– I love, love, love that there are things that scientists discover that have been right under their nose for a long time.
– Here are some reviews of Atlas Shrugged. I assume they are more fun to read than the movie is to watch. Or, for that matter than the book is to read.
– Has the tunnel debate become too classy?
I love, love, love that there are things that scientists discover that have been right under their nose for a long time.
you mean like when they spend 5 years and millions of dollars on a study to “discover” eating fruits and vegetables, as opposed to pizza and burgers lowers cancer rates?
1. Atlas Shrugged “could” have been a good movie (acting, cinematography, editing, directing…forgetting it’s childishly silly philosophy)…instead…it gets an 8% at Rotten Tomatoes. Fail…try again.
2. No one from Iowa can run for President now. Arizona has introduced their “birther bill” (which the gov vetoed, but might be overridden shortly)…it requires a “long form” birth certificate. Like Hawaii, Iowa has no such thing. There might be some medical form or something like that, but I JUST got my official birth certificate again this week 0had lost mine) and SHOCKING, it’s called the “Certificate of Live Birth”, it’s one page, and lists the same information that’s on Obama’s…just my parents names, hospital name, my name and date of birth and 3 or 4 state fields (registration #, etc). Nothing about my parents being citizens or not, their religion, or my ancestry or blood type(because NONE of that has anything to do with ME being a US citizen). So I guess no one from Iowa can EVER run for President in the “great”(sarcasm) state of Arizona anymore. Sad.
mano @ 1
Most of our diseases are lifestyle based. So, absolutely yes. Diet and nutrition are terribly neglected. Meanwhile, the sugar lobby, like the tobacco lobby before them, deny there’s any problem whatsoever.
FWIW, I’ve been transitioning to the Cave Man Diet, what I call “the TrogloDiet ™”, for a few years now. Meat, beans, veggies, one cheat day. The most recent findings reported in “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” and “Four Hour Body” etc helped strengthen my resolve.
Hi Carl. Yea, that bit about the wings is awesome, clever.
@1
Researching a link between CANCER and diet is novel. Researching a link between obesity and diet would be wasteful.
It doesn’t surprise me that you are hostile to scientific method. The political right prefers theory over fact. Such as, “We have a theory that lower corporate tax rates and fewer regulations increases employment. Despite 30 plus years of empirical data indicating this is false, we KNOW that lower corporate tax rates and fewer regulations increases employment.”
# 5:
“Researching a link between obesity and diet would be wasteful.”
In my undergrad days (30+ years ago), I did some of my mandatory student lab time under a professor who was studying obesity in rats. He found that by selective breeding, he was able to produce rats that had a tendency towards obesity.
The interesting results were that he could feed the same amount of food to the obese rats and the control group (average rats).
For the control group, the amount of food they ate resulted in either increased activity or reduced activity, but only nominal weight gains. After gaining only a small amount of excess weight, they would either quit eating the extra food or expend more energy in activity (making the hamster wheel go round faster and longer). When fed less food, they first lost the extra weight, then went into energy conservation mode, sleeping more and exercising less.
For the genetically created obese rats, however, they found that the no matter how much food they fed them, the rats would store a given percentage as body fat. If you overfed them, they would store all the excess as body fat, while their activity level either stayed the same or diminished as their weight increased. If you cut back below the neutral level of food, they would still store a given percentage of the food as fat, making even less available for immediate energy use, and the tendency to go into “energy conservation mode” was the same as for the control group.
In other words, by decreasing the food intake to starvation levels, the obese rats would still accumlate body fat, even as they were slowly starving to death. The rat’s body would then try to break down the body fat to use as food, but that was a very inefficient process, as it wastes energy in the creation of fat, and wastes energy again in breaking the fat down for use as immediate fuel.
The tentative conclusion was that genetic disposition plays an important part in obesity, in some cases more than the amount or type of food consumed. Longer-term experiments were continuing long after I left that class.
This tends to be supported in humans in cases where researchers have found identical twins who were seperated at birth and raised by different families, with no contact with each other. The appearance of those twins is often stunning, their difference in weight at age 40+ is only within a few pounds of one another.
