Daily Archives: January 6, 2009

Milky Way = Faster, Heavier. Like me.

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When Woody Allen was little, and his mother told him to clean his room, he countered that he had no room to put his stuff. So he was waiting for the universe to expand for a while, then it would be possible to clean his room.

Since then, cosmologists have admonished that expansion of the universe does not really work that way. Of course, it DOES work that way, and Woody Allen was partly correct. But other factors we need not discuss here would come into play and ruin his plans.

Anyway, I’ve been going to the gym a lot lately, and I noticed yesterday that my weight had gone UP instead of DOWN. To cheer my self up, I simply attributed the increase to the huge muscles I’m building. (De nile is not just a river in Africa any more.) But then I found out that there might be another explanation for the scale giving obviously erroneous results:

The Milky Way… has 50 per cent more mass than previously believed, increasing the chance of a collision with another galaxy, say astronomers.

That would explain a lot of things. If the entire Milky Way has gotten heavier, then everything IN the Milky way has gotten heavier.

They are also saying that the Milky way is spinning faster. I wonder if that means I don’t have to spend as much time on the treadmill….???

OK, but seriously…
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Five Thirty Eight Eviscerates the Wall Street Journal

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The Wall Street Journal published an editorial yesterday called “Funny Business in Minnesota” which is so full of inaccurate innuendo and fallacious factoids that when I read it I thought I was reading a piece of junk mail from Ann Coulter.

Well, the honorable web site Five Thirty Eight has torn the WSJ a new one with a brutally accurate deconstruction of the editorial. There really is virtually nothing in this editorial that can be salvaged from the bright light of actual truth. Shame on the Wall Street Journal.

Read the commentary from Five Thirty Eight here.

Thanks Mike for the tip.

Coleman is filing a law suit related to the Minnesota senatorial race.

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Details are just coming in now.

LIVEBLOGGED

They are suing regarding: the missing ballots from Minneapoilis (that won’t go anywhere, already settled); Double counting (that issue was killed off already, it will go no where) and absentee ballots (they have a small chance that this may develop into something).

They state that they will win in state court but have federal level issues to argue as well.

The won’t and the don’t. But it looks like they will continue to press.

We are being told that several Coleman lawyers are not being dispersed around the state to depose, under oath, election officials.

They are opposing several of the decisions made by the canvassing board such as the afore mentioned … missing ballots of Minneapolis.

Ana will be commenting below, I hope, on the missing ballots in Minneapolis.

They are talking about pre-trial phases, they are talking about a thee week period leading up to the trial, they are talking about a couple of months of proceedings.

Now they are threatening the Chief Justice … who was on the canvassing board. They want him off the State Supreme Court for this proceeding.

They are not making veiled threats to force a new recount.

Clearly, they are pulling out all stops and are not going to let this rest. This is the beginning of the Big Mess. The Republicans have decided that they are not going to allow the winner go to Washington no matter what it takes.

Time to start raising money for the Franken team again.

OK, done.

Pink Iguanas and Disappearing Islands

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It turns out that a recently discovered population of land iguanas on the Galapagos is probably a new species that represents the basal (original) form of Galapagos land iguana. Moreover, this iguana is found in an unexpected place, according to a paper just coming out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

And it’s pink.
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