That's right folks, it is not a typo. This guy actually had sex with his picnic table FOUR times in one day! Of course he's getting in trouble for the public nudity and ludeness, but now he faces felony charges because a school was in close proximity.
This guy is married and has school-age children, I wonder what his wife thinks, she can't outperform a picnic table.
Put this one down on the all-time mugshot list, holy shit!
And what did this splendid citizen do to get the honor of a mugshot? Well after a fight with his girlfriend he ran her over with a half-ton truck. That was Sunday and she died on Wednesday.
You can't make this shit up guys, and I'm nominating him for "Fucking Moron of The Week", he'll probably face some stiff competition from the "My Daughter Died Because I Thought Prayer Was The Cure For Diabetes Parents" but he may make a run.
(Image:PerezHilton.com, as if you couldn't tell with that awesome graphic!/sarcasm)
When talking about solar power most conversations revolve around photovoltaic (PV) cells, but there is another solar technology that may surpass the capabilities of PV production. Solar thermal energy is gaining ground among production companies (and I've blogged about it here, here and here.
Solar Thermal energy is a way of capturing the sun's energy by concentrating a large field of mirrors onto a single point in a tower. The tower has huge
of solar energy pass through our atmosphere and reach the Earth's surface at any moment (one terawatt equals 1,000,000,000,000 watts) .
370 - number of terawatts available from wind power.
15 - That's our current energy consumption in terawatts. Almost 6,000 times less than what is available from the sun and wind. That's not even counting ocean power, geothermal and hydro power. And don't forget the massive amount of efficiency gains
Welcome our newest writer Anthony Lopez to the StifledMind crew, he's currently working towards his MD and has a few thoughts to share, enjoy...
I weep for the quiet passage back into greatness this country could have had, but I weep also for my own naivety in thinking such was possible. I refer of course to the new "scandal" involving Sen. Obama's pastor. I am not going to go into a long winded discussion here about the silliness of all of this, or the evil of de-contextualizing a spiritual sermon and condemning a man for attending a church different from yours (especially one as prominent or crucial to its community as Trinity United Church of Christ). If I was going to my arguments would be somewhere along the line of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount being equally socially inflammatory, or Obama not being responsible for his pastors words, or perhaps if I was feeling really salty a discussion about whether the comments were true and thus not negative at all.
No, what I want to say here is that something like this happening was inevitable
Seems like a whole lot of people (I'm looking at you Big Media) are obsessed with whether or not that hybrid/plug in hybrid/electric car will "pay for itself" with fuel savings. How about this example; "The payoff for plug-in hybrids: 95 years?".
I hear claims about car "X" will save you money and so naturally you will want to examine that claim. I really have no problem with that, but it irks me that it seems like the whole freakin point of green(er) transportation is saving money, and that its the yardstick to measure all new green cars. Since when do cars pay for themselves?
This is just ridiculous. This girl's parent's decided that rather than take their daughter to the doctor, 11 years old and dying, they would simply pray for her health. As their little girl faded into an easily preventable diabetic coma, they idly stood by and trusted to "faith." This is neglect, in its most obvious form. Andrew Hauch, StifledMind's Senior Diabetes Correspondent, examined the case:
Given the girl’s age (11 years old) and the autopsy’s revelation in which there was a lack of insulin, it is almost certain that the girl was afflicted with Type I Diabetes. To help understand further, this lack of insulin originates from the pancreatic beta cells’ inability to produce adequate insulin. Without insulin, blood glucose is free-flowing throughout the body’s circulatory system and cannot be absorbed into cells and utilized for fuel. Thus, the body requires fat metabolism through beta oxidation to generate fuel for cells. In turn, a highly acidic environment falling outside of the optimal pH spectrum of the human body (pH 7.4-7.8) is created through ketoacidosis (beta oxidation produces a family of acidic byproducts called ketones-- more specifically in this case --acetone, acetoacetate, and beta-hydroxybutyrate). Once the body’s pH falls outside of this range for a prolonged period of time, tissue necrosis is inevitable leading to diabetic coma or even death. All of this could have been impeded by simple insulin injections.Ok, so he's no MD, but honestly, can you argue with that? I can't. Seems freakin' stupid to ignore everything your eyes and ears have taught you for however many years, and trust blindly in an old book.
