Later On

The "uncanny valley" is the name given to this phenomenon:

As the likeness to humans increases, reactions grow more positive—until the likeness gets too close, while still not being fully human. At that point, people recoil. This is one reason that successful CGI films use cartoon-like characters rather than trying to portray realistic humans.

What’s interesting is that monkeys have much the same reaction.

From the YouTube “more info”:

The US massacre at Al-Sukkariya, Syria in 2008 was a clear violation of international law.

Dan Colman has an excellent clip. He notes:

Jean-Luc Godard, one of the founders of New Wave French cinema, directed “Sympathy for the Devil” during the tumultuous summer of 1968. The film is part rockumentary, part advertisement for left-wing ideas that were alive at the time. (There’s no real way to sugarcoat that.) Above, Godard takes you inside the recording sessions of the Rolling Stones’ classic, “Sympathy for the Devil.” As the clip goes on, you can see the song, as we know it, unfold.

Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress (and I will say that it is important to watch the video: the transcript covers only a portion, and not the best portion):

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled “Medical Debt: Can Bankruptcy Reform Facilitate a Fresh Start.” The hearing examined medical bankruptcies in America, and witnesses included CAP fellow Elizabeth Edwards and Kerry Burns, a Rhode Island mother who was forced into “financial ruin” by her late son’s medical bills.

One of the highlights of the hearing was when Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) questioned Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth about medical bankruptcies. Franken asked Furchtgott-Roth — who claimed that moving towards a European-style system of universal health care would increase bankruptcies — about how many medical bankruptcies there were in countries that have universal health care, like Switzerland and France. Furchtgott-Rott repeatedly told Franken that she didn’t “have that number,” and Franken informed her that the number was actually zero:

FRANKEN: I think we disagree on whether health care reform, the health care reform that we’re talking about in Congress now should pass. You should that the way we’re going will increase bankruptcies. I want to ask you, how many medical bankruptcies because of medical crises were there last year in Switzerland?

FURCHTGOTT-ROTH: I don’t have that number in front of me, but I can find out and get back to you.

FRANKEN: I can tell you how many it was. It’s zero. Do you know how many medical bankruptcies there were last year in France?

FURCHTGOTT-ROTH: I don’t have that number, but I can get back to you if I like.

FRANKEN: Yeah, the number is zero. Do you know how many were in Germany?

FURCHTGOTT-ROTH: From the trend of your questions, I’m assuming the number is zero. But I don’t know the precise number and would have to get back to you.

FRANKEN: Well, you’re very good. Very fast. The point is, I think we need to go in that direction, not the opposite direction. Thank you.

Watch it:

Medical bankruptcies are an epidemic in the United States. According to a peer-reviewed study published earlier this year in the American Journal of Medicine, nearly 62 percent of all U.S. bankruptcies in 2007 were due to health care costs — and 78 percent of people who were driven into bankruptcy by their medical bills had insurance.

UPDATE: Furchtgott-Roth’s testimony was even worse than portrayed above. Please read this post.

If you design software, sooner or later you need some text, and Blind Text Generator offers a lot of options. The Wife will be interested in this one. Read this review at Lifehacker.com.

Sounds like great fun, in fact. 200 feet is roughly the height of a 20-story building. Via The Firearm Blog:

A very nice shave today. The Omega Pro 48 (Model 10048) boar brush did a fantastic job: great lather and ample for many passes. I’m liking that brush a lot these days. It got a great lather from Tabac’s shaving soap—which is inclined to produce great lathers, I should note. And the English red-tipped Gillette Super Speed is one of my faves, this one with a much-used Wilkinson Sword blade—too much used, as it turns out: I had to work a bit on the third pass to achieve my accustomed smoothness. Time for a blade change.

And, of course, the Tabac aftershave was the perfect finish.

Thanks to Bob Slaughter for a pointer to this post by by Casey Kazan with Josh Hill. It’s adapted from a University of Wisconsin release and begins:

"We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals."

John Hawks -University of Wisconsin anthropologist

In a fascinating discovery that counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.

The findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival.

A team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimated that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone -dating back to the Stone Age – has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.

"In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations," says Hawks. "And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time."

While the correlation between population size and natural selection is nothing new – it was a core premise of Charles Darwin, Hawks says – the ability to bring quantifiable evidence to the table is a new and exciting outgrowth of the Human Genome Project.

Read the rest of this entry »

This issue came up again today, so I thought I’d link to the earlier post about it.

