Since today is a celebration of St. Patrick, the religious figure who 'drove the snakes out of Ireland' (meaning Paganism), a whole lot of people got drunk last night.  

Yeah, Protestants getting drunk the night before before a Catholic religious festival makes as much sense as anything else about St. Patrick's Day. In addition, kids in California get something magical in their shoes, which puzzles me too. I never heard of that when I was a kid but the rural area I grew up in was a delightful mix of people descended from residents of Scotland and Eastern Europe so there weren't a lot of magical pots of gold lying around - if an Irishman came along asking about our shoes the reply was going to be sent at muzzle velocity. 

In the past few centuries, our understanding of bacteria has progressed from mysterious medieval vapours, to the microscopic "animalcules" of van Leeuwenhoek, to the germ theory of disease à la Pasteur, to the realizations that bacteria outnumber us within our own bodies and that good "probiotic" bacteria actually make us healthier.  Now, a new study seems to have discovered a Batman bacterium.  Well, technically, the bacterium was already well-known; the discovery was to show that this prokaryotic Bruce Wayne is, in fact, Batman.

Due to the insights gained from a decade's worth of viral research, it's not surprising that in the autumn of 2013, Penn State University will offer a newly developed course in viral ecology. For a century, the word virus had been exclusively associated with certain human, animal, plant or computer diseases. Virus, which is rooted in the Latin word for a slimy, poisonous liquid, had nothing but negative connotations. Yet virologists have slowly come to realize that only a minority of viruses are virulent. Most are innocuous, some are definitely beneficial, and others are indispensable to their hosts.

And the obesity wars drone on: it’s the sugar, it’s the fat, it’s the paucity of playgrounds, it’s the prevalence of too-thin models and TV and gaming and chips and texting. It’s the lack of parental discipline and self-restraint.

But wait: what if we accepted that “the environment”--the catch-all phrase for the above--just can’t be changed, or at least not fast enough to make a difference? And what if we just accepted that people will, by and large, continue to do as their genetic backgrounds direct them: eat as much as they can, and move as little as they must?

CMS is one of the two huge detectors built to study the high-energy collisions of protons produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. As all previous collider detectors, CMS is a redundant multi-purpose collection of dozens sub-detector components, which use different physics mechanisms to detect everything that comes out of the collision point, from protons to muons to photons, neutrinos (using the energy imbalance in the calorimeters), neutral hadrons.

Not long ago, we acquired a range of inexpensive storage vessels, ideal for keeping leftovers in the fridge before they go into yours truly, the family dustbin. 

Here is an example: the steel dish is covered by a tight-fitting plastic (presumably polyethylene) lid.  Or it was tight-fitting when we bought it, but some of these lids are now so tight-fitting that they won’t even go on at all, and one or two have split in the attempt to force them on.
 

 

Imagine that you’re a young rat. You’re in the woods, doing rat things among the dead foliage. Suddenly, off to your left, you hear a sound that you've never heard before. It’s loud, it’s strange, and it’s… rattley.

Howard Blume over at “looseendsdotme” in Assisted Suicide for Jumpers provides us with a strange article on my Suicidal Philosophy (which is as yet largely unpublished for reasons that should be obvious).