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Just look at T-Pain and his success selling ringtones instead of singles and being a "ringtone artist". I love full albums, and will search for "complete" albums (such as Muse's Black Holes and Revelations, which is the most recent "album" I've seen), but I think we are just returning to a couple of years like that of the 45 single. It's not going to kill the industry, but they will have to complely restructure to survive. They will, and those who don't will explode and start new companies that can adapt.

Torture is still used because it works, and it works because it's still used? That's some nice circular logic there, Lou.

The only reason it's still used because some people are sociopaths who enjoy hurting others (or they are in search of "revenge"). This is why it's generally associated with Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and North Korea. It's a verifiable fact
that
torture
does
not
work
for
the
reasons
I
explained
previously.

There Are Four Lights!

Get the laptops in the hands of 1st world schools and encourage users to develop open source lesson plans that can be freely shared and modified. If the cheap laptops really do help education in the 1st world they can then be adpted for 3rd world in phase 2. Offering a cheap but proven system will be a no brainier for the 3rd world.

...and so its distribution is often allowed for little or no $$ required of the end-user. One favorite source is NPR's concert podcast.

Many artists (or maybe more accurately, their record co. people) will allow fans to make ambient recordings of concerts and put them online. These vary in quality, but a good find can be a treasure. Some sites intend to provide only material an artist/label/venue allows to be recorded, and remove material an artist's reps complain about. It's caveat emptor in terms of legality, but this kind of distribution doesn't appear intently targeted by the legal eagles (who have a better case against someone if they can demonstrate a financial loss from trading recordings they're already attempting to sell). Etree is a favorite.

HE was sued by his old producer - who claimed he plagiarized himself!!!

And less auspiciously: the same was claimed of Nickleback...

The really radical conclusion of this book is that the kilo of olive oil consumed in the absence of carbohydrate will not make you fat. Without the insulin response engendered by eating carbs, fat storage really cannot occur, or occurs much more slowly. Taubes suggests a relatively simple experiment which would likely prove or disprove this hypothesis toward the end of this interview on NPR. As an interesting side note, a glass of olive oil is not an unusual morning beverage in some regions of Italy.

Just for starters, when nutritionists talk about calories, they're not really talking about calories like a physicist would. They're really talking about "food calories," which I believe are equivalent to kilocalories. This may be a minor point, but it serves to illustrate that if you think nutrition science maps directly onto physics, you are wrong.

There is no difference in calories...we call them calories because if your cereal said it had 100 kilocalories per bowl people wouldn't know what that means. This is fitting since it is the Thanksgiving season in the US... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1133564, and as evident by that story, it maps perfectly to physics. The thing is this, ever think how many C-C bonds or C-H or C-N bonds are in your 6oz of corn flakes? Sufficient to say, not enough to be counted by "calories" and certainly 100,000 calorie breakfast would turn some heads. Lets not even mention that measuring in calories is like measuring in drams, or a pound...the world has long since moved on to the joule, for energy, in science anyway.

Nutritionist, in the ICU for example, use the Harris-Benedict equations for determining caloric needs for patients in various stages of hurt.

Second, and more importantly, any good college chemistry instructor will tell you that the body does not "release energy" from the chemical bonds in food

Again, not to pick here, but that good college professor would be 100% incorrect. Your body, thankfully does release energy from chemical bonds, particularly oxidative phosphorylation. This, aside from generating a bulk of our ATP (energy) allows us to maintain a 37.3C body temperature within a wide range of environmental conditions.

In short...to simplify, digestion isa complex process, not all food is equal, but not in the way you think (Carbohydrate 4 kcal/gram,Protein:4 kcal/gram,Fat 9 kcal/gram, Alcohol 7 kcal/gram) and you can measure the "calories" in a food as if you had a gas gauge, for all intents and purposes. I mean this in the general sense of "if I continue to the level of activity, but halve my food intake, you will lose weight. Will it all be fat? No, if you ran and consumed and extra 3500kcal, would you lose exactly 1 pound? Not exactly, but enough to get close.

1. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002457.htm
2. http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPNS%2FPNS31_02%2FS0029665172000412a.pdf&code=a16c418636d75bd92cf84720c13bb8d5
3. http://www.adajournal.org/article/PIIS000282239800100X/abstract

Not so much, actually.

Can you substantiate that? Last I checked, the bill in question only applied to non-citizens. I'd be interested in knowing whether that's changed.

A very quick Google search shows otherwise, both with respect to bills passed and their interpretation by the courts:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090900772.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6167856

Also, good interview with Mark Klein on NPR's All Things Considered.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16088947&ft=1&f=1
One thing he mentions: The NSA likely has installations like this maybe a dozen of locations around the country.

yup npr interview on talk of the nation http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=7454969 link good for today only since its only todays show that is downloadable seems profiling is about as good as astrology.

No need to take your keyboard apart. For the lazy hacker, keyboards can also be cleaned in a dishwasher :
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11029793&ps=bb1
Not tried it myself -- I just scrape off the upper layers of grime occasionally...

Here's a longer NPR part than the article

This whole thing just reeks of sketchiness. If congress wanted to show some actually fortitude, they should knock the immunity out, even if there is a veto by the President.

Surely you're not suggesting that funding can change the results of studies?!?

Frank Lloyd Wright also has a college campus that's falling apart, but at least it held together for a little longer than Gehry's.

It is illegal for peasants to leave their village without the headmaster's Ok (he is the one issuing them passports), and for all others to leave the country.

Those suspected of subversion are tried by secret courts -- either for the actual subversion, or (in the later stages of the Cold War) for "drug dealing", "gun possession", or homosexuality.

It is illegal to own "xerox" machines and other "publishing" equipment.

Cars are small, unreliable, polluting, expensive, but you can't get them anyway. Same is true of electronics and most other manufactured things.

Patently false -- the government is seeking access to one particular method of communication -- unencrypted e-mails. Whether they get it or not, you are a fool, if you expected privacy of that to begin with...

In 1960, a guy conducted a psychological experiment where he took identical twin girls from an orphanage and purposefully separated them to different families with the express intent of them having no communication with each other - not even to know they had a sister.

They both found out after 30 years that they were part of an experiment.

I can understand that some twins are separated by accident, but how would you feel to know that you missing 30 years of growing up with your sibling because of some experiment?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/news/2007/10/twins_separated_as_babies_beco_1.html

Washington denied treatment to the members of this group even after the discovery of penicillin. The government wanted to see how syphilis mutilates and kills people.

The full details are far worse than that described by the NPR story. In some cases, nurses actually deliberately injected syphilis bacteria into the bloodstream in order to infect the men. None of the criminals involved in this experiment ever served time in prison.

Colbert does step out of character. A very nice interview with Terry Gross:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15116383

In the NPR interview http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15739280&ft=1&f=1003 on this topic, they did indeed mention that the cost had gone down for other telecommunications services. Repeatedly.

Saddam invaded Kuwait and made lame attempt to explain his position on annexing it (it was always part of Iraq, etc).

Not defending Saddam Hussein at all, but there's some historical basis for Iraq and Kuwait being the same country.

The west has been fooling around with that region for a *very* long time, and it hasn't necessarily done very much good.

Saddam was a horrible asshole. Everyone can agree with that. But, like when Tito died in Yugoslavia, sometimes when you have some horrible asshole in charge, it keeps a difficult balance of people who would otherwise kill each other.

Now we get to be the assholes keeping everyone from killing each other ...

A panelist on Talk of the Nation said that the link with abortion was unlikely. Reason being that abortion was legalized in different years in different countries and it didn't correspond with the global drop in crime (in organized countries).

He didn't claim to know the answer, btw.

Like the abortion correlation, I'd take this lead correlation with a large dose of salt. The real answer is probably a complex sum of factors. It's all very interesting stuff I agree.

