Protected: Portrait
Monotheism doesn’t necessarily mean sending all non-believers to hell
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
The image of the olive tree in [certain Koranic] verses has been interpreted as an allusion to the continuity of revelation, which springs from one “root” and branches into a multifarious variety of religious experience that cannot be identified with or confined by any one particular tradition or locality: it is neither of the East nor the West
What I’ve Been Listening To
What I’ve Noticed
Dollhouse is over. It was a great show.
When Americans say they want to cut NASA’s budget, they think they’re talking about a budget of more than 600 billion instead of about 15 billion.
Female orgasm described as ‘abhorent’ and banned on film in Australia along with small breasted women. Unsurprisingly, the standard does not apply to male orgasms or small penises.
Homoerotic subtext isn’t enough:
I want those main characters to fall in love and make out because it means that fans of their characters will have to come to terms with their gayness, exactly like they would have to do in real life. It’s one thing to start out a book … introducing your main characters as gay from the start. Because from the outset the reader knows, the reader can choose whether they approve, or tolerate, or whatever. They can put that book down and walk away.
But reality doesn’t let you choose. Reality is when your best friend turns to you and says, “the thing is, I’m gay,” and your entire world turns upside down.
The phenomenon of mansplaining; I am never sure whether to laugh at or smack the men that do this.
Women today aren’t more promiscuous than 60 years ago. They just don’t have to hide it.
This is what my favorite used bookstore/cafe looked like after the 3rd day of snow. Then it snowed 2 more feet and flooded the place.
Pirates buy more music. The only music I don’t buy is music from labels in the RIAA.
We know remarkably little about soil, so very cool and basic discoveries happen all the time. We just figured out that we were very wrong about which water is where when in the soil.
Suicide is labeled the #1 cause of death among Nepalese women. A better label would probably be sexism or oppression.
Late term abortions in America are almost impossible to get and very dangerous to perform, despite their legality.
Toxification of our environment is a much more serious issue than most people realize. This is just a little too close to A Handmaid’s Tale for comfort.
Michele De Lucchi
Transportation costs associated with sprawl probably contributed to the mortgage crisis.
Ghandi may have been good for India, but he was horrible for women.
Disgusting things like this are why mandatory partner notification for abortion is a bad, bad idea.
Left to my own devices, I never would have been raped. The rapist was really the key component to the whole thing. I was sober; I was wearing sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt; I was at home; my sexual history was, literally, nonexistent—I was a virgin; I struggled; I said no. There have been times since when I have been walking home, alone, after a few drinks, wearing something that might have shown a bit of leg or cleavage, and I wasn’t raped. The difference was not in what I was doing. The difference was the presence of a rapist.
Senator Jim DeMint: If we have the government making decisions about the most personal and private part of our lives, it is so naive to think that that coverage is not going to include a number of things that cause people of faith a lot of heartburn, whether it's funding abortions, whether it's rationing care, whether it's funding medical marijuana, whether it's euthanasia
Archeopteris
Archaeopteryx
You’ve likely seen or heard about Archaeopteryx, a very important transitional fossil showing the connection between birds and dinosaurs. (Isn’t it annoying that ID folks and creationists claim no transitional fossils exist no matter how many are found?) Archaeopteryx is pretty darn cool – it’s got feathers AND dinosaur teeth and claws. Archaeopteryx is slightly scarier than the average chicken.
By now you’re thinking I’ve misspelled the title of this post. Archeopteris isn’t a typo – it’s another fossil, and one I think is much cooler than Archaeopteryx, even if its Wikipedia page is quite a bit less developed. The names are similar because Archaeopteryx has feathers and Archeopteris has leaves that reminded some paleobotanists of feathers.
Archeopteris frond detail
Archeopteris is one of the oldest known plants with wood. Wood was a big deal in plant evolution. Without it, plants can’t get very tall. While Archeopteris had wood like a conifer, its leaves were similar to both ferns and conifers.
One thing that really sets it apart from woody plants today is that it made spores.* Today, only the oldest lineages of plants, like ferns and moss, make spores. All living woody plants are seed plants.
This is an artist’s rendition of Archeopteris. Archeopteris wood and leaf fossils were at first thought to be from separate plants.
- important clarification from The Phytophactor in the comments: “but seed plants make spores, microspores and megaspores, the former disperse as pollen, an endosporic male, and the latter as part of a seed. Carefully cut open a pine nut to expose an embryonic conifer, the surrounding tissue is an endosporic female that developed from a megaspore. Presumably Archaeopteris dispersed both prior to fertilization, i.e., like Selaginella.”
December Migraine Data
I’ve been keeping track of barometric pressure in order to get a better idea of how it influences my migraines. I believe that fast and/or large pressure changes are probably triggering many or most of my migraines. Below are graphs of barometric pressure throughout December when I did and did not have a migraine. I did not look at the barometric pressure every day, so not all days are represented. Days when I was well are particularly underrepresented.
Time is on the x-axis and barometric pressure (hPa) is on the y-axis.
On these days, I did not have a migraine at the time the data was plotted. However, on two of the days (highlighted in red) I got a migraine later in the day. On December 31st, I had a headache, but it was not a migraine. Click for larger view.
I did not look at pressure on enough days when I did not have a migraine to really determine if small or gradual pressure changes and steady pressure do not trigger my migraines. I would have expected to have a migraine the night of December 31st if fast pressure changes gave me migraines. Perhaps they were too small or I slept through the migraine.
These are graphs of barometric pressure on days I did have migraines. The day highlighted in green is a day that triggers other than pressure were present. Red highlighting corresponds to days in the "no migraine" picture where I began the day without a migraine, but developed one later on. Purple indicates days that I began with a migraine and it became more severe. Click for larger view.
Fast pressure changes are certainly associated with many of the days that I had a migraine, but not all. The pressure changes on December 2nd and 5th seem slow and gradual. December 10th’s pressure changes also did not seem that extreme. Yet I still had migraines. December 2-10 I was frantically working on papers and studying for finals, so perhaps I was more stressed than I thought and that triggered those migraines.
It’s possible that pressure change only causes migraines for me or is more likely to cause migraine for me in conjunction with another trigger, or that they aren’t related at all. I’ve been trying to do a better job of keeping track of pressure and my migraines this month, so hopefully January’s data will be more helpful. More data on my migraines in the archives.