My Quiet Life

I was pretty impressed with myself for getting as far south as the Bahamas a few years ago, but my friend Lauren has got me beat.

He's in the final stretch of a stint in Antarctica, working on TIGER:

The Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (TIGER) is a balloon borne instrument designed to measure the elemental abundances of Galactic Cosmic Rays. Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) are energetic atomic nuclei that originate from outside our solar system and are believed to be accelerated by exploding stars (supernova) to extremely high energies. These nuclei have been detected and measured at earth by a variety of ground, balloon-borne and space experiments.

GCRs are of particular interest to the astrophysics community since they are one of only two types of matter that can be directly sampled from outside the solar system (the other is extra-solar dust grains found in certain meteorites). They serve as a probe of the galactic cosmic ray source and the interstellar medium within our galaxy.

Sounds pretty cool, and completely over my head. Unbeknownst to me, this entire time, he's been keeping a journal. Check it out. It makes for some interesting reading.

The top story on Yahoo! news is a "Big Story" about Atkins and heart risks. Yesterday, a story warns:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A nutrition advocacy group warned on Thursday that the popular Atkins diet may cause heart disease and could have killed a teen-age dieter

Wow. That's pretty a pretty powerful discovery -- it must have taken years of research! Their methodology?

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine stressed it could not prove the diet had hurt or killed anyone. But one dieter said he believed the approach clogged his arteries and the parents of a teen-ager who died while on the diet also blamed her meat-heavy regimen.

Uh huh.

Another story today cites another claim of serious problems with the Atkins diet:

Gorran says the diet gave him heart disease, and he believes he can prove it. A heart scan conducted six months before he started the diet showed no evidence of the plaque or calcification routinely seen in people with heart problems. But after two years on the Atkins diet he had developed angina and had a 99% blockage in a major artery.

Has this guy never heard of post hoc ergo propter hoc? He believes he can prove it?! Gee, if only there were a rigid, defined process for determining these sorts of things that relies on control groups and empirical data. Some sort of .. "method" .. that we could use for "science". Oh well, I guess we'll have to rely on this one guy that got heart disease. False alarm, folks -- back to your low-fat feeding troughs. Nothing to see here.

So, I was planning on switching banks from First Tennessee to Suntrust because of First Tennessee's horrendous online banking and their draconian overdraft charges. But lo and behold, tonight, I notice an impressive new feature on First Tennessee's online banking that nearly convinced me to stay:

"Wow, all these years I have been trying to change my account balance the hard way!", I thought.

Much to my dismay, though, it only lets you edit the account name. Alas. Back to switching to Suntrust.

Over at Lean Left, Kevin points at an interview on Fox News with Gen. Wesley Clark (click here for a link right to the WMV), where he lays the smack down on a Fox News anchor who was trying to twist his words.

Clark really impresses me under fire (I guess that's part of being a military man). Watch this clip and tell me that the prospect of a Clark/GWB debate doesn't make you giddy. Clark would make him cry for his mommy.

Say Uncle has a post about a gun control convert that has me thinking about it.

I once had no particular stake on either side, but I did read an excellent article in the Brown Journal of World Affairs by David Kopel that made an amazing case at least for the futility of international gun trafficking controls, which got me thinking about this all. I can only find it here in PDF, unfortunately. I'd recommend reading it. It makes some good points. It also tells the interesting story of Bougainville. While I don't think a small island in the south pacific makes exactly the best case study to analyze the effects of gun control, it's still interesting.
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Billionaire George Soros announced today that he is donating $0.50 for every dollar raised by moveon.org for their voter fund -- an attempt to raise $10 million for ads to run in swing states where GWB holds a lead. Choice quote of the day goes to Soros:

"If someone guaranteed it."
- GEORGE SOROS
Asked if he would become poor to beat Bush.

While George Soros, or "Saint George" as he is sometimes known, has certainly secured his place in the upper echelon of wealthy philanthropists with the likes of Andrew Carnegie, some wonder about the methods by which he acquired his vast wealth, and its social and economic implications on the world -- implications that he himself acknowledges.
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Seeing as how I just deleted 2 pages of a post by accidentally closing Opera, I will present this handy tip, first:

Ever accidentally close your browser with CTRL-w? UNIX users are used to C-w being "delete word", but it has other, unfortunate bindings by default in other applications, Opera included.

Luckily (but too late), I just discovered you can turn that off in Opera 7.21 (perhaps earlier):

Go to File -> Preferences -> Mouse and keyboard

Under "Keyboard setup" click "Edit". In the "quick search", search for "close". There you have it -- the various bindings for Close page, Close window, etc. I deleted them all. When i close my browser I want to mean to close it.

Damn, I think Bob Herbert one-upped Krugman, on the economy no less, in his NYT op-ed today, addressing the growing culture of debt:

Borrowing, whether by the federal government or individual consumers, has become the preferred (perhaps only) way to make ends meet. What's been driving this so-called red-hot economy is not the solid growth in jobs and wages that is essential for a flourishing middle class, but an orgy of refinancing and an irresponsible mixture of tax cuts and federal spending that is creating monster deficits. In short, we're mortgaging the nation's future.

Amen!

Not that Krugman hasn't been a broken record on this front, but Herbert does a good job here with some eloquent and forceful phrasing.

From http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/11/07/MNG4Q2SEAM1.DTL:

Two of the three major credit-reporting agencies, each holding detailed files on about 220 million U.S. consumers, are in the process of outsourcing sensitive operations abroad, and a third may follow suit shortly, industry officials acknowledge for the first time.

Privacy advocates say the outsourcing of files that include Social Security numbers and complete credit histories could lead to a surge in identity theft because U.S. laws cannot be enforced overseas.

That's okay, I never really liked my current identity anyway.

For their part, the credit agencies say the trend is a necessary cost- cutting move in light of new legislation that would allow all consumers to obtain free copies of their credit reports.

It's true! Just this morning, I saw the CEO of Equifax panhandling for change down at the Exxon on the corner.

They have really been hit hard by being strongarmed into allowing people to view information collected about themselves in order to exploit them commercially! Hold on, let me get out my World's Smallest Violin, etc.

</vitriolic sarcasm>

Looks like the Nashville Public Library now has an online library card application.

This is great news. If you haven't been to the new downtown branch of the library, first, shame on you, and second, get a library card and go check it out. It's an amazingly beautiful building. Next time you compulsively type "www.amazon.com" into your browser to check on some new book you heard about, maybe try "www.library.nashville.org" first and save yourself some money.