Some minor face-lift things; the comment area now looks right, instead of being below the right sidebar. The title now is a nifty graphic.

From an interview of the game developers of KOL.

Where do babies come from?

Your mother. No, wait, my mother.

Well, when a stork and a cabbage love each other very much, they get together and have sex. Then the half-strings of DNA from the stork combine with the half-strings of DNA from the cabbage, and that produces a fetus. The stork takes the fetus, in the dead of the night, and visits a woman and puts the fetus into her uterus, or "baby oven," as the scientific community calls it. There, the fetus grows to a manageable size, about the size of a softball. Then it eats its way out of the woman's stomach and skitters off into the ventilation ducts, where it needs to be hunted down and killed before it can grow to full size. This is usually accomplished by a girl with an underbite, in her underwear.

That was from memory -- I really need hobbies, man.

There's even a threat of a lawsuit (sorta) thrown in.

I'm amazed not by the ruin of the town, but the greeness of the landscape. Nature always seems to come back quickly from a disaster.

Seems that top X lists are all the rage. What's not surprising: almost all the movies are bad action movies, and usually sequals to good action movies. What's surprising; almost all of them at least broke even; and some made serious profit (ie Pirates 2: ~600 million PROFIT). That's alot of dough for a 2 hour movie.

Heh. Key quote:

It took some percussive maintenance on the young man's head to break down the barriers to understanding. When Mam Rostam comes up, the accomplice has a moment of hope which is quickly dismissed with additional percussive maintenance because the Peshmerga legend does not appreciate young idiots shooting up his home town on a lark. After this final moment of manually applied clarity, the young man releases his attitude and realizes that when you are in deep dirt, it is far better to be head up.

I'm glad nobody was hurt; and that Kirkuk (which looks like a hell-hole, but a vitally important city in Iraq) is in good hands.

Good question. We no longer qualify for the 'free-file' system, which allows free e-filing if your AGI is less than $52k.

But here's the money quote.

Under a 2005 agreement that lasts for four years, certain tax preparers, including the two big tax software companies, agreed to take part in the Free File program as long as the I.R.S. did not allow direct filing.

In other words, this is a giant scheme to make yet more money from people. First you pay the price of the software (every year), then you pay the price to e-file. J did our taxes by hand this year, it's inconvenient but far cheaper than getting software to do it. Plus she enjoys math (go figure).

There is hope: "Senator Schumer (D,NY) said he would like to see a system in which taxpayers would fill out the tax forms online and then submit them directly to the I.R.S." (Just like we do for paper returns). Gee, that would make too much sense, wouldn't it? Makes me wonder what would happen if there was a democrat in the white house (and both house & senate controlled by dems.).

...to support our MS150 team. Good luck to all the riders. Anyway the Chronicle has a MS150 blog. should be a great ride (i wish i was doing it, but someone has to mind the store)

These are tragic and heartbreaking. But also excellent photography.

So far so good; a stage 1 vaccine trial against one of the most aggressive cancers known (glioblastoma - GBM) is complete.

Did an 80 mile ride yesterday with club members and some good friends. Unfortunately one of these friends was hurt in a bike collision with another cyclist in the club (said friend had only a few scrapes); the club member had to be transported by helicopter to the hospital. She was released with a minor concussion.

Anyway! Neal Peirce has a excellent article on cycling in this new oil-conscience era. He wonders if it's time for a cycling revolution in America. I hope so.

I haven't seen this posted anywhere (well, there's this Ajax post). Anyway, the answer is found here. . Essentially you just add some HTML code to your web page or blog.

I spent most of the week designing a new webpage for our bike club, Pearland Cycling Club. It can be found (temporarily at least) here. I'll be working on it for the next few weeks i guess (unless the committee changes its mind about this third complete rebuild of the website). It was a good opportunity to join the 'new age' of web design using CSS and HTML.

Whoa, check this out. Someone has too much time on their hands (Digg)

Glenn Reynolds has a brief about the possibility that the recommendation for women to get MRI now will run into resource limitation issues. He link's Andy Kessler, some journalist wonk, who has written a book on the issue (of course). He's probably right, but i don't trust a reporter to disseminate accurate medical info.

Update: link fixed, sorry!

Very impressive, funny!

The title says 'You need to read this before you see Grindhouse'. I just submit links.
Key quote:

I did this for both Kill Bill and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and I left both of those films more satisfied than a nymphomaniac at the Adult Entertainment Expo.

This seems interesting. I'll need to read more, and of course passage is by no means certain. I agree that science outreach is a huge problem. But i'm not sure throwing money at the problem will help. The bill language is here

H.R.1453, the Scientific Communications Act of 2007, was recently introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA). It's an effort to give the National Science Foundation the money to fund programs that will ensure that educational programs in the sciences will include instruction on how to communicate science to nonscientists. The bill itself explains the problem quite clearly:

Graduate training programs in science and engineering often lack opportunities for students to develop communications skills that will enable them to effectively explain technical topics to nonscientific audiences.
Providing training in communications skills development will ensure that United States-trained scientists are better prepared to engage in dialogue on technical topics with policymakers and business leaders.

Essentially what the bill wants to do is set up funding from the NSF (natl science foundation) to establish centers that teach scientific communication, specifically towards policymakers (ie politicians).

From the bill:

(a) Program- The National Science Foundation shall establish a program to make grants to institutions to provide communications training to graduate students to improve the ability of scientists to interact with policymakers. Such program shall be integrated with other National Science Foundation programs for the training of scientists, such as the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program.

I guess i'm not sure this is a problem. If there is a problem is it on our end, if we don't dumb down the information enough for politicians to understand? Should we speak slower? Kidding. But anyway. It's a start. I'd rather see a bill passed that improved the quality of grad student education. This might address this in a very narrow sense, but more needs to be done, from abusive advisors, to unclear projects. Graduate education is so arbitary, if you get a good mentor, you'll have a good experience most likely. But most mentors couldn't teach their way out of a paper bag, and leave their students to struggle for months on end before any sort of communication occurs. This is wasteful and wrong. Essentially, if you are the cream of teh crop, you'll do well. If you are not, then you won't. I think most people have aptitude to do science, and most people see a benefit for science and technology in our life. I don't think we should throw away 90% of our potential workforce through some sick, ill-defined arbitrary process; and that's essentially what we are doing with the current system.

I got it! The American Brain Tumor Association gives money (fellowships) to people who just finished their PhD (postdoctoral fellows) to work on projects related to brain cancer. So i applied and got it. This won't mean much to me, my salary is already covered. But it means alot to my c.v. (resume) and to my lab, who now has 35k in extra funding (hopefully, unless there is some burocratic thing that i don't know about). So this means we'll have more money for reagents, so we can do more experiments.

From Fox. Is there an oscar in its future?