Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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The apoprietor of these parts emails me of these, um, innovators then fails to blog about them. Maybe he just doesn't want to tread on my turf? Dunno.
Since my boss walked down the hall at 1:30 and said "Go home" (yes, unbelievable as it may seem, I am apparently employable) I actually have a few moments to visit the forum.
While I'm here, in other news, congressional Democrats actually showed some spine but not until after significant damage had already been done.
And more: It's long been my lament that we heavily subsidize clearcutting of our National Forests, in order to make paper products artificially cheap, advantaging those who would stuff my mailbox full of unwanted crap. But hey, at least those catalogs can... um... be... recycled... ?... Oy.
{heresy}Recycling is just a less bad way of wasting{/heresy}.
I will give this a try, however.
Geez.
A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims. In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries. Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable. [...]
In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church. There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".
"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.
The parent in me thinks, "You know what? If you two can't work this out, then neither of you can use the word."
We make money not art visits the Paul McCarthy retrospective in Belgium.
The Head Shop / Shop Head exhibition is rough, abject, violent, it grabs you by the guts, hovers between bad Hollywood slapstick and the restroom, it's a carnival of the vile and filthy but it is fascinating and mind-blowing. In fact, it must be one of the best exhibitions I've seen this year (together with History Will Repeat Itself (Part 1 and 2) which is currently running at the KW in Berlin.)
McCarthy's work throws at our face the dark side of The American Dream and western consumer society. S.M.A.K. presents a selection of the works he produced between 1966 and 2006, plus a series of new works which premiered in Ghent.
Exhibit trailer and a link to her Flickr photoset at the post.
Take a look outside. Red, white, blue, purple, green, yellow, black... We're all looking at the same moon. Merry Christmas, everybody. -Froz
Could be a big collision next month.
An asteroid similar to the one that flattened forests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars next month, scientists said Thursday. Researchers attached to NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, who sometimes jokingly call themselves the Solar System Defense Team, have been tracking the asteroid since its discovery in late November. The scientists, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, put the chances that it will hit the Red Planet on Jan. 30 at about 1 in 75.
A 1-in-75 shot is "wildly unusual," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near-Earth Object office, which routinely tracks about 5,000 objects in Earth's neighborhood. "We're used to dealing with odds like one-in-a-million," Chesley said. "Something with a one-in-a-hundred chance makes us sit up straight in our chairs."
The asteroid, designated 2007 WD5, is about 160 feet across, which puts it in the range of the space rock that exploded over Siberia. That explosion, the largest impact event in recent history, felled 80 million trees over 830 square miles. The Tunguska object broke up in midair, but the Martian atmosphere is so thin that an asteroid would probably plummet to the surface, digging a crater half a mile wide, Chesley said.
The asteroid is behind the moon right now, so they won't be able to get a more accurate reading of its trajectory for another couple of weeks.
Update: New .zip file up with the missing tracks included.
Previously:
Unfunkked
Unfunkked 2: id est, UNH!
People often get tattooed in places where the work won't be seen unless it's deliberately shown. This is a pretty sound strategy in case, some years later, you come to regret having gotten the tattoo. However, it isn't 100% fool-proof.
A surgeon faces a disciplinary hearing for snapping a photo of a patient's tattooed genitals during an operation and showing it around to other doctors. Mayo Clinic Hospital administrators said Dr. Adam Hansen, chief resident of general surgery, admitted taking the photo with his cell phone on December 11. The tattoo on strip club owner Sean Dubowik's penis reads: "Hot Rod." [...] Dubowik said he got the tattoo on a bet and that "it was the most horrible thing I ever went though in my life."
Caveat: The study was performed at Duke, so the college students' performances are obviously going to be lower than they would have been eight miles to the west, but still.
A college education doesn't give you much of an edge over a monkey when it comes to doing some basic arithmetic, according to a study released Monday that underscores the surprising mental agility of our simian relatives. In a rapid fire test of mental addition, monkeys performed almost as well as college students, showing they're no slouches when it comes to number crunching. The macaques got their sums right 76 percent of the time, while the students got the correct answer 94 percent of the time in a series of increasingly challenging maths tests.
On the other hand, the monkeys' five-paragraph essays sucked and not a single one could work a beer bong properly.
Y'kno, call me a heretic, but this is just one of the things I've never gotten about the "Big 3" religions. Dude took his kid up the hill to slit his throat because, um, "God told him to." And he ends up the founding father of these three faiths. Isn't it an improvement in civilization that, today, he would at least lose custody and hopefully be permanently incarcerated?
