We had to race across the street to catch Daisy, whose owner was chatting with a friend. Daisy is a four year-old sheepdog/German shepherd mix who eyed us warily as we approached. We had Ben sitting in the stroller, Julia standing on the back and I, croaky with Julia’s transferred chest cold, pushing the whole thing forward. Judging by the reaction of the dog and its humans, I presented something of an odd, disturbing figure as I shambled toward them.
At this point, I realized I’d forgotten my notebook, so I recorded everything on the palm of my hand, which didn’t help appearances. We took our leave and, from Greenwood, we marched up Florence where we met Sherwood and his owner. Sherwood was a big fuzzy retriever mix and, eventually, sat patient for Julia’s photo.
While looping around Mather, we met Pepe, a 10 year-old German shepherd/border collie mix. Pepe sat patiently as Julia took her sweet time getting near. We were having a large-dog day, and the anxiety was building. Julia’s a little dog kind of girl, and the near-licking from Sherwood had put her on guard. Pepe was a good boy, and tolerated us.
Cat interlude.
Nice kitty.
Then we met a puppy NOT of Jenkintown, Callie, a lovely Korean Jindo visiting from West Virginia. Although Callie was Julia-scale, his owner warned that she was a rescue dog from not-so-pleasant circumstances. So we practiced using the zoom feature of Julia’s camera. Then we had a nice talk about shelter dogs.
At last we met Charlie, a bichon pup of indeterminate age. But by that time, I was running out of palm, so that’s all the detail I have.
Pictures courtesy of Julia Rose Lester.
The Telegraph reports finding a 600ft jellyfish crop circle found in an Oxfordshire field.
Kill it!!! Oh, wait…
At the end of the article, the writer oddly refers to an entirely different crop circle from last year, and reuses the quotes from a retired astrophysicist on how THAT crop circle encodes pi.
I had to re-read it to figure out the this reference really had nothing to do with the jellyfish. Bizarre.
Hey, I really like this article over on Astroengine, so let’s make it part of the test.
Why is the term “failed star” synonymous with brown dwarfs? On the one hand, brown dwarfs lack the mass to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores. On the other hand, who said brown dwarfs were trying to be stars? Who ever said that becoming a star was the pinnacle of stellar living? Perhaps brown dwarfs are perfectly happy the way they are. In a world of equality and political correctness, brown dwarfs could be viewed as “over-achieving Jupiters”, or gas supergiants…
It isn’t for the feint of heart, I tried one out before I went to the Dell outlet site and managed to get one refurbished (and less than $200!). The keyboard is tiny, but passable. The only real problem I have is with the misplaced quotation marks button. I also tend to swipe the touchpad by accident, which can be annoying. I’ll end up just using a mouse, I think.
Web browsing is fine, but since space is at a premium, I won’t be collecting my links on their own toolbar.
Not a bad little machine, overall. Certainly a lot lighter than the macbook. It should be a breeze for travel, but I’m not replacing my work desktop or my home laptop.
1) One in seven US teens is vitamin D deficient
One in seven American adolescents is vitamin D deficient, according to a new study by researchers in the Department of Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College. The findings are published in the March issue of the journal Pediatrics and were presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies’ Annual Meeting in May 2008.
2) Not enough vitamin D in the diet could mean too much fat on adolescents
Too little vitamin D could be bad for more than your bones; it may also lead to fatter adolescents, researchers say.
A Medical College of Georgia study of more than 650 teens age 14-19 has found that those who reported higher vitamin D intakes had lower overall body fat and lower amounts of the fat in the abdomen, a type of fat known as visceral fat, which has been associated with health risks such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and hypertension.
The group with the lowest vitamin D intake, black females, had higher percentages of both body fat and visceral fat, while black males had the lowest percentages of body and visceral fat, even though their vitamin D intake was below the recommended levels. Only one group – white males – was getting the recommended minimum intake of vitamin D.
“This study was a cross-section so, while it cannot prove that higher intake of vitamin D caused the lower body fat, we know there is a relationship that needs to be explored further,” says Dr. Yanbin Dong, a molecular geneticist and cardiologist at the MCG Gerogia Prevention Institute.
I came across them when Julia and I went to Target last night, ostensibly to get some last minute item for my dad’s birthday party, but also to let Julia blow off some steam on her favorite activity: lining up the plastic Schleich animals by family grouping.
She takes them down, decides on gender/familial status — if not readily apparent, the animals tend to be highly-detailed, but you never know with the whales or reptiles — and lines them all up in whatever pattern makes sense. Then we’ll admire her handiwork for a bit before putting them away.
While she was doing that, I was looking over the new array of Nerf weaponry at the end of the aisle. I was, of course, in meerkat mode, constantly looking for predators or, more accurately, people who might toss me a tsk for not hovering over my daughter for fear someone would grab her and run.
Still, I was getting tired of admiring the growing parade and, yes, acknowledging the obvious evidence that this or that horse, in particular, was a boy.
