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It's wondrous. I think switching four years ago to Kinesis has saved my hands. I was developing chronic, persistent wrist pain from using my old IBM bucking-spring steel job -- still the best of the flat keyboards -- and was at my wit's end, when the ergo woman at my workplace brought a Kinesis by for me to try.

Read this.

I was at the point where I tried a Kinesis keyboard, and they are sure cool, but the real answer is in the above link.

"EMI and the CT Scanner (A) & (B)", case numbers 9-383-194 and 9-383-195, 26 pages, US$13 to purchase on line.

For you cheap bastards, like me, see MITOpenCourseWare (Made In India), and scroll down to lecture #8.

Replacement - The replacement for the HST is due to go up in 2012, so there's a relatively small window with no orbital telescope (at least, if all goes well)

Exactly. As an astronomer let me assure you that all of these are absolutely worthless, and all scientific progress will cease once this horribly-redesigned-to-justify-a-manned-shuttle, wasn't-even-built-right-by-political-contractees turkey that's reached the end of its operative lifetime.

Actually, it is a shame in a purely emotional way. Just like when MIR was deorbited. But it's still the right call.

And I don't mean to demean the astronauts who at risk to their own lives got that POS in something like working order, and finally gave everyone some pretty pictures.

Flordia's constitution required a full recount and cert by x date,

I see nothing in the Florida constituion regarding this, though my look was brief. Citation, please?

the SCOTUS ordered flordia to obey its constitution.

State laws are a matter for state courts. The right of every voter to be counted trumps arbitrary deadlines anyway.

could Gore have won?

If by "won" you mean "received more votes in Florida", the answer is clearly yes. He did. A full statewide recount would have favored Gore. (Gore blew it by not demanding a full recount.)

That's not even considering the many voters - mostly black, and more likely to be Gore voters - illegal disenfranchised, or the illegal and self-contradictory Palm Beach "butterfly ballot", or the invalid absentee ballots that were counted. (I assume the later are the ones you're refering to. However, Gore didn't challenge such absentee ballots - if he had, the Bush team might have had a harder time committing their fraud. Another blown opportunity.)

More voters - in the U.S. as a whole and in Florida - went to the polls to cast their ballots for Gore than for Bush. The fact that in Florida, more Gore voters had trouble getting their votes counted shows the absence of equal protection when different methods of vote-counting are used in different areas. (With rich counties generally having more accurate tabulation.)

Incidentally, here's a quote from cyber.law.harvard.edu on the topic:

"To be more specific, the use of a trademark in connection with the sale of a good constitutes infringement if it is likely to cause consumer confusion as to the source of those goods or as to the sponsorship or approval of such goods. In deciding whether consumers are likely to be confused, the courts will typically look to a number of factors, including: (1) the strength of the mark; (2) the proximity of the goods; (3) the similarity of the marks; (4) evidence of actual confusion; (5) the similarity of marketing channels used; (6) the degree of caution exercised by the typical purchaser; (7) the defendant's intent."

This is from here.

According to that site, my example of Coca-Cola might be a poor one, as the strength of the mark and the defendant's intent would probably take precidence over the other conditions.

In contrast to a lot of the comments along the lines of "Let's send Bush/Gates/whomever" nobody is supporting sending astronauts to die after a few days when their air runs out.

Sending the equipment to manufacture their own air, and grow some of their own food, as well as a couple of nuclear reactors, is cheaper then sending the fuel to go home, and also means the astronauts don't have to be confined for months twice.

People have lived in the past with little or no contact with civilization - a few dozen scientists and support folks at the South Pole are gearing up to do so now. They won't be able to come home, except in *really* extreme emergency, between February and November because the temperature is cold enough to congeal the fuel of any jet that tried to land.

Granted, they aren't stuck there for life, but they have far less equipment than a Mars expedition would, and they seem to be quite happy - they even develop their own culture over the winter. This is in a place where the average daily temperatures make CO2 a solid, and where it's possible to get severe frostbite just by touching the ground without gloves.

The journal of a recent "winterover" is available here. Read it.

Does Karina seem like she's someone to give up on life? Or merely like someone who was willing to put up with total isolation, being largely trapped in a small station for most of a year, in order to do basic science, and really enjoyed herself in the process?

Neither did yours.