So much potential, both positive and negative. But undeniably fascinating.
Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's first entirely handcrafted chromosome -- a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce. In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.
The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial -- and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive. [...]
LS9 Inc., a company in San Carlos, Calif., is already using E. coli bacteria that have been reprogrammed with synthetic DNA to produce a fuel alternative from a diet of corn syrup and sugar cane. So efficient are the bugs' synthetic metabolisms that LS9 predicts it will be able to sell the fuel for just $1.25 a gallon.
At a DuPont plant in Tennessee, other semi-synthetic bacteria are living on cornstarch and making the chemical 1,3 propanediol, or PDO. Millions of pounds of the stuff are being spun and woven into high-tech fabrics (DuPont's chief executive wears a pinstripe suit made of it), putting the bug-begotten chemical on track to become the first $1 billion biotech product that is not a pharmaceutical.
Worth reading all the way through. Via Carl Zimmer.
Jury deadlocks in malicious castration case but the judge refuses to take no for an answer. If you believe the defendant (and I think I do), that's how the first guy lost his marbles. So, defensive posture, your honor!
Indeed. Though they forgot the part where, after three days, Jesus climbed out of the chimney and saw his shadow, signaling six more weeks of winter.
Oh, and by the way, a whole 'nother gallery of Santa Claus scaring the bejesus out of small children, via Hermits Rock.
I'm not familiar with the going pay rate for cops in Massachusetts but whatever it is, these guys aren't getting paid enough.
Excellent quality streaming video of a righteously ass-kicking Marcus Miller concert. Bass so big it will make your bowels loose.
The man who police say was castrated by a Lillington woman with her bare hand took the stand yesterday, graphically describing a Christmas celebration turned bloody. The state has now rested its malicious castration case against Rebecca Arnold Dawson.
Update: Ms. Dawson testifies.
I'm generally pretty grinchy about Christmas, mostly because I viscerally hate Christmas music with every fiber of my being, and it's piped into every public space for hundreds of miles in every direction. Hell, not just public spaces; even the bathrooms at work have Jingle Bell Rock bouncing off the walls from the day after Thanksgiving 'til sometime after New Years. Horrorshow, I tells you.
However, I do enjoy annually linking to my two favorite Christmas sites.
1. Christopher Hitchens - Bah Humbug
2. The Sun-Sentinel's gallery of kids completely losing their shit in Santa's lap.
Steve Fraser believes the shit's about to hit the fan.
Will the presidential election of 2008 mark a turning point in American political history? Will it terminate with extreme prejudice the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the country for the last generation? No matter the haplessness of the Democratic opposition, the answer is yes.
With Richard Nixon's victory in the 1968 presidential election, a new political order first triumphed over New Deal liberalism. It was an historic victory that one-time Republican strategist and now political critic Kevin Phillips memorably anointed the "emerging Republican majority." Now, that Republican "majority" finds itself in a systemic crisis from which there is no escape.
Only at moments of profound shock to the old order of things -- the Great Depression of the 1930s or the coming together of imperial war, racial confrontation, and de-industrialization in the late 1960s and 1970s -- does this kind of upheaval become possible in a political universe renowned for its stability, banality, and extraordinary capacity to duck things that matter. The trauma must be real and it must be perceived by people as traumatic. Both conditions now apply.
War, economic collapse, and the political implosion of the Republican Party will make 2008 a year to remember.
One thing that has bugged me about Trader Joe's is the over-packaging. It seemed like every quartet of apples required a polystyrene clamshell. While I still would prefer less packaging in general, I am encouraged by their recent move to a "compostable" container. Not many folks will take advantage of this, methinks. But hey, at least they're responding to green market demands.
I'm skeptical to say the least, having gotten started lo-those-many-years-ago by tilting at windmills when SPI first established the PCCS (now RICS) labeling system while only milk jugs and soda bottles were recyclable, even those in only one out of about ten towns.
The manufacturer's website doesn't identify this particular product although I doubt quite seriously it's palm-derivative like their others. It's polylactide (PLA). Given that ADM controls everything that you or I eat, drink, wear or touch, I'm confident it is a corn product.
I know, the first part of that last sentence is rather understated; the list of verbs could go on and on and on...
