revere | September 7, 2008The Bush administration and Republicans in general have acted and talked tough about copyright violations. It's not just Republicans, either. Some scumbag Democrats are in bed with the RIAA and MPAA and going at it as much as they can as long as the Johns are paying for their services. But it's another case of "Do as I say, not as I do," for the GOP. The McCain campaign has now been tagged at least three times for using copyrighted material in campaign ads and events without the permission of the artists. Jackson Browne is suing them for $1 million for the unauthorized use of "Running on…
revere | September 7, 2008Naturally I find Sarah Palin's mixing religion and politics odious. Whether it's believing that the War in Iraq is a task from God or that Alaska's young people should pray that "God's will" be done in constructing her preferred version of a natural gas pipeline or thinking that it's fine to teach Creationism in science class, this is a person who feels untroubled and confident about the rightness of her personal religious views. Moreover she believes in the literal interpretation of the bible. So naturally I find Sarah Palin's religion and politics odious. What's to like?
I don't care about…
revere | September 6, 2008This is another in our Daily Dose of Sarah Palin, because even if John McCain didn't think it was that important to learn a lot about the person who might be the next President should some medical event befall the 72 year old cancer survivor should he be elected, most people want more information. Previous installments here. So much material, so little time. Oh, well. Let's do the library story today, since it's tied up with her alleged small town mayor claim.
Now Sarah Palin is claiming being the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, makes her a different kind of politician. Youknow, the kind who is in…
revere | September 6, 2008This has been around, but even if you've already seen it it's still funny. And instructive. Well, maybe not for everyone. Some people aren't trainable:
revere | September 5, 2008This is another in our Daily Dose of Sarah Palin, because even if John McCain didn't think it was that important to learn a lot about the person who might be the next President should some medical event befall the 72 year old cancer survivor should he be elected, most people want more information. Previous installments here. Today it's Troopergate.
Governor Palin has a nasty problem Alaskans call Troopergate. It is under investigation by a bipartisan commission of the Alaskan legislature about whether she abused her power. Palin has reportedly lawyered up. The story is the kind of messy and…
revere | September 5, 2008When influenza viruses with different genetic make-up co-infect a cell there is the possibility that they will mix their genetic endowments. The influenza virus is designed to do only one thing: make a copy of itself. It does this by tricking the host's protein manufacturing machinery to use the virus's genetic blueprint to make a viral copy. Influenza genes come in eight discrete packages and at some point these genetic segments are naked in the cell. If the segments of two viruses are in the cell at the same time the segments can mix and match, with some of the segments of one virus being…
revere | September 4, 2008This is another in our Daily Dose of Sarah Palin, because even if John McCain didn't think it was that important to learn a lot about the person who might be the next President should some medical event befall the 72 year old cancer survivor should he be elected, most people want more information. Previous installments here.
In answering a questionnaire for gubernatorial candidates in 2006, here's how she answered a question, about civil rights for people of different sexual orientations:
Do you support the Alaska Supreme Court's ruling that spousal benefits for state employees should be…
revere | September 4, 2008McCain wants to go full speed ahead for nuclear power (that's a maverick's way of dealing with climate change?) and Obama seems to feel friendly to it, too, as long as the waste disposal issue can be solved, satisfactorily (which it doesn't seem it can be, but that's another story). Everyone agrees that nuclear power has to be managed safely if we are going to rely on it to any extent and we are always given assurances that this is not only possible but what happens as a matter of course, no exceptions. To make sure, government plans are reviewed by independent experts. Too bad we can't see…
revere | September 3, 2008This is another in our Daily Dose of Sarah Palin, because even if John McCain didn't think it was that important to learn a lot about the person who might be the next President should some medical event befall the 72 year old cancer survivor who would occupy the position should he be elected, most people want more information. Previous installments here. What we see is that Palin is a perfect fit for the most extreme right wing Republican platform in that party's history.
I'm not interested in Sarah Palin's family joys and sorrows. Not my business. But I am interested in her version of…
revere | September 3, 2008I've mentioned my shit box of a car pretty often here, usually in connection with trying to get someone to buy it. I had another flat this morning from a rim that is so rusty it doesn't hold a seal anymore. I thought I'd replaced it at the junkyard last week but it seems they replaced the wrong rim. That's what happens when you buy tires and rims at the junkyard. I'm not really in to cars, which is why I can keep driving my 14 year old monstrosity. It gets me from A to B, which is what I want. It doesn't have much hi tech stuff, although I like that kind of thing. My next car maybe.
