Thom Hartmann on Sarah Palin’s “I’m a victim of blood libel” speech

I don’t really buy this “blood libel is an appeal to the antisemite element” charge at the end, but the first 6 minutes or so are right on (e. g., dog whistles about American exceptionalism, SHE (and her followers) are always the victims, etc.

13 January 2011 early pm

Sleep: evidently the light you are in prior to sleeping and while sleeping has an effect:

Melatonin is a hormone produced at night by the pineal gland in the brain. In addition to its role in regulating the sleep-wake cycle, melatonin has been shown to lower blood pressure and body temperature and has also been explored as a treatment option for insomnia, hypertension and cancer. In modern society, people are routinely exposed to electrical lighting during evening hours to partake in work, recreational and social activities. This study sought to understand whether exposure to room light in the late evening may inhibit melatonin production.

“On a daily basis, millions of people choose to keep the lights on prior to bedtime and during the usual hours of sleep,” said Joshua Gooley, PhD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. and lead author of the study. “Our study shows that this exposure to indoor light has a strong suppressive effect on the hormone melatonin. This could, in turn, have effects on sleep quality and the body’s ability to regulate body temperature, blood pressure and glucose levels.”

In this study, researchers evaluated 116 healthy volunteers aged 18-30 years who were exposed to room light or dim light in the eight hours preceding bedtime for five consecutive days. An intravenous catheter was inserted into the forearms of study participants for continuous collection of blood plasma every 30-60 minutes for melatonin measurements. Results showed exposure to room light before bedtime shortened melatonin duration by about 90 minutes when compared to dim light exposure. Furthermore, exposure to room light during the usual hours of sleep suppressed melatonin by greater than 50 percent.

So, here is a rookie question: are they talking about eye exposure or skin exposure?

Mollusks: can develop teeth strong enough to crush rock. How?

Derk Joester of Northwestern University is studying how the chiton makes its teeth. Chitons are mollusks. They’re small, rather flat and oval in shape. The chiton Joester studies is called Chaetopleura apiculata, and it has a rather odd way of getting a meal.

“This particular organism literally chews rock in order to feed,” he says. It grinds down rock to get at algae and other food particles that might be sandwiched in the rock. “And for that, it needs incredibly tough and hard teeth.”

In fact, Joester says chiton teeth are one of the hardest and toughest materials known in nature. “They also have a very particular structure that allows them to self-sharpen to a certain degree. … Imagine a knife that keeps its edge forever.”

And that’s a trick Joester would like to be able to replicate in the lab.

A Closer Look

But before you can contemplate making such a thing in the lab, you need to know how the chiton does it. “For that, we are using one of the most powerful microscopes, the so-called atom probe,” Joester says.

He focuses this microscope on the interface between the soft organic molecules of the chiton’s innards with the rock-hard inorganic minerals of the chiton’s teeth. [...]

When materials scientists try to make things in the lab, they frequently have to resort to high temperatures and extreme pressures to force materials into a useful shape. And yet the chiton is able to make its remarkable teeth in regular old seawater and without special equipment. That’s why it’s worth studying.

“We can start to understand what the important design features are, and then start to develop techniques in the lab that might be able to take some of those features out and replicate them,” Estroff says.

Millions of years of evolution did what we currently cannot do!

Politics Evidently conservatives are fine with their own superstitions, but not the superstitions of others. Some were unhappy with the Native American prayers at the recent Arizona memorial service.

Chivalry must be dead!

Can it be that there isn’t at least one gentleman that wants to help Ms. Kardashian pull up her pants?

Hey, viewing this video was a change of pace from writing this article about a set that has no well defined Lebesgue measure.

This reminds me an exchange that I had with my wife: she bought a new business pantsuit but had underestimated the size. She told me: “honey, these pants are so tight that I am afraid to sit down”. Then she saw my face and it was race to see if she could get out the door before I could find my digital camera.

13 January 2011 Topics

Workout notes About 20 minutes of stretching, warm up, sit ups, and TWO sets of 10 on the Smith machine: 10 x 45, 10 x 135, “perfect form” squats.
Then 12 minutes on the AMT
25 laps of easy running in 30:03 (28:54 for 3 miles; 9:50, 9:40, 9:28)
1 mile cool down walk
hip hikes, stretches, etc.

Everything felt better though I had some piriformis tingles.

From the world of running: poor guy…..he didn’t see the race official trying to correct him; he lead at 25.99 miles into the race only to go off course. This was a “relay marathon”.

Posts
Who says that science nerds don’t have a sense of humor? I love this mug even though I am not a cat fan.

Different sort of humor:

see more funny videos

Yeah, I got a speeding ticket (recently) but didn’t do this. Thank goodness….

Social Why do the wealthy feel as if they aren’t wealthy? One reason: they see who is ahead of them. But I love how Paul Krugman finishes this article:

The net result is a society of winners as whiners, where people who are not only doing fine but doing much better relative to the median than they were a generation ago nonetheless feel left behind.

A personal note: I’ve always found extreme inequality at the top rather relaxing from my own point of view. Robin and I are doing very well, of course, but others are much richer; the fact, however, is that especially in New York you know that no matter how much you make, there are other people making so much that your earnings look trivial. So what’s the point of evaluating yourself that way? Of course, it’s probably a lot easier to feel that way when you’ve gotten plenty of other ego-boosters.

In other words, he isn’t the richest, but he is far smarter and more successful than almost all of his critics.
Of course, not only am I not wealthy, but I also know that I am not on the same intellectual level with, say, professors in the MIT mathematics department or even the University of Illinois math department (by a long shot). But I am far smarter than, say, a Sarah Palin supporter.

President Obama’s Speech Reactions to it were pretty good. The contrast between President Obama and Governor Palin was stark and, to be frank, not at all flattering to Gov. Palin (and even less so to those who approve of her).

And please, don’t even start with “it is on both sides”; sure there have been some Democrats who said objectionable things but…

Now to be fair, one reason that the Republicans use more “hunting and gun” metaphors might be because many come from rural and “hunter friendly” areas where people actually relate to hunting and see it as a good thing; tell a liberal that we are going to “bag” a conservative and the image of taking a conservative out of a bulk bin in a co-op and putting them into a reusable canvas bag comes to mind.

But the fact remains that they use more violent rhetoric.

Treadmill Day….13 January 2011

That is -17 C to some of you. Given the snow covered streets and my newly healing back, I’ll be indoors again.