I so desperately want to leave some kind of supporting comment on this post, but I cannot imagine what I, a complete stranger, might possibly say that would be of any worth.
It’s an intern coming to grips with…no, just go read. Let her tell it. It’s her story.
Read it now.
Via GruntDoc.
Gun fearing socialist pussies everywhere, relax: my favorite African-American, Kim du Toit, is closing The Other Side of Kim, having gotten tired of shouting the ugly truth into the faces of people who have an ideological commitment to not hearing it.
When he started, he was one of the few strong advocates for the crazy idea that ordinary American citizens, men and women regardless of creed or color, were competent to run their own affairs, even in matters of life and death. He started the idea of National Buy a Gun Day, as a part of his Nation of Riflemen campaign, aimed at re-arming the militia of which the Second Amendment speaks, the unorganized one.
He has also been a tireless critic of communism, socialism, nannyism,and big government generally.
He was one of my very first daily-read bookmarks when I myself realized that the Second Amendment imposed much the same duty as the first: to actively participate in the nation’s political process in ways far beyond mere voting. (What, you thought the First Amendment was all about Freedom From Religion, and your right to buy, sell, and make child pornography?)
He put his money where his mouth is, nearly suffering financial ruin when his employer discovered he, uh, Spoke Real Truth to Real Power, and fired him. So great was his distress that he actually sold off some of his substantial collection of firearms to make ends meet. (And you may judge the size and value of that arsenal by the fact that selling off only a part of it actually made a difference in the finances of a family, including teenagers, who had recently purchased a new home in Dallas.)
He has also taken dozens of people, men, women, and children, Off to the Range, and taught them how to shoot. Fittingly, one of his last posts today was about one such excursion.
All Americans can be proud that when he escaped from the hell hole of South Africa he chose to come here; all Texans can be proud that when he abandoned Mayor Daley’s fiefdom to its own rot, he came here. He came not for a free handout, but to do his part in holding the line in the world’s Last, Best Hope for Liberty.
He, a foreigner, has been a better American than I, a native; indeed, a far better American than almost all of us, including especially many of those who now hold elective office. He took an oath to become one of us, he meant it, and he’s done his level best to keep it.
Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Please enjoy having a private life again; you have already done more than your share.
The power of Ceiling Cat compels me to post this image:
P.Z. Meyers at Pharyngula has two great biology posts today, in addition to the political humor cited below.
First, Cesarean-Section births may be allowing humans to grow larger brains.
Babies have very big heads that squeeze with only great difficulty through a relatively narrow pelvis, so the relationship in size between head diameter and the diameter of the pelvic opening has been a limitation on human evolution. We know this had to be a factor in our evolution: the average newborn mammal has a cranial capacity that is roughly 50% of the adult size, chimpanzee babies have heads about 40% of the adult size, but human babies have crania that are only 23% of what they will be in adults.
…
This is the subject of an article by Joseph Walsh in the American Biology Teacher, which suggests that C-sections will have an effect on human evolution.
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” This was the title of an essay by geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky writing in 1973. Many causes have been given for the increased Cesarean section rate in developed countries, but biologic evolution has not been one of them. The C-section rate will continue to rise, because the ability to perform a safe C-section has liberated human childbirth from natural selection directed against too small a maternal pelvis and too large a fetal head. Babies will get bigger and pelves will get smaller because there is nothing to prevent it.
That increasing availability of C-sections might lead to an evolutionary shift towards increasing cranial capacity at birth is a reasonable hypothesis, but I’m not convinced that it has been convincingly demonstrated yet. There are too many variables that effect brain size at birth to make a clean analysis possible; in addition, many of the measures are indirect. Often, we use birth weight as a proxy for cranial capacity, and that means the numbers and correlations are sloppier than they should be. Many of the measurements made are of factors that are readily influenced by the environment, which makes it difficult to imply that these are the product of genetics.
So the idea is weakly supported, but tantalizing. Even as a purely theoretical exercise, though, what it does say is that it is obvious that human culture cannot end human evolution…all it can do is shape the direction in which it can occur.
[Emphasis mine.]
That’s the way science works: even if, especially if, you like an idea, you must remain skeptical, and try your best to disprove it, to falsify it. Science isn’t a collection of eternal, unquestioned truths — it’s a protocol for throwing out the trash. Scientists are janitors, not priests.
===
Scientists are also custodians, in the sense that they care for things.
P.Z. Myers also points out that Old Scientists never clean out their refrigerators; they just keep meticulous notes about the contents.
We all know the story of the Miller-Urey experiment. In 1953, a young graduate student named Stanley Miller ran an off-the-wall experiment: he ran water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a sealed flask with a pair of electrodes to produce a spark, and from those simple building blocks discovered that more complex compounds, such as amino acids, were spontaneously produced. Stanley Miller died in 2007, and in going through his effects, the original apparatus was discovered, and in addition, several small sealed vials containing the sludge produced in the original experiment were also found.