Feature request of SlashCode: wrap text URLs in anchor tags. Please!

I'd much rather keep my money and let private firms start making big leaps in space exploration.

That's probably because you have never been anywhere near a real space program. I'm an astrophysicist and I'm Norwegian, still I recognize their great contributions to advancements.

How do you expect private enterprises to do some serious science and exploration? Private enterprises wants to get paid you know! That's what companies are for. There's mining, of course, lots of enterprises could make use of that. But that would turn the other suitable planets and moons in the solar system into junkyards, and screw it up just like we did with our own planet. I for one, don't want to see that happening.

Perhaps you can find similar ways to fund a private space program, but they will just be small change compared to the enormous costs. It all boils down to that you have to get most of it tax-funded. Private companies can do parts of it, the parts they do best, but it is still tax money.

Astrophysicists world-wide strongly depend on the work NASA is doing, and contributing back to the community. Perhaps most americans don't realize it, and that's bad of course, but I really can't put the blame on anybody but yourself: NASA has a really good outreach-program, and they even feel compelled to design missions with outreach in mind (compare the design of ESA's XMM to NASA's Chandra, at least people in NASA blames the design of Chandra on the fact that NASA has to keep an eye on outreach in everything they do).

With private companies, do you really think that things like NASA Astrophysics Data System would be open? Nope, it would have been closed, complete with DRM and the like. What a wonderful world that would be!

I know a lot of people working in NASA, both fresh-outs and mission Science Operation Coordinators, and it's being done a lot of really good work in NASA, and I really doubt it could have been done any better.

Furthermore, NASA is not only into the "space exploration" that's about just popping in and out of our atmosphere, around our tiny planet. It is also into some really fundamental science, like cosmology. That's the kind of research that expands the forefronts of science, I can understand why people don't recognize it, because it is so very far ahead, but it is nevertheless the driving force for any subsequent technology: Without Bohr's speculations on the nature of atoms, you would have no semiconductors and no computer for you!

I've never seen NASA actually kill off any private ventures, but I have seen a few kill themselves due to incompetence and or a "1) blah 2) ??? 3) profit!" business plan. And it may well be that others will "kill" themselves in the true sense of the word...

That being said, I'm not impressed with Bush in this matter either. The US needs to fix the economy, stop wars, transfer the defense budget into space exploration, free NASA from the hands of the DoD, and then let scientists decide what to do and how.

[puts on sifi author hat] it would be great if researchers could somehow create 'gravity beams' like there are laser beam, that would be a big step toward the famous star trek 'tractor beam'. And then maybe someway to slow or stop gravity, which would be instrumental in developing all kinds of 'anti-grav' stuff, levitation, flying cars at last, etc.

Read those abstracts found on the harvard search engine. Pretty interesting stuff, even from a layman's perspective:

A new, static, spherically symmetric solution to Einstein's equations is described, that presents a very different alternative from classical black holes for the endpoint of gravitational collapse. The solution is characterized by an interior de Sitter region (p= -rho) of gravitational vacuum condensate with an exterior Schwarzschild geometry of arbitrary total mass M. These are separated by a very thin shell with a microscopic but finite proper thickness of ultracold matter with the eq. of state p= rho, replacing both the Schwarzschild and de Sitter classical horizons. These extreme eqs. of state arise naturally as the allowed phases in the effective theory of quantum gravity, and the classical event horizon is replaced by a phase boundary in the quantum theory. The new solution has no singularities, no event horizons, and a globally defined timelike Killing field. Its entropy is maximized under small fluctuations and is given by the standard hydrodynamic entropy of the thin shell, which is of order M, instead of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula (which is of order M^2). Hence unlike black holes, the new solution is thermodynamically stable and suffers from no information paradox. The formation of such a cold (1 i K) gravitational condensate stellar remnant very likely would require a violent collapse process with an explosive output of energy. The formation and excitation of such remnants could provide more efficient central engines than classical black holes for some very high energy sources observed in the universe."

Read those abstracts found on the harvard search engine. Pretty interesting stuff, even from a layman's perspective:

A new, static, spherically symmetric solution to Einstein's equations is described, that presents a very different alternative from classical black holes for the endpoint of gravitational collapse. The solution is characterized by an interior de Sitter region (p= -rho) of gravitational vacuum condensate with an exterior Schwarzschild geometry of arbitrary total mass M. These are separated by a very thin shell with a microscopic but finite proper thickness of ultracold matter with the eq. of state p= rho, replacing both the Schwarzschild and de Sitter classical horizons. These extreme eqs. of state arise naturally as the allowed phases in the effective theory of quantum gravity, and the classical event horizon is replaced by a phase boundary in the quantum theory. The new solution has no singularities, no event horizons, and a globally defined timelike Killing field. Its entropy is maximized under small fluctuations and is given by the standard hydrodynamic entropy of the thin shell, which is of order M, instead of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula (which is of order M^2). Hence unlike black holes, the new solution is thermodynamically stable and suffers from no information paradox. The formation of such a cold (1 i K) gravitational condensate stellar remnant very likely would require a violent collapse process with an explosive output of energy. The formation and excitation of such remnants could provide more efficient central engines than classical black holes for some very high energy sources observed in the universe."

FWIW, NASA ADS returns 22 abstracts.

FWIW, NASA ADS returns 22 abstracts.

Also, after drinking 6 cups of coffee a day, one would have to think you would be quite fidgety and more active, so really it may just be a side effect.

But what about the decaf effect?

Instead of somewhat silly studies like this (I mean try to imagine the proposal trying to get funding for this), I would like to see studies that show what practical, small lifestyle changes have in reducing such risks- things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator/escalator, switching from soda to water, etc.

This is not a silly study. This is just one of myriad results from the amazing Nurses' Study. Read about the history of this groundbreaking public health project. It's all about ferreting out subtle connections between lifestyle, diet, fitness, and health over a broad population.

Also, after drinking 6 cups of coffee a day, one would have to think you would be quite fidgety and more active, so really it may just be a side effect.

But what about the decaf effect?

Instead of somewhat silly studies like this (I mean try to imagine the proposal trying to get funding for this), I would like to see studies that show what practical, small lifestyle changes have in reducing such risks- things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator/escalator, switching from soda to water, etc.

This is not a silly study. This is just one of myriad results from the amazing Nurses' Study. Read about the history of this groundbreaking public health project. It's all about ferreting out subtle connections between lifestyle, diet, fitness, and health over a broad population.

For the very very long story go here. It's one of the legal declarations from the case.

Nigger is Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy's ornate, lively monograph on what he calls the "paradigmatic" racial slur in the English language.
I'll admit to feeling relieved to know that Randall Kennedy is black.

In particular, there seems to have been an agreement made some years ago between whatever entity handles the summit for astronomy (probably the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy) and some native groups (mountaintops are sacred places) under which the astronomy folks got permission to build a certain number (int) of telescopes.

That many have now been built. The astronomy folks would like to build more. And... various folks (natives and others) are noting that um, no, that's not what they agreed to. So there's been a lot of paperwork, environmental impact statements, and so on.

In some cases, things are a little grey-area-ish. They want to build "outriggers" on the sides of the Keck scopes, for example. And the Smithsonian-Sinica.tw-Harvard submillimetre array - does that count as 8 scopes, since there are 8 dishes, or 1, since it's an interferometer?

As it now stands, though, Mauna Kea wins lots of astronomy pissing matches. :) It has the 2 largest optical scopes in the world (Keck and Keck II), plus the 4th largest (Subaru) and another in the top 10 (Gemini North), the largest single submillimeter telescope (James Clerk Maxwell) and I think the largest dedicated infrared telescope (UKIRT).

If someone wanted to build a truly monster scope on Mauna Kea, they could simply remove one of the small ones, it would seem. University of Hawaii has an 0.6-metre one and a 2.2-metre one. (Yes, those are "small," all you backyard astronomers who are now drooling. ;) Take out the 0.6 and replace it with a 30-metre one, and you haven't changed the number of telescopes, right?

It's a shame Hubble is our only orbiting telescope.

There's more to the electromagnetic spectrum than visible light you know. The Hubble Space Telescope is only one of NASA's four orbiting "Grand Observatories". Here are links to info about the other telescopes.

