Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
University of Washington researchers have developed a computer game that folds proteins. Yes, really.
Protein folding is a tough problem. You’ve got this long chain of amino acids, and somehow they come together to take on a particular shape. And they do this every time a cell produces the protein. You’d think that a […]

By Thoreau
I’m sure that Claire is dead. Maybe she died after being lured to Jacob’s cabin. Maybe she died in the attack on The Others’ Village and what we saw for the last 2 episodes was her ghost. Or maybe she died in the plane crash and what we’ve been seeing the […]

By Thoreau
I just got an email from the top student from my grad school research group.  He’s now a professor at a very prestigious research university.  And he just emailed me with a research question.
And I think I can solve the problem.

By Thoreau
Today at Hit and Run, they link to an article by Steve Chapman regarding McCain and Iran.  I’ve had my issues with some of Chapman’s columns on economic matters, but on foreign policy he makes some points that are as salient now as they were in 2003.
Amid all the war hysteria, it was easy […]

Spencer Ackerman on the wages of torture.

By Thoreau
Ever worry that it’s a bad idea to beam radio signals into space in hopes of making contact with aliens?  Ever worry that they might take those radio signals as an invitation for some interplantary pre-emptive democracy-building?  Well, fear no more:  If aliens detect our electromagnetic transmissions, the signal they’re most likely to detect […]

Tim F. explains the economics of bombing "training camps" in Iran or elsewhere:
If training camps are anything like the ‘training’ or ‘camps’ that I’ve seen those places are mostly dirt with targets set a long distance away from the muddy spots where people kneel to shoot at them. Obstacles are made out of unpainted plywood […]

By Mona
In the process of researching a totally unrelated (I swear!) topic, I ran into this:
There has not been a scientifically definitive physiology of female anatomy until quite recently but strange images from its ambiguous history still haunt the common imagination and impact on women’s self image. None is stranger than […]

By Thoreau
Nice article on why the brain takes so much energy and what it does with it.
It’s worth noting that TSA screeners require far fewer calories than the rest of us

Roger Kaplan’s "argument" that we seize "the oil fields" in the American "Spectator" today is a whole "tree" full of presents for the connoisseur of meanness and "idiocy" on your "guest list." I particularly enjoy the unselfconsciousness that lets him include the following in his article:
Let the stupids talk to the stupids . . . […]

Gareth Porter unredacts part of the classified war plans from late 2001 quoted in Doug Feith’s new book:
Rumsfeld’s paper was given to the White House only two weeks after Bush had approved a U.S. military operation in Afghanistan directed against bin Laden and the Taliban regime. Despite that decision, Rumsfeld’s proposal called explicitly for postponing […]

I’ve got a couple new, campaign-related pieces on The Art of the Possible, including my Indiana and NC predictions, and a couple of older pieces way down below the monumental Glenn Greenwald interview Mona linked to yesterday. My plan this week is: I want you reading AOTP anyway; so between now and Friday, I’m not […]

By Thoreau
The unstoppable juggernaut that is the Ministry for State Security is bound and determined to protect America from a dire over-supply of construction workers, for fear that any one of them might secretly be plotting to scam Osama Bin Laden.  (Only in America would that be a crime.)
However, they’ve run into a snag:  The […]

By Thoreau
Even a TSA screener.
Look, it would be one thing if the only people able to get guns past the TSA were the super-secret ultra-skilled undercover inspectors (and I’m sure that they’re ultra-skilled because otherwise the feds would never, ever hire them!). But apparently getting a gun past the checkpoint is so easy that […]

In this blog’s continuing quest to shake your sense of the world to its very foundations, I notify you that a New York Post film critic, writing in Pajama’s Media, laments Iron Man’s anti-Americanism. In comments on Julian Sanchez’s site, who provides our via, old friend of the blog Franklin Harris writes
I picture the neoconized […]

By Thoreau
The point of the lab was to characterize a meter.
Lab instructions: 1) Setup your circuit so that when the voltage measured over here is 3V, the needle on that meter is at its maximum reading. Get that? Needle at max means 3V over there.
2) Turn down the voltage over […]

By Mona
At Art of the Possible, we are delighted to have cadged an interview with Glenn Greenwald. Tickler:

GG: I think that many liberals have become much more skeptical of government power and the notion of trusting government leaders as a result of the abuses of the last eight years. Obviously, there are […]

The Stiftung is right: the Grady Hendrix piece on Iron Man the icon in Slate is almost cosmically bad. It’s like, if you uttered the words "state capitalism" at Hendrix he would gape like anal porn. Wha-? State Wha-?
Reed Richards might have been the Objectivist avatar five-minutes’ web surfing has deceived Hendrix into thinking Stark […]

By Thoreau
Delaware is opening the very first charter high school devoted to preparing students for careers in Fatherland Security.  Yeah, good luck getting kids to attend a school where you can’t bring soda or other liquids into the lunch room.
OTOH, the curricular option in “professional demolition” should be useful for the FBI’s efforts to grow […]

By Thoreau
As I mentioned, somebody from the Ministry for State Security decided to show up and debate us. Some of the most interesting things that our good comrade had to say were:
1) “We know all kinds of stuff, man.”
What I am, however, is on the inside; I know things you don’t. I know […]