Let's see which few these are:
We have Catholocism:

• Archbishop Denounces Evolution as 'Unguided'
• Pope prepares to embrace theory of intelligent design

• Tennessee Evolution Statutes
• Anti-Evolution and the Law

I think the mistake your making though is to assume that most people think about religion at all. So you picked up a few philosophy books, yeah yeah, I got that feather in my cap too. I've even sat down at the table, drank coffee, and chit chat'd philosophical with some of the leaders in Philosophical Religion today, Alviin Plantinga. He was attributed with single handedly reinvigorating the debate in philosophical circles over the rationality of believing in god with his symbolic logic book written in the 90's (long considered a dead horse). Not as impressive as it sounds, he teaches over and Notre Dame and I'm sure you could do the same if you wanted to drop by.

Most people don't think about religion, they believe in it. So what better describes religion as it is? A few intellectuals writing books, investigating possibilities, and chit chatting over coffee or the other 99% of the believing masses? I think the answer is obvious.

As dmadole said, the issue is bacterial vs. human cell size. Generally, people have about 1-2% of their body weight consisting of bacteria -- on the order of about a kilogram of them -- but the number of bacteria in there is about the same to maybe 5-10 times the number of cells in the person's body. Estimates for how many cells people have range from 3-50 trillion; estimates for how many bacteria the average person has are in the same general range, running up to 100 trillion. (Ew.)

Many bacteria aren't even floating around, but live their entire lives within cells: most of the mycobacterial diseases (leprosy, chlamydia, some types of pneumonia) have bacterial cell lives that are necessarily contained within the cells for their whole lives, with hundreds or thousands of bacteria in a single cell. The ultimate expression of this might be mitochondria, which look a lot like bacteria that have been retained in cells for over a billion years and are now necessary for cellular survival. Part of the reason that there's a difference between white and dark meat in birds is that the brown meat has so many mitochondria per cell they change the color.

They have a short discussion about peppers starting about 9:15 in.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14948199

It doesn't make sense to stop buying from Lenovo and continue buying goods made by other Chinese companies. Are you going to boycott all Chinese-made goods? Then be ready for some serious inconvenience.

Also, it's kind of sad that you're focusing on what's happening in Burma. It's evil, all right, but it also happens every day, all over the world. (And a lot of it is perpetrated by our very own beloved leaders.) If you really give a shit about human rights, stop reacting to headlines and start doing stuff day-to-day. Like joining the organization linked above, or one like it.

NPR did an interview with the author of "A Year Without "Made in China": One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy" and they admitted that it was almost impossible to avoid goods from China. It's a very good interview if you want to reduce your purchases from "Made in China".

Isn't this basically an electrical frontal lobotomy.

Great question! If you mean "electrical frontal lobotomy" as in "a way to use electricity to separate the frontal lobes of the brain from the rest of the brain", then no I don't think it is. Then again, I'm no doctor, but I did read the article!

On the other hand, if you mean "electrical procedure that is supposed to cure mental illness and that a lot of people really want to believe in to the degree that they may be willing to overlook gruesome consequences for several decades", then maybe. Who knows? Once upon a time, people thought sliced brains were the best thing since sliced bread.

For a great story on the topic, check out http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014080

What the fuck are you talking about?

The first incident you refer to was just a catalyst, tensions increased after that. Basically the white kid who got his ass beat had it coming, he was involved with the beating of a black student a few days prior. Read before you run your mouth.

Ya know, if you guys are going to argue about this, how about getting more than just the superficial facts of the case. (That is, reading beyond the TV News's abbreviated coverage.) I admit to not following this case closely until just recently, but I knew there was more than just nooses and then a single beating: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12353776

There's a reason people are upset about the treatment of the assailants relative to the way the white kids apparently got treated.

I don't know the answer for all of those glaciers in the 1930s, but here are a few examples of before-and-after photographs: Boulder Glacier 1932-2005, Swiftcurrent glacier 1930-2002, Mendenhall and Hugh Miller glaciers 1937-2005 and 1940-2006, Mount Stanley in Uganda, 1906-1958-1992.

The US Geological Survey web site linked above has similar photos of eleven glaciers in Glacier National Park, Montana, many from the early 1900s. They say that only a few glaciers there have not significantly changed since the 1930s, and that there were 150 glaciers in 1850, only 26 of which remain today. You might also check out the Wikipedia article Retreat of glaciers since 1850.

