My Own Thoughts

or end up in jail. That seems to be the bottom line for research Clayton Cramer reported on. The UK prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences they committed in the prison fell by 37%. Although no one [...]

National Geographic has a post about going to the doctor and getting your genome checked to find out what is wrong with you. A couple of thoughts. One: Do I want the doctors to have my genome? Two: How would checking my genome have fixed the problem the doctors had diagnosing the excessive scarring inside [...]

Iraq Body Count discussion of the Lancet study. IBC does NOT support the war in Iraq. A survey researcher who worked in Iraq for two years refutes the Lancet study in the WSJ. Both of these excellent additional sources were pointed out by Stop the ACLU, one of my daily blog reads. Another daily read, [...]

and the Boy Scouts are an indication of how. The Boy Scouts are a nonprofit and had access to certain places. Now they no longer have that access because they don’t admit gays and atheists. Other nonprofits do have that access. So religious groups can believe what they want to, but there will be a [...]

Reuter’s Health says, “Good early family life may counter depression gene.” I like that.

this article from Wired is something you might want to read. It’s about how sexual predators are on MySpace but that MySpace says they can’t find them. “The automated script searched MySpace’s 1 million-plus profiles for registered sex offenders — and soon found one that was back on the prowl for seriously underage boys. That’s [...]

Another great article on discrimination, this time from Uncle Jimbo at Black Five, highlights some problems for the people who are getting the goodies via discrimination. Again the discrimination is against whites and Asians and for blacks and Hispanics. A previous post of mine on this subject can be found here.

A cool article from Reuter’s. Lots of their stuff goes away, so I copied what I was interested in. … discovered two winged creatures carved on a basalt slab dating from the Hittite period in the second millennium BC…. …unique carvings of, among others, sparring lions, bull men, and a figure of a half man [...]

New Scientist says that “Facial expressions appear to be at least partially inherited, according to a study of blind people and their relatives.” Good. Now I can quit being upset that the big smile with the eyes almost closed that my husband doesn’t like is also smiled by my eldest son. It’s genetics, so I [...]

That’s a new word made up by someone (linguists) to mean “green-blue.” Apparently many groups don’t differentiate the color(s). Read about it at Nature. I wrote about the number of colors in a language varying, blue is green II, and language coloring vision earlier in my blogging career. I keep coming back to it because [...]

No, not me. But one of my best friends, who is one month younger than I am, is going to be a grandmother in six weeks. Yes, I know I ought to have known before now… But I wrote the mother a few weeks ago and she didn’t tell me, so I am not sure [...]

I’ve already had a call from a student who is in a hotel, with her baby, without a car. Her house and car flooded. She took a taxi to rent a car, but they wouldn’t rent her a car because she isn’t 25. At least she wasn’t one of those who drove their car through [...]

My sons are white males, so I’ve been a bit paranoid about affirmative action for years. (I even called the diaper company and complained because there were no male white babies on the diaper!) But some other people have more reason to be concerned, I think. Maybe my friend Bev should be worried for Mei. [...]

I am thinking of quitting homeschooling. I have been homeschooling my sons, ages 15 and 14, for about 13 years. Early on we did Bible lessons and crafts. We went for walks and sang songs. Then school came. A friend recommended “thirty minutes a day for kindergarten and then add half an hour a year.” [...]

“The socio-economic status of women tends to deteriorate as abortion is repeated.” So if you are pro-woman, you should be anti-abortion, since repeat abortions mean a woman is less able to care for herself. “Women who repeat abortions tend to have increasing health problems …” So if you are pro-woman, you should especially be anti-repeat [...]

lead to fewer births. I read the study online somewhere a few years ago. I remembered Ohio and Michigan, but couldn’t Google it up. One of my students showed me a sentence about it, when I asked if anyone had seen it, and the sentence, not cited!, included Georgia. Putting that in I got Trussell, [...]

control of the house, Fox News says. I hope this is like the newspaper announcing Dewey’s win for president.

is sometimes genetics. And sometimes it is because you had inadequate food. That is true of my grandmother and of one of my cousins. (My aunt fed her a no fat diet for years because when she was born she wasn’t in the lowest quartile for weight and she didn’t want her to be fat.) [...]

For me, anyway. Reuter’s Health says that ovarian cysts are linked to a 30% reduction in breast cancer risk. Yeah! Finally something bad is useful.

A round up of posts on the topic: All Things Conservative presents a review of what was wrong with the LAST hyped up number. Here is Seixon’s take on last years numbers, which were 500,000 lower than this years. This year’s study is a follow-up. Confederate Yankee mentions that the numbers are 550,000 more than [...]