Badgers, Books and Bacon — Note what this badger is standing on. Heh.
What is the rule for adjective order? — One of those simple looking questions that is in fact fantastically complicated. (Snurched from @elfsternberg.)
Braving End of the Tunnel Blues — Fellow late stage cancer patient (and friend) Janet Freeman-Daily talks about "End of the Tunnel Blues". Though perhaps they should be "Beginning of the Tunnel Blues"?
Hospital finances are broken. How to fix them. — [D]etails about why hospitals might not have any financial incentive to follow best practices. A new paper from researchers affiliated with Harvard, Boston Consulting Group and nonprofit health care delivery system Texas Health Resources suggests that, in some cases, providing worse care pays off for hospitals. This has not been my experience at all, but I may simply be lucky in that respect.
Combat juggling — No, really. (Thanks to
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Applicants wanted for a one-way ticket to Mars — Would you go?
Archaeology on an Interstellar Scale — Cool post from Centauri Dreams. Damned cool.
Mt. Hood and a Lenticular Cloud — I have seen these. They are very strange.
What Happens When You Throw Some Glow Sticks into a Waterfall — (Via my brother.)
Ice Caves Around the World — Gorgeous. (Via Lisa Costello.)
An Illustrated Tour Of Australia's Museum of Copulatory Organs — Ah, the bracing cut and thrust of museum science. (Via David Goldman.)
Study backs 'hobbit' island dwarfism theory — A diminutive species of human whose remains were found on the Indonesian island of Flores could have shrunk as a result of island dwarfism as it adapted to its environment.
Barbie Body Would Be Pretty Odd-Looking In Real Life — Whereas I closely resemble a Ken doll myself.
Death Test Reveals Strength of Social Interaction — Social ties between humans are stronger than those between fruit flies or ants but weaker than those between bees, according to a cheerful new ranking based on how quickly creatures die when they become isolated.
200 Strangers Respond To Facebook Invitation For Funeral Of Veteran With No Friends Or Family — Hundreds of strangers attended the funeral of a British veteran after a clergyman, fearing that the former Royal Marine would be buried without mourners, posted a message on Facebook asking people to attend. (Via
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Is the Grand Canyon showing its age? — This is science in action—researchers debating a 65 million year conflict between evidence from traditional geological methods and new dating technology. A concept that's hard to understand when your highest value is willful ignorance and rejection of the reality-based world.
Yes, Climate Change Is Worsening U.S. Drought — NOAA Report Needlessly Confuses The Issue — Much like O.J. Simpson's defense team, in the face of an overwhelming preponderance of evidence, climate change denialists will seize on any anomaly in the pretense that it negates all the rest of the weight of the evidence. That's not how science works, and most conservatives leading the denialist clamor know perfectly well better.
Multnomah County Sheriff Halts Washington Concealed Handgun Applications — I'm sure the gun nut conspiracy theories are already rolling, given the calm and rational nature of handgun advocates.
When Hacking Is the Smaller Crime — Here’s a fascinating article in the Yale Journal of International Affairs, by Paul Rexton Kan of the U.S. Army War College, about cyberwar between non-state agents — in this case, Anonymous versus Los Zetas, the Mexican drug cartel.
Top Ten Ways Islamic Law forbids Terrorism — Pretty sure the Christian tradition does likewise, but that doesn't stop clinic bombers.
The Boston Blasts and Terrorism: A Historian’s Take on What It Means
'Toolbox' that shut down Steel Bridge was actually a TriMet fare box — Portland's own contribution to public safety. This is what terrorism does. It makes paranoid incompetents of us all. Viz the entire Bush 43 administration.
Rubio: Don’t Tie Immigration Reform To Boston Bombing — Immigration reform opponent Rep. Steve King (R-IA) suggested legislation should be delayed just in case the bombing is linked to a foreign suspect. In case you had any lingering doubt that Republicans were anything but complete buffoons, that should take care of it. The stupid, it burns.
Microsoft Excel: The ruiner of global economies? — A paper used to justify austerity economics appears to contain an Excel error. Austerity economic is like supply-side economics: a mathematical fantasy that appeals to certain ideologies without any grounding in the real world.
The Willful Blindness of Bush Loyalists — Republicans are very good at embellishing or inventing Bush’s successes, and they need no encouragement in this regard. What they plainly refuse to do is to acknowledge Bush-era disasters for what they are, accept that the public holds their party responsible for those disasters, and try to find some way to correct the errors made. I will submit that when your entire ideology and your party's political fortunes are based on wholesale denial of objective reality (i.e. evolution denialism, climate change denialism, supply side economics, etc.), it becomes much harder to engage in honest self-reflection. Conservatives have deeply corrupted their own habits of thought. That's the basis of the well-documented conservative epistemic closure.
QotD?: Who could have prevented the fall of the unwise?
4/17/2013
Writing time yesterday: 2.0 hours (60 minutes and 1,500 words on Original Destiny, Manifest Sin, plus 60 minutes minutes of WRPA to produce 1,800 words of nonfiction)
Hours slept: 6.25 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: 248.0
Number of FEMA troops on my block checking the magazine sizes of gun owners: 0
Currently reading: The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett