True's beaked whale.jpg

Western spotted skunk

Hooded skunk

Yellow-throated Marten

Wolverine

Links for April 2015

April 1st, 2015

NPR Enables The Anti-Worker Movement
Economics blog: Beat the Press (Dean Baker)
Purple frog
Ultrasound Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function. pub link. Worth following up in a year
Welfare that the well off get
Medzhitov / Galli theory that allergies are a response to toxic chemicals
Family firms
Survey of gun researchers: having a gun increases your risk

Links for March 2015

March 5th, 2015

Ending the Creditor’s Paradise
First detailed microscopy evidence of bacteria at the lower size limit of life (0.2 um, 1/150th size of an E. coli) (paper)
Best Feminist Books For Younger Readers
Cold-brewed chocolate
A Chladni plate experiment–visualizes complex resonance patterns
Fuse glass in a microwave and metals
Variant annotation: ANNOVAR vs VEP: McCarthy et. al., 2014, pdf, suppl.
Blog post with a comparison: State of Variant Annotation: A Comparison of AnnoVar, snpEff and VEP by Andrew Jesaitis
TIP – Troubles in Paradise (history of creationist argumentation)
The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous–using naltrexone to treat alcoholism
Krugman reports on the Republican budget proposal
A Scientist’s Guide to Citizen Science

Links for February 2015

February 3rd, 2015

Comic: Phoebe and Her Unicorn
Illumina sequencer comparison: XTen, HiSeq 2500, NextSeq 500, MiSeq
NextSeq 500, an odd choice
How fast is your flash? Measuring high-speed flashes
Plans for an air-gap flash
The Infection Schedule versus the Vaccination Schedule by Mark Crislip. Comparing the antigens in a vaccine to the number a person responds to in ordinary life.
Elysium Health (Guarente) has a NAD precursor + sirulin targeting anti-oxidant, $2/day
VAX! A game about epidemic prevention.
Roald Dahl on Olivia, writing in 1988. “MEASLES: A dangerous illness.”
UPC codes for a product, inexpensive from a reseller
USB id for a product, inexpensive from a reseller
NGS machine comparison

2015 Nebula award speculation

Origin of the $ sign

Converting files avi to mp4

Measles vaccine nonsense

February 1st, 2015

I was sent a link to a blog post, “This Mama Isn’t Scared of the Shmeasle Measles” by Megan Heimer.

I’ll run through the post in a minute, it contains a whole lot of nonsense. First, some links to reliable info:
CDC measles info
CDC Manual for Surveillance of VPD: Chapter 7: Measles
Measles week posts by an immunologist

Now, on to the post…

Read the rest of this entry »

Links for January 2015

January 2nd, 2015

Designing The Best Board Game On The Planet: Twilight Struggle by Oliver Roeder
After 10 years, few payoffs from Gates’ ‘Grand Challenges’
the Mincome experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba, 19774-1979
State tax rates 2014
International SAT is Corrupt.
Great Commodore 64 game: The Castles of Dr. Creep (rewrite, description)
Science and the AAAS sell their souls to promote pseudoscience in medicine by Orac, link to Science advert Supplement
Bat hibernation, muted immune response, and aging
More Rotavirus Vaccination Means Less Rotavirus, paywalled article Sahni et al., 2015 in Pediatrics
Cooking charts
Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder review

Links for December 2014

December 8th, 2014

Travel ideas
30 Years of Conservative Nonsense, An Explainer By Kurt Eichenwald
The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare By Matt Taibbi
Japan, Awash in Chaos by Noah Smith
Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture by Robert Bruce Thompson
Why Didn’t Toxic Waste Cause a Cancer Epidemic, Like We Expected in the 1970s?
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
Alientube, Reddit comments on YouTube
Every time zone tool
Vaccines Work
Nanopore Sequencing overview
“Manipulating the Pain: Chiropractic and Other ‘Alternative’ Treatments for Back Pain,” by
Richard A. Deyo

Links for November 2014

November 24th, 2014

Shared DNA / relatedness among close relatives
Analysis of the midterm elections
Climate fiction: When literature takes on global warming and devastating droughts
Origins of BLAST
Charlie Brooks’s kriotherapy leaves me cold
Kryotherapy – Freezing the Balls off a Brazen Quack
Cost of new drug development (and patents), Dean Baker
Officer Darren Wilson’s story is unbelievable. Literally. by Ezra Klein

Modding a Sunbeam heating pad

November 21st, 2014

I bought a Sunbeam heating pad. It has low/med/high settings, and turns off after two hours.
heating pad

The back of the controller says ‘Sunbeam SLA103’.

I wanted to eliminate the shutoff, I’m using it to heat my fermentation bucket.

Read the rest of this entry »

Links for October 2014

October 23rd, 2014

What really undid the Berlin Wall, interview with historian Mary Sarotte
Genome-wide Ancestry Patterns in Rapanui Suggest Pre-European Admixture with Native Americans. Moreno-Mayar et. al., 2014, Current Biology
Russian site has birch scroll in Old Novgorod language, 1000-1400
New Deal projects site with a map!
34 states have governor elections only in off years
Theodore Roosevelt 100 Years Ago, “The people of the United States have but one instrument which they can efficiently use against the colossal combinations of business – and that instrument is the government of the United States…”
Lee Sheppard: Taxes Are A Monetary Instrument

Links for September 2014

September 7th, 2014

Hibernation in Lemurs
N-back memory task trainer
Pot research effectively forbidden in US

Ebola: Christian Althaus of the University of Bern in Switzerland just released a grim new calculation of the RO for this epidemic that finds that when the outbreak began in Guinea, it was RO = 1.5, so each person infected one and a half other people, for a moderate rate of epidemic growth. But by early July, the RO in Sierra Leone was a hideous 2.53, so the epidemic was more than doubling in size with each round of transmission. Today in Liberia, the virus is spreading so rapidly that no RO has been computed. Back in the spring, however, when matters were conceivably controllable, Liberia’s then-small rural outbreak was 1.59.


Egyptian D20

Egyptian D20
Banks control their Federal regulators
Lithium in water supply reduces suicide
Bennett Foddy’s Speed chess: up to 16 players, no waiting
Deep convolutional neural networks significantly improve computer vision in 2012
The destruction of Gary Webb over the CIA/crack history
Most People With Addiction Grow Out of It
Public health funding cut in half over the last decade