Pictures of the composting project are below the fold. I'll provide updates over time on how our little container behaves. It fractured easily and repeatedly, quite unlike polystyrene. Yes. I take this post as a gratuitous opportunity to show off yet another beautiful Froz Goboan compost pile. It's my blog and I can do that. You're welcome. Bask in my brilliance.
Ham. It's what's for Hanukkah. I guess it's the thought that counts.
The headline is way overselling the discovery, but it's pretty important nonetheless.
NASA says its Mars rover Spirit has discovered "the best evidence yet" of a past habitable environment on the planet's surface. Spirit has been exploring a plateau called Home Plate, where it discovered silica-rich soil in May. Researchers are now trying to determine what produced the patch of nearly pure silica - the main ingredient of window glass. They believe the deposits came from an ancient hot-spring environment or an environment called a fumarole, in which acidic steam rises through cracks. On Earth, both of these types of settings teem with microbial life, said rover chief scientist Steve Squyres.
"Whichever of those conditions produced it, this concentration of silica is probably the most significant discovery by Spirit for revealing a habitable niche that existed on Mars in the past," he said. "The evidence is pointing most strongly toward fumarolic conditions, like you might see in Hawaii and in Iceland. Compared with deposits formed at hot springs, we know less about how well fumarolic deposits can preserve microbial fossils. That's something needing more study here on Earth."
A man dressed in a silver metallic suit, a matching helmet and dark glasses heckled Bill Clinton Monday at his last campaign stop. About seven minutes into the former president's fourth speech of the day, the man stood on a chair on the press riser and shouted that robots wanted Clinton to say he was sorry for statements he made 15 years ago.
"Bill Clinton, I want you to apologize to Sister Souljah. Robots of the world want you to apologize to Sister Souljah. We want you to apologize," the man said as one observer gasped "Oh my God."
A volunteer demanded to know who had let him in and the audience heckled the heckler with boos and screams of "Get out of here!" He then threw dozens of orange, green, hot pink and yellow cards into the air. A woman yanked what appeared to be a microphone out of the man's hands, and he was escorted out of the room without further incident.
The cards read: "Robots are mad at Bill. MR-IFOBCA stands for Mad Robots In Favor Of Bill Clinton Apologizing. Mr. Ifobca says, "Bill Clinton should be ashamed of himself for slandering a Black woman named Sister Souljah," followed by a website address (www.Mr-Ifobca.org ).
(Via TPM)
Update: Video.
After running the anchor leg in my family's version of the flu-fever-five-thousand™ relay, the muscles are only minimally achy, the fog of delirium has mostly burned off, and only a slight cough remains. This is the treatment of my choice for the last.
In a three-way comparison, honey was significantly more effective than no treatment (P<0.001) for relief of symptoms, and dextromethorphan (the active ingredient in most OTC cough remedies -FG) was not, Ian M. Paul, M.D., of Penn State, and colleagues, reported in the December issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. "Honey may be a preferable treatment for the cough and sleep difficulty associated with childhood upper respiratory tract infection," they concluded.
While it's encouraging to see an inexpensive, minimally processed product that is widely available from local sources get some scientific validation, something seems sketchy about the experiment: The parents knew what they were giving the children then characterizing the results. It wasn't really blind. Does that jeopardize the conclusion?
*cough* *cough*
Hands down, the most logistically impressive single-car crash I have ever seen. But I'm confused: do Brits call the second floor of a building the first floor?
(h/t to Becks, who sent it with a quite justified squeamish alert)
How America Lost the War on Drugs. If you think the War on Iraq has been a colossally expensive and bloody bungle born of cockamamie theories and stupid, bipartisan, macho chest-puffing, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
So, there's been nothing here for a while. I've been stranded in the Plague House, as some nasty bug took down my family one person at a time. The last two days were my turn, and it was every bit as unpleasant as it looked. But everybody's on the mend, if a few pounds lighter and weaker for the experience. Yuck.
Now I'm trying to catch up with half a week's missed work, so probably slim pickings in the immediate future as well. In the meantime, here's today's turkeyslap of the day.
"Basically, I see a lot of geometric figures made into one gigantic figure," junior business major Jonathan Cummings said. "I guess it's interesting ... that would be the best adjective to keep things positive. All right, I'll come out and say it; it's a pair of testicles. That's what I see. Someone put a huge sack in front of the business building, and, being a business major, that's kind of a slap in the face."
Nothing like getting slapped in the face by testicles to start your week off right.
