Headline from the New York Times on May 30, 1907:

The May 24, 1907 NYT has the following prediction by the Surgeon General of Illinois:

"The methods for the prevention of diseases, which have developed wonderfully in the last few years, lead me to believe that the outlook for the elimination of the white plague [tuberculosis] is very hopeful. Those affected will be isolated, and if this is done, preventives may be used until consumption will be a thing of the past.

The great work to be done is in medicine, for surgery long ago has reached almost its limit of perfection. Simplification in surgery will develop, but I think no great discovery in that branch of the profession remains to be made. In fact, I think that the greatest triumphs of surgery have been attained, and to make them more accessible will be the work of the future.

As the medical profession in late years has discovered the causes of the worst diseases, it will only be a question of time when preventatives will be generally used. The outlook, then, is that the human race will be better physically than it has ever been."

It's finally been said, by a "family planning" professor (whatever that is):

"Children 'bad for planet'"

The scarily-named Optimum Population Trust says that families should have two rather than three kids for the sake of the planet. Prof. Guillebaud says that "when couples are planning a family they should be encouraged to think about the environmental consequences."

There is this curious bit: after the story describes how virtually all world population growth will come from poor, not wealthy, nations, Prof. Guillebaud says "rich countries should be the most concerned about family size as their children have higher per capita carbon dioxide emissions." So it seems that poor countries have too many kids and rich countries have too many wasteful kids. Of course, with fewer brains rich countries probably won't stay rich; they'll become poor and start spitting out rugrats again.

Well, let's reason this out. People of such mind usually perceive humans as a virus on the planet (thank you, Agent Smith), so why stop at two kids? The Optimum Population is obviously zero, when humans will no longer foul up the planet. It seems the Optimum Population Trust could be doing more effective things to reach this goal than releasing reports. Just ask Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, all unknowingly devoted to erasing carbon footprints from the world.

And why does it have to be fewer kids? Why can't we get rid of other people instead? Kids are too cute. Let's wait to see if Prof. Guillebaud becomes a martyr for his own cause. But I'm sure he'd tell us he's not the problem, it's "other people" who are the problem.

And don't trees like carbon dioxide? I wish these population-control types weren't so anti-arboreal.

According to this article in Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society:

E85 (85% ethanol fuel, 15% gasoline) may increase ozone-related mortality, hospitalization, and asthma by about 9% in Los Angeles and 4% in the United States as a whole relative to 100% gasoline. Ozone increases in Los Angeles and the northeast were partially offset by decreases in the southeast. E85 also increased peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) in the U.S. but was estimated to cause little change in cancer risk. Due to its ozone effects, future E85 may be a greater overall public health risk than gasoline. However, because of the uncertainty in future emission regulations, it can be concluded with confidence only that E85 is unlikely to improve air quality over future gasoline vehicles. Unburned ethanol emissions from E85 may result in a global-scale source of acetaldehyde larger than that of direct emissions.

The April 23, 1907 NYT reports on some strange events in upstate New York:

NIAGRA, N.Y. - The American falls went dry to-day in sections owing to the immense ice fields forced down from Lake Erie by a tremendous gale. Where the full sweep of water usually plunges over there were four separate falls, presenting a very peculiar sight.

A massive ice bridge has formed in the gorge.

On Saturday it snowed in Arlington, TX. Granted, it didn't snow enough to stick to the roads or the grass, but it snowed enough so that our two year old recognized the precipitation as snow. How crazy is that?

Around the Southeast it was rather cold over the past weekend, and I am sure many were like me: either wondering where the global warming was when we needed it or thanking our stars for global warming (otherwise the cold would have been that much worse). For our good friends north of, say, Nashville, I hear your chuckles, but one reason I stick close to home (at least in terms of latitude) is the cold - more specifically the relative lack thereof.

Notwithstanding the past weekend's freakish weather, the statists qua global warming advocates will not be dissuaded. One hypothesis, which if true would be the end of the endless stream of "protocols," is that contemporaneous weather patterns are reflective of a "100 year cycle." With about as much scientific method as most (non-scientist) advocates of global warming put forth, I mention this story from the April 9, 1907 NYT:

Ballston [New York], April 8 - This vicinity to-day...had a snowstorm which almost assumed the proportions of a blizzard. More than eight inches of snow have fallen.

The April 7, 1907 NYT reports on French scientists who are trying to market tobacco that has been purged of nicotine ostensibly for health reasons:

The Government, which has a monopoly of the manufacture and sale of tobacco, put on the market this week a variety of caporal, a common form of pipe and cigarette tobacco, which had been freed of nicotine.

This step was taken as a result of experiments on rabbits. An infusion of ordinary caporal tobacco was injected into the veins of a rabbit, which died five weeks later. A post mortem examination showed that the aorta was covered with large spots due to arteriosclerosis. Another rabbit was subjected to a similar test with nicotineless caporal. This rabbit lived two months and was then put to death. The aorta was found perfectly healthy.

This Congressional Research Service white paper concerning climate change reports the amount of spending on "Climate Change Science" by the federal government since FY1989. Annual spending peaked in FY2004 at just under $2 billion.

The total amount of spending since 1989? $32.5 billion in 2005 dollars (through FY2007)!!

In some sense, the spending might be a small price to pay if it were possible to come to a conclusion about what is causing climate change and if we (humans or the United States, depending on your viewpoint) can or want to do anything about it. However, if we did come to a conclusion, would it be politically feasible for either political party to reduce the spending on climate change science?

Two billion dollars is about one half of the economy of Arlington, Texas.

From the March 3, 1907 NYT:

I think with elevators, Ritz restaurants, cafes, palm gardens, flats, gymnasiums, Turkish baths, and swimming tanks, the limit of luxury [on transatlantic ocean liners] has been reached, though perhaps they may yet introduce billiard tables and bowling alleys.

In the olden days it was almost impossible to hear from home, after sailing from port, until we reached home again...To-day it is not only proper and intelligible, but an every day occurrence, and a message so addressed can be sent from almost any village in the States or Great Britain with an almost absolute certainty of reaching its destination...A great service the "wireless" has done for seaman is the possibility to acquaint other ships and land stations of any accident to ship or engines, and to call for aid or allay the fears of otherwise anxious friends. The value of the wireless installation on board the several disabled liners during the great hurricanes of February, 1899, cannot be estimated. [emphasis added]

The Feb. 6, 1907 NYT reports on the incredible cold that grips the upper Midwest and the plains (sound familiar?):

ST. PAUL - With few exceptions there has been severe weather in this section for seventeen days, and for three days the thermometers have registered 22 degrees below zero.