It does…
revere | September 2, 2008Not many people know much about John McCain's new running mate, Sarah Palin, first term Governor of Alaska (in office 20 months). Not even John McCain knows that much about her. He only met her twice before deciding she was worthy of being his running mate. So let's take a look at her record, as best we can with someone with as meager a history as she has. We'll do it a piece at a time, starting with the qualification most talked about, her stridently (almost) absolute anti-choice stance. She is more rigid and ideological than even consistent anti-choice McCain, who is willing to entertain…
revere | September 2, 2008You might think it is an arcane subject, but a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "Quantitative visualization of passive transport across bilayer lipid membranes" by Grime et al., is quite a stunner. This paper is about a century old formula called the Overton Rule (or Meyer - Overton Rule), used extensively to predict how fast chemicals get into cells and which ones do so most easily. It has been used to predict which anesthetics would work best and how fast and which toxic chemicals would get into which cells and how fast. For those of us who…
revere | September 1, 2008This really makes me crazy. I've already ranted about it at least twice (here and here), going back to January 2005. I thought this one was settled in the only way commonsense would allow. But commonsense isn't very common with some judges.
Here's the gist. Back in 2004 a small meatpacker, Creekstone Farms, wanted to test its cattle for mad cow disease (BSE or bovine spongiform encephalopathy). There is no cure for BSE. In fact there isn't even a treatment for it. It's fatal 100% of the time. The best you can do is prevent it. You do this by not allowing cattle that harbor the agent, an…
revere | August 31, 2008The folks at ScienceDebate2008 pushed hard during the primaries to have the candidates address science policy. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum from Scienceblogs The Intersection were among the leaders in this movement. They didn't succeed in getting a debate then, but now with the field down to the finalists, they have received a response from Barack Obama to 14 questions culled from over 3400 submitted by the 38,000 signers of the ScienceDebate initiative (we were proud to be among them; they include nearly every major American science organization, the presidents of nearly every major…
revere | August 31, 2008Maybe it says "In God We Trust" on our currency, but it's a financially risky strategy, as the "Christian-centered" Georgia-based Integrity Bank discovered as it came apart at the seams last week:
The Alpharetta-based bank, which opened its doors in 2000 with a Christian-centered philosophy, is the 10th U.S. bank to fail this year and the second Georgia institution to fail in the past 12 months.
As ranked by its total assets of $1.1 billion, Integrity becomes the third-largest bank failure in Georgia history.
[snip]
Integrity is the second financial services firm with a Christian-centered…
revere | August 30, 2008The daycare where my daughter's 15 month old is a scholar-in-residence is closed this week so grandma (Mrs. R.) and grandpa (yours truly) have been filling in with the newborn and the older sib. It's been a while and there were a lot of things we'd forgotten about. Like the fact that babies like to "spit up," a euphemism for puking on you. Since I am famous in the family for wearing my dinner on my clothes (absent-minded professor style), my daughter thought I would appreciate the latest in wearable body fluid fashion, T-shirts decorated with realistic looking baby emesis patterns:
From the…
revere | August 29, 2008I used to joke that the only plan the Bush administration had for dealing with air pollution was to put all the free radicals in jail. If you don't know what a free radical is, it is a highly reactive form of a chemical, usually involving an unpaired electron. Radicals often are short lived intermediates in other reactions and can have half lives in the microseconds or less. In any event we're talking seconds. It is free radicals that are formed by ionizing radiation. They quickly react with whatever chemicals are in their vicinity and if that chemical happens to be your genetic material, you…
revere | August 28, 2008Civilian scientists are still trying to get used to the hysterical nonsense around "biodefense" that the homeland security apparatchiks imposed as Act I. in their Security Theater, bullshit that included indicting an artist and a respected scientist for shipping a harmless bacterium (see here, here). Meanwhile the Army has claimed the only serious bioterror attack on US soil with actual biowarfare agents was done by one of their guys. Whether it was the guy they fingered or not we may never know, since he conveniently is dead, but whether he was or wasn't the claim has revealed they operate…
revere | August 27, 2008I have been severely critical (many posts among those here) of the Indonesian government's irresponsible assertions of ownership of potentially pandemic pathogenic viruses isolated from their citizens. The question of Intellectual Property is a difficult one in many instances but when it comes to a public good involving a global scourge, some of the gray areas become more black and white. The world has been struggling with the issue regarding the global influenza surveillance system for two years now, precipitated by Indonesia's refusal to cooperate any longer, resulting in a significant gap…