Roman Polanski: Rapist

Let’s see:
Geimer later agreed to a second session, which took place on March 10, 1977 at the home of actor Jack Nicholson in the Mulholland area of Los Angeles. “We did photos with me drinking champagne,” Geimer says. “Toward the end it got a little scary, and I realized he had other intentions and I [...]

Yet more on Honduras

Let’s look at a typical editorial basically supporting the coup in Honduras and compare it to the facts presented here:
He was removed from office three months ago in circumstances of doubtful legality. Both the Supreme Court and the Congress had demanded his removal for “repeated violations of the constitution and the law,” but the way [...]

Water on the moon, the milky way, and a poem

A new report says water has been found on the moon:
From its perch in lunar orbit, M3’s state-of-the-art spectrometer measured light reflecting off the moon’s surface at infrared wavelengths, splitting the spectral colors of the lunar surface into small enough bits to reveal a new level of detail in surface composition. When the M3 science team [...]

New Hampshire Vampires

This is quite old, but I just found this interview of “Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England Vampires”. author and folklorist Michael E. Bell:
When consumption (which is what people used to call tuberculosis that settled in the lungs) took hold in a family, some people in the outlying areas of New [...]

Zelaya back in Honduras

Deposed President Zelaya has appeared back in Honduras (in the Brazilian embassy–no one is sure how he got there (well, he must know)). Obviously this changes the situation. It’s a tough situation, but this statement is not helpful:
“Everyone has been working hard to reach a peaceful resolution to this crisis,” said a senior State Department [...]

Affordable housing

Since I started receiving emails from the BRA about affordable housing opportunities in Boston, I think about it more. I have concluded that the current set up will lead to less affordable housing. Under Mayor Menino the city pushes for projects to have 10 or 20% affordable units which sounds good until you look into it [...]

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and a poem

I finished reading ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’, the reworked classic of Jane Austen (by Seth Grahame-Smith). I liked the idea of the book, but not the actual product.
The reason ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is a classic is that it works at two levels. The first level is a love story where the characters fall in [...]

Another study shows why we need national healthcare

A new study in the American Journal of Public Health  (the NY Times has an older version here) has found (this study uses data, it seems, through 2000–the bold is in the Boston Globe post):
After accounting for age, education, income, and other factors, the researchers found that people without private insurance had a 40 percent [...]

More healthcare stuff

This postby Steve Benen shows why liberals and progressives are so upset at the prospect of losing the public option in the healthcare bill:
I continue to think these are not exactly effective negotiating techniques. Republicans say, “We want explicit language in the bill that would restrict coverage for illegal immigrants.” The White House responds, “You [...]

Jim Carroll and Norman Borlaug

In the last couple of days, two people have died.
Norman Borlaug was a food scientist who:
rose from his childhood on an Iowa farm to develop a type of wheat that helped feed the world, fostering a movement that is credited with saving up to 1 billion people from starvation.
They give part of his speech when [...]

Math and a new poem

Ok, I’m really just linking to a post by Krugman:
What I objected to in the mag article was the tendency to identify good math with good work. CAPM is a beautiful model; that doesn’t mean it’s right. The math of real business cycle models is much more elegant than that of New Keynesian models, let [...]

Placebo Effect

I’m a little slow getting to this, perhaps because I find it fascinating. It seems that the placebo effect is getting bigger. The article has some of the historyof the placebo effect:
In a 1955 paper titled “The Powerful Placebo,” published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Beecher described how the placebo effect had [...]

Overdraft ‘protection’

Hmm, maybe I should look at this:
Ralph Tornes, who lives in Florida, is pursuing a lawsuit against Bank of America for charging him nearly $500 in overdraft fees in 2008 after it rearranged his purchases from largest to smallest. In May 2008, for instance, Mr. Tornes had $195 in his account when he made two [...]

New Hubble

The first set of Hubble photgraphs are now out and here are a couple (the credit for both is: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team). The first is the Butterfly Nebula:

and the second is the barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217, which is the first image taken by the repaired Hubble:

Part 3 of a story and a poem

Today my soon to be epic movie moves on, the start of the story is here (no pictures in this part, so find a picture of a mountain range before you start to read):
Still they looked around. They seemed to be on a plateau near a large body of water. There were a few trees, but [...]

US moves on Honduran coup

It’s taken quite awhile, but Secretary of State Clinton has announced that about $22 million in aid to Honduras has been revoked (or $35 million?). By itself, this isn’t very strong (the aid had already been suspended) but this was added:
The State Department also announced that it was revoking the visas of several people who had [...]

Jacoby: Class warfare only ok for rich

Jeff Jacoby has an article about possible tax increases on the wealthy:
President Obama, who said last year that he would use the presidency to “spread the wealth around,’’ is seeking to raise the top marginal income tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, and to collect even more tax revenue by limiting the deductions [...]