Monthly Archives: April 2011

Fewer Jesuits, but the Jesuit perspective is spreading successfully, says reporter Michelle Boorstein 0

Her article is worth reading for those with a sense of history and/or an interest in spiritual matters The Jesuit order occupies an energetic niche of unorthodoxy within the Catholic Church. Washington Post reporter Michelle Boorstein wrote that Jesuits are disappearing from the Washington D.C. area (and the developed world generally), but their philosophy is [...]

Your virus buddies and you 0

Viral companions Bacteria being part of “us” (with a significant proportion contributing to our welfare) has hit mainstream media, but its viral equivalent not yet. Last month, Science had this to say about our viral ecology: For a start, the variety and sheer number of viruses that inhabit us put our bacterial companions to shame. [...]

Dramatic food-web changes in Lakes Michigan and Huron show the surprising power of invasive species 0

Think about the huge volume of water that these invasive mussels are affecting Zebra and quagga mussels are non-native introductions to the Great Lakes.  They feed on algae in the water and are depleting the food supply for native fish species, as well as everything else that depends on the algal supply: The blitzkrieg advance [...]

Language and nuclear disaster — the Japanese language’s use of honorifics may reveal a parallel tendency to defer taking charge 0

Is our barbarians’ English better suited to efficient, emergency communication? Read what Minae Mizumura said in regard to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster: One unlikely side-effect of the Japanese crisis has been a new critique of our use of honorifics. One tends to associate honorifics with social hierarchy, but they play another critical role: they [...]

Battling the Greedy Right with humor 0

Look at Tom Tomorrow’s “Language Is a Virus” cartoon http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/11/965457/-Language-is-a-Virus?detail=hide

Cost benefit analysis apparently encourages people to postpone church involvement in societies with long life expectancies 0

Judging by its abstract, this paper might be interesting Elissaios Papyrakis and Geethanjali Selvaretnam said: The paper analyses religiosity through a cost-benefit framework, where decisions at each point in time depend on expected social and spiritual benefits attached to religious adherence (both contemporaneously, as well as in the afterlife), the probability of entering heaven in [...]

A probable source of recurring Nipah virus outbreaks in Bangladesh traced through bats to date palm sap 0

Nipah virus kills about 75 percent of the people it infects in Bangladesh and leaves many survivors with severely damaged neurological systems Researchers early on traced the virus’ vector to fruit-eating bats, but the natural source of their recurring infections escaped detection. Epidemiologists discovered that at least some of the deceased had drunk raw date [...]

Ever wonder about how best to apply liquid manure in a productive, yet environmentally protective no-till way? — A mathematical model, verified against field research, shows that shallow disk injection is best 0

I think about this every time I fertilize my sloping, concrete-hard lawn Fertilizer and manure are prime contributors to water pollution, so the mechanics of dosage, application, and runoff are significant. Al Rotz and colleagues did computer simulations on three different kinds of farms to come up with an answer, insofar as liquid manure from [...]

Whale and dolphin mortality after Deepwater Horizon oil spill was probably much higher than previous (abysmally dumb) estimates 0

When self-interest calls, it is easy to park our brains in delusion’s soothing space My guess is that I could ask a beach-living 10-year old whether she thought that humans would be able to recover every carcass of deceased dolphins and whales in the Gulf of Mexico, and get the appropriate “no” response. Cetacean carcasses [...]

We’re going to declare that regular coffee and a fatty meal are bad for glucose tolerance based on a study of only 10 men? 1

The drama These findings will probably surface in the news media as if they have actionable meaning: These results show that oral consumption of lipids and caffeinated coffee can independently and additively decrease glucose tolerance. Incretin hormones could explain at least in part this impaired glucose homeostasis. © 2011 Marie-Soleil Beaudoin, Lindsay E. Robinson and [...]