This isn’t too surprising. I’ve gone through a few old scientists’ labs, and you’d be surprised at all the antiquities they preserved, all with notes documenting exactly what they are. It’s habit to keep this stuff.
Now the cool part, though: the scientists who unearthed the old samples ran them through modern analysis techniques, which are a bit more sensitive than the tools they had in the 1950s. In 1953, Miller reported the recovery of five amino acids from his experiment. The reanalysis found twenty two amino acids and five amines in the vials. He was more successful than he knew!
All my adult life, I thought Paul Newman was the quintessential Young Punk, while my dad was a stodgy Old Fart.
Newman died at 83. My dad is 81, and, I’m happy to report, still kicking.
OK, there’s really, really important stuff to talk about, like factcheck.org lying about guns, B. Hussein Obama being a lying Commie tool, the current financial crisis resulting from Democrat efforts to force lenders to make bad loans, and the media response to Ike, but somehow this is what forces me to write:
PETA Urges Ben & Jerry’s To Use Human Milk
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow’s milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.
“PETA’s request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow’s milk in the food he serves,” the statement says.PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.
I’m, uh, trying to, uh, get a grip on the, uh, logistics of harvesting enough human milk to cover Ben and Jerry’s production needs. As fantasy, every single aspect opens pornographic panoramas (and indeed, has been pornoed somewhere, sometime). As policy, this is a horror beyond even my fevered imaginings; “ripe for abuse” stretched to thin, pale tatters does not even begin to cover….
I’ve known for a long time that PETAns are deranged. This is proof positive that they simply do not understand the difference between humans and animals.
The official Ben and Jerry’s response: “We applaud PETA’s novel approach to bringing attention to an issue, but we believe a mother’s milk is best used for her child” . Bravo.
Via Snowflakes in Hell.
Chelsea started to get out and about Cairo today, taking a horseback tour out to the Pyramids:
They are in a type of artificial desert with Cairo spreading out around them, the pictures I’m sure you all have seen are shot from a specific angle to make it seem like they are isolated in the middle of the desert. It was still magical and amazing to see them rise up from behind a hill as we were riding out.
…
I won’t be taking horses out the next time though. The horses are malnourished and are whipped to exhaustion everyday.
…
The area around the pyramids is abysmally poor. You ride through alleys of huts with dirty barefoot children waving at you while their mothers try to sell you things like individual packets of Keenex. Their is trash everywhere.
…
As bad as I felt for the horses, I suppose it is a way for the people there to make some type of living. I am still conflicted about the whole experience.
She took pictures, but felt they were too blurry to post.
Her classes will start Saturday, 06 September.
Google map I’ll try to maintain of places she goes to. So far, only AUC and the pyramids.
View Larger Map
[I've got to say, I hate the Google map interface when it comes to creating custom maps and passing links around. I very often cannot get the display I want. Let me know, then, if this link shows you something different than what I claim it does.]
Google map of the pyramids area, showing the very sharp demarcation between the desert and the irrigated urban area of Cairo.
View Larger Map
[Sorry, no. Google Maps is being a useless pile of rotting camel dung, and will not save the coordinates and zoom for the area I want to display. Why do these idiots make it so bloody hard to that? Why can't I find instructions on how to do that? OK, it's working now. What the hell?]
Cairo is UTC/GMT +2, seven hours ahead of Houston time, so when it is noon here, it’s seven p.m. there.
I am using Lingua-naut to look up basic Arabic phrases.
Mom, Physicist, Ham, Home Schooler, Commenter, Guinea Pig, and Friend Chanda has a blog!
And a bunch of really cute and insanely intelligent kids! (I’ve heard a rumor that her eldest, J., recently passed his General Amateur Radio exam! That makes him a better ham than me! )
And she just had a birthday! Happy Birthday, Chanda!!
I, on the other hand, just got a great deal! On a box of exclamation! points!!!
[WARNING! Use of more than two exclamation points in a row is strong evidence that the writer wears his underpants on his head, but I'm a professional and I know what I'm doing!!! I have excellent reasons for wearing my underpants on my head, and I do so only after taking all appropriate safety precautions!!!!]
This won’t make sense to anyone not in my immediate family:
Frankly, it doesn’t make much sense even to me, but it’s got a platypus in it. A flying platypus, in fact.
Approach with caution: the platypus is the only poisonous mammal. It’s such a bizarre animal, that when the first type specimen pelts were sent to natural history museums, they were thought to be hoaxes.
They do not, however, have wings.
It is embarrassing not to know these things. (Although, to be fair, I’ve known this since grade school, and I’ve found plenty of other ways to embarrass myself.)
Bad Behavior has blocked 429 access attempts in the last 7 days.
