Daily Archives: December 21, 2007

My Linux Calendar

Dec 21
Benjamin Disraeli born, 1804
Dec 21
Phileas Fogg completes his trip around the world in less than 80 days
Dec 21
Women gain the right to vote in South Australia, 1894
Dec 21
Women gain the right to hold political office in South Australia, 1894
Dec 21
Frank Zappa is born in Baltimore, 1940
Dec 21
Yule (Norse for “wheel”) – Germanic 12-day feast
Dec 21*
Winteranfang
Dec 21*
Winter Solstice
Dec 22
Giacomo Puccini born, 1858

Roland Martin, sorry to offend, but you are an offensive dit

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Roland S. Martin is a CNN commentator who is coming late to the War on Christmas.

The name Roland Martin reminds me of Rowan and Martin. I’m pretty sure that is why Rowan S. Martin uses the “S.” .. so people don’t think of Rowan and Martin when they hear his name.

Rowan and Martin were funny in their day. Roland S. Martin is not funny. Yet it is hard to not laugh at the guy.

Continue reading Roland Martin, sorry to offend, but you are an offensive dit

Heritability of Magical Powers Investigated

A multilocus model with a dominant gene for magic might exist, controlled epistatically by one or more loci, possibly recessive in nature. Magical enhancers regulating gene expressionmay be involved, combined with mutations at specific genes implicated in speech and hair colour such as FOXP2 and MCR1.

The most important thing about this study is not its conclusion, but what we will do with it. Continue reading Heritability of Magical Powers Investigated

Now they’re banning the books

The Catholic Church has repressed positive reviews of the movie The Golden Compass, and has encouraged people to not see the movie. Representatives of Catholic groups have spoken out forcefully, on the verge of Holy War Level Talk, against the movie and the book. Now we year news of an event that started to play out a few weeks ago and that is now coming to a head: One school district has banned the book. The Halton Catholic District board has removed the His Dark Materials trilogy from the library shelves in that district.

Continue reading Now they’re banning the books

A Step Towards Defeating Malaria

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchA lectin is a funny little protein that seems to be used in a lot of biological systems. They bind to sugars, and one of the roles they play is inhibition of “agglutination” … clumping, or gluing together … of other molecules.A sea cucumber is an echinoderm that lives in the ocean. It looks kind of like a cucumber, but if you saw a cucumber that looked and acted like an echinoderm you would probably not put it in your salad.Malaria is a type of protozoan, a single celled organism that is not a bacteria. There are many kinds, and they complex life cycle with many different stages, including one stage that lives in the gut of a mosquito, and another stage that lives in the blood cells of a vertebrate host. One of the nasty forms of malaria that affects humans is Plasmodium falciparum.An ookinete is the general name for a protozoan zygote. It is an egg that moves, as you can guess from its name. The malaria parasite is an ookinete when it enters the gut of a mosquito.A sporozoite is the life stage of malaria when it has moved from the gut to the salivary glands, from where it is potentially passed to the vertebrate host when the mosquito is busy sucking blood. Continue reading A Step Towards Defeating Malaria