Right as I got to Samira to meet lyceum, I got a mystery call. Turned out to be from some Comcast employee (exec?) in Pennsylvania, who'd seen my earlier LJ complaint, and was calling to see if he could help. That's kind of neat. Not as neat as an actually smooth changeover system, but still.

Samira buffet: still tasty. Best parts for me are the chicken -- especially fatty skin bits that have fallen off bigger pieces -- and the cucumberish salad. For the first time, I saw smaller chuncks of chicken in with the fried pieces, yellow mild curry things.

Real sunken continents! Zealandia and Kerguelen.

Administration claims immunity to the 4th Amendment. Can I start talking about traitors yet?

Pharyngula coins an acronym: SIWOTI syndrome.

Article on the farm bill and a (foo) Dakota family that avoided the temptation of subsidized corn.

There may be a bottleneck in building top quality nuclear reactors. Unlike a_steep_hill, I don't see that as a good thing.

Me on how I'd be happier if a lot of "science fiction" was called something else. Or if I thought of space opera as its own genre, not a flawed subgenre of science fiction.

59% of US doctors favor national health insurance.

I could do better, but something I wrote about why I like the Exalted setting.

A one-way mirrored public toilet

Ancient Mideast water delivery and storage and air conditioning tech.

1) Interview PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins for your creationist propaganda under false pretences
2) Prevent PZ from going to see a pre-showing of your lies
3) Let Richard Dawkins in
4) ...
5) Profit!

Is Europe as poor as it seems?

Is America as dumb as it seems?

From heron61: rats not raised in cages don't do drugs. You may have heard that rats will self-administer cocaine until they starve to death, but it seems that holds for rats raised in isolated cages with nothing to do, as opposed to a colony of rats in a rat park, who'll go off drugs even when forced onto them.

People arrested for plotting murder of one of the Danish Mohammed cartoonists. (The excitement was two years ago? Eek, my poor timesense.) I can say that as a private counter to the boycotts, I started seeking out Danish cheeses; the baby Havarti at Sahara Mart is pretty good.

Sugar-substitute food causes rats to gain weight.

I discovered a new webcomic, pure shoujo: Red String. Liked it.

A review of Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davies, on the famines of colonialism.

Government as a car.

USA demands more and more information about foreign visitors or even overflights. Effect of the War on Terror on our tourism industry

I've discovered that SF authors such as Pohl, Heinlein, and Leinster thought of things like the Internet, cell phones, or both, going back to the 1930s.

I just read Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley, her latest novel, modern world + fantastic creatures including dragons. Good, not as awesome as Sunshine.

Fiedler Farm pork: reeaallly good.

Attention-starved emo condition was cancelled a while back due to receiving attention.

Horrifying bugs

Victorian sex-ed manual with talking monkey and interracial kiss.

Former insurance manager arguing for universal health care. More meatily, Sara Robinson compares her experiences with US and Canadian health care. If you read just one link, I recommend that one. Unless you know it all already, of course.

History of guns and gun control in Japan. "Less than three decades after Japan saw its first gun, there were more guns in Japan than any other nation on the planet. Several Japanese feudal lords had more guns than the whole British army." Accuracy of piece not guaranteed.

How Kobe beef is really raised. Think "veal for three years." Think "packed in crates."

Modern Linux tips

Attitudes of Dutch and American parents toward teen sex (link has comments, and link to the real article).

Unintended consequences of the ADA

Karl Schroeder's interstellar cyclers. The inspiration behind the beamriders of Orion's Arm.

"World's oldest democracy" still can't vote properly.

(from fanw) aerosolized pork brains disease.

I had lunch buffet at Chow Bar, for the first time in a long time. Decent food for $6.50. But after my first plateful, I'd eaten all the meat and not all the rice, and I went back to get more meat to put on my rice. The employees stopped me, saying that the Health Department didn't let them let me re-use my plate. WTF?

4chan declares war on Scientology.

Little children turn Jesus on.

Spanking the Monkey:
The Strangest Children's Book of the 19th Century Teaches You the Facts of Life—Complete With Singing Vagina

Edo Japanese, including farmers and 12 year olds, used to give geometrical proofs as gifts to the kami (Sangaku)

Local gamers reject the common fallback religious choice for the non-religious, Buddhism, as boring and depressing, in favor of the immortality and magical superpowers of Taoism. I stick to Shinto, myself.

LOLParrot

Huckabee endorses wifely submission. Fred Thompson calls him a liberal. All the GOPers endorse more tax cuts, because the federal government is running such a surplus right now... McCain says US was founded as a Christian nation.

Majikthiese notes the various male Presidents who have cried in public, without the grief that Hillary Clinton is getting over her voice wavering.

Greta Christina on the harm of woo-woo thinking. Links in passing to the total failure of a whole slew of phone pet psychics to detect that the pet in question did not exist.

(from pompe) More on how US doesn't regard foreigners as having any rights.

Dead heart stripped of cells, remaining matrix repopulated with stem cells. Woo!

...around the world.