• Chandra X-Ray Observatory
• Compton Gamma Ray Observatory
• Spitzer Space Telescope

Well, US drug policy has rarely had anything to do with common sense. Marijuana's primarily illegal due to racism. Ephedra was banned this week based on a handful of deaths in America while tobacco kills approximately 4.8 million people per year world wide and while alcohol contributes to a significant percentage of auto accidents, firearm incidents, rape, and child and spousal abuse.

Of course, I'm a prohibitionist, not an apologist for marijuana legalization. I'm of the opinion that tobacco and caffination of soft drinks should be illegal too. I'd just like to see a little less hypocrisy in our drug laws and our trade fights to push our own drugs on other nations.

Hey, this is /.! We don't take a lot of time to write posts here! OK, get your shoulders down, ease up, cool down. Feeling comfy? Good.

See my other reply in this thread.

Perhaps you're unaware that, for example, the Hindus taught the world as a platform supported on the backs of elephants,

Yes, there are myths like that around. I specifically mentioned scientists.

Vikings quested for the edge of the world to find the roots of Yggdrasil,

Bullshit. They did have a few creation myths you could easily interprete that way yes, but once you read later manuscripts more thoroughly, it is quite clear that they realized the shape of the earth. I'm able to read some old Norse, my mother reads it well, it's not so hard.

What you're missing is that in the day and age where Columbus was getting laughed out of the courts of kings over the round earth, the common man already knew to be true.

Quite the contrary. The royalty consulted the people with the correct numbers. Among the commons, it was however quite common to not realize the shape of the earth. I'm really sorry if you can't read it, but I'd recommend researching the background of the play "Erasmus Montanus" by Ludvig Holberg.

The thing that kills me is that from a few of the palaces that Columbus was laughed out of, you can *see* the curvature of the planet.

Yup, but what should this mean to you? It should mean to you that they knew it, but you refuse to realize it.

Through Augustin, every leading authority accepted the idea of a spherical earth.

I'd love some reference for this.

Hm, I don't have the bibliography with me right now. A really good source is Gingerich, Owen: "Astronomy in the Age of Columbus", Scientific American, November 1992., but I do not remember if he actually mentions this, and I do not remember if he has an extensive list of references. But the writings of Owen Gingerich are generally very good, I'd recommend many days in a dusty library reading his stuff and references therein... :-)

Then, of course, there's Dreyer, J. L. E.: "A history of astronomy from Thales to Kepler", Dover pubications, Inc. (1953), which I'd recommend you read all of. Unfortunately, again, I don't remember if he specifically deals with it.

Then, an author that discuss this point at some length is Koestler, Arthur: "The Sleepwalkers, a history of man's changing vision of the Universe", Hutchinson et CO, LTD (1959). The problem with Koestler is that he isn't actually doing research, and that book is very badly written. His agenda is pretty much to portray Copernicus as some kind of misunderstood genius that nobody read. He fails miserably, Copernicus was an over-cautious man that many read, but few understood. Also, Koestler tries very, very hard to make the earth flat is far as possible, but carefully selecting sources, and by doing that, he manages to maintain a flat earth to about 900 AD, at which point there are no sources left to claim that anyone in authority thought the earth was flat. For that reason, you should read it: It shows how someone desparate enough can make the earth flat up to about 900 AD, but not longer.

Uhm, but well, yeah, that Augustin specifically adopted the shape of the earth... Hm, I must admit that I have thought this to be general knowledge that I really don't remember where I read it. I realize that's a bad argument. But try Dreyer, it should be at least mentioned there, IIRC.

A shallow inspection of Columbus reveals that he knew he wasn't sailing for India,

Funny, well, being Norwegian, that's one of Norway's favorite myths too. "He did it because he knew Leiv Erikson's journey". I personally held it up to five years a

Given that they censor every damn thing that comes in and out of the country don't expect to see a lot of sites in China, especially anything that talks about Tibet, Falun Gong or any system that doesn't agree with the "great unfailing Chinese leadership".

What do they need with 100 Mbps? Ways to send elaborate communist propoganda?

There is the idea that the more you bring them into the world community the more they have to play by the rules. Witness their growing pains regarding the WTO. Gotta respect intellectual property now.

Agree with me or not you can have fun testing whether or not the Chinese are blocking your favorite sites.

Here is one group's attempt to stack virtual machines. It contains a screenshot of the humorous VirtualPC error message. Warning, its a pdf.

