Thanks for the dino colour link, that is cool.

Flogging the conservative opposition to the healthcare bill is fun, but I worry that it takes attention away from the liberal opposition to the bill.

“It will basically be a government law that says you have to buy their defective product [ie private health insurance],” says Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a founder of Physicians for a National Health Plan. [ http://www.pnhp.org/ ]

“[ In a similar program in Massachusetts. ] For someone my age who is making $40,000 a year you are required to lay out $5,000 for an insurance premium for coverage that covers nothing until you have spent $2,000 out of pocket,” Himmelstein said. “You are $7,000 out of pocket before you have any coverage at all. For most people that means you are already bankrupt before you have insurance. If anything, that has made them worse off. Instead of having that $5,000 to cover some of their medical expenses they have laid it out in premiums.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090823_this_isnt_reform_its_robbery/

When I was a kid, one of my top kid-theories were that dinosaurs were brilliantly colored and patterned. After all, I reasoned, we are reconstructing their bodies based on bones, that doesn't tell you what color their skin was. Why do we assume they came in shades of green and brown? They might have been iridescent purple, for all we know.

Kid me has been really excited by recent developments in this field.