Contrary evidence was shown by researchers who studied Mexican and Mexican-Americans families who were split by the border. Those who lived on the Mexican side of the border tended to have little problem with obesity, whereas those who lived on the U.S. side of the border had considerable problems with obesity. Since they came from pretty much the same genetic pool, it appears that genetics wasn’t a factor in that study. What environmental factors (diet, excercise, etc.) might account for the differences is still being studied.
So in Arizona, women cannot run for prez because they don’t get circumcised?
What if you are an uncut American? Do you have to prove that?
# 7: Drop your pants, turn your head, and cough. Okay, you can vote.
@7 Fantastic insight, if only I knew what the fuck you were talking about.
Re: the 3rd item, I’d say good for Tim Harris, except now we want to talk about if the tunnel DEBATE is appropriate as opposed to, you know, the tunnel itself?
Maybe we can get the Taiwanese CGI folks on it.
@9: Per the Az bill, one of the approved means of ID for proving you were born an “American” is a record of circumcision.
# 10: Gee, and I thought the only thing a circumcision would prove is the person might be Jewish.
But I guess a certificate of circumscision might give the identify of the parents or where the birth occured, or it may not – it’s not a government-required form, so it might say anything the parents want it to say.
But the whole idea is pretty humerous, with respect to determining citizenship. For some reason I can’t get the faux ad on Saturday Night Live out of my head, where instead of cutting a valuable diamond in the back seat of a Buick to demonstrate the smooth ride, they conducted a Jewish ritual circumscision (there’s a word for that, but I have no idea how to spell it).
The crack Koch-caine addled moronic troll, the ld/LD(iot), has on many comments bleated the “hyperinflation” fear-mongering of the right wing and its knee-jerk proxies in the financial media.
Well it’s kinda funny what this Forbes blogger has to say:
http://blogs.forbes.com/beltwa.....est-rates/
Heh. This guy is pushing higher interest rates but mostly to give savers some relief.
@5
It doesn’t surprise me that you are hostile to scientific method. The political right prefers theory over fact.
ok, so you missed my point. i’m not hostile to the scientific method. i was pointing out, i guess not very well, the absurdity of spending time and money to determine that eating fruits and vegetables is better for you than eating pizza and burgers. which, amazingly, they’ve opted to study more than once.
Just thought I’d enshrine yet another dumbass dropping from the most dense fool ever to haunt these threads – and after Puddybud and the ld/LD(iot) that’s really saying something.
@13
Of COURSE they studied it more than once.
The only thing better than pizza is pizza paid for by some government nutrition program that funds a study to support its health consequences.
Duh.
Donald Trump’s showing his idiocy in spades recently, taking to the stump to promote his candidacy. First he pushes the “birther” issue, and produces a copy of his own birth certificate – which is exactly the same type of “Certificate of Live Birth” which the birthers say isn’t sufficient evidence of Obama’s birth in the U.S. But he just ignores the critics and keeps pounding the podium, to the cheers of the Tea Party enthusiasts.
Then Trump says he would either invade Libya to seize their oil, or stay out. He saw nothing wrong with invading a country to seize their assets, he claims it’s been done all the time. I guess he hasn’t read the U.N. charter lately. Maybe his new strategy should be “Liebenstraum for Americans!” (Liebenstraum – and I’m just guessing at the spelling – was the Nazi cry for the invasion and occupation of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union). Or perhaps he want’s to start a “Greater Western Hemisphere Co-Prosperity Sphere”, like the Japanese proclaimed to justify their invasion of China, the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina and the Phillipines, etc.).
Now comes news today that he claims to be “very strong” on “pro-life”, yet claims that there is a right of privacy in the Constitution. He also made it clear he didn’t understand the relationship between the two issues. (Usually when Trump gets caught in an issue he doesn’t understand, he tries to intimidate the questioner into backing down by implying it’s a stupid question).
The Donald trumped on abortion question?
Trump is even embarrasing Karl Rove, who has stated that Trump is just embarrasing the Republican Party with his attachment to the Birther issue.
On one level, it’s pretty entertaining, as the Tea Party fruitcakes battle each other for attention and leadership of that group. For Palin, Bachman, and Trump, it’s all ego-driven, they are fighting to stretch their fifteen minutes of fame into a career. What one gains is a net loss to the others, so expect some fireworks sooner or later.