I hear a lot of moaning from the anti-solar crowd about how much space it takes to build a truly powerful plant (I'll refrain from saying the obvious about how Death Valley really isn't that useful anyway, oops I guess I did say it). Anyway, what about this idea? On all of those commercial big box buildings lets put solar cells on the roofs to turn that into a productive space.
Well less than a year after announcing it would build the biggest solar project in the world, California is poised to take an even larger chunk of the renewable pie and produce 250-megawatts of power from rooftop installations.
The project will be distributed among many commercial rooftops, starting with southern California's Inland Empire, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. The 250-megawatt goal is 170 more megawatts than was planned in the Cleantech installation.
"These are the kinds of big ideas we need to meet California's long-term energy and climate change goals," said Governor Schwarzenegger. "I urge others to follow in their footsteps. If commercial buildings statewide partnered with utilities to put this solar technology on their rooftops, it would set off a huge wave of renewable energy growth."
I have a confession to make. I live with bipolar disorder, a category of psychological mood disorders. You may recognize it by its former name, manic-depressive disorder. So some recent news that a startup company is now selling a bipolar genetic test ($399) startled me. In my years of dealing (and not dealing) with my disorder I have learned a lot regarding the physiology and progression of the disease and a claim like this scares me.
Dr. John Kelsoe is the designer of the test and after researching for years he identified several gene mutations closely related to the disease. These breakthroughs are no doubt very significant for the identification and treatment of bipolar disorder but they do bring up some very serious questions that the medical profession must answer.
Many public health officials, medical ethicists, and doctors are troubled by the proliferation of such tests. They receive almost no government oversight, and even though many are being sold as tools for making serious medical decisions they are built on thin data. It really is a double edged sword as openness and sharing are very powerful paths down the road to medical discovery, but at the same time a premature test preys on individuals' deepest anxieties.
But he said his test is a vital starting point toward moving away from the notoriously tricky practice of diagnosing bipolar disorder based purely on a person's behavior.
"The goal of this is to try and help doctors make an accurate diagnosis more quickly so the patient can be treated appropriately," Kelsoe said. "Anything is going to help, even if it just helps a little bit."
This diagnosis help is very useful but should be performed by licensed medical professionals who are capable of making a diagnosis on observation and testing. Making these kits available for home tests only raises fears and self-diagnosis problems. And unfortunately this is a very serious disorder to be putting people at fear of having.Freakin hilarious post at Kos by Tripletee. This is a reference to the recent uproar over some claims Clinton made about her international experiences which turned out to be slightly less than true. Clinton originally claimed, on several instances, that a trip to Bosnia as the First Lady read like a Rambo movie. Running from sniper fire and ducking into armored convoys etc. But oops, there were, you know, video cameras and (gasp) other people on that trip, and they remember a slightly different version. Poems and photo-opps, rather than bullets and adrenaline.
Ok, now why does this matter?
Mexico was burning some trash and here are the results! Texans woke up to ash and dust covering vehicles and anything left outside. Large plumes of smoke escaped high into the atmosphere and were pushed all across the state. The images are from my front driveway.
Here's a video from the weather channel about the event.
The John McSame campaign continued its march of ignorance this week with a deeply insightful diatribe about climate and national policy. In an interview with E&E News (sub. req'd) the campaign tossed out some info that should really make you question whether the Senator from Arizona could successfully take on the threat of global warming and climate change.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a McCain campaign policy adviser, dropped a few incredibly stupid ideas on the American public, I don't know which one is worse.
1. "The basic idea is if you go with a cap and trade and do it right with appropriate implementation, you don't need technology-specific and sectoral policies that are on the books and that others are proposing
simultaneously."
