Cavalcade of Mammals

Steel finish grades: BA, 2BA, 7, 8 are shiny
Proteins designed from scratch in Baker lab Koga et al, 2012
How the immune system works (for non-scientists)
khmer, a general framework for low-memory k-mer counting, filtering, and advanced trickery
the NRA, scheming
Sisu
To Keep and Bear Arms, September 21, 1995, Garry Wills, review of 2nd amendment law
Brief, but damning end of year review of the Washington Post
Massive online open courses, the future of work, and more
Funny, funny book
Perl one-liner tips

Illinois makerspaces/hackerspaces:
Little Bits Workshop in River Forest, Illinois
Wanger Family Fab Lab at the Museum of Science and Industry
Makerspace Urbana in Urbana, IL (webpage broken) See here
Pumping Station: One in Chicago (north side), IL

Making Machinable Wax

GDP: the US is doing better than Europe or Japan:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/11/long-slump

Unemployment: the US doing much better than Europe:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/transatlantic-divergence/

Different economic policies, different outcomes. Europe and Britain have run austerity programs, cutting spending while the US increased spending and cut taxes.

Not unexpected, given what happened during the Great Depression, with the US economy quickly improving as New Deal spending programs kicked in, then falling back into recession after federal spending was cut in 1937 when the economy was still weak:
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009020603/fdr-failed-myth

Obama has done better than any other world leader during the financial crisis and the recession it caused. Not that he’s done super–unemployment is still at 8%. An extra $500 billion of Fed spending until the unemployment rate drops below 6% would be a much better policy than the current US policy to cut spending.

Common passwords
Occupy is having a jubilee
Delta government spending by administration (Rick Ungar, 5/24/12 Forbes)

There’s Already a Center-Right Party
Roman geometric shapes in bronze
Glass frogs from the cloud forests of South America pdf1, pdf2

Fighting over Miss Piggy:

The forgotten recent history of religion and abortion
Fiscal Madness, a summary of the current US budget situation as it relates to the economy
When Congress Busted Milton Friedman (and Libertarianism Was Created By Big Business Lobbyists)
Walmart and the squeeze on the lower middle class
How Damon Runyon Would Have Explained Jon Corzine

Saw in the news that the Seattle Times endorsed for Congress a Repub with ties to the militia/patriot movement–violent right wing nuts. I liberal Seattle has a hard right newspaper, how many cities have a Dem leaning paper left? I realize that Seattle has a big Defense industry economy, but that was my question.

from Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010

I found this graph listing newspapers and giving them a score. I don’t follow enough papers to have a feel for how good a measure this is. I would place the Washington Post on the conservative side of the line, the NYT in the middle (painfully in the middle). Which doesn’t leave many liberal (or even Democratic) big city newspapers–the LA Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Post, San Francisco Chronicle. I don’t know enough about the Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, or Philedelphia Inquirer to have a feel for their content.

(El Niño-Southern Oscillation) ENSO
Mann reviews Nate Silver’s book on climate change Spoiler: skip
Failures of electricity privatization in Australia
Thomas Jefferson’s spurious quotations.
Rusty-spotted cats
Anodizing aluminum
Anodizng titanium
Corn production moving north due to climate change
Great kinetic wood sculptures
Early days of the witch hunt in Hollywood
Inactivity bad for health. Be interesting to see if this holds up in future studies (Wilmot et al., 2012)
The slow destruction of the University of California

More and better bioinformatics software would be nice, I agree!
Hyperinflation
Japanese river otter extinct, last seen 30 years ago
Teacher pay compared to other college grads
Report on US Schools
US schools, better than ever
High power LEDs exist and are fairly inexpensive: 30-50W Luminus Devices PT-54-B-C21-EPA for $30 at Mouser

I went to a panel that discussed gut microbes at Chicon, and had a few ideas for making use of them:

1) Microbes as sensors. Take existing gut bacteria, electroporate in a reporter plasmid, reintroduce orally. The reporter can be a sensor protein hooked up to GFP or an enzyme that acts on a microbial product to make a derivative not found normally in bacteria, and easily detectable and distinguished from normal chemicals in the gut.
1a) Detection can be by examining poop. A souped up Japanese toilet would be the least obtrusive solution.
1b) if the product is fluorescent, detection can be by direct gut imaging, as is done for mice.

2) Introduce GFP producing bacterial into the gut, and use them like barium is used for gut imaging. Imaging would be done using transilluminated epifluorescence microscope or a fluorescence light box
and thermoelectrically cooled CCD camera. By moving the detector and light source around, enough images can be made for low resolution computed tomographic imaging.

3) Introduce gut bacteria that absorb methane. Natural methane absorbing bacteria, normally present in low numbers can be introduced to increase total gut methane absorbtion, or if methane absorbtion happens at low levels, bacteria could be selected to find strains that do it at a higher level. A third option is to engineer normal gut bacteria to have this capability.

Brought to you by Cokie’s Law, an article asks what he’s hiding
New glider found that lives in a Penrose tiling version of Conway’s Life
Digispark, cheap USB dev board
Printcrime by Cory Doctorow
Collection of recession economic stats
Cat ancestry genetic testing

Learning population genetics
Malaysian beetles

Cheap GPS unit
DIY copper rivets for PCBs
DIY through hole plating
Emergency contraception doesn’t prevent implantation: 1 2