But on another level, I strongly suspect that the financial interests which ultimately control the Republican Party are feeding this dog-fight to keep the people distracted while they slip through their real agenda and sufficiently compliant candidates. After all, compared with Palin, Bachman, and Trump, even Romney appears to be relatively reasonable. They may think that by stretching the right flank of the Republican party far to the right, it might result in a movement to the right of the center of the political continuom as well.
Everyone focus your attention on Trump. We’re counting on it.
Interesting developments in Benton Harbor, MI.
http://www.care2.com/causes/po.....financial/
This is the first wingnut take-over of a city using the “emergency financial crisis” BS that Walker will also likely use in Wisconsin to dismantle local governments. Is the real emergency in Benton Harbor that a developer wants to take over the city’s waterfront park and turn it into a golf course and residential development? The Maddow show last night got into some of the connections between the wingnuts involved.
It’s just another wingnut attempt to rape, pillage and burn America. Wingnuts. They’re fascist asswipes, every damned one of them.
rhp @ 16
Trump’s candidacy reminds me of the News Radio episode in which Jimmy James runs for President.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0660216/
Fact is stranger than fiction. At least Jimmy James had a motive.
(Phil Hartman RIP)
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
—John F. Kennedy
@ 18:
What’s the objection? That the takeover is by the executive branch of the state?
Camden, NJ was taken over by the state legislature for a few years.
I suppose the city of Benton Harbor could declare bankruptcy like Vallejo, CA, instead.
What’s your alternative?
@13
Perhaps you should make your points better. Research is duplicated constantly. It’s how “theory” becomes “fact.” (See vaccines and autism and the high level of crazy stirred up by one individual study.) That’s scientific method to which you are hostile.
Here’s how it works. Say there’s a study that says Vegans have a lower rate of cancer than meat eaters. Another study duplicates the results. Some new research might decide to look at if the link is Veganism or if lacto-Vegetarians have similar results. Then it might be studied if exclusive goat milk vs. cow changes the results. And on and on.
But your big problem seems to be that tax dollars would be “wasted” as a tiny percentage of a University budget to double-check accepted science and investigate new.
@10 Thanks, was just confused because I didn’t see this was an open thread… not that it seems to matter if it wasn’t.
“I assume they are more fun to read than the movie is to watch.”
I don’t really expect our movie reviewers to like “Atlas Shrugged.” They are not exactly Libertarians in their viewpoints. Most of them are elitist “progressives” who have very high opinions of themselves. I think it’s safe to say that they are similar to limosine liberals.
I’d say that they’re just smarter than trolls.
Ayn Rand’s “model” for her super-duper megaman was a guy who abducted a 12 year old girl, collected ransom from the girl’s father…then gave the girl back to her Dad in PIECES.
Rand admired sociopaths and the Randian philosophy is sociopathic.
@21…
The objection “Bob” is that the takeover of Benton Harbor only benefits the patrons of the Governor. Like the shenanigans of the Wisconsin Governor only benefit and enrich the robber baron Koch brothers.
Would the take over of Benton Harbor, MI, be like Seattle, bankrupt from paying for tunnel cost over runs, being taken over by Governor Rossi, having Tim Eyman appointed to run it, and a big Bellevue developer razing the Seattle center and the Space Needle to put in a gated community of luxury homes and a golf course?
# 22: Yep, the ability for a study to be able to be duplicated with similar results is a big factor in the scientific method. If attempts to duplicate the study fail to reach the same or similar results, then there’s something flawed in the original study.
Remember back in the late 1980’s when somebody claimed to have discovered cold fusion? Everyone went bat-crazy, calling it the answer to all our energy needs, providing our independece upon imported oil. There were quite a few calls for lots of federal money to be spent on adapting the technology for commercial use.
Even on the theoretical level nuclear scientists were scratching their heads, mumbling that “…I just don’t see how this would work in the manner they suggested….” But they kept an open mind, until the results came in from several Universities which tried to replicate the experiments. They couldn’t do so.
Well, it was a nice party, while it lasted….