Reprinted from here, and a public post thanks to the Creative Commons license. Link provided by the always-inspirational quixotickitten. :)

( Hack Yourself )

( Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Al Gore, 12/10/07 )

From here: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/927hkdzx.asp?pg=2

( What (Acting) President Cheney Did )

Contains NSFW language and subject matter

From: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove
One of the best responses from an advice column I've ever read.  Via interactiveleaf

( Letter and response from Dan Savage's Savage Love Column )

Embryo-free embryonic stem-cells? Accomplished... in mice. Scientists took skin cells from mice and added viruses containing four specific genes. That caused the skin cells to be reprogrammed to behave like embryonic stem cells, which could then be used to treat diseased tissue and organs. More here, here and here.
However,

"...it will take further study to see whether this scientific advance can be harnessed for creating new human therapies. For one thing, the procedure used to get the mouse skin cells to mimic embryonic stem cells wouldn’t be suitable. And it’s simply not known whether the mouse results can be reproduced with human cells."

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James Gandolfini reflects on the Sopranos, whose final episode airs on Sunday. Entertainment Weekly picks the 10 Best Episodes. In addition, The Nation: The Sopranos' Last Song, The Economist: Bada Bing! and a couple from EW: Burying the Sopranos and Chase 'n' the Russian, which contains this quote from the producers about the Pine Barrens episode:

"WINTER: That's the question I get asked more than any other. It drives people crazy: ''Where's the Russian? What happened to the Russian?'' We could say, ''Well, he got out and there's a big mob war with the Russians,'' or ''He crawled off and died.'' But we wanted to keep it ambiguous. You know, not everything gets answered in life.
CHASE: They shot a guy.Who knows where he went? Who cares about some Russian? This is what Hollywood has done to America. Do you have to have closure on every little thing? Isn't there any mystery in the world? It's a murky world out there. It's a murky life these guys lead. And by the way, I do know where the Russian is. But I'll never say because so many people got so pissy about it.

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Other links:

AARP: 50 Things You Need to Know by 50 (Includes advice from a few American well-knowns, from George Takei to Donald Trump.)

Isaiah Washington has lost his job on the hit ABC medical drama "Grey's Anatomy," five months after creating a furor with his use of an anti-gay slur. More here.

How to hire the best people you've ever worked with

Author and Singer(?) Rabbi Zalman Goldstein presents the "Say a Blessing" keychain repeats a Jewish prayer in Hebrew and English. I just wanna know where the button is that chatters with your mother when you're trying to avoid her.

17 years since the Tiananmen Square Massacre: The Tank Man. (An hour long documentary.)

Fareed Zakaria:
Beyond Bush: How to Restore America's Place in the World Also, What Bush Got Right

An English Physics teacher begs for his subject back, in an "open letter to the AQA board and UK Department of Education".

A broad immigration bill to legalize millions of people in the United States unlawfully suffered a stunning setback in the Senate Thursday, costing President Bush perhaps his best opportunity to win a top domestic priority.

He swore off beer, had to put the pricey organic bananas back on the supermarket shelf and squeezed four meals out of a single chicken, all in the name of reducing hunger. And this is not even an election year.

Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski’s decision to live on $3 a day in grocery money for a week, as he had been urged to do in an Oregon “food stamp challenge,” could confound the surest cynic. At 66, he was just elected to his second term, with a budget surplus surpassing $1 billion and a legislature controlled by his fellow Democrats. So just what was there to gain politically?

For a governor who has long pushed to reduce hunger and happens to like eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, maybe that was not the point.

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A flickr gallery that only jlygrnmgt could love. :) The artist's entire gallery is creepy and fun to look over. Check out the Cthulus!

A Johnson City, TN middle-school music teacher asked a student to pose for him in a mermaid costume. She complained. Parents complained. He was reassigned. Full story.

West Legal Directory: More than 800,000 lawyers and law firms in the U.S. -- not all, but many. If you know the name, you can find the lawyer anywhere in the U.S. Or search by area of practice.

A Soldier's Viewpoint on Surviving Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Attacks
(via spiritualmonkey)

An annotated list of the Top 25 Web 2.0 Search Engines (via ozarque)

Young, Gifted, and Not Getting Into Harvard

WordSmyth: "The Educational Dictionary-Thesaurus," with more than 50,000 words defined. Links to synonyms.

NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead....it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. (from dsgood)

Forbes: Condemned to Google Hell

And finally....

Saturday is the third annual CAPE Free Comic Book Day event at Zeus Comics in Dallas. Local residents can catch sclerotic_rings's "impromptu lecture on "How to Feed Your Carnivorous Plants When You've Run Out Of Neighbor Children" while he works as Lea Hernandez's booth bunny." :D Hey, with a sense of humor like that, the experience is sure to be memorable!

Columnist and Author Molly Ivins has died of cancer at the age of 62, just months after her longtime friend, Governor Ann Richards passed away.

I've linked to tons of her brilliant, inspiring, witty and incisive columns over the years, including this eloquent one from right before the 2000 election and "Who Needs Breasts, Anyway?" from Time Magazine. She had a special gift for making us laugh at life's absurdities and poking fun at those who needed a little wind taken out of their sails. We need that now, more than ever. :-(

What made her so special, though, was her fearlessness:

Invited to write for The Dallas Times Herald, she brought on a good many canceled subscriptions when she said of a local politician that "if his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day." The paper's response was to put billboards all over Big D emblazoned with "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?" The Times Herald's clear answer was that Molly Ivins could say anything she pleased, and that was a piece of good luck for those of its readers who appreciate plain talk expressed with the high poetry of the Texas vernacular, as well as asense of humor as big as Alaska.

Here's a old profile/interview from Salon.com.

From here, a Molly Ivins Tribute: ( Read more... )

We're going to miss you, Molly. Here's to you and all the underdogs you championed over the years.

Update:
AP has a longer obit than they did last night.
The New York Times also has a nice article.
E&P has a recent interview.
NPR: Remembrances

The Texas Observer has a nice tribute essay up:

"Molly always said in her official résumé that the two honors she valued the most were (1) when the Minneapolis Police Department named their mascot pig after her (She was covering the police beat at the time.) and (2) when she was banned from speaking on the Texas A&M University campus at least once during her years as co-editor of The Texas Observer (1970-76). However, she said with great sincerity that she would be proudest of all to die sober, and she did.
...
Molly's enduring message is, "Raise more hell."

I thought I had posted these... but can’t find them through the search engines or gmail search..... Two hokey-yet-inspirational poems I was given years ago that are now hanging in my office.

( Read more... )

This is a very long, but incredibly brilliant article, originally posted here, obtained from here which talks about the rise of Creationism and Intelligent Design. Thought I’d preserve the whole thing for posterity.

( Greetings from Idiot America )

Taken from iocaste212, who got it from therblig:
From here. This is SciAm's April 2005 Letter from the Editor:

Okay, We Give Up

There’s no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don’t mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there’s no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that’s a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That’s what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn’t get bogged down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody’s ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can’t work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars and imperil national security, you won’t hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration’s antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that’s not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either— so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools’ Day.

Okay, We Give Up

MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com
COPYRIGHT 2005 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.

Edit: If you're reading this through a link from another site, please feel free to say hello in the comments. :) ~Jon

For an online discussion, I've been been searching the net for a speech entitled "Is There An Artificial God", which Douglas Adams gave at the Digital Biota Conference in 1998. It used to be at the now defunct Biota site. A long and in-depth Google search turned up several hundred links to the biota site, but no essay. I own The Salmon of Doubt, also by Adams, where the essay has been reprinted. Google has the Biota page cached, but once it updates again, the cached page will disappear from their archives.

So I'm posting the essay below, (behind the link cut) because I think it deserves a permanent net home. It is most definitely copyrighted to Douglas Adams estate. Please don’t lift anything here without giving him credit.

Adams was an avowed atheist. I’m not, and I don’t personally agree with his conclusions. But his deceptively simplistic-sounding conclusions regarding a universe that is constructed from the bottom-up (as opposed to one made from the top down by a higher power) are fascinating and, imo worth reading. Plus, Adam’s puddle analogy is the most clever argument against the concept that the universe was created for our benefit I’ve ever seen.

The good stuff starts around the fifth paragraph.

( Read more... )

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The story behind the internet controlled Coca Cola machine can be found here. ~J