Sometimes you set out to test for antibiotics but get a bonus; in this case, diphenhydramine, arsenic, and fluoxetine.
Yikes.
"Contact", Carl Sagan's 1985 novel about man's contact with extraterrestrial life and where it takes us, was, like all good stories, modeled around real characters.
The book was okay but the movie "Contact" had Jodie Foster, who I would contend had the most convincing portrayal of a scientist in film ever, and that made it special. Where did she get her inspiration? The same place Carl Sagan did; from Jill Tarter, the director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute.
I'll tell you a secret a chef told me. That secret is...butter.
There is a reason restaurants that seek to charge the same for 'healthy' fare end up being big flops; people feel cheated eating bean sprouts they can make at their house. No one cares about how much butter is in a dish when they go to a restaurant because it is a night out, a special occasion. Calories are basically unimportant and taste remains supreme. We want to eat something prepared by someone who only cares what we think about its flavor.
Obviously the human body was not designed to eat at a restaurant every evening. If you do that, and you don't exercise, you are going to get fat.
California faces an identity crisis. The financial mismanagement is so well known that late-night talk show hosts make jokes about getting loans...from
Greece. Three years ago,
third world countries like Romania were safer bonds than California but now Greece is better too? That's kind of sad. The tired old 'we will cut important services for show until you vote for tax increases' strategy seems to have petered out. But California wants to continue to buy friendship from the 'green' contingent even as the money runs out.
A cap and trade system for carbon dioxide has been a terrific flop; even proponents are leery that it is just another layer of bureaucracy and the only economic benefits have been of the economic voodoo kind, similar to a federal stimulus package that went primarily to state and municipal union employees were called 'jobs saved' in a brilliant bit of marketing.
Why would anyone want to export that fiasco to another environmental issue? It's academic. Sometimes academic is obviously a good thing; basic research, for example. And sometimes 'academic' connotes 'out of touch with reality', like people in the humanities who try and argue that communism really works, it's just that no one has really tried it.
Helicopter parents rejoice - when you are not slathering on chemicals to make sure your cherubs never get any sunshine and scraping off deadly pathogens with antibacterial soap, you can further protect your offspring by insuring they catch no debilitating diseases from...a garden hose.
Sure, millions of years of evolution and drinking water a lot more polluted than the municipal kind didn't kill humans but our ancestors did not have to contend with evil BPA.
What, you think BPA is just more health scare journalism during slow news weeks when no miracle vegetable stories are available? Why do you hate children so much?
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