfk | July 26, 2007Reposted because it amuses me. Right before Saddam Hussein's execution, I wrote:
As my AP English teacher told us when we read Billy Budd by Herman Melville "A criminal is hanged, a man is hung."
Yet another piece of 19th century arcana that the Bush administration has made necessary in the modern world.
In other news, I'm currently packing furiously. I'll be scheduling some posts to go up over the next week or so, since I'll be driving west to Oakland, CA, and will have little or no internet access during the drive and probably until I actually find an apartment. Anyone with a nice,…
tfk | July 25, 2007Tony of Tony's Kansas City has a scoop: I am leaving Kansas.
TfK will be unchanged, or at least will continue changing in the same way it's always changed, but in honor of the move out of state, my upcoming birthday (July 26), the birthday of TfK (August 4) and the anniversary of the move here to Scienceblogs (August 20), I'd like to challenge you cunning linguists out there to suggest a new name.
This blog has always been about the readers and the community. It started out void and without form, and your attention, smart comments and helpful corrections have all made it the success it's…
omnibrain | July 23, 2007Ok ok... I'll do it too.....
$4725.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth. From Mingle2 - Free Online Dating
Mingle2 - Free Online Dating