Dinosaur feathers

Did all dinosaurs have feathers?
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/64439-did-all-dinosaurs-have-feathers

My, how times have changed! When I was a kid, dinosaurs were cold-blooded, slow, lumbering beasts that dragged their tails. Now they are warm blooded, fast, agile and hold their tails up high, and, it seems, covered in colorful feathers! One of the big conundrums with explaining the evolution of birds was how the heck did something as complex as a feather come into being when it was so difficult to imagine feathers as any sort of survival characteristic until flight was well developed. Over the last decade in a half or so theories have emerged (and been supported by fossil data) that many therapod-type dinosaurs (the most bird-like) had extensive feathers. There was also some evidence that wings did evolve in several steps and some plausible theories (supported by observed activity with modern birds) that even without the ability of full flight that having proto-wings would be survival oriented (using wings a bit like a net to capture prey as well as having the (very short-term) ability to ‘leap’ up if attacked or to leap up to capture insects (which have been flying for a really long time)). Now, as seems increasingly likely, many many dinosaurs were covered in feathers, then it will have been something that is very plausible to have evolved gradually over time rather than requiring a bunch of head scratching and intellectual leaps of faith.

That is the way of science. No matter how great your story is, how well it hangs together, how plausible or appealing it is, without physical evidence it is nothing more than a campfire story. Now, at least regarding birds, we have evidence that is firming up and we can move this from the campfire realm into the text books.

Treason!

Tea Party “treason”
What powers should the president have against those who advocate open, violent revolt against the U.S. government?
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/29/tea_party_treason/

It seems clear to me that if these people had any intellectual honesty (really, I can’t believe I even typed that!) they would have to agree that the President has the authority to order them assassinated or held indefinitely without charges for making such statements. What blithering idiots, they insist that the law only applies to them when it is convenient. These people used to be fringe figures that were ignored by the mainstream, how these morons _are_ the mainstream!

Not that I advocate the Constitutional shredding that Obama and company have undertaken, but the blithering idiots mentioned in the article really do seem to be ideal candidates for some time in Guantanamo.

How about that storm?

Man, we keep having these once-a-century events on the heels of one another! I am wondering, now, if in the past the once-a-century events did indeed all happen in the same decade in the days of yore. Maybe the wild weather we are having all on the heels of itself is actually the normal swings of weather independent of climate. Of course, that makes me a Global Warming Denialist, clearly our current batch of adverse weather can ONLY be explained by the end of times apocalypse brought on by our profligate use of fossil fuels, the remedy for which is inescapably the destruction of our civilization before it self destructs (wtf?).

Anyway, as I have no doubt bored you with before, we have a house in the Virginia country side and that is where we spend our weekends and much of our free time (though it ain’t so free since we are doing construction). We were planning a party on Saturday and I was laboring in the insane heat doing landscaping to try to make the place look nice all day Friday. Then, while relaxing (but before taking a shower, something I had cause to regret for the next two days) we watched the storm front move in. Our place gets a lot of very strong winds during the winter and we had things blow down that have made it through years of severe winter storms, so I imagine the winds were right up there with hurricane speeds. Despite a neighbors reassurance that in the 15+ years he had lived there he had had only like 12 hours total loss of power, we got zapped. Going out on Saturday for breakfast we found trees on power lines on either side of us, though we were finally able to find a route out. We didn’t decide to look for a generator until late Sat afternoon and of course they were all long gone by then. Sunday we went on another quixotic quest to find a generator and stopped by our old stalwart Home Depot. They said that while they didn’t have any, they were expecting a truck with nearly 200 that should be there in a few hours. While we sat arguing if we should wait or come back, they returned and said that the truck was actually there already and they were unloading. Thus we got a 5500 watt generator (only about $600 if I recall) which turned out to be just enough to run our two portable AC units, the fridge, the TV and the internet (yes, we had DSL, go figure). Sadly, it isn’t enough to run the well pump, since I wanted a heavy duty pump instead of the typical residential sized one, so we will have to continue with buying water and using it to flush.

Our house in Maryland isn’t any better, the power is off there as well. Fortunately, being on city water we could still take (cool, but not cold, since the water bakes all day in the sun (were we to get the pump going in Shen we would have to take freezing showers as that water comes out of the ground at 55 degrees)) showers. Man, that felt great after being so sweaty and gross for three solid days. The house has a full basement which is much cooler than the rest of the house and that is where we slept (just me and the wife, we left the rest of our party with my wife’s sister-in-law where they had power). The trip in was a bit surreal. Several places on Connecticut Avenue were closed entirely on one side because of trees and power lines. It is going to be the full week like they say before they can get all this crap cleaned up, that is for sure.

My work location has power now, though it didn’t on Saturday. I was planning on being here Mon and Tues and taking the rest of the week of, something I will keep with since at least it is cool here and I have ‘net connectivity. We are back to Shen Tues afternoon, though, but at least we have AC and TV, though that generator sure makes a damn racket. I think that this will serve as the final incentive to come up with an off-grid system for our place in the country. I have been doing some figuring over the last couple of years (indeed, since we bought the land, so since 2004) about ways to develop a reasonably economical off-grid system and have had some ideas that survived the initial sanity check. I will delve deeper into those ideas and see if I can find any that withstand the higher levels of scrutiny. It would have to be cobbled together from used equipment, but I think it might be do-able for the price of a moderate (24KW) standby generator and be robust enough to cover the whole house.