In North Dakota 30 degrees below was common, and this was coupled with terrific blizzards. For days the main lines of the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific Railroad have been blocked, and many of the branch lines have been at a standstill for weeks and months.

To the average layman that sounds reasonable - who remembers the last time it was 30 degrees below zero in North Dakota? Not too many people in Texas at least. However, while such stories in the NYT from 1907 do not constitute a statistical test, it is suggestive that extreme weather events have occurred in the past (what created the Grand Canyon?) and makes one wonder about the veracity/intention of implied claims to the contrary.

From the Jan. 13, 1906 NYT:

Everyone knows that this has been a mild Winter, but just what has made it so is a problem about which the weather experts are divided. A few days ago Capt. Chaplin of the British steamer Shimosa reached the Port of New York after a long and decidedly foggy voyage from China. The weather was so remarkably unseasonable that Capt. Chaplin took some observations that revealed the fact, not noticed as yet by other mariners, that the Gulf Stream has been undergoing certain deviations from its normal course which are of a sufficiently radical nature, according to the theories of some meteorologists, to account for the extreme climactic changes which have taken place this winter.

The Jan. 11, NYT prints a letter to the editor concerning the upcoming Auto Show in New York City's Madison Square Garden:

Possibly no invention ever installed itself as a vital institution in the life of the world as quickly and as firmly as the automobile. It is not many years ago that we were wont to stare and gape at it in passing with much the same bewilderment that we now bestow upon a balloon or a submarine boat. The automobile is an absolute fixture. It filled a want, and when that want became evident the development of the automobile was assured. No more striking testimony is needed than the standardization of parts by manufacturers, which goes far to prove the thorough organization of the automobile business.

The automobile, unlike many inventions, owes its speedy development to the fact that it is the product of many mechanics, engineers, capitalists, and sporting men - all aiming at one central idea, a speedy, strong, and easily controlled road wagon. There have been many ingenious ideas advanced, including not a few madcap theories, but as is the case with every evolution, be it animal or mechanical, there has been a survival of fitness. We see that fitness embodied in the present motor car, which is notable for the absence of freak ideas. It is a sane machine.

It looks like Viagra might be effective against pulmonary edema (fluid leakage in the lungs caused by high blood pressure).

High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE) and High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE) are serious and potentially lethal risks for mountain climbers at elevations starting above 10,000'.

I've never had any problems with Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), much less anything more serious like HAPE or HACE, as high as 13,000', but they say it can strike anyone anytime. (Kilimanjaro, my next mountain, is 19,340'--by far the tallest I've ever attempted.)

Now the question is this: Do you really want your mountain climbing buddy, sleeping in a two man tent, at high altitude, days away from the nearest female companionship, popping Viagra?

It is said that democratic governments are myopic, scarecely looking beyond the next election. "Not so we the British," say...uhm, the British. This BBC story tells of a far reaching study, released today by UK's Office of Science and Innovation.

The 246 summary papers, called the Sigma and Delta scans, were complied by futures researchers, Outsights-Ipsos Mori partnership and the US-based Institute for the Future (IFTF).

The papers look forward at emerging trends in science, health and technology.

The scans explore a diverse range of areas from the future of the gulf stream and the economic rise of India, to developments in nanotechnology and the threat posed by HIV/Aids.

Perhaps the most tantalizing futurist prediction? Rights for robots.

The paper which addresses Robo-rights, titled Utopian dream or rise of the machines? examines the developments in artificial intelligence and how this may impact on law and politics.

The paper says a "monumental shift" could occur if robots develop to the point where they can reproduce, improve themselves or develop artificial intelligence.

The research suggests that at some point in the next 20 to 50 years robots could be granted rights.

If this happened, the report says, the robots would have certain responsibilities such as voting, the obligation to pay taxes, and perhaps serving compulsory military service.

Conversely, society would also have a duty of care to their new digital citizens, the report says.

With apologies to Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov et al., HT: Wired blog

A new study covered in Runner's World:

An Austrian study that made worldwide headlines last week suggesting a link between marathon running and skin cancers, possibly including the dangerous malignant melanoma (MM), turns out to be somewhat less worrisome than many news reports indicated. Of course, sun exposure is a known cause of skin cancers, and runners do go out in the sun (in skimpy clothing), so they should be careful. But the research study uncovered no melanomas among either the 210 marathoners or the 210 control group members, and never attempted to measure skin cancer incidence. "On clinical examination, no skin lesions suggestive of MM were diagnosed in either group," wrote the authors, a group of running aficionadoes and marathoners/triathletes from the University of Graz in Graz, Austria.

However, the marathoners clearly had more liver spots and atypical moles, and received more referrals, than the control subjects. Of particular interest to runners, all three findings were associated with increased levels of training. In other words, those who trained the most (over 44 miles a week) had more liver spots, atypical moles, and referrals than those who trained less. Presumably, the more you train, the more time you spend in the sun. Here's the data on miles/week of training and incidence of atypical moles, liver spots, and "referrals."

A letter to the editor in the Nov. 28, 1906 NYT continues the cigarette "debate":

If "M.C." in writing yesterday on the evil of cigarette smoking, referred to Gen. Grant's death as caused by cigarette smoking, he was certainly mistaken, as the cancer of the throat was caused by "dry" (unlighted) smoking of cigars to an excessive extent.

Every crime on the calendar has been charged to the cigarette although the crimes were prevalent before the cigarette.

The real danger in cigarette smoking is that the smoke is invariably inhaled, while the cigar smoker rarely does so, an argument which few use.

With the Reuters descriptions:

This Hubble image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. As the two galaxies smash together, billions of stars are born, mostly in groups and clusters of stars. The brightest and most compact of these are called super star clusters. (NASA, ESA/Hubble, and B. Whitmore - Space Telescope Science Institute/Handout/Reuters)

The Andromeda spiral galaxy is shown in this infrared image taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and released by on October 18, 2006. Astronomers have new evidence that the Andromeda spiral galaxy was involved in a violent head-on collision with the neighboring dwarf galaxy Messier 32 (M32) more than 200 million years ago. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/D. Block - Anglo American Cosmic Dust Lab, SA/Handout/Reuters)

One of my favorite websites is summitpost which has fantastic amounts of information about mountain hiking/climbing. It's a "wiki" style site where users host and edit individual pages about mountains, routes, etc.

Users also post some amazing pictures:

Health experts in the UK are warning the public that snorting cocaine through a rolled-up banknote poses a serious health risk. Not from the cocaine -- from the banknote, which can harbor droplets of blood and thereby pass Hepatitis C from snorter to snorter.