Stacking Virtual Machines - VMware and VirtualPC

Wow, this is timely. I just posted a GrepLaw article about the subject of region codes.

Unfortunately, the CEO of Blockbuster was not interested in whether or not region codes were fundamentally evil. He was only concerned with the fact that their implementation caused an increase in piracy and a decrease in his revenues. I like the irony of the fact that a system that the MPAA created to impose unfair pricing has actually benefitted their illicit competitors. Here is hoping the MPAA continues to shoot itself in the foot.

I don't see how this would be a problem. Several credible reports exist that say our natural body clock cycle is 25-26 hours, making the adjustment to "Mars time" rather painless.

Completely pointless. The heat would kill it.

Huh? AFAIK, nano-ITX is supposed to be fanless, 12cmx12cm. And it'll need a power supply and an HD (plus a CD for install), but other than that it'll be great for a tiny headless fileserver... the crypto accel in the Nehemiah core would be great for ssh, although I might wait for Esther and built-in SHA (plus more speed at the same power, due to smaller process). It'd also make a great node for hyperencryption, given that it has a good hardware RNG; you could do this without even the hard drive if you boot from a memory card.

Are online papers free? A few are, but the vast majority are not, like Nature, which makes you pay directly, or Science , that makes you pay indirectly through society memberships.

I think he would have been into the right kind of digital. I used to work for Paul Horowitz, author of The Art of Electronics and designer of much of Adams' electronic gear (light meters, exposure timers, etc; some actual designs are in that classic text). From the few conversations we had on the subject, I was left with the impression that Adams was definitely not beyond mixing in a bit of digital with his intuition, but would not change his established "rituals" for the sake of a new electronic widget (often sending items back several times for modification).

I have learned.

I can't speak for you, or the freakish condition of your flippers, but for me it is just as easy to use a thin scroll wheel as a fat middle button.

Ok, how about:
Article on Salon...

Harpers...

Bradenton Herald...

Harvard U. School of Gov't Reseach Paper...

One or these days, they're going to declare it treasonous to be so criminally ignorant. Wise up before then.

Some early studies seem to show that if you can stop the body attacking islet cells, you don't even need to transplant any.

Are you referring to this work at Harvard Medical School?

But one gray area in particular is something like a driver that was originally written for another operating system (ie clearly not a derived work of Linux in origin).

That's simply nonsense. Just because something is written for an operating system does not make it a derived work "in origin." If that were true, then all Windows software would be a derived work of Windows. All Nintendo games would be a derived work of Nintendo. Game Genie would be a derived work of Nintendo.

Linus is wrong. Just because something is written with the other thing in mind does not make it a derived work. See for example Galoob v Nintendo. Game Genie was created with copyrighted Nintendo games in mind, yet it was declared to not be a derivative work by the 9th circuit court of appeals.

Not all experience, or learning, is positive, and some things can't be unlearned.

"Polanyi admits that focusing on particulars may improve our capacity to attend to the overall meaning. For instance, when we analyze poetry we might temporarily destroy our appreciation of it but it also makes for a much richer understanding once our attention is returned to the whole. It can be expected that one's understanding will be different from one's original understanding once attention has been shifted to the particulars and then back to the whole, in keeping with the idea that the relationship between the proximal and distal terms is dynamic and an active shaping of experience. The shifting of awareness may improve on previous understanding--as in the case with the poem, but, according to Polanyi, one's perspective can never be the same."

I believe that the contrast is also true, If you see a bad movie (or even a good one) it can forever alter how you view the book. Not always a bad thing, but usually somthing is lost after watching a bad film based on a good book.

1. Annual licenses should be made available to any person for a small annual charge, removing all legal liability for using that music, including giving it to other people who may not be licensed (go after them, not me!).
2. Any artist should be able to place their content under the scheme at no cost, and without discrimination.
3. A non-profit low-cost organisation should figure out the split (and deal out the cash) using publicly verifiable logs, and open source software to crunch those logs and produce the final result.
4. anything else I forgot :-)

1. Annual licenses should be made available to any person for a small annual charge, removing all legal liability for using that music, including giving it to other people who may not be licensed (go after them, not me!).
2. Any artist should be able to place their content under the scheme at no cost, and without discrimination.
3. A non-profit low-cost organisation should figure out the split using publicly verifiable logs, and open source software to crunch those logs and produce the final result.
4. anything else I forgot :-)

I direct you a legal analysis of the situation. Long story short: downloading is probably legal, uploading is not, and this includes sharing through P2P apps.

