Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Various Things

1. Via Ego we read,
"When we put forward the view that respect for human freedoms and rights were lacking in Cuba, it led to a furious outburst from the Cuban ambassador about Sweden's blood, colonialism, imperialism, Vikings and oppression and so on and
so forth. We have said that this is an unacceptable use of language," said Bildt.
The Swedes make the rather understated criticism that human rights are lacking in Cuba, and the Cuban ambassador responds by bringing up the Vikings? You can’t make this stuff up.

Next we’ll have demands from the Native Americans that Scandinavians apologize for invading Vinland 1,000 years ago.

2. Before Stephen Speicher died I knew his condition was not good when it was reported that his heart had suffered so much damage that he needed a heart transplant. So many people survive heart attacks that sometimes I forget how serious they can be. A piece in the New York Times looks at the lessons of heart disease.

The key to minimizing heart damage seems to be rapid response. My father and my best friend’s father both died of heart attacks in their 50’s, and both men ignored the symptoms. Had they gone to the hospital when they first felt angina, how much longer would they have lived?

3. It looks like Grindhouse is a bomb. Could it be because a woman with a machine gun for a leg is just stupid?

4. Red dwarfs seem to have hot Neptunes, but not hot Jupiters. Soon they will find Earth-like planets in the habitable zone. “[T]he detection of an Earth-like planet in the closer habitable zone of an M dwarf is actually within reach of today’s best spectrographs.”

This red dwarf is only 14.67 light years away. Traveling at .1c, which is 10,000 faster than any manmade object traveled in the 20th century, astronauts could get there in just 146.7 years, not counting time for acceleration and deceleration.

5. "U and Dat" by E-40 Featuring T Pain – is E-40 Featuring T Pain a rap artist or a motor oil?

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