The Mittmentum builds in wake of NH results

Of course no one expected Mitt to lose, everyone expected him to win big, and most articles I’ve seen this morning are trying to figure out an angle where he didn’t win big enough and therefore doom is in the details. I think that’s BS, Mitterns won plenty big enough. Now the clown car moves to South Carolina, where we can only hope certain disgruntled clowns cause more trouble than help. 

Elsewhere, it was nice seeing Hunstman and Paul coming in with good numbers and reaffirms my view that even the craziest part of the crazy New Hampshire conservative base is far smaller, or maybe just more sane and thoughtful, than the mean or moderate part of the same base anywhere else. My big bottle of schadenfreude, or any antique bottle of laudanum that happens to come my way, is that Rick Perry was crushed. Anyway, without further delay, results below the jump: [Read more…]

Guess I’ll go eat worms

This image from a scanning electron microscope shows the upper leaf surface several nematodes (arrows), stalked glands, and adherent sand grains (arrows). Image Rafael Oliveira PNAS

Title partially inspired by the post below about careers and non careers, but mostly by this newly discovered plant that chows down on annelids — correction from comments, Phylum Nematoda, aka roundworms:

(MSNBC) — The rare plant Philcoxia minensis is found in the tropical savannahs of Brazil, areas rich in biodiversity and highly in need of conservation. Although some of the plant’s millimeter-wide leaves grow above ground as expected, strangely, most of its tiny, sticky leaves lie beneath the surface of the shallow white sands on which it grows.

A small word of career advice

If you’ve been an executive, don’t join a company as an “enlisted” man even if it looks good. You won’t be able to climb out of that hole in most cases, and even if it is possible at some times and places it will probably take years to get back to even close to where you were, and you’ll live in near poverty during that climb. Hold out for the executive job, work wherever you need to in the meantime but don’t expect any advancement if you start out low. That’s what dead-end job means, Dead End Ahead.  I made a very big mistake joining a great company but at the lowest rung of the ladder, thinking that, because I had a strong track record of personal sucess followed by two decades of running teams of people in the same environment, I would be able to move up.

Uh-uh, doesn’t work like that. You start as a scrub and a scrub you will remain for a very long time. So, while that company’s pay checks clear and they don’t generally screw me over the way I’ve heard others do and the way others have, I’m going nowhere. I literally am not allowed to even apply for a management job where I am; although if I did not work here then I could. It’s an insane policy but, alas, a common one in the corporate world.  That is all.

Insight into anti-vaccination

This comment was posted on Daily Kos by the (Obviously admirable) parent of an autistic child. I thought it appropriate and well written enough to reproduce in its entirety below. — DS

“I have a teeny insight into that large faction of antivaxxers. (My biology degree, ironically, “immunized” me from believing their arguments, however.)

When someone sits you down and tells you that your child has this “terrible affliction,” you usually know almost nothing about it beyond a few Hollywood stereotypes. All you know is that your life, your entire world, has been flipped upside down. You can’t breathe. This must be a mistake, you think. I can’t do this. I don’t understand how this happened. [Read more…]

This week in science

I haven’t written much about HIV/AIDS denialism. It’s pseudo-science through and through, as lousy and underhanded as creationists are with the evidence for evolution or climate change deniars are with thermometer readings. They are sometimes allied with antivaxxers and other forms of quackery, but generally don’t neatly fit across the traditional left-right US political axis. Regardless, in some circles the shit hit the proverbial fan this week: [Read more…]

The “Lost World” of Antarctica

The thing about Antarctica is it’s cold. Really cold. As in an average temperature of about 15 F on the warmer coastline and even more frigid in the interior. So maybe it’s no surprise that warm seeps and hydrothermal vent communities in that neck of the woods would march to their own beat. That’s exactly what a team of researchers has announced:

(Houston Chronicle) — Interestingly the life found at these hydrothermal vents varies significantly that made in the first discovery of hydrothermal vent life, back in the 1970s, on the Galapagos Rift, as well as elsewhere since then. “What we didn’t find is almost as surprising as what we did,” said Oxford University zoologist Alex Rogers, who led the research. “Many animals such as tubeworms, vent mussels, vent crabs, and vent shrimps, found in hydrothermal vents in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, simply weren’t there.”

One of the things that’s exciting about this isn’t simply the evolutionary divergence, the warm seeps under the frigid Southern Ocean and ice shelves are about as close as anything on earth to what could lay under the thick ice of Jupiter’s second moon Europa.

Some more pics:

Iowa Caucus: the afterbirth

Results: AP | CBS | CNN | DMR | Google | NYT | Politico | Daily Kos

Mitt Romney squeaked by Rick Santorum by a whopping eight votes as of this morning to edge out a razor-edged win in the Iowa caucus. The former Massachusetts Governor and current serial flip-flopper will now take to the airwaves proclaiming the unbridled, unstoppable power of his Eight Vote Mandate By The People. Santorum meanwhile will be met with dozens of steely eyed advisers intent on convincing him he could actually win, mostly so that said steely eyed advisers can try to separate as much money from Anyone-but-Romney voters and divert it into their paychecks and expense accounts as they possibly can before the cruel ministrations of electoral reality set in. [Read more…]