I will probably post a bit today and tomorrow, but don’t expect anything the rest of the week.

Maybe some whales will get caught…

A Huge Break in the LIBOR Banking Investigation
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-huge-break-in-the-libor-banking-investigation-20120628

I discussed before how the real criminals were skating by, but it seems that there might be some hope that they won’t get off Scott Free (whatever the hell that means). Still, a $450 million fine for a company the size of Barclays or UBS doesn’t amount to much and might not even be enough to change their behavior.

But, at least with this tiny ray of hope, one can fantasize that perhaps the oligarchy’s strangle hold can be loosened just a bit, maybe leaving room for me to slip in to the 0.1%…

A win for Obama or a win for the insurance companies?

SCOTUS upholds ‘Obamacare’! Roberts backstabs the GOP! Insurance companies rejoice!

Well, were I a bettin man (I do gamble, but with cards, not law) I woulda bet that the ACA would have been overturned. Still, with the 5-4 decision it is clear that it wasn’t the no-brainer originally thought by nearly all the pundits I read. However, what is interesting to me is that there are some very unhappy people that it was upheld, but not just the Tea Party wackos…

Supreme Court upholds Obamacare 5-4
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/28/how-will-supreme-court-rule-on-health-care-law/?hpt=hp_t1

[Updated at 10:38 a.m. ET] Physicians for a National Health Program responded critically to the Supreme Court’s decision, saying that the ruling did not amount to universal coverage, 26 million people will remain uninsured, it keeps in place high co-pays and gaps in coverage and it will not control costs.

“Why is this so? Because the ACA perpetuates a dominant role for the private insurance industry. Each year, that industry siphons off hundreds of billions of health care dollars for overhead, profit and the paperwork it demands from doctors and hospitals; it denies care in order to increase insurers’ bottom line; and it obstructs any serious effort to control costs,” the group’s statement said.

It said a “single-payer, improved-Medicare-for-all system” would remedy these problems, including the issue of cost. Ideally, the group said, such a system would pay “all medical bills, streamlines administration, and reins in costs for medications and other supplies through its bargaining clout.”

I basically agree with their sentiments. Nothing in the ACA will help reduce medical costs. It may provide a lot more people with insurance, but as pointed out, lots of people will still be uninsured (and presumably uninsurable, due to poverty or whatever). The real winners are the insurance companies, they get guaranteed new revenue, yet their obligations are in many cases much weaker (and they were rather weak to begin with).

So obvious to the biochemist

Certain Diets May Help Body Burn More Calories: Study
Low-carb and low-glycemic plans work best, but low-carb regimen has drawbacks
http://www.ivillage.com/certain-diets-may-help-body-burn-more-calories-study/4-a-468579

I wanted to title this “Another thing that makes you go ‘Duh!'”, but felt that would be too repetitious, so went with something completely different (a man with three buttocks!). The gist here is that the way they measure calories for food has nothing to do with metabolism (except that at some point someone was smart enough to label food that didn’t get digested as having zero calories). Why does that matter? Well, when you are counting calories, the number on the label doesn’t tell you what the actual number that will be utilized by your body and as such, you may be making very poor eating decisions. Fat calories, while they look huge on the label, are a bit deceptive. The body does not efficiently convert fats into energy on a per-molecule basis, so despite fats as being reported as a high calorie food in comparison to carbohydrates, because (simple) carbohydrates are generally turned into energy with the highest level of efficiency, you could actually be much worse off with a low fat diet. Also, interestingly (to me, anyway), most fats have to be metabolized before they can be repackaged into your own fat cells, so in many cases the body will preferentially pack the energy from carbohydrates into stored fat and instead metabolize fat in the diet into energy for immediate use.

Proteins are generally very poor sources of energy for your body’s cells and cause problems with toxins (we can ‘excrete’ carbon, oxygen and hydrogen via breath, nitrogen (proteins always have nitrogen, fats and carbs almost never) has to be excreted as a solid or liquid). In addition to having complex metabolic pathways to make use of proteins, your body would rather use it for cell maintenance than for just keeping warm. Indeed, there is a fairly rare genetic disorder that causes people with the defect to slowly poison themselves by eating protein and they have to be very careful in their diet.

So, the net effect is that pure calories are not enough to determine an optimal vs non-optimal diet. The different food groups have different types of energy sources and the body makes use of them very differently. There is also a big difference between the highly refined foods (pure sugar and refined flour are biologically almost identical) and more ‘raw’ food (like whole grains) in that the more complex foods require energy just to break them down to become an energy source. This is never taken into account on the nutrition labels either, so you can imagine that relatively modest changes in the types of food in your diet, despite having the same number of reported calories, can have a vastly different effect on your waistline. The vast majority of information made available to the average Jill and Joe is totally misleading (of course, that is because of a vast (right wing?) conspiracy with food producers, so you can be sure something bad will happen to me on my way home this afternoon) and instead of simple information like ‘eat less, exercise more and avoid processed foods’, we are drowned in blather about how to drop 40 lbs in 40 minutes or some such.