Some years back, the unemployment figures looked bad. So the administration at that time (and I no longer recall whether it was Democratic or Republican, but either would have done it) change the definition of "unemployed" to reduce the percentage of Americans "unemployed" by the new definition. Even the new definition didn’t hold up—some years later, unemployment was rising again, so "unemployed" was again redefine to result in a lower number.

The problem is this: when you have a safety gauge that shows the needle entering the red zone, bending the needle to keep it out of the red zone is not really effective and can be downright dangerous.

Michael Lind at Salon.com:

According to official statistics, the unemployment rate in the United States is now 9.8 percent. But those statistics understate the severity of the jobs crisis. The official statistics do not include the 875,000 Americans who have given up looking for work, even though they want jobs. When these "marginally attached" workers and part-time workers are added to the officially unemployed, the result, according to another, broader government measure of unemployment known as "U-6," is shocking. The United States has an unemployment rate of 17 percent.

And even this may understate the depth of the problem. By adding the 3.4 million Americans who want a job but have not looked for one in over a year, businessman, philanthropist and Obama advisor Leo Hindery Jr. infers an actual unemployment rate of 18.8 percent. In other words, nearly one in five Americans is unemployed or underemployed.

The sound you hear is the sound of the social fabric in America rotting and beginning to snap. Thanks to the unemployment insurance system adopted during the New Deal years, and thanks in part to the stimulus that the Obama administration and Congress passed earlier in the year, we do not have hordes of out-of-work Americans standing in line at soup kitchens and riding the rails from town to town. Even so, the invisible decay of America’s social order is just as real as the highly visible decay of abandoned McMansions in new developments that are turning into ghost towns across the continent.

Mass unemployment has yet to spawn a wave of crime or social unrest. But those possibilities cannot be dismissed. And the desperation is real, even if it is not signaled by desperate acts. The psychological toll of prolonged unemployment is devastating on individuals who have lost their roles as breadwinners or productive, self-reliant citizens. Employers prefer not to hire people who have been unemployed for long periods — and laid-off workers today are spending an average of 26.2 weeks without jobs, the highest average since the Great Depression. And then there are the new graduates of high schools and colleges, a lost generation whose members may be crippled throughout their careers by the lack of opportunities in their youth.

The American political class, insulated by wealth and connections from the economic storm, has been slow to respond to this crisis. The Democratic majority in Washington has hoped that the stimulus would solve much of the problem. While waiting for its effects to manifest themselves, the Democrats have focused on long-term problems of structural reform — healthcare, the environment, education. The Republican right has nothing to offer, except a contradictory message that both taxes and deficits should be drastically cut.

During the campaign, candidate Obama promised a jobs tax credit…

Continue reading. As is too often the case, candidate Obama seems unrelated to President Obama.

Take a look at this post: free video lecture series offering help.

Here’s the story by Kathleen Doheny at WebMD:

Blood levels of mercury are similar in children with autism, those with other developmental problems, and those who are developing typically, according to a new study.

”There has been discussion about whether children with autism have high levels [of mercury],” says the study’s lead author, Irva Hertz-Picciotto, PhD, an epidemiologist, professor, and chief of environmental and occupational health at the University of California, Davis, and a researcher at the MIND Institute there.

Hertz-Picciotto cautioned that her recent study does not examine whether mercury plays a role in causing the disorder, which has been the focus of ongoing debate. Major studies of children who were given vaccines with the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal (now phased out of most vaccines given to children) don’t find a link between the vaccines and autism, but some organizations led by parents of autistic children doubt those conclusions.

The blood levels in the study were taken after a child had already received a diagnosis of autism, a developmental disorder now believed to affect one in 91 U.S. children and marked by difficulty in communication, social interaction, and learning.

Some took exception with the new study.

”Measuring blood levels of mercury is a useless way to assess chronic damage or pathology from mercury, as it clears the bloodstream relatively rapidly," says Jim Moody, a director for the Coalition for SafeMinds (Sensible Action for Ending Mercury-Induced Neurological Disorders), an organization that investigates the risks of mercury exposure…

Continue reading.

As one would expect:

Exposure to lead in early childhood significantly contributes to lower performances on end-of-grade (EOG) reading tests among minority and low-income children, according to researchers at Duke University and North Carolina Central University. “We found a clear dose-response pattern between lead exposure and test performance, with the effects becoming more pronounced as you move from children at the high end to the low end of the test-score curve,” said lead investigator Marie Lynn Miranda, director of the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative (CEHI) at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

“Given the higher average lead exposure experienced by African-American children in the United States, our results show that lead does in fact explain part of the observed achievement gap that blacks, children of low socioeconomic status and other disadvantaged groups continue to exhibit in school performance in the U.S. education system, compared to middle- and upper-class whites,” Miranda said.

