So goes the lyrics to Beastie Boys You’ve Gotta Fight For Your Right to Party. But it looks like a gang of rogue Amish fundies from a breakaway clan were on a hair cutting spree for another reason, failure to worship properly:

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department in Ohio has released the mugshots for three of the five Amish men arrested for allegedly breaking into the homes of other Amish men and cutting off their hair and beards.

Seeing those mugshots, the first thing I thought was they should have turned the scissors on themselves.

New research on a very old animal has given one scientist enough info that the top velocity of the large dino can be estimated:

Persons figures the Carnotaurus could have topped out at 56 km/h, but only in a straight line, as the tail muscle prevented swift lateral movement. That’s faster than a charging rhinoceros, by comparison, and also a heck of a lot more deadly.

That’s not slow, it’s about 35 mph, but there are several breeds of domestic dogs, lots of horses and antelope — and a few species of cats whose half grown children — could leave this dino eating dust. Of course good science tends to be conservative and I wager that’s exactly what this researcher was doing. But in the almost 200 hundred million years dinos dominated, odds are good that somewhere and some-when, there were species that would give a modern greyhound or maybe even quarterhorse a run for the money.

A new study on plant and animal species indicates an alarming trend: they’re getting smaller:

The shrinking victims, according to the study, include cotton, corn, strawberries, bay scallops, shrimp, crayfish, carp, Atlantic salmon, herring, frogs, toads, iguanas, hooded robins, red-billed gulls, California squirrels, lynx and wood rats.

The study suggests climate change as a possible agent of change. I suppose that’s possible, less rainfall for example could certainly translate into smaller stature directly, and select for smaller sized plants and animals over time. But that’s a bold claim and it will require more evidence before its widely accepted.

Hubble is still out there of course, taking brilliant shots of a breathtaking universe (Below). One of the things the world’ most famous telescope will hopefully illuminate, in what’s left of its operational life, includes one may well be one of the most important mysteries in the universe: Dark Matter distribution:

To find out where dark matter lies, and how much of it there is, scientists look for an effect called gravitational lensing. This bending of light is caused when mass — including dark matter — warps space-time, causing light to travel a crooked path through it. The end effect is a curvy, funhouse-mirror type view of distant cosmic objects.

You might wonder why Dark Matter is so important, especially since it stays so diffuse, whereas the ordinary stuff clumps up in gas, dust, and stars, turning hydrogen and helium into carbon and oxygen, making rocky planets, butterflies and humans possible. [Read more…]

My friend Mark Sumner brings up an excellent point for anti-government lunatics in this great essay at Daily Kos. Without rules baseball wouldn’t be baseball, it would be a gang fight:

The rules aren’t just a part of baseball, they are baseball. Executing those rules under those supervision of the umpires is what it means to play the game. Functional capitalism has always required the same thing: rules and people to enforce those rules.

Mark’s a way better writer than I am and he goes on to explain beautifully what this means in the context of government regulation. I probably would have cut straight to the crude point and say that unlimited and unconstrained capitalism without oversight and government enforcement of that oversight isn’t called capitalism for long, it’s called war.

They have borked my email, it may be time finally, after many friends and co-workers have begged me, to make the big change.

All in all I can only think of a single, mega-successful software company that fucked up as bad as AOL has. That would be Novell, the one time networking giant which had about 80% of the business networking market in 1991, at the dawn of the dot-com boom. And yet somehow Novell utterly failed to hold onto to enough of that market to prosper while every other firm with a transistor or chip in its balance sheet soared skyward on the NASDAQ. As a stock-broker at the time I assumed, wrongly, I would never again see such mismanagement. And that was a valid assumption, until AOL in the last decade.

Transdermal Buprenorphine, has anyone ever heard of or have experience with this stuff? The reason I ask is my doc put me on it. I’d never heard of it, some research shows it appears to be some kind of morphine knock off. I slapped on the first patch Saturday morning, it seemed to work OK and they’re each supposedly good for seven days, although I noticed a little perspiration from time to time. But when I went to sleep last night I woke up half an hour later in a fucking pool of sweat. [Read more…]

So I was down for the count with a stomach ailment for the last 36 hours or so. And I do mean down, as in delirious and flat on my back for most of it. It struck me during the rare, lucid moments throughout the whole miserable experience that our innate system for dealing with such maladies is not exactly ideal. Projectile vomiting and trips to the bathroom every ten minutes? Really, Yahweh, that’s the best you could come up with?

Fortunately there are some real designers, albeit less supernatural and far more recent in time, who have developed working solutions for such conditions. Without which I’d probably still be stuck in an endless delirium of mutant dreams and walking nightmares, where the only possible silver lining is rapid weight-loss: between the injury last month and this deal I’ve dropped 15 lbs.

Like a zombie rising from repeated bullets to the brain, the Republicans have proposed what they call the real jobs plan, and guess what’s in it? No seriously, take a wild guess? [Read more…]