CalJunket |
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Campus personalities present and past Rebecca C. Brown and Tommaso Sciortino tackle the issues. This week on a very special CalJunket: Rebecca learns not to chew with her mouth open and Tommaso finds out his best friend is addicted to no-doze. Site feed: caljunket.blogspot.com/atom.xml
AIM Rebecca:
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Monday, August 29, 2005
Terrorists at UC BerkeleyThis article details how the mother of Cal's very own student group everyone loves to hate has in fact been labeled a terrorist organization. Now, let me be clear that Bamn in is ineffectual at best and creepy at worst, but unless Bamn has been up to something I don't know about they are most certainly not a terrorist organization.This is a waste of law enforcement time. Here's a hint: if they're trying to get their pictures in the newspaper they probably aren't terrorists. Beat you again, Calstuff! Update: Tightening up my original post. (9) comments |
UC Berkeley rejects scientific relativism
From the LA Times comes this article detailing how our very own UC is standing up to those who believe that biologists should get their knowledge from scientific process and not divine inspiration. (Which is not to knock divine inspiration, just to identify it with its proper sphere).
Basically, some religious right schools are trying to make-believe that students who took a “biology” class using an evolution denying textbook should get as much credit as students who attended bio classes that taught them facts that might actually help them make scientific advancements some day. The UC is putting its foot down and setting firm standards for what students need to know to succeed in biology. The Christian schools are taking the UC to court.
If only the left had a media machine as good as the right stuff like this would get more attention. Bill O’Reilly could stretch an issue like this out for months. Some day… some day.
*snark*I wonder if I this story will get a link from calstuff or if I they only link to stories from the cal patriot nowadays. *snark* Just kidding. I’ll always love calstuff.
Update: Via The Questionable Authority comes these exerpts from one of the books in question:The people who prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second...If...at any point God's Word is not put first, the authors apologize.And this gem:The same encyclopedia article may state that the grasshopper evolved 300 million years ago. You may find a description of some insect that the grasshopper supposedly evolved from and a description of the insects that scientists say evolved from the grasshopper. You may even find a "scientific" explanation of the biblical locust (grasshopper) plague in Egypt. These statements are conclusions based on "supposed science." If the conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.Italics mine. I think I may have been hasty with the calls of scientific relativism. These people just seem to oppose the main tenets of science all together.
(11) comments
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Global warming consequences
A while back during a discussion on Environmentalism, BAD took the brave and original position that global warming wasn’t a big deal even if it did happen. He even argued that it could be beneficial because as certain places became to hot for productive farming, other places would be thawing out. So brave and different from the conservative orthodoxy was this that no less than Dennis Miller took a similar “Hey, if it gets 1 degree warmer every 50 years, big deal” position on the daily show while conservative New York Times editorialist John Tierney argued that global warming could help polar bears. We really do have to hand it to these brave souls fighting against the evil liberal hierarchy while respectfully disagreeing with the conservative spin. Sure, they end up supporting the same policies as Republicans but they do so not with the same old crap we’re fed everyday on TV and radio, but with all new, different crap, which is so stupid that no one has bothered to refute it yet. This allows me to be the very first person to try to debunk the “replacement farms” argument. It’s not a very good argument, but I get to debunk it all on my own.
Forget for a second that the world is spherical and not tube-shaped. Forget for a moment the actual distribution of land on the surface of that spherical earth and how a lot more of it lies where we farm now than where we would be able to farm when it got hotter. Let’s focus merely on the portion of the earth where our country lies. America
Wouldn’t that be bad for our national interests? Would BAD really want to have to buy wheat from Russia China and India
Of course, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but why is BAD willing to risk the employment and industries of his fellow Americans? I can guess at an answer: The only other option is to agree with a liberal. And that is worse than all the beetles eating all the forests in all of Alaska
I think that’s what South Park Republicanism is all about: You don’t have to adopt the Republican position to be accepted, you just have to be hate Liberals. If you absolutely must hold a position similar to that of a liberal like accepting gays, pretend it’s a libertarian position even if they don’t really care too much about it.
(11) comments
Sunday, August 14, 2005
The McDonald's Coffee Lady
Howdy y'all! Just got back from italy and boy are my arms not tired! Also, the rest of my isn't tired either becuase I have jet lag so I hope you all enjoy my 3 in the morning post.
