24 August 2010 (pm)

Humor This headline in and of itself is hilarious! (note: this is from The Onion)

Study: Children Exposed To Pornography May Expect Sex To Be Enjoyable

Really not funny but Things that 20 percent (or more) Americans believe (beyond “Obama is a Muslim”). One of them I knew about already (that 1 in 5 Americans believe that the Sun goes around the Earth). More shocking: 24 percent didn’t know that we gained our independence from Great Britain (UK and England were also considered correct answers).

Note: in this list of incredible things was included that “George Bush was a great President”. While I certainly don’t agree with that, this is a matter of opinion and therefore not in the same category as the two things that I mentioned, believing in witches (NOT the Wicca type but rather ones that can cast spells).

Science Astronomy: the most planet dense “exo-solar system” was recently discovered, which includes a planet not much larger than the earth. This exo-planet is very close to its star; this system also has no Jupiter caliber gas planets.

Human biology: This article isn’t so much about the biology, but is interesting nevertheless: there are a few women who are born with no internal female organs. This is one such case. A friend explained it to me this way:

Lauri Dömötör Berger I learned about this in my genetics class just last semester. Basically, at the extreme earliest of stages (like within the first few days after conception), those male genes must be “turned on” by what’s called “housekeeping genes” or Hox genes. For whatever reason, these Hox genes fail to do so. Since you can live with one X chromosome (all females have one inactive X chromosome), but you cannot live without an X chromosome, or just a Y chromosome, you get female physiology, at least from the outside.

24 August 2010 (AM)

The semester starts tomorrow; I have lesson plans, quizzes, and my lunch stuff all ready to go. Oh yes, I need some pain killers at work.

I also got my hair cut in West Peoria; from my short time in there, people show up to chat, bag, and talk about local politics. Still, I can recommend that barber shop (right across the street from Haddad’s West Peoria Market, where I get my groceries. So I am beardless.

Links:
Now we can use “bone printing” to scan for terrorists: that’s right; enter a stadium and get your bones scanned that way if a terrorist tries to enter…oh wait…

Because every country has a database of terrorist skeletons just waiting to be used.

Ok, not all new ideas are good for what they were intended to be used for.

Economics:
People are taking issue with what Paul Krugman said. He doesn’t care:

The Tax Policy Center estimates (pdf) say that the budget cost of making all the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to only the middle class cuts, is $680 billion over the next decade. It also says that 55 percent of the benefit flows to 120,000 taxpayers. That’s $374 billion divided by 120,000; TPC expresses it as a per year gain of $310,000, but it is more than $3 million per member of the top .1% over the course of the decade.

So if you are reading some source claiming that I got it all wrong, you have just learned something about that source’s credibility.

I’ll put it more bluntly: many (not all) of his critics are idiots who routinely get their “information” from liars.
Was that too strident?

Oh wait, there’s more. Eugene Robinson says that they are wimps too: (ok, I switched from “critics of Krguman” to rabid right wingers…but the first is a subset of the second…)

The thing is, though, that the manufactured brouhaha over the Park51 project is part of a larger pattern in which the far right embraces victimhood and stokes fear. The faction that likes to portray itself as a bunch of John Waynes and “mama grizzlies,” it turns out, spends an awful lot of time cowering in the corner and complaining about how beastly everyone else is being.

Witness the frequent eruptions over instances of reverse racism — real or imagined. The Shirley Sherrod affair was the most recent example of how eagerly the far right wants to sell the false narrative that African Americans, once they achieve positions of authority, will use their newly acquired power to punish whites for historical discrimination. The facts of the Sherrod case, as they finally emerged, argue persuasively against this fictional tale of longed-for revenge. But it will be back.

And look at the hysteria over illegal immigration. Facts don’t matter — for example, that the flow of undocumented migrants has decreased, or that border enforcement under President Obama is much tougher than under George W. Bush, or that illegal immigrants are not responsible for any kind of crime wave. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), has gone so far as to sound the alarm about alleged “terror babies.” The idea is that undocumented pregnant women would cross the border so that their children could have U.S. citizenship, then take the babies away to be raised as terrorists — who would be able to come back in 20 years or so, with legitimate U.S. passports, and presumably wreak untold havoc. No, I did not make that up.

Is the far right really afraid of its own shadow? Do these people really have so little faith in our nation’s strength, resilience and values? I hope this is all just cynical political calculation, because there are genuine threats and challenges out there. We’ll be better off meeting them with a spine, not a whine.

Emphasis mine. All of those “tough” right wingers are really little cowering sissies.

Psst: David Brooks/Kathleen Parker type Republicans; those on the left side of this political cartoon: I am NOT talking about you!

24 Aug 2010 Rehabilitation

1:11:13 (walk; cool conditions, felt fine)

Last night: pain in my shoulder 4 hours into sleeping then none. Some slight lateral pain in the knee (surface, shallow, not in the joint, not behind).

PT: therapist is out sick. But that is just as well since I’ve had no improvement.

Daily Kos: Awesome Jon Stewart debate: Is Fox News evil or stupid? (+ Colbert on anti-Muslim protesters)

Daily Kos: Awesome Jon Stewart debate: Is Fox N…, posted with vodpod

Petite Girl Lifts Twice Her Weight

She lifts 220 pounds. DotaPro’s dream girl?

Petite Girl Lifts Twice Her Weight, posted with vodpod

24 August 2010 early am

A President can only do so much; here is an example:

US government funding for research using embryonic stem cells has been thrown into disarray after a judge ruled that it violates laws prohibiting the destruction of human embryos.

The effect of the temporary injunction, by district court judge Royce Lamberth, bars federal funding for studies on stem cells derived from human embryos that are later discarded, which had been allowed by President Obama’s executive order last year.

The judge ruled that the research violated the Dickey-Wicker amendment first passed by Congress in 1995, which outlawed the use of taxpayer funds to carry out any “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed”.

The New York Times reported that the ruling came as a shock to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and at medical research universities across the US: “Scientists scrambled Monday evening to assess the ruling’s immediate impact on their work.”

The injunction appears to set the scientific clock back to President Bush’s executive order restricting federally-funded research to stem cells already in existence by August 2001. But some scientists fear that the scope of the latest ruling may even prohibit research on that basis, since the limited lines of stem cells allowed under the Bush regulations were also derived from human embryos.[...]

The judge’s decision is almost certain to be appealed by the administration but it does confirm fears at the time of President Obama’s order that an executive ruling would provide weaker protection for funding than legislation passed by Congress.

Well, time for Congress to get cracking.

Three Links…

Bush Tax cuts vs. Obama’s plan, in pictures.

Christopher Hitchens on the “ground zero” mosque; he gets it. I don’t like Islam but the opposition to this mosque is nothing more than an attempt to score cheap political points at the expense of an unpopular group of people.

If you follow PZ Myers: he is having some serious heart trouble. But do not pray for him.