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“There’s so much good in the worst of us
And so much bad in the best of us
That it ill behooves any of us
To talk about the rest of us.”
–attributed to several different people

Joseph Albietz, a medical doctor, briefly gives the harm reduction numbers for inoculations against disease.

Thinkoholic has some lovely pictures of Europe, including an Austrian salt mine and ripe walnuts on the tree. Like chestnuts, they form inside a thick, green skin, which dries up and splits open. There are also pictures of Venus fly-traps, lakes, mountains, gondolas, biking through Switerland, and a host of other entertaining subjects.

Q: How many Republican politicians can you fit in the closet?
A: Evidently, all of them.

Thanks to John Marcotte at  Badmouth.com (August 2007):

… At this point, it appears your average public restroom has more gay Republicans in it than clean handtowels. The “holier-than-thou” party has spent an awful lot of time on their knees this past year, but they haven’t been doing a lot of praying.

I have no theories why this is the case, other than I think that being gay is the way God made some people and being conservative is a choice, and almost every Republican I’ve met thinks the opposite.

But why question it? The larger point is that if you enjoy seeing politicians destroyed by their own hypocrisy, it’s been a very, very good year. So I give you the top five republican gay sex scandals of the past 12 months.

The Hubble telescope has taken some distant pictures of star formation. My very basic explanation is below. Follow the link for Alan Boyle’s description of the science behind this new image.

Just as each of us is in the centre of our own personal observable universe, so our earth is in the centre of astronomy’s observable universe. Light travels 186,000 miles per second. The light from our home star, the sun, takes about 9.3 minutes to reach us. The light reflected from planets takes several hours. The light from Alpha Centauri, the next nearest star, takes 4.2 years. So, when we look at distant galaxies, we are effectively looking back in time, at younger and younger objects. Thus, powerful telescopes enable us to see developments of stars and galaxies at different times in the past. Galaxy M83 is 15 million light-years away, so we are seeing it as it was 15 million years ago; and we can’t see it any older.

If we look far enough, we can see first-generation stars. The big bang, a sudden expansion of space-time, produced almost entirely hydrogen and helium, the two lightest atoms. Stars burn by fusion, joining nuclei to release energy and creating heavier atoms. They can continue until they get to iron, which has the lowest-energy nucleus. Creating heavier atoms would use up energy. After it creates iron, a sun’s nuclear fires burn down. Without the energy of fusion to keep it hot, the star collapses inwards because of its own gravity. The energy from gravity smashes iron atoms together and creates heavier atoms.

That’s how we know our sun is a second-generation star: our solar system contains heavier atoms than iron. The atoms in our body have already been through one star’s furnace.