Via Ezra Klien comes this article about how a lot of "wacky jury" court stories are really just urban myths. I say this as a starry-eyed defender of the jury system and a person who has personally argued for the the verdict of Stella Liebeck v. McDonald's against a bunch of Orange county conservatives on their own turf. These jury award tall tales are often used by conservative pundits to push objectivley bad policy. You always find these stories butressing conservative anti-jury anti-patient's rights policy proposals like capping jury awards. These in turn are often put forward as means to bring down medical costs.
No seriously, stop laughing, it's true.
I guess I can see how a political movement might grasp at that straw if their ideology prevents them from contemplating the same solution used in just about every other developed country in the world. That the premium spent on medical insurance doesn't really account for the inefficiencies in the system and that studies show that american malpractice insurance costs don't really go down when such caps are put in place should be enough to convince anyone of the stupidity of capping the amount given to people who have proved in a court of law that a doctor has been neglegent.
And just so we don't have argue with any trolls on this point: I don't think healthcare is a "right". I think we should implement it becuase it's more efficient.
(7) comments
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Let that be a lesson to the residents of Freeborn Hall
I'm sure it's the way he would have wanted to go:
A 28-year-old South Korean man died of exhaustion in an Internet cafe after playing computer games non-stop for 49 hours, South Korean police said Wednesday. ... Lee had been fired from his job last month because he kept missing work to play computer games, police said.
People like this make reading the news worthwhile. Oh, yeah, and people like the president or whatever. Shit, Peter Jennings' lung cancer is the biggest story in the papers right now, and Bush is on vacation, so can you blame me for gravitating toward novelty stories?
(0) comments
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
We have more old people, but not more really old people
When I complain that Americans' fattening diets and sedentary lifestyles are giving us cancer and heart disease, I'm often countered, even by incredibly knowledgable and intelligent people like my mother, that people get these ailments more often these days because people are simply living longer, and thus have a larger window of opportunity to become sick. My intuition of course told me that eating more processed foods and sitting at desks all day makes people unhealthy is quantifiable ways, manifested in, for example, cardiovascular disease rates over time.
So today I actually bothered to do some research on life expectancy and age distribution in the United States in the past century, and naturally I found what I was looking for. Thanks, Google.
This chart contains fascinating data (page 77 of the document, in case the permalink isn't working). Indeed, the US life expectancy at birth has shot up consistently since the McKinley administration. In one century, the aveage lifespan of Americans doubled, from 47.3 years in 1900 to 77.0 in 2000. No surprise there. Simple medicine - antibiotics, fewer deaths during childbirth, less life-threatening disease among children - makes people live longer.
But look down at the life expectancy after the age of 65, and then after the age of 75. From 1950 to 2002, the life expectancy at birth picked up nearly 10 years. In that same timespan, the life expectancy if you made it past 65 went up less than 5 years.
From 1980 to 2002, life expectancy at birth increased 3.6 years; after 65 years old that number is 1.8; and after 75 years old that number drops to 1.1 years.
The point of all this is that as time progresses and technology does too, the medical community is most talented at lowering mortality rates among pre-retirees. There have always been individuals in populations who live to be really old, and everyone past a certain very old age ends up living to about the same age, no matter how spectacular medicine is in their generation. (Hell, Plato lived to be 80; Archimedes croaked at 75.) The top end isn't going up that much over time.
This is relevant to the disease/age argument because most cases of those persistently deadly afflictions like cancer and heart disease occur after the age of 60. Check out page 14 of this report, or page 16 of this one. Cancer and heart disease rates take a massive jump at 60 and 50 years old.
Given that the percentage of the population over the age of 60 remains fairly consistent over the decades, any increase in these diseases among the entire American population is attributable only to environmental factors, and not the fact that there are more old people hanging around. Of course the aging Baby Boomers throw a wrench in this model.
But that blip is not applicable to the mind-blowingly massive increase in heart disease over the last century. Look at the first graph on page 8 of this report. Heart disease deaths go from almost zero in 1900 to roughly the current rate in about 1970, back when Baby Boomers were still hip grad students, but long after processed foods had invaded our diets.
I've never taken a course in statistics, so undoubtedly my analysis of these data contains some errors, but I think at the very least people who claim that more old people are suddenly cropping up in our population should re-examine the evidence.
That's right, Beetle, I'm talking to you.
(5) comments
Friday, August 05, 2005
See, ladies? Cuddling KILLS!
Alright, so this guy is a nut shit.
