WhatEVAH!
mikethemadbiologist | March 14, 2009Isn't this kinda missing the point? Here's an ad I saw in the Weekly Dig:
Yes, an organic cigarette would probably be less harmful than one...laced with dioxin. But it's still a cigarette. It's not good for you. In fact, it's bad for you.
I think the label organic has jumped the shark....
mikethemadbiologist | March 1, 2009The green globs, inside the head, are the eyes
Imagine a fish with eyes that slide around in its head--which looks like a fighter cockpit. Meet the barreleye fish, Macropinna microstoma:
Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute recently solved the half-century-old mystery of a fish with tubular eyes and a transparent head. Ever since the "barreleye" fish Macropinna microstoma was first described in 1939, marine biologists have known that its tubular eyes are very good at collecting light. However, the eyes were believed to be fixed in place and seemed to provide only a "…
mikethemadbiologist | February 18, 2009This is not the Mad Biologist
Or how the Boston Phoenix proves they missed the point of Shepard Fairey's work (Fairey made the iconic Obama poster). I'll get to that in a moment, but Sunday, I went to the ICA in Boston to see the Shepard Fairey exhibit. For me, it was a blast from the past: I was in Providence when the whole Andre the Giant thing started (I still have a sticker from that time). It was also funny to watch (discretely) a middle-aged--to be generous--docent explain to similarly aged visitors about Andre having a posse. Ironic proto-skaterpunk anarchism wasn't really…
mikethemadbiologist | February 15, 2009While I'm reasonably happy with the passed version of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, I'm still having deja vu all over again (to steal Yogi Berra's phrase) regarding Obama's attempt at bipartisanship. Virtually every Democrat, regardless if they were liberal or conservative, and a bunch of Democratic-leaning independents that I know, not to mention the entire Democratic-oriented blogosphere (which includes people who are definitely not liberals or leftists) realized what would happen with Obama's call for bipartisanship:
Democrats would negotiate away lots of things, even before the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 14, 2009In the midst of all of the financial turmoil, it's good to see that municipal bonds can be a good investment--especially if you bought them in 1868:
Anyone who has failed to keep track of a winning lottery ticket for all of 12 months may want to consider the efforts of 39 bondholders who have been safekeeping valuable, tissue-thin, New York City securities since shortly after the Civil War.
Next month, one of the bonds, issued in 1868 and thought to be one of the oldest active municipal bonds in the country, will come due. And the city stands ready to retire the debt incurred when Winston…
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2009At the behest of Our Benevolent Seed Overlords, I recently discussed elitism and how to restore science to its rightful place. I think, though, porn is probably not the best way to do so (italics mine):
...the [NSF] employees in question weren't just logging onto their Facebook accounts or buying birthday gifts on Amazon.com. The report says they were watching, downloading and e-mailing porn, sometimes for significant portions of their workdays, and over periods of months or even years.
In one particularly egregious case, the report says one NSF "senior official" was discovered to have spent…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2009This weekend, I was going to blog about framing the tax cuts as the 'Pornography Stimulus Plan', since the last tax cut rebate benefited few sectors other than the pornography industry. It would be similar to the Republican term for the estate tax--'the death' tax.
And then Larry Flynt arrived and screwed everything up:
Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment…
mikethemadbiologist | December 12, 2008I think NASA director Mike Griffin wants to lose his job (not a good idea these days...):
NASA administrator Mike Griffin is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama's transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is "not qualified" to judge his rocket program, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.
In a heated 40-minute conversation last week with Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator who heads the space transition team, a red-faced Griffin demanded to speak directly to Obama, according to witnesses.
In addition, Griffin is…
mikethemadbiologist | November 17, 2008Apparently, Al-Queda is quite...concerned about having Democrats in power. By way of maha, I found this David Ignatius op-ed, who quotes Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradhawi (italics mine):
Before the election, the radical Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradhawi even issued a fatwa supporting John McCain: "Personally, I would prefer for the Republican candidate, McCain, to be elected. This is because I prefer the obvious enemy who does not hypocritically [conceal] his hostility toward you . . . to the enemy who wears a mask [of friendliness]."
Obama makes the jihadists nervous because he is an appealing new face whose…
mikethemadbiologist | August 21, 2008By now, you might have heard about McCain's forgetfulness about how many homes he owns (at least seven). But his campaign's response is utterly absurd (italics mine):
The houses gaffe doesn't matter because ... he was a POW!