ABC news ran two global-warming stories today. The first was Branson’s giveaway; the second was not news, but a revisit of the dying polar bears story. These are excerpts from an article cited by cei.org that calls this report into question.

One polar bear population (western Hudson Bay) has declined since the 1980s and the reproductive success of females in that area seems to have decreased. We are not certain why, but it appears that ecological conditions in the mid-1980s were exceptionally good.

Climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson population of polar bears, but really, there is no need to panic. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.

It is noteworthy that the neighbouring population of southern Hudson Bay does not appear to have declined, and another southern population (Davis Strait) may actually be over-abundant.

I understand that people who do not live in the north generally have difficulty grasping the concept of too many polar bears in an area. People who live here have a pretty good grasp of what that is like to have too many polar bears around.

By the way, Charlie Gibson closes the report by saying that scientists have documented a 20% population decline in Western Canada since the 1980s. Good work: Select your subset of the poplulation, select your endpoints, and fit your trend line. I never knew model estimation was so easy.

Thomas Bray's comments on implications of DDT policy:

Researchers haven't even been able to show conclusively that DDT is the cause of widely-cited declines in populations of eagles and other animals. There appeared to be a strong correlation, but the type of DDT use being recommended by WHO - indoor spraying to reduce the risk of mosquito bites to sleeping humans - is no threat to nature. All this was known more than three decades ago, but so powerful had the environmental lobby become that rational decision-making was all but impossible.

There is an important lesson here. Policy decisions that aren't based on a cold, hard appreciation of costs and benefits, as well as solid science, cost lives.

Citing the so-called "precautionary principle," advocates of such controls [to reduce greenhouse emissions] argue that we must act even before all the facts are in. To delay is to risk catastrophe down the road, they assert. But insofar as the precautionary principle is valid, it might offer a strong reason not to act too quickly. The one thing we know about government, after all, is that it often gets things wrong - as it did with DDT.

The Royal Society announces their archive of 350 years of articles is freely available through the end of the calendar year. From the front page:

For the first time the Archive provides online access to all journal content, from Volume One, Issue One in March 1665 until the latest modern research published today ahead of print. And until December the archive is freely available to anyone on the Internet to explore.

Spanning nearly 350 years of continuous publishing, the archive of nearly 60,000 articles includes ground-breaking research and discovery from many renowned scientists including: Bohr, Boyle, Bragg, Cajal, Cavendish, Chandrasekhar, Crick, Dalton, Darwin, Davy, Dirac, Faraday, Fermi, Fleming, Florey, Fox Talbot, Franklin (pictured), Halley, Hawking, Heisenberg, Herschel, Hodgkin, Hooke, Huxley, Joule, Kelvin, Krebs, Liebnitz, Linnaeus, Lister, Mantell, Marconi, Maxwell, Newton, Pauling, Pavlov, Pepys, Priestley, Raman, Rutherford, Schrodinger, Turing, van Leeuwenhoek, Volta, Watt, Wren, and many, many more influential science thinkers up to the present day.

Here's a link to Crick and Watson (1953) whose innocent sounding abstract is as follows:

This paper describes a possible structure for the paracrystalline form of the sodium salt of deoxyribonucleic acid. The structure consists of two DNA chains wound helically round a common axis, and held together by hydrogen bonds between specific pairs of bases. The assumptions made in deriving the structure are described, and co-ordinates are given for the principal atoms. The structure of the crystalline form is discussed briefly.

A recent Wall Street Journal article suggests that the WHO, unlike much of the UN, has taken temporary leave of its insanity:

The World Health Organization, in a sign that widely used methods of fighting malaria have failed to bring the catastrophic disease under control, plans to announce today that it will encourage the use of DDT, even though the pesticide is banned or tightly restricted in much of the world.

The new guidelines from the United Nations public-health agency support the spraying of small amounts of DDT, or dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, on walls and other surfaces inside homes in areas at highest risk of malaria. The mosquito-borne disease infects as many as 500 million people a year and kills about a million. Most victims are in sub-Saharan Africa and under the age of 5.

HT to Jeff Hoffman, who expresses hope that some bureaucrats are coming to see the importance of marginal analysis. I'm less sanguine.

Consumer Reports has weighed in on E85, one of the most massive boondoggles of our time. Some salient points:

E85, which is 85 percent ethanol, emits less smog-causing pollutants than gasoline, but provides fewer miles per gallon, costs more, and is hard to find outside the Midwest.

Government support for flexible-fuel vehicles, which can run on E85, is indirectly causing more gasoline consumption rather than less.

E85 is unlikely to fill more than a small percentage of U.S. energy needs.

On the last point, Consumer Reports is mute on the question of what will fill those needs. One alternative that I suspect is seldom mentioned in the circles in which CR writers move is nuclear energy. A particularly promising alternative is the pebble bed reactor.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds (aka Instapundit) reports:

Meanwhile, in Britain, environmental guru James Lovelock has called for the deployment of nuclear power to fight global warming, but other environmentalists are horrified at the thought. At least, however, the subject is being debated after decades of being off the table entirely.

Further, Reynolds points to a development that might make nuclear power ever safer than it already is:

The Chinese seem to be on the right track. Pebble-bed technology looks to be both feasible and safe (and it's only one alternative), and it seems unlikely that the world can sustain another 50 years (or even 20) of economic growth on the scale of recent decades while depending on oil and coal -- at least, not without unpleasant side effects.

For more than you want to know about pebble-bed technology, see Wikipedia. An excerpt:

The pebble bed reactor (PBR) or pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR) is an advanced nuclear reactor design. This technology claims a dramatically higher level of safety and efficiency. Instead of water, it uses pyrolytic graphite as the neutron moderator, and an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly. This eliminates the complex steam management system from the design and increases the transfer efficiency (ratio of electrical output to thermal output) to about 50%. Also, the gases do not dissolve contaminants or absorb neutrons as water does, so the core has less in the way of radioactive fluids and is more economical than a light water reactor.

Now that the astronomers have purged Pluto from the planetary club - shock to the astrologers, I am sure - I wonder what would be purged from economics if it were put to a vote?

My votes:

Keynesian stimulus
Most of what Marx/EnglesEngels (see, I read the comments!) wrote

That's my short list after fifteen seconds of thought.

I mentioned that last week there was a release of data pertaining to about 20 million AOL searches and how AOL tried to put the genie back in the bottle. Unfortunately for AOL and AOL users, the data have been stored on a number of mirror sites, and incorporated into Splunk'd which is a large data mining program. Heck, for some reason even I downloaded the data, all 439 MB of it. For giggles, I tried to read the data into STATA, but that didn't work very well with the limited resources of my laptop.