A man who got angry with his wife because she wanted to cuddle after sex when what he really wanted to do was watch sports on television was sentenced to death for killing her with a claw hammer.
...
Christopher Offord wanted to watch SportsCenter to see clips of a Mike Tyson boxing match.
To be fair, Stuart Scott is really witty.
The irony now (besides the fact that Mike Tyson is also a maniac with no respect for women) is that Offord will have no choice but to cuddle after sex with his cellmates during his tenure in prison. This guy is totally bitch material.
Anyhow, as always, Florida's favorite pasttime of killing murderers solves nothing, nor does it anything to prevent crimes. But it makes people feel like something resembling justice exists, so who cares.
(1) comments
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Droooool...
What's the feminine analog to "boner fuel"?
Chopping wood is so hot.
(My apologies to any grandparents of mine who just read that.)
(0) comments
Global warming consequences
A while back during a discussion on Environmentalism, BAD took the brave and original position that global warming wasn’t a big deal even if it did happen. He even argued that it could be beneficial because as certain places became to hot for productive farming, other places would be thawing out. So brave and different from the conservative orthodoxy was this that no less than Dennis Miller took a similar “Hey, if it gets 1 degree warmer every 50 years, big deal” position on the daily show while conservative New York Times editorialist John Tierney argued that global warming could help polar bears.We really do have to hand it to these brave souls fighting against the evil liberal hierarchy while respectfully disagreeing with the conservative spin. Sure, they end up supporting the same policies as Republicans but they do so not with the same old crap we’re fed everyday on TV and radio, but with all new, different crap, which is so stupid that no one has bothered to refute it yet. This allows me to be the very first person to try to debunk the “replacement farms” argument. It’s not a very good argument, but I get to debunk it all on my own.
Forget for a second that the world is spherical and not tube-shaped. Forget for a moment the actual distribution of land on the surface of that spherical earth and how a lot more of it lies where we farm now than where we would be able to farm when it got hotter. Let’s focus merely on the portion of the earth where our country lies.
Wouldn’t that be bad for our national interests? Would BAD really want to have to buy wheat from
Of course, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but why is BAD willing to risk the employment and industries of his fellow Americans? I can guess at an answer: The only other option is to agree with a liberal. And that is worse than all the beetles eating all the forests in all of
I think that’s what South Park Republicanism is all about: You don’t have to adopt the Republican position to be accepted, you just have to be hate Liberals. If you absolutely must hold a position similar to that of a liberal like accepting gays, pretend it’s a libertarian position even if they don’t really care too much about it.
(11) comments
The McDonald's Coffee Lady
Howdy y'all! Just got back from italy and boy are my arms not tired! Also, the rest of my isn't tired either becuase I have jet lag so I hope you all enjoy my 3 in the morning post.
Via Ezra Klien comes this article about how a lot of "wacky jury" court stories are really just urban myths. I say this as a starry-eyed defender of the jury system and a person who has personally argued for the the verdict of Stella Liebeck v. McDonald's against a bunch of Orange county conservatives on their own turf. These jury award tall tales are often used by conservative pundits to push objectivley bad policy. You always find these stories butressing conservative anti-jury anti-patient's rights policy proposals like capping jury awards. These in turn are often put forward as means to bring down medical costs.
No seriously, stop laughing, it's true.
I guess I can see how a political movement might grasp at that straw if their ideology prevents them from contemplating the same solution used in just about every other developed country in the world. That the premium spent on medical insurance doesn't really account for the inefficiencies in the system and that studies show that american malpractice insurance costs don't really go down when such caps are put in place should be enough to convince anyone of the stupidity of capping the amount given to people who have proved in a court of law that a doctor has been neglegent.
And just so we don't have argue with any trolls on this point: I don't think healthcare is a "right". I think we should implement it becuase it's more efficient.
(7) comments
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Let that be a lesson to the residents of Freeborn Hall
I'm sure it's the way he would have wanted to go:
A 28-year-old South Korean man died of exhaustion in an Internet cafe after playing computer games non-stop for 49 hours, South Korean police said Wednesday. ... Lee had been fired from his job last month because he kept missing work to play computer games, police said.
People like this make reading the news worthwhile. Oh, yeah, and people like the president or whatever. Shit, Peter Jennings' lung cancer is the biggest story in the papers right now, and Bush is on vacation, so can you blame me for gravitating toward novelty stories?