The study, published online in the peer-reviewed journal NeuroToxicology, linked data on blood-lead levels from the North Carolina Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program surveillance registry to EOG reading test scores for 4th graders in all 100 of the state’s counties.

Read the rest of this entry »

I got a so-so lather from one of Kell’s Original hemp blends, but I thought it might have been the brush (or bad technique or wrong phase of the moon), so I wanted to try again with a brush I knew well.

Today the Rooney Style 2 created a great lather from Kell’s Original Almond Hemp Blend—no problem at all. So the soap is fine, if you know your brush.

I swapped out the much-used Bolzano blade from the Futur and loaded it with a new Astra Keramik Platinum—very nice blade, and a very nice shave, nicely finished with Paul Sebastian aftershave. Good to go.

Read this post. Unbelievable, even by Texas standards.

It’s exactly like the pen that Annabelle Sciorra wrote in her journal with in What Dreams May Come, a movie that had its moments and its scenes but did not quite succeed. The pen, as I recall, is a Parker 60, with the little gold arrow inlay above the point. Very cool. Too bad the point is so narrow.

The wild blueberry bush has a lifespan of 13,000 years.

Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress:

One of the worst tragedies of the recession has been people losing their health insurance because they lost their job. Nearly 14,000 Americans lose their insurance every day. Wisconsin father Bill Caudle was laid off from his job at a plastics company in March 2009, which resulted in his family losing their employer-subsidized health care coverage. This put the family in an especially precarious position, because Bill’s wife, Michelle, was an ovarian cancer patient. After months of unsuccessfully looking for work, Caudle did the only thing he could to get his wife chemotherapy — he joined the Army:

Bill needed a job. He needed health benefits. [...]

The Army would solve their health coverage problem. In years past he would have been too old, but in 2005 the age limit for enlistment was increased from 35 to 40, and a year later it was raised again to 42. The tradeoff would be his absence from home.

In the end, although he risked leaving Michelle to fight cancer on her own, Bill chose the Army. He signed on for a job as a signal support systems specialist, a soldier who works with communications equipment.

“Seventy percent of the reason is for the insurance,” said Bill’s mother, Marguerite Hemiller. “He told me, ‘I’ve always wanted to do something for my country and I have to help Michelle.’”

The United States is the only industrialized country in the world that does not guarantee comprehensive health coverage to all of its citizens. In the rest of the developed world, Bill would not have to leave his cancer-stricken wife behind and risk his own life in order to get her care.

The theory of evolution solves many problems in biology, but it leaves unanswered (so far) how life originated. We may be getting very close to that. Nick Lane in New Scientist:

Peter Mitchell was an eccentric figure. For much of his career he worked in his own lab in a restored manor house in Cornwall in the UK, his research funded in part by a herd of dairy cows. His ideas about the most basic process of life – how it gets energy – seemed ridiculous to his fellow biologists.

"I remember thinking to myself that I would bet anything that [it] didn’t work that way," biochemist Leslie Orgel wrote of his meeting with Mitchell half a century ago. "Not since Darwin and Wallace has biology come up with an idea as counter-intuitive as those of, say, Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger."

Over the following decades, however, it became clear that Mitchell was right. His vindication was complete when he won a Nobel prize in 1978. Even today, though, most biologists have yet to grasp the full implications of his revolutionary ideas – especially for the origin of life.

"Mitchell’s ideas were about how cells are organised in space, and cellular energy generation is a feature of that," says geochemist Mike Russell of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "The problem is that most ideas on the origin of life lack both spatial organisation and a supply of energy to drive replication or growth."

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting New Scientist article by Bob Holmes:

Women of the future are likely to be slightly shorter and plumper, have healthier hearts and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving.

Medical advances mean that many people who once would have died young now live to a ripe old age. This has led to a belief that natural selection no longer affects humans and, therefore, that we have stopped evolving.

"That’s just plain false," says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. He says although differences in survival may no longer select "fitter" humans and their genes, differences in reproduction still can. The question is whether women who have more children have distinguishing traits which they pass on to their offspring.

To find out, Stearns and his colleagues turned to data from the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the medical histories of more than 14,000 residents of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1948 – spanning three generations in some families.

The team studied 2238 women who had passed menopause and so completed their reproductive lives. For this group, Stearns’s team tested whether a woman’s height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol or other traits correlated with the number of children she had borne. They controlled for changes due to social and cultural factors to calculate how strongly natural selection is shaping these traits.

Quite a lot, it turns out…

Continue reading.