Happy 4th of July All!

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:42 PM | Comments (417)
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This reddit thread is f'n hilarious. NSFW for some R-rated text.

Here's a small sample:

My husband gave me permission to post this: He went in for back surgery and in pre-op, they asked him if he was allergic to any medications. He said that he had an intolerance to keflex, an antibiotic, which caused him gastrointestinal issues. The surgeon said that they were going to try to use keflex anyway, since he didn't have a true allergy . With him having back surgery, he had to be on his stomach with his ass in the air. Apparently, in the midst of surgery, my husband shit all over himself and the surgical team. He woke up towards the end of the surgery to a horrid smell and the nurse saying, "Well we should have listened to you!"

TL;DR My hubby became a shit volcano in the OR.

Tons more just like it at the link.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:45 PM | Comments (161)
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A round of Nobel Prizes, please. (The good kind, the top-shelf variety.)

For physicists, evidence for a new particle requires a "3-sigma" measurement, "corresponding to a 1-in-740 chance that a random fluke could explain the observations." A claim of a discovery requires a "5-sigma" measurement, "or a 1-in–3.5 million shot that the observations are due to chance." 5-sigma is the gold standard. One of the teams using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the ATLAS team, crossed the 5-sigma threshold, while the CMS team almost did with a finding exceeding 4.9-sigma. So we got us a particle.

This is somewhat surprising. People had been expecting a 4-sigma announcement today, so the news is big. Video of the announcement this morning. From Reuters:

Scientists at Europe's CERN research center have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.

"We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering of scientists and the world's media near Geneva on Wednesday.

"The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe."

Two independent studies of data produced by smashing proton particles together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider produced a convergent near-certainty on the existence of the new particle.

The Higgs boson proves the existence of the Higgs field--a field that permeates the entire universe and imbues elementary particles with mass through the Higgs mechanism. Here is a good video that explains all that. And more background from an older New York Times article.

In the video embedded below, CERN spokesman Prof. Joe Incandela explains the significance of the discovery and talks about what comes next. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 11:57 AM | Comments (342)
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Thanks to Sean. He thinks this ran on the site, posted by a coblogger, last year.

Funny stuff, thouh.

Posted by: Ace at 09:19 AM | Comments (326)
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This truth should be axiomatic to everyone, especially those in government. Of course, it's not.
more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:30 AM | Comments (121)
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Two world changing ideas, first, "that people should have the right to choose their own leaders, and be sovereign over their own destiny", and second "that the power of those leaders, the power of government must be checked, so that individual rights will be protected."

Amen.

Happy Independence Day you goofballs.

via Texas Red

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 06:36 AM | Comments (177)
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The Declaration of Independence

Happy Independence Day, Morons.

(Open thread)

Posted by: andy at 03:26 AM | Comments (263)
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Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:53 PM | Comments (705)
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Rep. Larry Kissel, NC-8, won't endorse Obama and doesn't know if he'll attend the convention (in his own state!).

Haden Rogers, NC-11, won't endorse and says he has "no plans" to attend.

Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas won't attend the convention. No mention of his endorsement plans.

They join this list of non-attendees (some of whom also declined to endorse Obama over Romney):

Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, as well as Reps. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, Mark Critz of Pennsylvania and Jim Matheson of Utah. Reps. Rep. Stephen Lynch and Richard Neal, both of Massachusetts, will be staying home as well, The (Springfieldm, Mass.) Republican reported.

We're the "extremists," while high-level members of their party find Obama's a wedge issue they can't be associated with?

Posted by: Ace at 02:20 PM | Comments (340)
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Why would the dissenters do this? Even keeping the language that called Ginsberg's concurrence (with the majority) "The Dissent"?

Frankly, I think, to embarrass Roberts.

My source insists that “most of the material in the first three quarters of the joint dissent was drafted in Chief Justice Roberts’ chambers in April and May.” Only the last portion of what eventually became the joint dissent was drafted without any participation by the chief justice.

And he deserves the embarrassment. That said, if he now feels betrayed, this weak man will cozy up fast enough with the swell people whose opinions are the only thing that matters to him, i.e., liberals.

So, who leaked? Speculation continues to focus on Kennedy, with some circumstantial evidence that maybe it was Thomas. (He's given interviews to CBS' Crawford, who had the story.)

But perhaps this is irrelevant -- if the four justices now in the dissent wished to make a Statement by using Roberts' own words to embarrass him, in all likelihood, they were unified in their belief that people should know about this. So they may have mutually agreed that it should be leaked.

Alternate Theory: This actually makes a lot of sense:

[J]ust maybe, because they held out hope to the bitter end that heÂ’d switch back and join them in striking down the law. By keeping the dissent intact as a potential majority opinion rather than larding it up with language lashing out at Roberts, the four conservatives made it as easy as possible for him to reconsider and climb back aboard right down to the wire. To my mind, thatÂ’s the best explanation for the tone of the opinion, the inclusion of the otherwise gratuitous severability section, and the lack of any references to RobertsÂ’s opinion. They werenÂ’t working on a dissent, they were working on a shadow majority, ready to go right out of the box in case Roberts came back into the fold. (Crawford notes that Kennedy was lobbying Roberts up to the last minute, in fact.)

Via the link to Allah.

That's certainly less provocative than my own theory.

Even so, they did have time to modify the Roberts' draft into a dissent-- but chose not to.

Why not? It doesn't take all that much work to change a criticism of "The Dissent" to "The Concurrence." Just a word search & replace. But they didn't even do that much.

They also chose not to join Roberts even when they agreed with him (the Commerce Clause language). Why not?

This seems very pointed to me.

Posted by: Ace at 01:09 PM | Comments (297)
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