Nevertheless, for those who would like to see some of the data, here are the first 100,000 searches in a 40MB STATA data file

This article at Slate.com describes a taxonomy of seven types of Internet searchers:

1. The Pornhound
2. Manhunter
3. Shopper
4. Obsessive
5. Omnivore
6. Newbie
7. The Basket Case

I qualify myself as an Omnivore.

Here's a link to Splunk'd [I can only get it to work in IE - dangit]. I especially like the display searches by time option. You could spend a lot of time at Splunk'd but I did three quick searhces: approximately 1100 searches had the term "economics," 580 searches with "Sheehan" (mostly in March 2006 and then dropping off considerably), and 1,920 searches for "Tom Cruise." That says something, but I am not sure what.

Perhaps it doesn't mean anything, yet for what it's worth, here are some weather reports from the Aug. 7, 1906 NYT:

"Yesterday was the hottest day of 1906 and the hottest Aug. 6 in twenty-five years...Yesterday the mercury ran up three degrees higher than it went Sunday...In consequence there were fourteen deaths and the prostrations numbered nearly one hundred...The mercury rose to 92 on Sunday. Yesterday it reached 93...some retrospective comfort may be gotten out of the stated fact that on Sept. 7, 1881, the mercury rose to 100 degrees in New York...

WASHINGTON - At 3 o'clock this afternoon the thermometer at the Weather Bureau registered 95 degrees while the unofficial thermometers on the street scored 103 in the shade and as high as 120 in the sun.

BALTIMORE - There were three prostrations from heat in this city to-day, none of them proving fatal, however...The thermometer registered 98 degrees...This temperature has not been exceeded here for several years.

PHILADELPHIA - The temperature in this city to-day reached a maximum of 94 degrees...A number of deaths and prostrations were reported by the police.

Eight die in Manhattan, six in Brooklyn...pet terrier goes mad and attacks owner, is shot by policeman...man commits suicide on Coney Island, ostensibly driven mad by the heat.

From the Annals of Improbable Research:

Hair Soy Sauce: A Revolting Alternative to the Conventional by Alexander Tse-Yan Lee

The study is available here

AND

"Cannibal Crickets On A Forced March for Protein and Salt," Stephen J. Simpson, Gregory A. Sword, Patrick D. Lorch and Iain D. Couzin, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 103, no. 11, March 14, 2006, pp. 4152-6.

This study is available here

It is interesting to read the weather forecasts from the early 1900s. They are almost too general, they come with very little specifics. I am no meteorologist, but I wonder if it is because a) the science of forecasting the weather was not fully developed, and/or b) there was little reason for most people (beyond farmers, perhaps?) to be terribly concerned about the detailed specifics of the weather.

Here's an example, from the July 30, 1906 NYT:

The Weather Bureau forecast for Monday and Tuesday in the cotton States is as follows:

North Carolina - Showers Monday; Tuesday, partly cloudy; fresh west to northwest winds.

South Carolina - Occasional showers Monday and probably Tuesday; light to fresh southwesterly winds.

Georgia - Showers Monday; warmer in northwest portion; Tuesday, fair; warmer in northern, showers in souther, portion.

Eastern Florida - Showers Monday and probably Tuesday; variable winds.

Western Florida and Alabama - Showers Monday; Tuesday partly cloudy and warmer.

Mississippi - Partly cloudy Monday; warmer in southeast portion.

Louisiana - Generally fair Monday and Tuesday; warmer Monday in southeast portion.

Eastern Texas - Fair Monday and Tuesday.

Western Texas - Fair Monday and Tuesday.

In a separate article, there is a table of temperatures in New York City - one of the first I have come across. The notes to the table suggest the following:

The average temperature yesterday was 76; for the corresponding date last year it was 74; average on the corresponding date for the last twenty-five years, 73.

This isn't really a science issue, but I notice that the heat wave of 2006 is very similar to reports of the heat (and shortages of ice, with subsequent price increases/investigations/indictments/outrage) in 1906.

From the July 20, 1906 NYT:

The Fifteenth Regiment of United States Cavalry from Fort Ethan Allen, Burlington, Vt., arrived early this afternoon at Hoosick, four mile south of this place [Hoosick Falls, N.Y.], after a fifteen-mile march from Shaftsbury, Vt., where they spent the previous afternoon and night.

The heat, which made the march unbearable during the first four days, was the source of much trouble to-day, many horses having become exhausted and dropped in their tracks. Most of the animals were able to continue the journey after their loads had been removed, but several died. Just before the camp at Hoosick was reached two horses dropped dead.

The heat has prostrated more than fifty men since the march commenced, last Saturday. At to-night's company review twelve in line fainted, and nearly all the men showed signs of great fatigue. Evening parade was dispensed with owing to the condition of the men and horses.

What is obviously missing is the warnings that we receive today.

Bonking is, of course, slang for running out of energy during exercise. It usually happens when the working muscles run low on glycogen, which is the body's limiting fuel source for sustained activity.

Bonking is something you'd never want to do on purpose. Or would you?

Believe it or not, one highly respected exercise scientist has suggested that it may be beneficial to bonk regularly in training.

ATSRTWT

From the June 23, 1906 NYT:

AUGUSTA, Ga - A special from Athens says during a hail storm in Clark (sic) and Oconee Counties great damage was done. In some places the hail fell to a level of fourteen inches. Pine trees for miles were stripped of their foliage.

In Clark (sic) county the storm was about 2 mile wide and seven miles long. In Oconee it was two miles wide and ten miles long. Corn, cotton, and other crops in the path of the storm were totally destroyed.

If all that is needed to "prove" the downside of global warming is weather variablity, then all those folks should come to Texas - as they say here "if you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes."

My biggest problem with the whole debate is that the global warming issue and what to do about it is simply too easy for totalitarians and totalitarians-in-training to hijack.

From this BBC story:

Italian researchers say eating pizza could protect against cancer.

Researchers claim eating pizza regularly reduced the risk of developing oesophageal cancer by 59%.

The risk of developing colon cancer also fell by 26% and mouth cancer by 34%, they claimed.

Tyler Cowen is worried about the bird flu. So worried that he started a blog (now dormant) devoted entirely to it.

Gillian Air, influenza virus expert and Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Oklahoma, writes today in the Oklahoman (registration required) that fears of a bird flu pandemic are overblown. Here are the money quotes:

An avian influenza pandemic might produce good ratings for a made-for-television movie, but in reality the risk to the majority of people is almost nonexistent right now. …The facts do not point to an impending pandemic.

… Although the virus has met many prerequisites for the start of a pandemic, it still does not have an ability to spread efficiently among humans.

