Events

These are kind of cool: Winston Churchill Avenue, Gibraltar's busiest road, cuts directly across the runway. Railroad-style crossing gates hold cars back every time a plane lands or departs. "There's essentially a mountain on one side of the island and a town on the other," Schreckengast says. "The runway goes from side to side on the island because it's the only flat space there, so it's the best they can do. It's a fairly safe operation as far as keeping people away," he says, "It just happens to be...

You really have them: Technically known as the enteric nervous system, the second brain consists of sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of the long tube of our gut, or alimentary canal, which measures about nine meters end to end from the esophagus to the anus. The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system, [says Michael Gershon, chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at New York–Presbyterian...

I'm not even going to bother explaining this.

I remembered one anniversary on the right day but totally forgot another one: ten years ago January 15th, I passed my private pilot checkride.

My corporation, whose name appears on contracts as "Punzun Ltd., an Illinois corporation doing business as Inner Drive Technology," turns 10 today. No, really. The name Punzun Ltd. (a trademark, by the way) dates back to 21 March 1985, when I dreamed it up while drifting off in Mr. Collins' Algebra class. It is, in fact, the only thing I remember from that class, for which I apologize to Mr. Collins.

What if the stimulus package signed into law a year ago today had actually worked? Let’s say this bill had started spending money within a matter of weeks and had rapidly helped the economy. Let’s also imagine it was large enough to have had a huge impact on jobs — employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now. If that had happened, what would the economy look like today? Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now. Because those nice descriptions of the...

Two more items about anthropogenic climate change. First, from NPR this morning Most don't see a contradiction between a warming world and lots of snow. That includes Kevin Trenberth, a prominent climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. "The fact that the oceans are warmer now than they were, say, 30 years ago means there's about on average 4 percent more water vapor lurking around over the oceans than there was, say, in the 1970s," he says. Warmer water means more...

I received three items from the Internets today bringing various threads about the right into perspective. First, a note about Joe the Plumber's frustration with the McCain campaign: "I don't owe him sh*t," Wurzelbacher said. "He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it." "McCain was trying to use me," he said. "I happened to be the face of middle Americans. It was a ploy." Readers will note that one of my long-time criticisms of the right is their pandering to people who want to avoid...

Paul Krugman has a good explanation today why the problems of Spain and Greece come from the ways Europe and the U.S. are different: [T]here’s not much that Spain’s government can do to make things better. The nation’s core economic problem is that costs and prices have gotten out of line with those in the rest of Europe. If Spain still had its old currency, the peseta, it could remedy that problem quickly through devaluation — by, say, reducing the value of a peseta by 20 percent against other European...

Forty nine states have snow on the ground right now thanks to a rash of snowstorms caused, in part, by human-induced climate change (.pdf, 1.8 MB). First, the situation on the ground: The extraordinary rash of snowstorms which have swept the U.S. in recent weeks, many generating record snowfall, have produced one of the country's most expansive snow packs in recent memory. National Weather Service researchers charged with monitoring the country's snow cover and its water content estimated Friday that...