"This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison," spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post.
For those of you who haven't kept track, the McCain campaign just recently cited McCain's POW years in explaining away the Miss Buffalo Chip gaffe, and in dealing with the allegation that he broke the rules and listened in on Barack Obama during…
mikethemadbiologist | August 13, 2008This is creepy (italics mine):
Pigtailed and smiling, Lin Miaoke, age 9, stood in a red dress and white shoes during Friday's Olympic opening ceremonies and performed "Ode to the Motherland" in what would become one of the evening's most indelible images: a lone child, fireworks blazing overhead, singing a patriotic ballad before an estimated one billion viewers.
Except that her proud father, Lin Hui, noticed "that the voice was a little different from hers." On Tuesday, Mr. Lin said in a telephone interview that he had assumed "the difference might be caused by the acoustics."
Acoustics had…
mikethemadbiologist | August 9, 2008Any time there's a send up of news anchors, disaster coverage, and George Bush, it's worth watching:
mikethemadbiologist | July 3, 2008By way of Pandagon, we learn that the stimulus check isn't, well, stimulating 'values':
An unforeseen and surprising beneficiary of the Economic Stimulus Plan, a plan that George Bush contends will "boost our economy and encourage job creation," has surfaced this week. An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans' mailboxes across the country.
According to Kirk Mishkin, Head…
mikethemadbiologist | June 27, 2008If the Glouchester teen pregnancy scandal isn't bad enough, now we have to deal with a ninja outbreak. Really:
The librarian-in-training was a few minutes early for work at the Barnegat branch of the Ocean County Library on Wednesday morning when she saw a man dressed in what looked like black pajamas sprinting past the parking lot carrying a large sword.
"I was like, "Did I really just see a ninja?' " said Shilling, 23.
Turns out she did not.
The man clad in all black moving stealthily along the wood line was merely a camp counselor on his way to a costume-theme orientation at a nearby…
mikethemadbiologist | June 24, 2008There seem to be some problems with the CDC's Q Fever Biohazard level 3 facility:
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's new $214 million infectious disease laboratory in Atlanta, scientists are conducting experiments on bioterror bacteria in a room with a containment door sealed with duct tape.
The tape was applied around the edges of the door a year ago after the building's ventilation system malfunctioned and pulled potentially contaminated air out of the lab and into a "clean" hallway.
Nine CDC workers were tested in May 2007 for potential exposure to the Q fever bacteria…
mikethemadbiologist | June 1, 2008In an interview (in which I think Huckabee was trying to ensure he wouldn't be chosen as the Republican vice presidential nominee), Mike Huckabee critiques conservative economic thought (italics mine):
The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it's this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it's a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says "look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don't get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go…
mikethemadbiologist | May 3, 2008This is why you should read local weeklies. From the Back Bay Sun:
GROPE PATROL EFFECTIVE
Sgt. O'Connor of the MBTA Police gave a presentation on transit crime at local subway stops that highlighted the effectiveness of the city's current undercover operation aimed at deterring groping on the subway.
"Many more people are reporting incidents because of the patrol," said O'Connor. This past week, the patrol arrested a man on the Green Line when it was noticed that he did not appear to be going anywhere, simply riding back and forth between Kenmore and Park Street.
The plainclothes officers…
mikethemadbiologist | March 31, 2008So I found this real cool two-dimensional barcode generator. Here's this blog's two-dimensional barcode:
It stands for:
Mike the Mad Biologisthttp://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist
Providing help to idiots who desperately need it by calling them fucking morons since 2004
What's your barcode?
mikethemadbiologist | March 17, 2008And a Beannachtai na Feile Padraig too! (I've left out the accents cuz MovableType eats them). Tomorrow, in Boston, we celebrate one of the goofiest holidays EVAH!
No, I don't mean St. Patrick's Day--which is the Irish Purim*, and has perfectly...sensible traditions associated with it. I mean Evacuation Day, which celebrates the retreat of the British from Boston after an eleven month siege. That, and that the British decided not to burn the place down to the ground upon said leaving. Of course, Evacuation Day--a nice secular holiday--just happens to coincide with St. Patrick's Day.
What…