…The picture in Indonesia strongly suggests that there is a rare gene in the human population that makes some humans susceptible to bird flu while the vast majority are either resistant to the infection or get a very mild infection.

From the May 19, 1906 NYT:

Prof. Hans Molisch of Prague, according to the London Mail, has been able to read a newspaper by the mircobic glow emanating from a sausage.

All meat - beef as often as in 52 cases out of 100 and veal in 50 out of 100 - contains the microbe, which projects a greenish-white light. With sausages it is not so frequent, but is, when present, much stronger....

Prof. Molisch asserts that the presence of these microbes in meat is no sign of decay, but rather the contrary, as in no case have they been found in meat unfit for human consumption.

Step 1: Create a problem.

President Clinton issued an Executive Order June 12 extending the current moratorium on the leasing of oil drilling sites on the outer continental shelf of the United States to June 30, 2012.

[Story.]

Step 2: "Fix" a problem.

WASHINGTON -- Scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs will be able to vie for a grand prize of $10 million, and smaller prizes reaching millions of dollars, under House-passed legislation to encourage research into hydrogen as an alternative fuel.

[Story.] HT: Dave Reed.

The current issue of Nature reports on a study purporting to calculate the value of insects to the U.S. economy. A sampling of their "conclusions":

By far the greatest direct contribution of insects comes from their role as food for birds, game and fish, Losey and Vaughan calculate. Given the overall value to the US economy of the recreation industries of hunting, fishing and birdwatching, and the proportion of species involved that eat insects, these industries would be almost $50 billion worse off each year without them.

Insects also save farmers some $4.5 billion each year by gobbling up pests on dozens of different crops, and a cool $3 billion by pollinating many different fruits and vegetables. The humble dung beetle chips in with savings worth $380 million, by keeping cowpats out of the way of parasitic flies and saving valuable cattle from infections.

On the other hand, some of these same insects invade our homes, picnics, etc., thereby reducing their total value to the economy (unless we count purchases of Off! as enhancing value).

From the April 1, 1906 NYT (not a joke, as far as I can tell):

Every man his own wireless station with the aid of an umbrella, is the promise made yesterday by an officer of the American De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company...By the pocket wireless apparatus, it is declared, any one man can, with a knowledge of the Morse alphabet, telegraph from any point in New York City to Coney Island and possibly to distances further away, even to ships at sea. This apparatus might be ready in a few weeks, it was asserted.

I wonder who was the expected audience for such a contraption? If such a technology was the sole province of the very wealthy, would this have triggered fake portable telegraphs with which the mere mortals could pose (as was the case at one time with cell phones)?

Isn't it amazing how far we have come not only in the past ten years but in the past one hundred.

In hiking mountains it's not always the highest mountain that is best. Many of the Colorado 14ers are fairly unimpressive peaks simply because they rise only a couple thousand feet from the nearby ridge (or saddle) leading to the next peak.

So mountains end up being defined in terms of something called prominence more than height. There's quite an elaborate science behind determining a mountain's prominence.

Prominence is a term that represents the elevation of a summit relative to the surrounding terrain. It is defined as the elevation of a summit relative to the highest point to which one must descend before reascending to a higher summit.

Here's a list and map of the 57 "ultra" prominent peaks in the 48 states of the U.S. with prominences greater than 5000 feet.

I've hiked up one, 56 to go.

The static view of the world and the state of technology, which in turn would suggest that the price of oil will forever increase and we will all be riding llamas in a few years, would be funny if it wasn't so prevalent amongst those who are in control of my tax bill.

Many economists claim that we have little to worry about, and while in the short run things might become a little more or less expensive, in the long run I am also confident. Why? There are a lot of advancements and ingenious methods for capturing the wasted energy in the world, from speed bumps that depress (just a little) when a car drives over them, which in turn provides energy that can be stored in batteries or sold back to the grid (more here), to advancements in auto and truck technology that predict fifty-plus miles per gallon within the next twenty years.

One place some folks are looking at is the use of carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes can be molded to any shape/specification and can be made several times stronger than conventional steel quarter panels while weighing a fraction of today's car frame/body. Imagine how little power we will need when the cars we drive are the size of an H2 (if we wish) but weigh the same as a LeCar or old Beetle!

Nevertheless, there are advancements in conventional internal combustion engines, including this 6 stroke engine concept. What are the best aspects of the idea? It is cool, it could work, and it is most decidedly non-government-inspired.

In the Feb. 5, 1906 NYT it is reported that Sgt. Joseph A Furot, who had been sent to Europe by NYC police commissoiner McAdoo, had returned from his journey a convert to the finger printing system that had been adopted by Scotland Yard.

Said Mr. Furot:

in his opinion, the finger print system was about as near pefection as was possible, and that there was no limit to its scientific application.

The end of the telegraph was announced yesterday. Creative destruction took 145 years to have its ultimate effect on the friendly (and all too often not so friendly) telegram.

Where is the outrage?

More here

The Jan 14, 1906 NYT provides an overview of a proposed continuous rail link from New York City to Paris. Trans-Atlantic trips were evidently too dangerous or uncomfortable, therefore the proposal was to ride a rail from New York to Alaska, cross the Bering Sea via two 36 mile tunnels (one dug by the U.S. and one dug by Russia), take one of three proposed routes across Siberia, and eventually cross Russia and Eastern Europe and eventually to Paris. From my understanding of rail travel at that time, it is not immediately clear that the rail link would be a more enjoyable trip than the sea-going version.

In one sense, the proposal was really focused on the Bering Strait and the digging of what would have been the two longest tunnels in the world (kind of like the Chunnel ninety years hence), although the trans-Siberia railroad had yet to be completed - the remainder of the rail link would have simply connected existing rails.

While the course of the next ten years would make the rail link an impossibility, the article ended with the following optimistic view of technological advance:

It is dangerous to fix any limitations upon human enterprise. A few years ago we should have laughed at the idea that in 1905 about three hundred British scientists would visit the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi by a railroad extending 1,600 miles from the ocean.

Excerpt, on division of problems in society. The claim is that this reflects on division of labor, in Smith's sense. Interesting. On the other hand, it quotes Chomsky approvingly in the article itself, so how good can it be?

Whitehead realized that many of society's most important problems are multidisciplinary in nature. For example, such problems include preserving the environment, population control, or the allocation of scarce resources. He felt that individuals having the generalist style of education, who had a broad knowledge of the basic concepts of every field, as favored on the European continent, would be better prepared to solve these kinds of problems, rather than the specialist, with all the accompanying communication problems and whose views outside their discipline in any case would be necessarily subjective, and therefore more prone to error. .

Fuller said what happened is that the business owners turned to yet a third tier of people, even duller than themselves, for an answer to the highway construction problem! These are the politicians, who know little about science, engineering, truth or costs, but who have the gift of gab, who tell the Populus, if you vote for me, I will have the government build the highways for you! No one in this group of people had even the slightest appreciation of the possible hidden costs in such a decision. It never crossed their mind. And the general public was just as ignorant. But, did you know that even as expensive as highways may be, in the grand scheme of things, it's just a drop in the bucket? Consider the hidden costs of how much we spend militarily to defend our access to oil supplies in the Middle East! Or the hidden costs of health care due to breathing foul air? Or even the loss of beauty of not being able to see a blue sky? Some people don't even know the sky is supposed to be mostly blue, and that red sunsets are something ominous. You have to read the accounts of early explorers to know what sunsets were like a hundred years ago.


ATSRTWT

From the Dec. 28, 1905 NYT is a story about Francis Hamilton, then solicitor to the Collector of the Port (of New York), who intended to prosecute boat captains for "unnecessary" whistle blowing. The statute enforced was U.S. Revised Statutes section 4.450 which provided for punishment of steamboat Captains for "misbehavior, negligence, or unskillfulness."

The basic idea was that the noise associated with the shipping traffic along the waterfronts of NYC was too great and was causing heath problems and even death amongst the citizens of NYC. Similar to today's "new study," the whistles-cause-death hypothesis had support:

From a health viewpoint, Dr. John H. Girdner, who has made a special study of the effects of noises on the brain and the general condition of the human anatomy, testified that he believed that death has frequently resulted from the terrific wear and tear on the brain and the nerves by noises [emphasis added].

"I believe," he said, "that many a man who has died on July 5 was hurried to his grave by the noises of July 4. The difference between noise and music is the difference of rhythm. The steady gallop of a horse will not injury one; it is when the animal's hoofs strike a loose manhole cover and the like, and the sound is harsh and sudden, that the effect is harmful."

"Has the increase in the night noises from the river front hurt property on the upper west side?" he [George Carrol, a real estate man] was asked by Mr. Hamilton.

"It has cut down rents of one apartment house that I know of about one third."

Mr. Carroll added that he had fewer places rented, as well as less rent, on account of the din at night.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm sure that the noise of the big city is annoying, but this is why I don't live in a big city. I would have thought there are a number of different compensating differentials that accompany living with noise, beyond the obvious issue of lower rent. Are there higher wages, more "culture," and other quality of life issues such as the ability to get Chinese takeout at 4am? Nevertheless, the concern about noise affecting quality of life and health has not completely disappeared.

The EU has introduced noise abatement regulations for member-country cities, with fines on the way, especially for those pesky bagpipes.

The last Wednesday in April is International Noise Awareness Day, although this seems focused on hearing loss/damage rather than death.

While there are plenty of ways to reduce noise and maintain economic activity, I wonder if the anti-noise activists understand this? What grabbed me when reading the 1905 story was how, in many cases, the activists of the twenty-first century are not as sophisticated/progressive/avante garde as they first appear.

A picture of the new Honda Gold Wing - beyond the airbag, the bike has foot warmers, nav system, and an 80 watt sound system. Given some of the video clips of motorcylce wrecks rolling around the net, it is not clear that the airbag will help much.

If it wasn't Honda, I would have thought it a joke.

Coming back from an enjoyable week unplugged has one downside - having to wade through an overflowing email box. This little nugget was sent my way - which might make it old news/new news to some.

The next big concern amongst the computer jocks is the Y2k+38 bug (that's 2038) where C+ programs will possibly crash. This is just a bit earlier than the Y2k bug was advertised, which makes me suspect.

The Y2k bug was either a grand example of markets correcting a potential calamity before it happened or a grand example of over-hype. I tend to go with the latter, but I am willing to be persuaded.

So goes the Apple vs. PC Clone debate which seems to be maintained mainly by Apple fans. I played with Apple's in middle school, but my first machine was a Tandy Model 4, and eventually an IBM XT. By the time I left high school to go to UGA in 1987, I had a new Northgate (now Gateway?) machine with a monochrome (amber) monitor and a 10MB hard drive.

The market spoke and Apple and the other competitors at the time lost (at least the first few rounds). This article gives a nice history of the PC, and includes this interesting graph:

A couple of observations. First, Apple apparently never had that big of a market share, likely because of their pricing/cloning strategy, and it was Commodore that took it on the chin after the PC arrived. Second, is it amazing how quickly the PC dominates. We usually see an S-curve of technology adoption/penetration, but with the PC it isn't quite S-shaped.

HT: J-Walk blog

Exercise: try to square the notion of "intelligent design" with the maladaptation of the modern kidney:

"The kidneys do an incredible job of holding on to sodium, which was important to the survival of our early ancestors who lived in a salt-poor world, but today there's so much salt in the food we eat that the kidneys end up holding onto too much sodium," and that can lead to high blood pressure, researcher Dr. Howard Pratt said in a prepared statement.

Among the more serious reasons to not run a marathon cited by economist Art De Vany was the possible elevated risk of cancer.

Marathon running elevates markers of cancer. S100beta is one of these markers. Tumor necrosis factor, TNF-alpha, is another.

A recent article in Runner's World summarizes the research.

In late 2002, the Journal of Nutrition published a review of 170 epidemiological studies on the relationship between physical activity and cancer. Here is some of what the researchers found. Colon cancer: Forty-three of 51 studies produced positive results (more exercise was associated with fewer cancers), with an average risk reduction of 40 to 70 percent. Breast cancer: Thirty-two of 44 studies produced positive results, with an average risk reduction of 30 to 40 percent. Prostate cancer: Fifteen of 30 studies produced a positive result, with an average risk reduction of 10 to 30 percent, particularly of the most aggressive forms. Endometrial cancer: Nine of 13 studies produced positive results, with an average risk reduction of 30 to 40 percent. Lung cancer: Eight of 11 studies produced positive results with an average risk reduction of 30 to 40 percent.

While I admit to not being a huge fan of these so-called meta-analysis studies that lump disparate studies (with different samples, methodologies and varying degrees of quality) together, this looks like running isn't so bad. And the evidence on total mortality is very clear according the the article.

Epidemiologist Steven Blair, the president and CEO of the Cooper Institute in Dallas, Texas, is one of the world-leading experts on exercise and longevity. While he notes that the book is still open on cancer rates among serious exercisers, he says, "In our most relevant work on this topic, we do not see any higher cancer risk in the most fit or most highly active individuals. In fact, the highest activity or fitness groups consistently had the lowest mortality rates."

