Here's what I don't get about the Colorado "definition of person" thing:

If a fertilized egg were to be defined as a person -- presumably in order to define abortion as a form of murder -- then wouldn't that also define miscarriage as a form of manslaughter?
read more...

Here's what I don't understand about the gay marriage debate:

1. Are there any salient legal differences between heterosexual civil marriage and a homosexual civil union other than the name?  Can two people in a civil union file their federal income tax as married?

2. In this modern day, why is the government even involved in (heterosexual) marriage ( Read more... )

There's a relationship between daylight savings switchover days and heart attacks.  The scientist guesses that more sleep and/or regular sleep patterns help prevent heart attacks, and that less sleep and/or irregular sleep patterns cause more heart attacks.
More heart attacks in the week after losing an hour and fewer in the week after gaining an ( Read more... )

A subsequent revision of the oversized pecan pie has been mentioned in the New York Times.

(via beetree)
read more...

Keep still, you!

read more...

I got my first figlet spam today.  The spammer didn't choose a very legible figlet font.  Still, I thought it was clever. Dan Egnor's unfiglet script-merely a funny joke back then-actually needs to be written for real now. I bet the gmail people already have one.

Previously
read more...

Curious about the Google App Engine, I started playing with it, which meant writing code in Python.

Unicode support in Python seems to be a tangle of confusing function names, source code file encodings, backslash escapes, the letter "u" before strings, and probably other things. Together, this smells to me like the language originally didn't ( Read more... )

Guard in front of Tian An Men

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China

中国北京市天安门广场
read more...

A typical automobile accident in China, and typical dispute resolution: people stand around and discuss or argue until some agreement is reached.  Crowds gather, bystanders start piping in...

Shangri-La, Yunnan, China

中国云南迪庆州香格里拉
read more...

There are two puppies left, out of the litter of five. Tiny #1 and Tiny #2 died the afternoon and evening that Zhuoma left for Weixi, which was the day after Jumbo had suddenly ballooned to about 3x their size. I think they got out-competed for milk.

Small died two nights ago. I had been trying to micromanage him into living the two days previous to ( Read more... )