The headline reads Phillip Winikoff, 81, Allegedly Impersonated Doctor, Performed Breast Exams, and I have to admit, for a moment or two there was a little adolescent giggle bubbling up inside me. Then it struck me that this kind of shit could get someone killed. A misdiagnosis on breast cancer for example could waste valuable time and cost lives: [Read more…]
Herman Cain is the current conservative fave in the not-Romney GOP race to the bottom. Because the Teaparty thinks the problem with the economy is there aren’t enough part-time minimum wage pizza delivery jobs:
Cain checks in as the first choice of 27 percent of Republican voters in the poll, followed by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 23 percent and Perry at 16 percent. After those three, it’s Texas Rep. Ron Paul at 11 percent, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 8 percent, Bachmann at 5 percent and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman at 3 percent.
The thought of running against a repugnant, delusional megalo-maniac is a pleasant one. But how long can Cain stay on top if, or rather when, retirees — and those of us within bottle-rocket range of retirement — discover his center-piece 9-9-9 plan is not only somewhere between nationally devastating and ludicrous, it would cut off Social Security and Medicare?
So a little while ago at one of my day jobs we were all marched into a meeting to discuss unauthorized Internet usage. At which point the speaker tells us, “You can now use the Intertnet as much as you want, just keep it work appropriate.”
Totally unexpected.
So join me @SAndrewDKos or where ever as I burn company bandwidth to the fucking ground.
The Black Death, a real life horror show that reverberates into our own era. Think of Halloween, or zombie movies, with the ravenous undead parading around in ghastly make up. Not to mention the suite of autoimmune diseases many descendants of the lucky survivors are, please pardon the term, plagued with. [Read more…]
Yes, Russian crypto-pseudo zoologists who have nothing to gain — except fame and fortune through books, tapes, and tourism — are, once again, claiming they have incontrovertible proof for a living Yeti. Except the bullshit and backpedaling begins right away:
Russian researchers looking for the yeti — the Asian version of the North American Bigfoot — claim to have found “indisputable proof” of the long-sought mystery beast in Siberia. There isn’t a ton of evidence to work with — just a few strands of hair and some tracks in the snow — but it’s enough that the research team says its 95 percent sure that the yeti exists. Others, however, are mighty skeptical of the findings.
Of course, a few strands of yak hair and some markings in the snow. LOL, oh yeah, it’s bullet proof man! You know what would really be indisputable proof for a Yeti? A Yeti.
Uranus as seen by Hubble in 2005, shown in approximate orientation to the plane of its orbit.
If you want to get a feel for how utterly dishonest creationist arguments can be, look no further than Mr. Hovind and the Professor. It’s a spiel told by creationist nutbag Kent Hovind AKA Dr. Dino where he purportedly confounds a nameless scientist by pointing out that some planets and moon rotate backward. Hovind says since “Evolutionists claim the whole universe came from a single spinning dot that blew up,” and therefore any planets or moons, such as Uranus or Triton, going backward would defy the conservation of angular momentum. Thus, evolution is wrong.
Last I heard Hovind was doing time and it’s unlikely he’s open to evidence contradicting his little diatribe anyway. Nonetheless, such evidence exists and more is being gathered all the time:
Uranus is a real oddball in our solar system. Its spin axis is tilted by a whopping 98 degrees, meaning it essentially spins on its side. No other planet has anywhere near such a tilt. Jupiter is tilted by 3 degrees, for example, and Earth by 23 degrees. Scientists have long suspected that some manner of violent impact knocked Uranus off kilter. The accepted wisdom had been that a single object several times more massive than Earth did the damage, slamming into Uranus long ago, researchers said.
The red speck at the centre of this very deep image from the ESO Very Large Telescope shows the galaxy NTTDF-474, seen when the Universe was only 820 million years old. It is one of the most distant ever to have had its distance measured accurately, and is one of five that have been used to chart the timeline of the reionisation of the Universe about 13 billion years ago. Image: ESO/ L. Pentericci.
There has long been a theory, or perhaps its more of a hypothesis or a conjecture, that the first stars were very different from any class of star we see today. Sci-fi writers and cosmologists wonder if Very Early Massive Objects or VEMO’s might have lit up the early universe and, because of the great density and virtual absence of heavy elements early on, could have had bizarre properties compared to “modern” stars. It’s even possible some may have gone through a phase with nested fusing cores burning multiple substances at the same time, or even semi-distinct cores separated by millions of miles embedded in the same plasma envelope. We may never know just how far off the HR diagram some of these first generation mutants ventured. [Read more…]
Truly a leg-slapping howler from Mitt Romney:
I would call upon Gov. Perry to repudiate the sentiment and the comments made by that pastor,” Romney told reporters just hours before the pair are scheduled to meet in another presidential debate. “Governor Perry said that introduction hit it out of the park,” Romney added. “I don’t believe that that kind of divisiveness based on religion has a place in this country.”
It’s almost like Mittens lives in some kind of bizarro universe, or maybe he just flat forgot what party he belongs to. But now that the question has beenr aised, you know what I’d like to see asked in the debate tonight? Are followers of Reverend Sun Myung-moon in a cult? Why or why not?
That would be a hoot.
Very odd, the American Cancer Society reportedly turned down 250 grand, apparently for no other reason than the donating org was not religious:
Now, in case you’re wondering if this is standard behavior, find someone who works as a development director for a nonprofit. Ask her what her response would be to a $250,000 matching offer from a philanthropic foundation. And ask if her organization would be drooling, celebrating wildly, and bending over backward to make it happen — or if they would be evading, delaying, dodging, deflecting, changing their stories …
There are plenty of grisly things in the natural world, and the universe of microbes is no different. But for some reason the life cycle of megaviruses disturbs me as much as any blood-sucking, brain-invading metazoan parasites known to science:
The unusual size and gene content of the virus led one scientist to suggest that viruses could explain the origin of DNA-based life. If viruses carried all these genes, then it’s possible to imagine that one could set up shop in a cell and simply never leave … A paper is being released today, however, that argues that this scenario has things exactly backwards. Giant viruses, its authors argue, have all these genes normally associated with cells because, in their distant evolutionary past, they were once cells.