UPDATE: Trent McBride, M.D. has a very nice post about this over at catallarchy.net. ATSRTWT

A new study claims that people who retire early do not live as long as those who work longer. The study claims to have controlled for the obvious selection bias in that people often retire early for health reasons. As they say, more research is needed. [Media link.]

UPDATE: Here's a better link covering the study.

This article at Live Science (HT: Drudge) discusses whether there is a need for a Category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricanes. Other than another bin in which to sort storms, I don't see why we need another category. Beyond the scientific interest in wind speeds, barometric pressures, etc. (which the scientists already have access to), what purpose would the higher category serve for the general public? If folks don't get out of the way of a Cat 5 storm, will a Cat 6 do the trick? If folks use the scale to measure how far the storm will move inland, perhaps there needs to be a different scale, not just an extension of the current scale.

The categorization system was designed to convey to the public, and ostensibly public officials if they choose to dial in, expected storm intensity at landfall (and resultant damage). Therefore, once the wind/storm surge reaches the intensity of "absolute destruction/death" what point to say the storm is more intense? A Category 5 will destroy your house in thirty seconds but a Category 6 will destroy your house in twenty seconds?

Indeed, Simpson himself justified the scale in much the same way - the damage from 190 mph wind will look the same as the damage from 165 mph wind:

First, it was designed to measure the amount of damage inflicted by a hurricane's winds, and beyond 156 mph, the damage begins to look about the same, according to Simpson.

"When you get up into winds in excess of 155 mph you have enough damage," Simpson said in a 1999 interview with the National Weather Log, a publication of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"If that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building it's going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it's engineered. So I think that it's immaterial what will happen with winds stronger than 156 miles per hour. That's the reason why we didn't try to go any higher than that," Simpson said

Aside from the obvious reason not to run a marathon (it hurts!), economist Art De Vany goes through the not-so-pleasant medical research.

My take: Some of this I knew about and some I didn't. Much of it is transitory in nature and not likely to cause long term problems. Much of it is manageable if you know the contributory risk factors (such as not overusing NSAIDS like Advil). And much of it is not settled science. Still, there's no doubt long distance running carries risks.

[HT: Rick]

The world was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Arnold Kling over at EconLog caught my eye with an entry yesterday entitled “Economics and Autism” because (1) I’m an economist and (2) I have two sons with autism. Kling links to a recent op-ed piece by Simon Baron-Cohen on findings about the relationships among autism, male-female differences, and genetics.

Baron-Cohen reports on questionnaire research that has found a higher percentage of men than women to fit an approach-to-the-world type he calls “systematizers” (54% vs. 17%). Men are correspondingly less often “empathisizers” (17% vs. 44%). Autism, he proposes, is symptomatic of an extreme systematizer-type brain with “an unusually low drive to empathize”.

I have no doubt that this captures something true and important about high-functioning individuals with Asperger syndrome (a relatively mild version of autism that shades into socially awkward nerdiness), and particularly those who have the “splinter skills” that are typically systematizing (e.g. Rain Man’s mathematical skills) rather than empathetic. I am doubtful that it explains much of importance about individuals at the other end of the spectrum, e.g. those who never learn to talk. It doesn’t seem to explain the association of autism with developmental disability.

Of course, my authority to speak about autism is no greater than Baron-Cohen’s to speak about economics supposing he had been trying for years to understand his economist son.

The part of Baron-Cohen’s findings that really surprised me, though, was that “autism is the genetic result of ‘assortative mating’ between parents who are both strong systemizers.” That is, his research finds that not only are fathers of autistic children more likely than others to think like engineers, but so are their mothers. I'm not surprised at the idea that autism has a genetic component, or that engineering-type careers are correlated with carrying the gene (we all know the engineer stereotype), but at the finding that mothers of autistic children have more "engineer-like" minds than other mothers. I wouldn't have made that generalization from the support-group mothers I knew in Athens, GA. They were highly empathetic -- but that's what the support group was for, so maybe it was a matter of self-selection? -- and not observably "systematizer" types.

Simon Baron-Cohen is, by the way, a cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen, the comedian known for playing the clueless fictional reporter Ali G.

This one displays the blast radius of user-defined and user-placed nuclear bombs. I would wage this hack will be forced down pretty quick.

It is an interesting exercise seeing as the Federal, state, and local governments have done absolutely nothing to prepare us for a major terrorist event. I have it on good authority by the folks I know who work in local governments that there are plans in place, however they can't share them with us. My comment was that the plans likely require us (the citizenry) to cooperate instead of going apesh*t.

I went to elementary school after the "duck and cover" days and we didn't talk about nuclear strikes - I suppose the assumption was that the city-killers the Russians were going to throw at us wouldn't leave too much behind.

It is unlikely that Al Qaeda or someone else would be able to get ahold of a 10,000 kiloton nuke - which is what seems to be required to get a fifteen mile blast radius of reasonable destruction (about the distance from Arlington to Fort Worth) but not enough to destroy the entire Metroplex. Things, of course, are much different in the concentrated cities.

If there is no threat, then a lack of civil defense preparation is probably okay. If there is a threat, isn't there a need for civil defense preparation? Perhaps hacks such as this one will motivate someone?

Find cell phone towers in your neighborhood.

[HT: Dave]

Sponsor a mile of a 1,800 mile round trip hike to the South Pole and back.

Can the sponsors be held liable if the hikers perish? Nevertheless, I wish them (the hikers) luck.

Researchers at the University of Texas have found that an ingredient in turmeric and curry powder (specifically, the yellow spice curcumin) acts to reduce the growth of melanoma (skin cancer) tumors.

This is the kind of lab finding that obviously cries out for an epidemiological cross-check. People with diets rich in curry have reportedly already been found to have reduced rates of colon cancer. How much reduced? What about reduced skin cancer? Other cancers?

According to Innovations Report:

Research published in this month’s edition of the journal Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, describes a method that can detect a pattern of contamination on banknotes from drug related crime that is different from the pattern seen in general circulation.

“People involved in drug-trafficking are not always involved in handling illicit drugs, but they may possess cash that has been held by others who come into contact with drugs, so finding traces of drugs on an unusually high proportion of bank notes is another piece of evidence that could help guide a police investigation, or be used in court,” says co-author Karl Ebejer.

Work by the same group has shown that traces of cocaine may be found on a majority of banknotes.

Next time I see a drug deal in the movies or on TV, I’ll expect to see the drugs sealed in one plastic bag, and the currency sealed in another. Or maybe this is just the thing needed to jump-start the Mondex card that allows peer-to-peer electronic cash payments.