(Old humor)
Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

Thank you, pompe! I get to re-use my 'hubris' tag (in a good way): biggest building plans, from an architect who's already built similar buildings. Article also links to a much bigger proposal for Japan, which is probably vaporware. This hyperbolic pyramid design is a new one to me, for arcologies, and my first reaction is "wow, that's really space inefficient", compared to a cube or dome, but I assume there are other benefits. Be nice to know what they are.

From James we get GOP candidates as Buffy villains.

From fallenrose, Michael Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma, Botany of Desire) has a new book out (In Defense of Food). Don't eat too much, eat plants, don't eat things your grandma wouldn't recognize as food... I'd note that some of the animal engineering he mentions is arguably counteracting previous abuses; eggs aren't getting "fish oils", they're getting a flaxseed component which might be closer to natural eggs than the pure corn diet.

I wonder how this interacts with the John Hawks paper on rapid human evolution, which seems to support my intuition that various human populations could well have adapted to their specific agricultural diets. Perhaps we should think about not just traditional foods but food traditional for our individual genomes, where determinable. A related thought was that if there's any genetic component to correlations between 'race' and IQ, perhaps it's not from "X are dumb" but "X aren't adapted to Middle Eastern-derived agriculture, and IQ is nutrition sensitive", with certain middle-class populations suffering from the fact that while they can afford all the food they think they want, their genomes actually want foods not sold in their hemisphere.

Creationists take on plate tectonics and linguistics.

Huckabee, the "Christian candidate", as Rove's Frankenstein monster.

Christians in Nigeria witch-hunting children.

Gerry was picked out by a 'prophetess' at a prayer night and named as a witch. His mother cursed him, his father siphoned petrol from his motorbike tank and spat it over his eight-year-old face... Magrose is seven. Her mother dug a pit in the wood and tried to bury her alive... "To give more than you can afford is blessed. We are the only ones who really know the secrets of witches. "

Victorian prisons and their descendants. Just last night I watched that Michael Moore video on Norway, with their maximum sentences of 21 years, and a rather different kind of prison. (8 minute video.)

"We pledge allegiance to the flag... one white nation, indivisible..." Satire, not news.

Alternate, less exciting reading of the Gospel of Judas.

Reality has a liberal bias, #4375: immigrants lower crime rates (via james_nicoll)

Physics-biology lolcat

Suspect records detective during interrogation with his MP3 player, proves perjury. We're told not to worry that lying detectives might be, you know, common.

Squirrel in armor

Wikipedia on Tiahuanaco includes a brief but interesting discussion of their raised-field agriculture, with canals holding warmth to survive killing frosts.

John Ford on games in one solar system. Somehow the mention of an orrery in place of a star map really appealed to me.

Article I haven't actually read yet, but supposedly on Huckabee getting a rapist released to get back at the Clintons.

A lolthulhu.

No links, but in response to the report that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program four years ago, Bush has called on Iran to "come clean", and Gates talks about the ongoing threat. The Supreme Court is gearing the appeal of Guantanamo detainees; Roberts asks what the length of detainment has to do with anything. This in the context of people held for six years without charges, in an undeclared "war" against a nebulous enemy, with some of the detainees plausibly turned in by biased informants in Afghanistan. "Yeah, that guy with the attractive land next to mine is a terrorist, trust me."

I thought recently that to say prostitution is inherently wrong because of the oft-attendant abuses is like saying cotton farming is wrong because of slavery. It's the abuses which are the problem, not the economic transaction itself.

Someone's sig quote on rpg.net:
"Liberal? Pagan? Atheist? Socialist? So we have birth control, hot naked chicks, subjective morality and workers rights...Tell me, what does the other side having going for it?-Dogstar

And in conclusion, the climate must be controlled.

Charming Indian video on condom usage

Very brief Krugman post on the National Review's fear of universal health care and how it might mean a permanent shift away from conservatism. Comments note there's an implicit assumption that universal health care would work, if not it could be revoked by the electorate and drive them back to conservatism.

Old LJ post on religious discrimination by the Salvation Army.

That report (PDF) on Iran? The administration has been sitting on it for the past year, while saber-rattling about the imminent nuclear threat.

Don't sell fiction to the new Dragon. Unless you like giving up all rights for what would be a pittance even from normal publishers.

I currently have no plans for Thanksgiving.

( Mess o' links on AIDS, terror, physics,and atheism )

At least as he sees it, in Japan

Analysis of the famous UFO trip of Betty and Barney Hill. Conclusion: an aircraft warning light combined with deprivation of sleep and sensation, and an already-stopped watch.

Kowloon Walled City, an organically developed micro-arcology. Wow. Probably a good setting for a pulp game, too.

Parody of reviews of The God Delusion.

Anthony Flew: converted ex-atheist or confused old man?

Non-theist billboards

L. Ron Hubbard wikiquotes.

* "There is no more ethical group on this planet than ourselves."

o L. Ron Hubbard, KEEPING SCIENTOLOGY WORKING. 7 February 1965, reissued 27 August 1980

* "If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace."

o L. Ron Hubbard, Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter, 15 August 1960, Dept. of Govt. Affairs

Greta Christina takes on Lewis's Lord, Liar, or Lunatic? trilemma. A commenter rejoins with the Riddle of Epicurus: "God:weak, wicked, or non-existent?"