Besides, and I am not exaggerating, the $35,000 Apple is promising probably wouldn't even cover the cost of tasking a union city crew to remove the meters, rebuild the sidewalk and put the meters someplace else.

Halfway down on the left side: "Watch the Moray Eel"

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=14194579

From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=7442915

• B Flats and Alligators: Alligators respond by bellowing, alone/in groups to a Bb tone.
  
• B Flat and Glenway Fripp the Piano Tuner: Fripp hums Bb on a stairway landing and the tone persists
  
• B Flat and Black Holes: Waves passing through gas near the black hole resonate at Bb, 57 octaves below middle C.
  

Digging a well is one way to provide your own water infrastructure, and citizens can also build their own internet infrastructure. Two of the neighboring towns in the county I live in built their own broadband system over the course of a summer. It took a group of a dozen volunteers about four months, but we use it at my office and it seems to work well, not super fast, but now it is available.

National public radio did a piece about the build your own broadband story in the wilderness of West Virginia. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5053488

And so does the left, more than one in fact, along with newspapers and national radio networks. As for Fox, how do you measure left-right bias, and where do they fall on a scale that includes a large sampling of news outlets?

You incorrectly stated that the Attorney General argues the Administration's cases before the Supreme Court; as a general matter, as I pointed out, that's not the job of the AG, but the Solicitor General.

As for integrity vs. political, it is certainly political and probably illegal when the Attorney General and his staff, in consultation with the President's political chief, direct U.S. Attorneys to bring cases of alleged corruption only against Democrats just before an election, and fire those who don't toe the party line. That doesn't even address the Administration's promotion of torture while Gonzales was White House counsel, and his own calling the Geneva Convention's protections "obsolete" and "quaint".

As an attorney, a law professor and a citizen, I was appalled at the selection of Gonzales as Attorney General, and appalled at how he has served in that role. I can only hope that, for the integrity of our justice system, his successor will be both more qualified and take his oath more seriously. {Prof. Jonathan}

The Native Americans suffered the worst of their indignities centuries ago. Palestinians who are in their 70's and 80's still have their house keys from their homes that they were forcibly removed from.

Yeah; good thing there was no genocide of Native Americans...oh wait. But, I guess if we just wait a few centuries, we can ignore how Palestinians were forcebly moved from their land?

The Native Americans are allowed to become full American citizens. Palestinians are denied citizenship by Israel.

"To illustrate this point further, note that after occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel could have annexed and integrated those territories into Israel by providing the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. However, Israel did not do this and instead chose to treat the West Bank and Gaza as if they were part of Israel physically without providing the Palestinians in those territories with citizenship, political rights or civilian rule. Among the reasons Israel did not integrate the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza into Israel is because Israelis were afraid of a demographic problem. The Israelis feared that if they gave the Palestinians equality, political and civil rights that the Palestinians may one day out number the Israelis and vote Israel out of existence." -- Solving the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. You know, that sounds virtually identical to Native American history. In any case, Native Americans weren't instantly granted American citizenship. I am interested, though. Is it that Palestinians can't get Israeli citizenship or "suspect terrorist" Palestinians can't? Because I'm pretty sure "suspect terrorist" Native Americans couldn't either.

Native Americans are offered economic autonomy, ie casinos and tax-free shopping, while Palestinians are suffering while Israel closes the borders and blocks commerce and electricity.

You mean like how Native Americans have the economic autonomy to grow hemp. Oh, right, they can't do that. It's funny how much lack of autonomy Native American "nations" really have.

But you are right, to an extent. The analogy is false because, unlike the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, the Native American conflict is "resolved"--ie, there is no more serious fighting going on. No matter how oppressive or unworkable Israeli's approach is to ending the conflict, I think one can give it 200 years to solve itself. At least, that's the case so long as the conflict is truly about land and isn't some sort of religious war; religious wars can last for eons.

1. It is not necessary that water remain liquid for viable specimens to be transported (this one works in their favor).
2. Effects of radiation on microbial DNA are significantly deleterious, creating a predictable half-life for the loss of material and probability of survival (this one blows them away).