Google earth

Earlier today I posted on a recent medical study that showed a 35% increase in colon cancer resulting from eating red meat daily. I criticized this because a 35% increase of a very small number is -- well -- a very small number. If I have my numbers right (and I would be very pleased to know if I'm off base here), this 35% increased risk is on the order of 0.1 percentage point. That is, 1 person out of 1000 who eats a lot of red meat daily is likely to get colon cancer compared to people who eat red meat only rarely. To be sure 1 person out of a 1000 is not zero, but it isn't a particularly big number either.

The study also found that (1) eating a lot of red meat and (2) not eating a lot of fish would combine to increase your colon cancer risk by 63%--something on the order of 0.2 percentage points or 2 persons out of 1000 (again if I have my math right).

But get this quote...Professor Tim Key, Deputy Director of Cancer Research UK's epidemiology unit, said: "We estimate that more than two thirds of colorectal cancer cases - 25,000 cases in the UK - could be avoided by changes in lifestyle in Western countries."

I can not see how this conclusion can be drawn. I read the study to say that at most 2 out of 1000 people would not get colon cancer if they switched away from eating red meat and into eating more fish. He is saying that 67 out of a 100 cases could be eliminated. To be sure, he may have been talking about the improvements from combining all lifestyle factors including obesity, lack of exercise, smoking, etc. But his number is 335 times greater than mine! This is too big a discrepency.

Either I am reading these studies all wrong or these guys need to go back to grade school for remedial mathematics.

Maybe I should create a "Where's the Ooomph?" category for all these medical studies showing the most trivial results. Yet another case in point:

Study confirms red meat link with bowel cancer People who eat more than 160 grams of red or processed meat a day are 35 percent more likely to develop bowel cancer than those who eat less than 20 grams a day, according to one of the biggest nutrition investigations ever carried out. [Story.]

Ok. 35 percent more likely than what?

The study in question found 0.278% of the sample developed bowel cancer. If we take this figure as the baseline, we find that a 35% increase comes to a risk of 0.375% for those who eat a lot of read meat.

Big freakin' deal!

I wonder if anyone would bother to read this stuff if the headline read, Study finds eating a lot of red meat increases your odds of getting cancer by 0.1 percentage points.

WSJ's Carl Bialik on hurricane forecasting:

"Researchers' methods may be complex and rigorous, but their results over the past six years -- at least for the total number of hurricanes -- haven't been much better than an educated guess. To evaluate the forecasts, I measured the average error for each one -- the difference each year between predicted hurricanes and the actual number. (Thanks to Iowa State statistics professor Philip Dixon and National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Barbara Brown for advising me on this evaluation, and reader Paul Haskins for suggesting it.) I looked at forecasts made in May or earlier, before the start of hurricane season -- some researchers continue to update their predictions later in the year. It turns out that all four forecasts have missed by between 1.3 and 1.5 hurricanes each year. But a more simplistic method, a five-year moving average of hurricane counts, does just as well, missing by an average of 1.4 hurricanes each year. (To arrive at a five-year moving average, you simply add the counts for the previous five years and divide by five. For instance, to get a prediction for the number of hurricanes in 2000, I averaged the actual counts from 1995 through 1999. For 2001, I used counts from 1996 through 2000. I did this for each of the six years I evaluated.)"

Maybe people will lighten up on economic forecasting.

These have been making the rounds, so here are the links.

Shadow illusion

Rapid color changer [not safe for epileptics (not a shot, I just don't know)?]

Here are a whole bunch more

Google maps and its satellite imagery is amazing. What's left to do?

The future might be 3-D rendering in Google Earth? Eventually rendered in real-time?

Forget about the government as big brother, perhaps we need to worry more about Google and Microsoft?

Via FoxNews we learn:

"A study of 85 infant boys found a correlation between increased exposure to some forms of the chemical phthalate and smaller penis size and incomplete testicular descent.

A paper describing the research will appear in a future issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, a journal of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences."

A sample of 85--this reeks of junk science and we haven't even examined how the researchers measured "increased exposure."

Perhaps. Would it be surprising that evidence against global warming, or against humans causing global warming, can't make it into the bigger science journals?

Might it be less noisy? From Defense Review comes information on the DREAD - a new type of small arms "gun" that doesn't use gunpowder for propulsion but uses centrifugal force. The upshot: the DREAD is hyped as being quiet, delivering up to 120,000 .308 caliber rounds per minute, and it is "safe."

The weapon is advertised as offering stealth technolgoy" because it doesn't leave a heat signature, there is no noise, no muzzle flash, and therefore it is difficult to detect. This sounds a little too good to be true. Didn't Isaac Newton prove that for every action there is a reaction and thus if a projectile will be sent out at 4000-8000 feet per second there will have to be recoil somewhere. Perhaps it is possible to try to corral the recoil and use it (as in automatic and semi-automatic weapons) but it would seem that physics would ultimately get in the way.

Here is a Quicktime promotional movie (warning: 18MB)

Is there any irony in the movie suggesting that the DREAD is "safer" than conventional arms - ostensibly for the guy pulling the trigger - because there is no gunpowder, toxic fumes, etc.

I really like it when little bit (9 years old) rides in the front seat with me in the car. It seems like we have our best conversations in the car like this. When she sits in the back seat, the dynamic is changed for some reason and it doesn't work the same.

Of course I know riding in the front seat is more dangerous than the back seat. For the record, I usually let her sit in the front only in the old Benz (sans airbag) as opposed to the new Subaru (with airbag). And she always wears her seat belt no matter which car.

Am I a bad parent to let her sit in front?

New study alert: Back Seat Safest For Children, Study Confirms

It looks like the raw odds of a child dying in a car accident are about 0.48% (1800 child deaths out of 370,000 accidents in which children were present). If the child is wearing a selt belt, then the odds are cut by "more than half" to about 0.24%.

According to the study, the odds of surviving increase by 40% if you're in the back versus the front seat taking the odds (conditional on wearing a seat belt) from 0.24% to about 0.34%.

My bottom line: This tiny increase in safety is worth sacrificing for the quality time with little bit. She can ride in front all she wants.

Middle-Age Obesity Linked to Dementia in Later Life [Story.]

Ok, how obese to you have to be and how much more likely are you to get dementia? Surprisingly, the article cited above actually gives us most of the needed facts:

Investigators analyzed data for 10,276 members of Kaiser Permanente medical care program in California who underwent detailed health checks from 1964 to 1973 when they were aged 40-45 and who were still members of the health plan in 1994.

Both men and women with the highest skin-fold measurements had a 60-70 percent greater risk of dementia compared to those with the lowest measurements.