Repeal the damn thing! A survey of doctors nationwide has found that 83% have considered abandoning the practice of medicine due to Obamacare.
Saturn from above: Cassini has shifted its orbit so that it can look down on Saturn and its rings.
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center today posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. As I do every month, I am posting this graph, which you can see below the fold.
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The religion of peace: “Christianity should be destroyed and wiped from the face of the earth.”
New research suggests that — despite its known bad effects — weightlessness might actually slow the aging process.
Don’t jump into that spaceship yet! The research was done on worms, and is to put it mildly very preliminary. Moreover, none of the results change anything regarding the serious loss of bone density and the weakening of the muscles and cardiovascular system caused by weightlessness.
The uncertainty of science: New research has apparently disproven the Mono Lake research that suggested that arsenic might replace phosphorus as one of the basic building blocks of life.
The National Park Service is proposing the removal of several historic bridges in Yosemite because they interfere with water flow, according to environmentalists.
Look, why don’t they simply admit it: They really want don’t want any humans to visit these parks, and simply outlaw them all? That way, the job of the National Park Service will be so much easier: They — and their environmentalist buddies — will finally have the park to themselves to play in without being bothered by all those disgusting American citizens.
Cool images of the opening of the floodgates of a Chinese dam.
The House Appropriations Committee has approved a $1.4 billion cut in the budget of EPA, also including 31 additional riders limiting the agency’s regulatory powers.
That would make the 2013 EPA budget equivalent to its budget in the early 2000s, numbers that would hardly be crippling.
For a second year in a row the U.S. has negotiated a deal with a Russian company to provide icebreaker service to Antarctica during the winter.
The company had played hardball in negotiations, so I expect the National Science Foundation is paying a lot more this year than last for the service.
An evening pause: Clearly a terrorist by the modern standards of Homeland Security.
This is freedom? A Phoenix man has been jailed for holding private Bible study sessions in his own home.
Salman is the owner of Mighty Mike’s Burgers — and he is also an ordained pastor. He and his wife have been hosting Bible studies on their 4.6 acre property since 2005. The gatherings were originally attended by as many as 15 people.
Wow! As many as fifteen people! The mind boggles. Just imagine the traffic problems these mobs must have caused, especially as they gathered on a plot of land as small as 4.6 acres!
I say “Please!” and I say it loudly. Picking Ryan for number two would reverse Ronald Reagan’s biggest mistake, picking moderate George Bush Sr. as his VP. The result of that bad choice was 12 years of Bush rule in the late 1980s and in the 2000s, during which there was little effort to rein in the power or size of government. In fact, the Bushes did a lot to increase government’s power and size.
Picking Ryan as VP would place a competent fiscal conservative into the limelight and make such a person a leading contender for the Presidency in future years. It would also help demonstrate again that the 2010 election was a trend, not a fluke.
Is the U.S. government reading your emails without a warrant? The answer appear to be “Maybe.”
And the stance of the Obama administration?
The Justice Department and the Obama administration had a chance to settle the issue in April 2011, during a Senate hearing on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Instead, officials with both the Commerce and Justice departments failed to provide any clarity. Instead, a Justice Department official argued against extending Fourth Amendment protections — specifically strict warrant requirements — to email, saying that doing so would hinder investigations. “Congress should consider carefully the adverse impact on criminal as well as national security investigations if a probable-cause warrant were the only means to obtain such stored communications,” James Baker, associate deputy attorney general, testified at the hearing.
This behavior is not only immoral it is constitutionally illegal. It should stop.
And now for some important results! A study has found that Americans and Europeans give directions differently.
Americans were far more likely, across all tests, to give navigators a street name or a cardinal direction (i.e. north, east, south, or west). Dutch wayfinders, on the other hand, provided far more landmarks and left-right turn-descriptors.
Scientists can now use neutron detectors at the south pole to warn astronauts on ISS of incoming dangerous radiation.
Job growth amounted to a disappointing 80,000, below analyst expectations of 90-100K, while the jobless rate remained the same at 8.2%:
Read the whole article. There’s a lot more, all of its depressing and trending downward.
While no President should be blamed entirely for the unemployment numbers, the policies of any President do have a direct influence on those numbers, and should bear some responsibility, especially in this era where we have ceded so much power to the federal government. Consider this graph (below the fold), which shows the “total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.” The steep upward swing, beginning in 2008, sadly corresponds too closely with the beginnings of the Obama administration. And it is with this administration that we have seen the worst deficits, the most regulation, and the biggest increase in the power of government in our lifetimes. It is thus no surprise the economy has crumbled.
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No one’s gotta get stoned: An Israeli company has developed a medical marijuana strain that doesn’t make you high.
I like this factoid, that the company’s research facility is at “an undisclosed location” in northern Israel.
The only program surveying the southern sky for dangerous asteroids has lost its NASA funding and will end this month.
Birds of a feather: A European Space Agency (ESA) working group has recommended the agency focus its next manned space project on redesigning its now abandoned ATV cargo ship as a service module for the U.S.’s Orion capsule.
Believe it or not, this is how ESA plans to pay for its use of ISS from 2017 to 2020, by abandoning the ATV (which supplies ISS) and building a service module for a capsule that might never launch and is not intended to go to ISS anyway.
But then, it isn’t surprising, coming from a government agency.
Six patients are suing one of the world’s largest stem cell companies, accusing it of fraud.
The patients claim that at RNL workshops they were misled into believing that treatments, still in the experimental stage, had already been proven effective. They allege that Hong told them stem cells would cure all ailments from which they suffered, including diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, back pain and insomnia, and “reverse aging, restore health and virility including sex drive, and rejuvenate their body functions to that of their twenties and thirties.” They all say they have received no benefit from the treatments.
Altogether these patients spent $75,000 for these treatments.
It is very suspicious for any respectable medical institution to charge patients for experimental work. That should have been a red flag from the beginning.
Opportunity’s view from Mars, a panorama taken during the rover’s recent winter stopover.
It ain’t easy creating your own nation, and here’s the history to prove it.
News you can use: How fireworks work.
Having worked for several years on a fireworks team setting up and lighting a county fireworks show in Virginia, I can say that lighting these things is by far more fun that sitting at a distance and watching them go off.