Something which is not discussed in that analysis is that it is technically difficult for collective societies to sue uploaders in Canada as opposed to in the US, because privacy law more firmly protects the identities of ISP customers.

you are assuming that laws are logical. Let me challenge that assumption: here in Germany we pay sort of a tax on blank media and recorders. Music industry is even trying to broaden the scope of these royalties: they are currently pushing for a copy tax on printers (older link here.).

In addition to that, there is an entity called GEMA which makes sure that radio stations pay for each song they play. Public radio and TV cost consumers a monthly fee, too.

Recently they made a new copyright law. Copying for private use used to be legal, and strictly by the letter of the law still is, but circumventing copy protection mechanisms in order to do something the law explicitly allows you to do is now illegal. In other words: They didn't outlaw crossing the road. They made touching the ground with your feet while crossing the road a crime.

So consumers over here are forced to pay for the same product multiple times. All attempts to set that straight have failed so far. I have a hunch that this kind of legal creativity may become an exportschlager.

Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

Look, ma! He doesn't know anything about science OR government!

FYI. The "Nature abhors a vacuum" myth was discredited in 1643 by a student of Galileo. Read about it.

This animation shows the known minor planets in the Inner Solar System presently.

This page updates regularly on newly discovered objects.
There are many more to be found. Though the risk of an impact like the one believed to have been involved is very slight.

Once you read about how the electorial college works, you'll realize how stupid your post sounds, especially the part about Gore receiving ~500,000 more votes nationwide than Bush being in any way relevant.

From my weblog:

An article titled "IT Doesn't Matter" by Nicholas G. Carr published in May 2003 issue of venerable Harvard Business Review, announcing the elevation of IT into a mature infrastructure, in the same league as rail-road, electricity and hence incapable of providing any strategic advantage, seems to have generated good amount of controlversy. Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick wrote in his column Stupid-Journal Alert: Why HBR's View of Tech Is Dangerous: "One of the article's most glaring flaws is its complete disregard for the centrality of software." Pete Delisi wrote in SOUND OFF column of CIO magazine: "What I believe he misses is that IT is not only a transport technology, as are all the other technologies he compares it to. IT is also a "processing" technology capable of doing more than carrying electronic signals or goods, which basically arrive at their destination without major value being added by the technology in the transport process."

The HBR article defines IT (Information Technology -- if you are still wondering) as the technologies used for processing, storing, and transporting information in digital form. But still uses specific embodiments of IT such as number of hosts connected to the Internet as an indicator of IT's overall maturation. Conclusions drawn from state of a specific IT segment cannot be applied to the the whole of IT. I agree that the Internet itself may be in a fairly advanced stage of development. But then, the Internet, however important, is just a segment of IT and cannot be equated with IT. IT is much broader and has seen evolution of many such segments: Transaction Processing, Personal Computing, Desk Top Publishing, Multi-Media and so on. The Internet is only one among many manifestations of IT.

In my opinion, this is the biggest flaw of the HBR article -- It takes a fairly narrow view of IT. It may be okay to compare the Internet with Railroad but it is not fair to compare IT with Railroad. Comparison with the general category of Trasnportation would be more appropriate. Maturing of Railroad did not preclude aviation based transport or even the network of highways for the ground transportation!

IANAL, but no employer has ever won a court case on these IP agreements, even when the software was developed for the company on company time and on company computers.

This is completely and utterly wrong. The norm is to enforce these provisions in favor of the employer, except in the most egregious cases and absent local statute to the contrary (like California's). Provisions that require assignment of all inventions (created at home or at work) are also very often enforced.

I'm not going to bother giving any cites, but I will point you to this interesting article by Rob Merges, which he published back in 1999, entitled "The Law and Economics of Employee Inventions." In the beginning of the article, it gives the default rules on employee inventions (i.e., the rules that apply when no contract exists), and then talks a bit about what happens when an explicit contract does exist. (Hint: there's a reason why that subsection is called "the (almost complete) primacy of contract.")