NRA government conspiracy

The NRA vs. Eric Holder
The rabidly pro-gun/anti-Obama group is pushing a wild theory – and intimidating some Democrats along the way
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/27/the_nra_vs_eric_holder/

This article is quite apropos my last post. It is clear now that the GOP and the NRA (thus the Tea Party) are in fact one in the same and the lies about ‘Fast and Furious’ were made up with the soul intention of embarrassing our President (like him or loath him, he is still ‘our’ President and in a rational world (yes, I know how idiotic that statement is when applied to the US) he would have all of our support even if we disagreed with him).

Personally, I like guns and if I could afford it I would have a .50 cal sniper rifle and would practice with it every day (those rounds can cost nearly $5 a pop, so just practicing needs a deep pocket) until I got good enough to pick off targets at a mile (when I was in the Marine Corps I could hit a man-sized silhouette at 500 meters 8 out of 10 times, though that wasn’t considered exceptional in any way). Having said that, I do think that the NRA’s unyielding objection to any sort of restrictions on guns is idiotic. If someone wants to be a collector and be able to buy and sell hundreds of high powered assault rifles a year, he should be required to register and should keep records of who he bought and sold to. While I think that it should be trivial for anyone to purchase such weapons, I think it should not be trivial to do so several days a week while being homeless and destitute. I can only assume that the NRA wants to support the militia men who advocate armed insurrection against our government, how else to explain their dogged resistance to even the most mild and narrow attempts to keep track of people and identify people who are clearly purchasing guns for black market resale? They claim it is part of a slippery slope, that once any single restriction is put in place then an avalanche of restrictions will follow, but that only reinforces the insanity behind such idiot conspiracies like the one outlined in the article above. I don’t hunt, but I don’t care to give up the option to do so. However, I am happy with being identified as someone who has purchased a gun specified by serial number. The effort to purchase a car is way greater AND that act requires insurance. Surely it is possible for rational people to agree on a level of tracing that raises the bar for black market sales to the point where it becomes trivial to catch criminals yet also allows us (after we win the lotto, of course) to get our automatic weapons and pop off a few (thousand) dollars worth of rounds.

More fast and furious

I commented obliquely about the Fast and Furious folderol when I blogged regarding the clearly politically motivated attack on Holder earlier, now it seems that the _entire_ thing has been fabricated by a disgruntled ATF agent and inflamed by, get this, militia member “who has advocated armed insurrection against the U.S. government”. This is where the GOP gets its information! Oh, did anyone mention that the people behind many of the purchases (totally legal, btw) “turned out to be FBI informants who were receiving money from the bureau”?

The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal
A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/?hpt=hp_t2

It is very sad reading, so you might want to stick with the bliss of ignorance. It is hard enough to support our fucked-up society as it is, you may not want to realize the depths of institutional idiocy.

Drop in crime

I doubt that most of us would realize this without being told, but violent crime has actually dropped precipitously over the last 30 years. Cracked has a wonderful article on the interesting statistical correlations with this drop:

The 6 Weirdest Things That Statistically Lower Crime
http://www.cracked.com/article_19893_the-6-weirdest-things-that-statistically-lower-crime.html

#6. Getting the Lead Out of the Environment

This has a very plausible sound to it and had me nodding my head as I read it. Sort of like the antibiotic thing I talked about earlier, there seems to be a very strong correlation and one that is easy to extrapolate to causality.

#5. Crack Cocaine Scaring Everyone Straight

This one I am not buying so much, humans don’t really ever get ‘scared straight’, so I see it more related to

#4. There Is Suddenly Plenty of Drugs for Everyone

This is the core of my reasoning for doing away with the whole ‘war on drugs‘ (but please note my caveat). With the massive profit removed, the incentive for crime, particularly violent crime, has largely vanished. I like this one like I like the lead one.

#3. Gangsters Getting Geekier

While I do see that there is a huge benefit to going with identity theft (this is an even safer crime than prostitution! more money, even less risk), I think the reduction in violent crime is largely due to #4 (and #6 and #1).

#2. Illegal Immigration

I am of the opinion that lots of this crime goes unreported, so to me the reduction in crime associated with illegal immigration is more to do with our idiotic response to the illegals (throw them in jail, then toss them back over the fence, even when they are victims rape, robbery, murder, etc.). However, I have read about #1 below and believe that it slots right in next to #6 as the likeliest reason we have seen the drop in crime…

#1. Legalized Abortion

This is not to say that rich don’t engage in violet crime (Menendez brothers, anyone?), just that they engage in a whole crap load less than impoverished sons of husband-less mothers. What do you wanna bet that the crime rate starts to creep up 15-18 years after all the GOP’s war on women effects start to settle in?