I’m lucky, in this day and age. I have a job, my firm is making money, and I might get a little piece of it. My bonus should be a couple of thousand bucks — if I’m still employed when that time rolls around and if — thanks to missing four days last month while recovering from a life threatening injury in the trauma ward of a local hospital — I don’t miss a single day of work between now and then. So cry me a fucking river:

During the first nine months of the year, Goldman set aside an average of $292,836 of pay per employee, down 21 percent from $370,706 for the same period last year. But much of that pay was set aside in the first two quarters of the year. In the third quarter, the bank set aside just $46,000 per employee, down an eye-popping 57 percent from the same period last year.

Short answer seems to be … No! [Read more…]

Cut and burn Republicans usually interested in eliminating grandma’s health insurance and pension in favor of their rich, thieving friends can’t get themselves enough government spending in some cases. And so it is with the decaying corpse of NASA, there’s meat on them thar bones for shortsighted politicians to pilfer yet! One of them goes by the name of the Space Launch System or SLS. There it is over to the right, in conceptual form anyway. [Read more…]

So goes the lyrics to Beastie Boys You’ve Gotta Fight For Your Right to Party. But it looks like a gang of rogue Amish fundies from a breakaway clan were on a hair cutting spree for another reason, failure to worship properly:

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department in Ohio has released the mugshots for three of the five Amish men arrested for allegedly breaking into the homes of other Amish men and cutting off their hair and beards.

Seeing those mugshots, the first thing I thought was they should have turned the scissors on themselves.

New research on a very old animal has given one scientist enough info that the top velocity of the large dino can be estimated:

Persons figures the Carnotaurus could have topped out at 56 km/h, but only in a straight line, as the tail muscle prevented swift lateral movement. That’s faster than a charging rhinoceros, by comparison, and also a heck of a lot more deadly.

That’s not slow, it’s about 35 mph, but there are several breeds of domestic dogs, lots of horses and antelope — and a few species of cats whose half grown children — could leave this dino eating dust. Of course good science tends to be conservative and I wager that’s exactly what this researcher was doing. But in the almost 200 hundred million years dinos dominated, odds are good that somewhere and some-when, there were species that would give a modern greyhound or maybe even quarterhorse a run for the money.

A new study on plant and animal species indicates an alarming trend: they’re getting smaller:

The shrinking victims, according to the study, include cotton, corn, strawberries, bay scallops, shrimp, crayfish, carp, Atlantic salmon, herring, frogs, toads, iguanas, hooded robins, red-billed gulls, California squirrels, lynx and wood rats.

The study suggests climate change as a possible agent of change. I suppose that’s possible, less rainfall for example could certainly translate into smaller stature directly, and select for smaller sized plants and animals over time. But that’s a bold claim and it will require more evidence before its widely accepted.

Hubble is still out there of course, taking brilliant shots of a breathtaking universe (Below). One of the things the world’ most famous telescope will hopefully illuminate, in what’s left of its operational life, includes one may well be one of the most important mysteries in the universe: Dark Matter distribution:

To find out where dark matter lies, and how much of it there is, scientists look for an effect called gravitational lensing. This bending of light is caused when mass — including dark matter — warps space-time, causing light to travel a crooked path through it. The end effect is a curvy, funhouse-mirror type view of distant cosmic objects.

You might wonder why Dark Matter is so important, especially since it stays so diffuse, whereas the ordinary stuff clumps up in gas, dust, and stars, turning hydrogen and helium into carbon and oxygen, making rocky planets, butterflies and humans possible. [Read more…]

My friend Mark Sumner brings up an excellent point for anti-government lunatics in this great essay at Daily Kos. Without rules baseball wouldn’t be baseball, it would be a gang fight:

The rules aren’t just a part of baseball, they are baseball. Executing those rules under those supervision of the umpires is what it means to play the game. Functional capitalism has always required the same thing: rules and people to enforce those rules.

Mark’s a way better writer than I am and he goes on to explain beautifully what this means in the context of government regulation. I probably would have cut straight to the crude point and say that unlimited and unconstrained capitalism without oversight and government enforcement of that oversight isn’t called capitalism for long, it’s called war.