Unfortunately Holtz-Eakin is wrong, and without an aggressive technology development/deployment effort (especially in the transportation sector), a cap & trade system will fail because of the economic strain it will place on America. And what about the explicit statement that McCain opposes "technology-specific and sectoral policies that are on the books" if we have a cap & trade?
Yesterday scientists said Antarctica's Wilkins Ice Shelf has started to collapse in a fast-warming region of the continent. According to the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center the collapsed area measured about 160 square miles.
In a telephone interview with Reuters, Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said, "block after block of ice is just tumbling and crumbling into the ocean...one corner of it that's exposed to the ocean is shattering in a pattern that we've seen in a few places over the past 10 or 15 years. In every case, we've eventually concluded that it's a result of climate warming."
There you have it, another crazy scientist spouting the dangers of global warming like the crazy alarmists they are. Like a part of Antarctica is just going to fall into the ocean, wait....
Sit in a room full of collegiate liberals and expound on the disastrous conduct of the wasteful war in Iraq, and no one will applaud. It used to be that voicing your objections to an unjust war got clapped, but nowadays, it's old hat. Even people who once supported the war are backing away from it (although it's rare for them to plainly say "I was wrong"), and the futility of the war has simply lapsed into the status of a given. It has become the background noise of our country. Protest has been ground out of us by the dreary dun of corruption and destruction and the unresponsiveness of our government — we are in a democracy with a large majority opposed to the war, to no effect and with no expectation that our representatives will actually act to end the killing.
So now we've reached a nice round milestone of 4,000 dead in Iraq. 4,000 dead American soldiers, that is; it's almost as if the two orders of magnitude greater number of slaughtered Iraqis, the millions of refugees, the destruction of an entire country, simply don't matter and don't count. Americans find it hard to gather outrage over thousands of our own dead, and tens of thousands wounded, and they sure as hell aren't going to get stirred up over hundreds of thousands of dead foreigners.
As a nation, we stand atop a pedestal of bones and ruined lives. The disruption of families is ongoing, and our honor has been thrown away by the greed and ignorance of our leaders. And yet we carry on as if nothing is happening, nothing is wrong, no action need be taken. We will have an election, and one of the candidates stands for amplifying our involvement in this evil chaos … and he stands a chance of winning. The monsters who have perpetrated this crime will walk away to fat retirement checks and lives of wealth in the service of bloated corporate sponsors, and they will not pay — you will.
We all have blood on our hands, and no one cares.
Once, four dead in Ohio could stir us. Now, four thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, it doesn't matter … we have all become dead inside.
(From Pharyngula)
I was searching around for some flu information at work dealing with an NIH project I have and my google search turned up some pretty freakin scary results. One of the first hits, "Building a Child's Immunity the Natural Way" is so fundamentally wrong about all matters medical that it took a while for me to read through it. It starts off really bad.
New Jersey's Public Health Council gave its citizens a Christmas present that will not please the health-conscious, as it became the first state in the nation to require flu shots for preschoolers.
Vaccines are dangerous for the health of any individual, but when administered to small children in their important developmental years, they are especially damaging. Medical "experts" have not even determined the correct dosages for small children, who in this regard are not just small adults. When we talk about daycare, we are talking about babies as young as a few months of age. Additionally, not only do vaccines usually contain mercury, but many lack effectiveness and can cause problems with the development of the child's natural immune system (emphasis mine).
Wow, I almost threw up watching this. Unfortunate really that a bright group of kids is going to have to deal with some issues about this later in life because their parents want confirmation of their own beliefs.
And I really have no problem with religion, I actually attended Easter Mass yesterday (maybe one of the all-time peruasive arguments by a girl) but I believe an understanding of science and religion is not mutually exclusive. And how do I know that teeth evolved from scales you ask? How do I know? Well...
But maybe a picture is worth more than all of my words. Special thanks to Philippe Rekacewicz for putting this together with data from the WHO and UNICEF.
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