Btw, the interesting part is the law and econ analysis that makes up the meat of Rob's article. (At least, it's interesting to me.)

2003 VS 2 has an inclination of 14.8 degrees, BTW

Check out the pictures taken using the other end of the spectrum, namely X-rays.

Take the wonderfully violent Crab Nebula for instance. Just marvellous.

Check out the pictures taken using the other end of the spectrum, namely X-rays.

Take the wonderfully violent Crab Nebula for instance. Just marvellous.

"I got 9.3M in 0.11 secs at Google, did someone add 1.2M links this morning? ;)"

It depends on the country you're viewing from

The google results can vary depending on per-country censorship rules (French and German laws are the ones discussed here, but other examples include China and the US where the results may be less than expected)

Regional pronunciation differences have been a hobby curiosity of mine. I finally found a web site from a linguistics survey done by Harvard. They got survey results from around the country and turned up some cool results of what words people use for stuff and how they say them.
Here is the link to the study.
It has great stuff like soda/pop/coke as the term for a soft drink, how do you pronounce crayon, coupon, mischevous, etc. Really cool stuff.

Unfortunately Chandra's orbit is way out of reach of the shuttle -- orbiting between 133,000 km (82,646 mi) and 16,000 kilometers (9,942 mi) from the Earth.

Your comment deserves to be modded up, not because I'm out of date, but because it is based on data, or at least reporting on the data. It's good to look at real data to make your choice. If you find this data convincing, go for it.

First, to dismiss the findings of the liver inflammation study: no health professional would suggest a high simple sugar diet - eg sucrose etc. Such diets are long associated with obesity and liver and pancreas disease. There's nothing to indicate that these subjects were eating brown rice and whole wheat bread for their carbohydrates rather than fries and a coke. Without that data, the study doesn't mean much.

The USA Today article presents a summary of three smaller studies that found some interesting results - and indeed they are interesting. But the results are presented as a meta-study of smaller studies. The problem is that the association of high intakes of animal fats with coronary disease and obesity is the consequence of hundreds of studies. Taken as a whole, the data overwhelming contradicts the Atkins diet. It's not fair to choose only supportive studies for inclusion in a meta study.

The most reported and best structured study is the Harvard one, and it's generated a lot of press. But note that the Atkins organization paid for it. Paid research overwhelmingly achieves results in keeping with the sponsor's goals. Contradictory results don't' get published, not to demean the author, but if she found the opposite, we wouldn't have heard about it. How many studies did Atkins pay for that haven't found results? This study used 7 - SEVEN whole subjects on each diet. Compare this with more rigorous studies, such as this one which found a clear correlation between heart disease and animal fats: 80,000 nurses. It's your heart - which results do you trust?

But a more in-depth review of the results provides more details, and as always the results are less astonishing than the general press makes them seem. It's well known that it takes more energy to digest protein than carbohydrate. The subjects lost 2 pounds per week, not the 20 pounds of the absurd claims, and the difference in weight loss between equal Calorie subjects differentially fed protein or carbohydrate was only 20%, which is about the inefficiency of high protein processing. Like she says - it's not smoke and mirrors. Plus her subjects were fed fats considered relatively healthy - not hamburger patties, for example, but fish and chicken.

If you want to believe, just click your heels and eat your fatty beef (as long as we're not co-insured), but there's nothing in this study that should make you think doing so is healthy. It does suggest further study - I find the data unconvincing, but it definitely suggests, if it holds up in larger, non-atkins funded studies, that it may be possible to lose slightly more weight on the high fat and protein diet she cooked up vs the high carbohydrate diet she cooked up, at least as long as she's doing the cooking... But the numbers look to me to be more disproving of the Atkins diet than proof - here's why: it is well known that of the three basic calorie sources (carbohydrate, protein, fat) only protein has a substantially lower bioavailable caloric value than it's bomb calorimetric data would indicate. This is not new, mind you, but well known in "traditional" nutrition.

For example soy protein isolate provides about 3.28 Calories per gram, compared to roughly 4 Calories per gram for carbohydrate. Compare the two 1800 Calorie men's groups. Calorimetric values for the protein in their diets would be 4 Calories per gram: therefore the high fat group got 135 gms of protein per day, and the high carbohydrate group got 67.5, meaning the high protein group got 50 fewer available Calories per day. If they