This is old news, and pretty inside baseball for new blog readers, but I would never have guessed who Stephanie Dupont was.
Great stuff, Will. It was hilarious. And kudos to Brian Linse as well, for putting it together. And if you weren’t around, you might want to follow the link from his site to Stephanie’s archives before reading the denouement.
Let’s have a vote. Which is more surreal:
“Wisconsin Man Runs Over, Eats Seven-Legged Transgendered Deer,” or “World’s Tallest Man Saves Plastic Eating Dolphins“?
Boy, the copy editors must have had a blast with those.
That last one is kind of ambiguous. I think that “plastic eating” should be hyphenated. As written, one could interpret it as the man was saving plastic while it was eating dolphins, or that he was saving plastic while he was eating dolphins. Neither of which is the actual story.
I used to have an hilarious book of journalism bloopers, including miswritten headlines. The book’s title was “Milk Drinkers Turn To Powder.” It included the classic from the Jimmy Carter era, on one of his speeches: “More Mush From The Wimp.”
This could be huge. I’d like to see it replicated as soon as possible. Some researchers may have come up with a cure for diabetes. And it’s an unconventional one, out of left field:
Dr. Dosch had concluded in a 1999 paper that there were surprising similarities between diabetes and multiple sclerosis, a central nervous system disease. His interest was also piqued by the presence around the insulin-producing islets of an “enormous” number of nerves, pain neurons primarily used to signal the brain that tissue has been damaged.
Suspecting a link between the nerves and diabetes, he and Dr. Salter used an old experimental trick — injecting capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chili peppers, to kill the pancreatic sensory nerves in mice that had an equivalent of Type 1 diabetes.
“Then we had the biggest shock of our lives,” Dr. Dosch said. Almost immediately, the islets began producing insulin normally “It was a shock ? really out of left field, because nothing in the literature was saying anything about this.”
The only problem I see is that this is worse than stem cells from a human sacrifice standpoint. How many people will a small band like the Hot Chili Peppers be able to cure? Just how much capsaicin can they produce, and how fast?
FAA-AST has finalized their rule making for private crew and spaceflight participants. Happy reading.
This won’t put an end to the humans versus robots debate, but it should.
Via emailer Jon Bossard, who notes:
The argument that robotic missions are far cheaper and more effective than human missions is belied by the fact that, even with more than half a dozen robotic missions to Mars, we still don
Does anyone have any idea why the words “de-vice” and “st0ck” (spelled properly) break the script? It’s hard to even debug a broken script.
From Lileks:
The idea of people sitting at home in sweatpants watching a big TV while shoveling in the Haagen-Daz mortifies the social engineers; they can practically feel the planet wobble on its axis from the cumulative weight of so much freedom and prosperity.
The preferred model for a nice, controlled population is a dense city where your small apartment has a tiny fridge st0cked with bean curd molded into pleasant, food-like shapes. Trains take you to your job, which is either building trains, fixing trains, designing public service posters for trains, cleaning trains or writing software to operate trains. Once a week you’ll pull on your best taupe-hued hemp jumpsuit and take the train to the biweekly Culture Expo to hear something held up to enlightened ridicule (anything’s game, except Islam and Global Warming).
It may sound like hell itself, but at least it’s sustainable.
Makes me want to get in the SUV and head to McDonald’s. And I don’t even like McDonald’s.
Cliff May comments on the inanity of the notion that the problem in Iraq are caused by resentment of foreign occupation:
So when Iraq day laborers are mass-murdered by a suicide bomber, when teachers are taken from their classrooms, lined up and shot
Apparently, Canada is reassessing its future in space:
The federal government has turned down a request by Canada’s space industry to support a contract that would have allowed the companies to build the European Space Agency’s Mars surface rover, CBC News has learned.
The decision stunned the companies and has left the ESA scrambling to find a new partner, as no European firm is adequately prepared to match the technical abilities of Canadian firms to build its ExoMars rover.
This points out once again that government space programs are first and foremost jobs programs. If having the best robotics (which at least in theory might translate into the best science) were really important to the Europeans, they’d simply send CSA the money, and hire them as a contractor. But space development funds are not allowed to cross borders. ESA insists that each government get an amount of work on its projects in proportion to each member nation’s contributions. Now they’ll have to spend a lot of money for one of the European partners to get up to speed, and it will result in schedule delays, cost overruns, and risk of failure, all because (at least) when it comes to space, they don’t believe in comparative advantage.
We will make much more progress on the high frontier when it starts to pay for itself, and management decisions can be made independently of politics.