Compensating Organ Donors

I always enjoy reading Sally Satel on the ethics of compensating kidney donors. She has a thoughtful essay on the ethics of bioethicists here.

Some of her other articles more directly about compensating kidney donors are here, here, with more at her website here.

Not a man of parts, but layers…

From Waldo Lee, via Street Anatomy. Check out more of Waldo’s stuff here.

for Beaux Arts Magazine

Creepy-Girl Art

If you’ve been missing images of creepy girls, check out David Ho’s website here.

A couple of samples:

Earth, from his Element 5 series.

And

From his Candice The Ghost series

Or

Another from the Candice The Ghost Series

It’s Okay For Him to Blow Through A Few Trillion in DC

but the president says you shouldn’t spend money in Vegas. The title is stolen from one of the commenters.

from Old Shoe Women on Flickr

Caprica, Two Episodes In

I’m hoping to get past the dopey parts. For example, Daniel Graystone invents some virtual reality network, and goes into military contracting. He’s Tony Stark without the lifelong dedication to Priapus. Then his genius daughter Zoe finds a way to build her own self-aware doppelganger in the holoband, and Daniel discovers this after she’s killed. Somehow both the program that Zoe wrote, and the working doppelganger appear to vanish when he tries to put her into a cylon body. (“appear to vanish,” I like that)

This guy does not understand the difference between the MOVE and the COPY commands? Didn’t he move/copy her onto the flash drive when he hitched a virtual ride with Lacy? What happened to that version?

And Daniel has a protocol droid, Serge, at home, but is having a hard time building a robot that shoots things? Seems like programming a robot as a butler would be a far more complex task than programming one to shoot everything with a target on it. I can make a shooting robot with my Lego NXT and the sensors that come with it.

Amanda Graystone discovers that her daughter was a member of Soldiers of The One, while at a memorial event for those killed in the MagLev 23 bombing, and announces to the crowd that her daughter may have been the bomber? Seems like the instinct for preservation might have kicked in before doing that.

All that aside, I’m enjoying the show. And I was poking around on the Battlestar Wiki and saw that James Marsters (Spike, from BtVS) will be on some upcoming episodes. “His motivations are both moral and carnal.” Frack, yeah. They got the right guy.

Physicists: As Bulletproof in This Economy as Government Employees

Peter Woit, of Not Even Wrong blog and book fame, (if you think YOU hate String Theory…) has a post today about the job market for particle theory physicists. As expected, the number of tenure track positions are down. He remarks that, despite the role that physics-trained quant jockeys played in the debt monstrosity we are suffering from, financial firms are hiring PhD’s in physics.

I like how he skirts the question in the comments of why financial firms that played such a large role in the current economy are one of the few places hiring.

Many wrong-headed ideas are contained in all this. See if you can identify them all. I’m not referring to the picture below.

The reference to government employees comes from this.

from Brian Giberson at Indigo Arts.

More Unverified Assertions Passed Off as Science in IPCC v4

The notion that the Amazonian Rainforest is at increased risk due to global warming – as stated in the IPCC v4 report from 2007 – was taken from a WWF report that was not part of any peer review process. The WWF report was written about forest fires, not the Amazon Basin, and was generated to

“secure essential policy reform at national and international level to provide a legislative and economic base for controlling harmful anthropogenic forest fires.”

This is not in itself a bad thing. Advocacy organizations do this all of the time, and it is completely reasonable for individuals and groups to try to convince others of their viewpoint. And it is true that the Amazonian Rainforest is under threat from clearing for cattle pastures, logging, etc. But the IPCC reports are supposed to present science. The IPCC holds its peer review process up as the gold standard. And there was no peer review to confirm or disprove the assertion that global warming itself threatens the Amazonian Rainforest. This bit of advocacy was included in the same portion of the report as the now-discredited assertions of catastrophic retreat by Himalayan Glaciers.

From Eric A. Litman

I love this quote from Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC, regarding this new information:

“I would like to submit that this could increase the credibility of the IPCC, not decrease it. Aren’t mistakes human? Even the IPCC is a human institution.”

Trust us more because we make mistakes. One does not usually get that effect from this cause. Here is an article about the Rainforest portion of the IPCC report.

Government is Working For You

I knew that government employees were faring better than private enterprise employees, and that government pensions were a looming burden for us all – but this article in Reason really lays out the situation. Plus, it’s nice to have a way to hide from traffic violations. The focus is mainly on California.

Glaciers in the Himalayas, not set to vanish in 25 years after all.

The often quoted alarm that glaciers in the Himalayas will vanish by 2035 turns out to be based on math errors (obtaining a rate of glacial retreat by dividing meters lost by 21 years, instead of the actual period of measurement: 121 years) and lies intended to gain attention from political leaders. Here’s the admission by the author.

Thanks For Stopping By

Sorry for the dearth of posts, I’ve started my teacher certification classes and so my evening activities have been focussed more on reading assignments than writing blog posts. I think I’m adjusting to the new work load and will resume posting something every day or so.

But I see from my traffic meter than folks are still coming by, so thanks!