(0) comments
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
We have more old people, but not more really old people
When I complain that Americans' fattening diets and sedentary lifestyles are giving us cancer and heart disease, I'm often countered, even by incredibly knowledgable and intelligent people like my mother, that people get these ailments more often these days because people are simply living longer, and thus have a larger window of opportunity to become sick. My intuition of course told me that eating more processed foods and sitting at desks all day makes people unhealthy is quantifiable ways, manifested in, for example, cardiovascular disease rates over time.
So today I actually bothered to do some research on life expectancy and age distribution in the United States in the past century, and naturally I found what I was looking for. Thanks, Google.
This chart contains fascinating data (page 77 of the document, in case the permalink isn't working). Indeed, the US life expectancy at birth has shot up consistently since the McKinley administration. In one century, the aveage lifespan of Americans doubled, from 47.3 years in 1900 to 77.0 in 2000. No surprise there. Simple medicine - antibiotics, fewer deaths during childbirth, less life-threatening disease among children - makes people live longer.
But look down at the life expectancy after the age of 65, and then after the age of 75. From 1950 to 2002, the life expectancy at birth picked up nearly 10 years. In that same timespan, the life expectancy if you made it past 65 went up less than 5 years.
From 1980 to 2002, life expectancy at birth increased 3.6 years; after 65 years old that number is 1.8; and after 75 years old that number drops to 1.1 years.
The point of all this is that as time progresses and technology does too, the medical community is most talented at lowering mortality rates among pre-retirees. There have always been individuals in populations who live to be really old, and everyone past a certain very old age ends up living to about the same age, no matter how spectacular medicine is in their generation. (Hell, Plato lived to be 80; Archimedes croaked at 75.) The top end isn't going up that much over time.
This is relevant to the disease/age argument because most cases of those persistently deadly afflictions like cancer and heart disease occur after the age of 60. Check out page 14 of this report, or page 16 of this one. Cancer and heart disease rates take a massive jump at 60 and 50 years old.
Given that the percentage of the population over the age of 60 remains fairly consistent over the decades, any increase in these diseases among the entire American population is attributable only to environmental factors, and not the fact that there are more old people hanging around. Of course the aging Baby Boomers throw a wrench in this model.
But that blip is not applicable to the mind-blowingly massive increase in heart disease over the last century. Look at the first graph on page 8 of this report. Heart disease deaths go from almost zero in 1900 to roughly the current rate in about 1970, back when Baby Boomers were still hip grad students, but long after processed foods had invaded our diets.
I've never taken a course in statistics, so undoubtedly my analysis of these data contains some errors, but I think at the very least people who claim that more old people are suddenly cropping up in our population should re-examine the evidence.
That's right, Beetle, I'm talking to you.
(5) comments
Friday, August 05, 2005
See, ladies? Cuddling KILLS!
Alright, so this guy is a nut shit.
A man who got angry with his wife because she wanted to cuddle after sex when what he really wanted to do was watch sports on television was sentenced to death for killing her with a claw hammer.
...
Christopher Offord wanted to watch SportsCenter to see clips of a Mike Tyson boxing match.
To be fair, Stuart Scott is really witty.
The irony now (besides the fact that Mike Tyson is also a maniac with no respect for women) is that Offord will have no choice but to cuddle after sex with his cellmates during his tenure in prison. This guy is totally bitch material.
Anyhow, as always, Florida's favorite pasttime of killing murderers solves nothing, nor does it anything to prevent crimes. But it makes people feel like something resembling justice exists, so who cares.
(1) comments
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Droooool...
What's the feminine analog to "boner fuel"?
Chopping wood is so hot.
(My apologies to any grandparents of mine who just read that.)
(0) comments
Let that be a lesson to the residents of Freeborn Hall
I'm sure it's the way he would have wanted to go:A 28-year-old South Korean man died of exhaustion in an Internet cafe after playing computer games non-stop for 49 hours, South Korean police said Wednesday. ... Lee had been fired from his job last month because he kept missing work to play computer games, police said.
People like this make reading the news worthwhile. Oh, yeah, and people like the president or whatever. Shit, Peter Jennings' lung cancer is the biggest story in the papers right now, and Bush is on vacation, so can you blame me for gravitating toward novelty stories?
