I sure hope 2008 is better than 2007 (We’re gonna miss you Bob Jacoby)

Let’s do that by not nominating any candidate before the start of the Republicant and Democrap Conventions.  At least it will make for good TV.

Time to sell low-bank waterfront? “When the calendar turned to 2007, the heat went on and the weather just got weirder. January was the warmest first month on record worldwide — 1.53 degrees above normal. It was the first time since record-keeping began in 1880 that the globe’s average temperature has been so far above the norm for any month of the year.” Full Slice

“…By comparing the distribution of brain injuries between the PTSD group and the non-PTSD group, the researchers found two regions where damage was rarely associated with PTSD: the amygdala, a structure important in fear and anxiety, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), an area involved in higher mental functions and planning….” Full Slice

Journal

twelve horizontal stories

are enough for human magic

some would say ten or sixteen

but ten’s not enough for music

and for every sixteen-division-mentat

minutiae dominate negatively

a poem is like

an optical illusion

but with more axes

Bitching about the Christ in the Mass

Is like bitching about Freya in Friday

Thor in Thursday - you get what I mean

And giving a shit about the bitching?

Delusional fucktard!

“…If the asteroid does indeed strike Mars, it will impact somewhere in an 800 kilometer (500 mile) wide band that crosses the Martian equator. The southernmost boundary of this band lies slightly to the north of the region explored by the rover Opportunity. Though close, however, the rover is clearly outside the zone of possible impact….” Full Slice

Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of P* hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.)

Don’t overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.

From linuxworld

“We have discovered what appear to be micrometeorites imbedded in seven Alaskan Mammoth tusks and a Siberian bison skull. The micrometeorites apparently shattered on impact leaving 2-5 mm hemispherical debris patterns surrounded by carbonized rings. Multiple impacts are observed on only one side of the tusks and skull consistent with the micrometeorites having come from a single direction….” Full Slice

[This is a follow on to the earlier Younger Dryas impactor evidence paper]

Elon Musk has been busy.

Elon is a rich techie who is spending his money the way I like to think I would spend it, if I were a rich techie. I’m merely a dealing-with-it dilettante, so I “spend” by virtue of deferring the larger monetary compensations, while flogging my curiosity as a scholar-in-training.

“What may be the oldest known remains of a polar bear have been uncovered on the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic. The jawbone was pulled from sediments that suggest the specimen is perhaps 110,000 or 130,000 years old..“We have this specimen that confirms the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago, and this basically means that the polar bear has already survived one interglacial period…“This is just how I interpret it. But this is science - when you have little data, you have lots of freedom.“…”

John Harris and his blog:

REWIRING NEUROSCIENCE

This blog explores the impact of a “smarter” neuron on vision, human memory and the brain. It argues that this hypothetical neuron is precisely the neuron we already have.

The Zoomable Carina Nebula.