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
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
Humour appears to develop from aggression caused by male hormones, according to a study published in this week’s Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal…. Makes total sense to me. And if you think I’m kidding, you can stuff it. Continue reading Humor and Hormones
Plant and animal fossils recently discovered from an island in the Bahamas tell a story of habitat change and human involvement in local extinction. Continue reading The Bahamas Yield Amazing Fossil Finds
Firefox 3 Beta is released… Continue reading Firefox 3 Beta
No, no, she didn’t die. My past-tensing of the verb “to live” (sorry about the verbing of the noun “tense”) is a clever trick. But today is a big day in British History.
Continue reading Long Lived the Queen
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.
is Here
A 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
Or, even, one of these…
It does require a prescription (rats!) but all you need is a special barcode and out comes your meds.[source]
Red Hat Profitable; Solar-powered laptop for Tanzania; Happy Birthday Perl; NetBSD 4.0 released Continue reading Technology News
Reminder: NY to pick between ODF and OOXML:
“In August of 2007, the State of New York passed legislation requiring its CIO, Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, to gather information on the advantages and disadvantages of adopting either ODF or OOXML as a document standard, and to report her findings by 15 January 2008. As part of her duties under that legislation, the CIO issued a Request For Public Comment to get feedback on the topic. The deadline for that public comment is 28 December 2007
CC+ is a protocol providing a simple way for users to get rights beyond the rights granted by a CC license. For example, a work’s Creative Commons license might offer noncommercial rights. With CC+, the license can also provide a link by which a user might secure rights beyond noncommercial rights — most obviously commercial rights, but also additional permissions or services such as warranty, permission to use without attribution, or even access to performance or physical media.The CC+ architecture gives businesses a simple way to move between the sharing and commercial economies. CC+ provides a lightweight standard around these best practices and is available for implementation immediately.
Russian railways plans to replace humans with tiny robots made made in Russia. Apparently, what makes this news is that they want to use Russian robots instead of robots made by Honda: Continue reading Latest Robot News