There's been a couple NPR interviews with Colbert, where he's obviously not in-character. Here's one, pre-Report: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4464017

He also hosted an episode of The Daily Show a few years back, and you can see the real Stephen interviewing David Cross.

The playing field could be leveled by forcing China to stop artificially lowering the Yaun, which makes China appear more competitive on the global market. This practice alone has decimated U.S. manufacturing sector and is why we have a nearly 1 trillion dollar trade deficit - with no end in sight.

1) Force people to work for a pittance
2) Allow children to make toxic toys for Americans
3) No minimum hours per week, no overtime
4) IP theft
5) Lax environmental regulations

But most of all, at least relating to America's 850 billion dollar trade deficit (as of 2007), is the fact that China artificially lowers the Yaun to appear more competitive on the global market. This practice alone has decimated U.S. manufacturing sector and is why we have a nearly 1 trillion dollar trade deficit - with no end in sight.

but on the whole, the Shuttle is safer now than it has ever been;

Who said they were necessarily eco-friendly? The Hunter/Gatherer lifestyle does not scale to todays' population sizes (at least, until we get cheap solar panels and 3D printers); that' s one of the reasons it isn't around much anymore. Still, just because it doesn't scale, it still might have been nicer for the people who lived it 50000 years ago than a standard mainstream US life centered around watching actors or animation on the tube (assuming you survived past age five).

Why don't I live that way? For much the same reason I don't move from the USA to, say, the Netherlands, even though it is rated as pretty much the number one place to live in the world for families.
    "U.S. on List of UNICEF's Worst Countries for Kids"
    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=7407245
    "Why Dutch women don't get depressed"
    http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/06/news/happy. php
Unless you are born and raised in a place or time or way of life, you are always an outsider. You will never have the easy fluid interactions and skills and human relationships a native to that time and place has. To live in the wilderness well also takes a village. And almost all land in the world of any value as far as wildlife or edible plants has been claimed by one militarized bureaucracy or another, and they tax it. That's what drove most hunter/gatherers off their land and out of their way of life. If the **AA groups succeed in pushing "Trusted Computing" down everyone's throat with lobbying dollars and legal firepower to their own profit, does that mean everyone will be happier?
    http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
So too, if militarized bureaucracies destroyed the hunting/gathering way of life, does that mean people living in them are happier? Might may historically make right, but it doesn't necessarily make happiness.

The fast majority of poor africans produce many more children than rich fat westerners.

I don't know how the inter-cultural numbers stack up, but intra-culturally speaking, I had learned to associate greater levels of education in modern industrialized societies with less children. But then I heard this story on NPR this weekend:

In Some Circles, Four Kids Is the New Standard

The newest status symbol for the nation's most affluent families is fast becoming a big brood of kids.

Historically, the country-club set has had the smallest number of kids. But in the past 10 years, the number of high-end earners who are having three or more kids has shot up nearly 30 percent.

Some say the trend is driven by a generation of over-achieving career women who have quit work and transferred all of their competitive energy to baby making.

I'm sure Thorstein Veblen is smirking in his grave.

Seriously, hearing that the New York Times would actually allow their reporters to investigate this story makes me really sad. Is the Times turning into NBC Dateline?

We have Pakistan (our ally) collaborating with the Taliban, there are Over 20 million displaced homeless due to floods in India, and let's not mention the hypocrisy of the government at home.

If The New York Times feels that this is a worthy exercise for their investigative reporters.... what has the world come to. Rupert Murdoch owns the WSJ, and I think that everyone knows that Murdoch can't keep his fingers out of the editorial pages of any newspaper he runs. There is hope, however. There are still investigative journalists worth reading out there, here's one: Seymour Hersh

So, has anyone yet found the lost original tapes of the Apollo 11 landing?

You're right, we should nationalise the media and create a government ministry to handle everything. The Ministry of Truth perhaps.

Co-ops?

You mean something like this: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5053488

One of my coworkers did this a few summers ago in his spare time.

70 square miles in the course of 4 months.