(0) comments
We have more old people, but not more really old people
When I complain that Americans' fattening diets and sedentary lifestyles are giving us cancer and heart disease, I'm often countered, even by incredibly knowledgable and intelligent people like my mother, that people get these ailments more often these days because people are simply living longer, and thus have a larger window of opportunity to become sick. My intuition of course told me that eating more processed foods and sitting at desks all day makes people unhealthy is quantifiable ways, manifested in, for example, cardiovascular disease rates over time.
So today I actually bothered to do some research on life expectancy and age distribution in the United States in the past century, and naturally I found what I was looking for. Thanks, Google.
This chart contains fascinating data (page 77 of the document, in case the permalink isn't working). Indeed, the US life expectancy at birth has shot up consistently since the McKinley administration. In one century, the aveage lifespan of Americans doubled, from 47.3 years in 1900 to 77.0 in 2000. No surprise there. Simple medicine - antibiotics, fewer deaths during childbirth, less life-threatening disease among children - makes people live longer.
But look down at the life expectancy after the age of 65, and then after the age of 75. From 1950 to 2002, the life expectancy at birth picked up nearly 10 years. In that same timespan, the life expectancy if you made it past 65 went up less than 5 years.
From 1980 to 2002, life expectancy at birth increased 3.6 years; after 65 years old that number is 1.8; and after 75 years old that number drops to 1.1 years.
The point of all this is that as time progresses and technology does too, the medical community is most talented at lowering mortality rates among pre-retirees. There have always been individuals in populations who live to be really old, and everyone past a certain very old age ends up living to about the same age, no matter how spectacular medicine is in their generation. (Hell, Plato lived to be 80; Archimedes croaked at 75.) The top end isn't going up that much over time.
This is relevant to the disease/age argument because most cases of those persistently deadly afflictions like cancer and heart disease occur after the age of 60. Check out page 14 of this report, or page 16 of this one. Cancer and heart disease rates take a massive jump at 60 and 50 years old.
Given that the percentage of the population over the age of 60 remains fairly consistent over the decades, any increase in these diseases among the entire American population is attributable only to environmental factors, and not the fact that there are more old people hanging around. Of course the aging Baby Boomers throw a wrench in this model.
But that blip is not applicable to the mind-blowingly massive increase in heart disease over the last century. Look at the first graph on page 8 of this report. Heart disease deaths go from almost zero in 1900 to roughly the current rate in about 1970, back when Baby Boomers were still hip grad students, but long after processed foods had invaded our diets.
I've never taken a course in statistics, so undoubtedly my analysis of these data contains some errors, but I think at the very least people who claim that more old people are suddenly cropping up in our population should re-examine the evidence.
That's right, Beetle, I'm talking to you.
(5) comments
Friday, August 05, 2005
See, ladies? Cuddling KILLS!
Alright, so this guy is a nut shit.
A man who got angry with his wife because she wanted to cuddle after sex when what he really wanted to do was watch sports on television was sentenced to death for killing her with a claw hammer.
...
Christopher Offord wanted to watch SportsCenter to see clips of a Mike Tyson boxing match.
To be fair, Stuart Scott is really witty.
The irony now (besides the fact that Mike Tyson is also a maniac with no respect for women) is that Offord will have no choice but to cuddle after sex with his cellmates during his tenure in prison. This guy is totally bitch material.
Anyhow, as always, Florida's favorite pasttime of killing murderers solves nothing, nor does it anything to prevent crimes. But it makes people feel like something resembling justice exists, so who cares.
(1) comments
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Droooool...
What's the feminine analog to "boner fuel"?
Chopping wood is so hot.
(My apologies to any grandparents of mine who just read that.)
(0) comments
See, ladies? Cuddling KILLS!
Alright, so this guy is a nut shit.A man who got angry with his wife because she wanted to cuddle after sex when what he really wanted to do was watch sports on television was sentenced to death for killing her with a claw hammer.To be fair, Stuart Scott is really witty.
...
Christopher Offord wanted to watch SportsCenter to see clips of a Mike Tyson boxing match.
The irony now (besides the fact that Mike Tyson is also a maniac with no respect for women) is that Offord will have no choice but to cuddle after sex with his cellmates during his tenure in prison. This guy is totally bitch material.
Anyhow, as always, Florida's favorite pasttime of killing murderers solves nothing, nor does it anything to prevent crimes. But it makes people feel like something resembling justice exists, so who cares.
(1) comments
Droooool...
What's the feminine analog to "boner fuel"?
Chopping wood is so hot.
(My apologies to any grandparents of mine who just read that.)
(0) comments