Cut Feet

Workout Notes 5 mile treadmill walk in 58 minutes.

Personal I spent most of the day in the hospital with Barbara; she had her scheduled foot surgery and that ate up about 6 hours. She is at home; I am watching NOW on PBS as I type this. They are talking about a homeless person plan: they give away a place to stay, free of charge, no questions asked.

Here are some articles from the internet that I have found interesting.

Ron Paul That Paul has openly accepted money from racist and anti-semitic groups is old news. In fact, he has talked about that on the news. He is asked about this and responded: (about 3:15 into the video)

Evidently, there is a neo-Nazi that claims that Paul has done much more that take money; he claims that Paul actually met with them and has provided names and time periods. The magazine New Republic is working on this.

This is Ron Paul with KKK leader Don Black and his son; this photo has made the rounds on the internet. Click the thumbnail for a larger version.

On a side note, the New Republic has another article on Ron Paul; one written by Tucker Carlson. Yes, that Tucker Carlson; TNR is hardly a liberal magazine.

What he says about Paul supporters is interesting:

[...]It’s hard to think of a presidential candidate who’s ever drawn a coalition as broad as Ron Paul’s. At any Paul event, you’re likely to run into self-described anarcho-capitalists, 9/11-deniers, antiwar lefties, objectivists, paleocons, hemp activists, and geeky high school kids, along with tax resisters, conspiracy nuts, and acolytes of Murray Rothbard. And those are just the ones it’s possible to categorize. It’s hard to say what they all have in common, except that every one is an ideological minority–or, as one of them put it to me, “open-minded people.” To these supporters, Paul is a folk hero, the one person in national politics who doesn’t judge them, who understands what it’s like to be considered a freak by straight society. [...]

Other stuff

Yoga: a yoga.com yogi has created a series of holiday cards with himself and his “significant other”.

A sample:

Those are nice photos!

Speaking of yoga: I like these yoga pants. (click for larger version)

Speaking of the Holiday Season, a local blogger points out that it is the Christians that “put Christ into the Season” to begin with; there already were several different celebrations going on at the same time.

Of course, the Christian tradition of Christmas celebration is a relatively new one, though the idea of a celebration at that time of the year is ancient. Check out the History Channel’s brief history of Christmas.

Of course, others are doing something else: check out the Rational Response Squad’s Christmas plans!

Science:

A water glacier on Mars? Yep.

A large rock may hit Mars soon; we’ve been hit by these too.

While this is very interesting and all, the truth of the matter is the Earth gets smacked, hard, by fast-flying rocks at least 1-10m in diameter between 35 and 40 times a year, based on telemetry from early warning satellites whose primary job is to detect rocket exhaust plumes and nuclear flashes on the lovely, peaceful, equitably-distributed and ecologically-balanced planing rolling underneath them.

The big rocks like our new friend, Asteroid 2007 WD5, here can ruin your day, but for someone under an airburst as destructive as an SS-14 or MX missile warhead or “merely” as bad the Hiroshima bomb, it’s not that important a distinction. A rock that weighs on the order of 50-500 tons going at 10-40 kilometers per second is going to hurt.

Still, we should give the upcoming possible fireworks show a look. [...]

Biosingularity has an end of the year science roundup, with an emphasis on the study on human genetic variation.

In 2007, researchers were dazzled by the degree to which genomes differ from one human to another and began to understand the role of these variations in disease and personal traits. Science and its publisher, AAAS, the nonprofit science society, recognize “Human Genetic Variation” as the Breakthrough of the Year, and identify nine other of the year’s most significant scientific accomplishments in the 21 December issue.

“For years we’ve been hearing about how similar people are to one another and even to other apes,” said Robert Coontz, deputy news editor for physical sciences who managed the selection process. “In 2007, advances on several fronts drove home for the first time how much DNA differs from person to person, too. It’s a huge conceptual leap that will affect everything from how doctors treat diseases to how we see ourselves and protect our privacy.”

The genomes of several individuals have already been sequenced. As technologies advance, many of us will have some, perhaps all, of our own genomes sequenced and will be able to learn the diseases for which we are at risk.

Since the sequencing of the human genome, biologists have been charting minute variations as small as one base, called single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). These variations were key to a dozen research projects in 2007 called genome-wide association studies in which researchers compared the DNA of thousands of individuals with and without a disease to determine which small genetic variants pose risks. This information can help lead researchers to disease-related genes, as in the case of several type 2 diabetes genes found this year.

Genome-wide association studies this year provided insight into many diseases, including atrial fibrillation, autoimmune disease, bipolar disorder, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, type 1 and 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

In 2007, biologists also learned that within DNA’s billions of bases, thousands to millions of them can get lost, added or copied in ways that can change genetic activity within a few generations. The effects of these “copy number variants” have been shown in populations with high-starch diets, as they have more copies of a gene for digesting starch than members of societies of hunter gatherers. Geneticists who studied the genomes of children with and without autism have found a new DNA modification that leads to increased risk for autism. [...]

They list other science advances; one of the advances is the proof that the game of checkers always ends in a draw, if neither player makes a mistake.

Biosignularity also has an article that reports that coffee can be good for you. Now that is one study that I welcome.

Humor:

The Stubborn Curmudgeon has a funny photo called “How Devout Catholics Read The God Delusion“