The Nerf collection nowadays is impressive. I couldn’t tell you if they still make soft balls (as opposed to the hard plastic ones on the ponies) any more, because all that was in front of me was the military hardware. There are dart gun tag games, sniper rifles and the new 3-rounds-per-second chain gun. And ammo, lots of ammo for kids too lazy to check under the couch.
They have sniper rifles that can reach 30 feet (which is impressive for foam), but the Nerf people apparently feel that the ought to branch out into hand-to-hand combat. The Nerf swords are impressive and pretty much what you’d think: foam with a stiff plastic core. They’re also a little painful.
I whacked myself a few times in the forearm and it didn’t tickle or blossom into flowers. It stung a bit.
I’m not against pain. In fact, I’m all for it in small degrees. Play pain is an important part of childhood, and I’m sure the Nerf swords more satisfactory to kids than the entirely-foam swords in the dress up aisle. They want to inflict pain, if just a little. And, frankly, the lightsabers are a little lacking in the danger-area.
The Nerf swords are a win for kids and their bruising, but I’d be surprised if they last.
In an article published in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that teenagers who preferred popular songs with degrading sexual references were more likely to engage in intercourse or in pre-coital activities.
Already, with the euphemisms. What are pre-coital activities? Heavy petting? Badminton?
Writing in the article, Brian A. Primack, MD, EdM, MS, Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, states, “This study demonstrates that, among this sample of young adolescents, high exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex in popular music was independently associated with higher levels of sexual behavior. In fact, exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex was one of the strongest associations with sexual activity…These results provide further support for the need for additional research and educational intervention in this area.”
If I had known this then, I would have taken extra care in putting together mix tapes for the girls I fancied.
Surveys were completed by 711 ninth-grade students at three large urban high schools. These participants were exposed to over 14 hours each week of lyrics describing degrading sex. About one third had previously been sexually active. Compared to those with the least exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex, those with the most exposure were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse. The relationship between exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex and sexual experience held equally for both young men and women.
Similarly, among those who had not had sexual intercourse, those in the highest third of exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex were nearly twice as likely to have progressed along a noncoital sexual continuum compared to those in the lowest third. Finally, the relationships between exposure to lyrics describing non-degrading sex and sexual outcomes were not significant.
Students reported the number of hours per day that they listen to music and their favorite musical artists. Through a detailed content analysis, the percentage was calculated of each artist’s most popular songs containing lyrics describing degrading sex. An exposure score for lyrics describing degrading sex was then computed by multiplying each student’s hours of music exposure by the percentage of his or her favorite artists’ songs that contain lyrics describing degrading sex.
Oh, OK, I think I found the problem here. They surveyed “711 ninth-grade students at three large urban high schools”…now, I’m no expert on youth culture, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find a song popular among urban high schoolers that wasn’t about degrading sex. Of course kids listen to songs about sex.
When I was a kid, I’d hover over any material, in print, on video or sketched by a 17th c. Dutch Master in the often vain hopes that there would be some sort of sexual content in it. A kid would no sooner pass up a song about deviant sex than they would a Trader Joe’s Vanilla Joe-Joe (Crom, I love them). On the surface, there seems to be some correlation/causation confusion.
And that’s the danger of it. For all I know, this is probably good, legitimate science and there are factors here that just aren’t coming across in a press release. Mark my words, this press release will picked up unedited and regurgitated in news outlets across the land.
It doesn’t help to use phrases like “noncoital sexual continuum” as if that’s a normal everyday figure of speech. What does that mean? It sounds like the leading cause of blindness in teenage Borg. I’m assuming “noncoital sexual continuum” is how we round the bases in science-speak. Does that make it degrading? If so, I don’t know what’s normal.
How do you quantify degrading sexual lyrics, anyway?
“I’m sorry, son, that hip-hop song rates a 6.5 on the Ludacris scale and, well, that’s logarithmic and the logarithm is going to get you. Your mother and I don’t want that sort of thing in the house. You understand? Good, now here’s $20, go see American Pie 7 while your mother and I get our freak on…Gladys, where’s the butter and the Lil Wayne?”
The NIH is slated to get $10 Billion. That’s American dollars and, roughly, three times what they were originally slated to get in the stimulus bill. Thanks to Arlen Specter, that’s not a problem anymore. (Go Arlen, I told all my hyper-Dem friends that he was worth keeping around, for the sake of Pennsyltucky, at least!)
The NIH famously doubled its budget a few years back, but then the budget stabilized and, in fact, failed to keep up with inflation. I have heard said that it would have been better if the doubling hadn’t happened, since so many institutions invested heavily in new programs and infrastructure that a level NIH budget just couldn’t sustain.
So now the question is, I guess, what the hell will they do with all this money? How much of this will go to fulfilling research grants? How sustainable will this be…or should the scientific community just take this and run with it best they can knowing that this will be a one-time respite from their regularly scheduled budget woes?
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