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Sunday, June 12, 2005
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The National Academy of U.S. science has set up a Web site to battle intelligent design and creationism. Check it out.
(Via Red State Rabble.)
8:58:04 PM 
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The other day I was in the pharmacy and saw a display for the Choice A1C Home Test. A1C is a measure of your blood sugar over the last 3 months, so it's much more important, and more useful to know than the standard sort of test you take at home. Before this thing, you had to have the A1C test done by a lab, and so I only did it every six months when I saw my doctor. The normal sugar test is easy to game, consciously or not; it measures only the current state of your sugars, so it rises and falls during the day.
So I bought the kit. The pharmacy had a $3.00 instant coupon on the display, and there was another $3.00 by rebate, which made the price much more reasonable than its $19.95 list. (Coupons are available on the web site, but the site's web programmers are either too stupid or too lazy to figure out how to make the coupon site work from the Mac's Safari.) I had it around for a few days, and just took the test. Not surprisingly, it's a bit trickier than the normal test, and requires more blood, mixture with something in a tube, and an 8 minute wait. But that said, it was really easy to do.
How accurate the results are, is for others, like David Mendosa, who has looked at this and another one closely. In my case, my blood sugar is 5.9%, which is low for diabetics, but higher than I've been getting for the past couple years. It tells me, better than the normal, varying test, that I need to crack down a bit on my blood sugars, and see if I can't get it back down to the 5.4% or 5.5% I enjoyed a year or more ago.
So, for a first time user of this thing, I'm happy with it, happier I think that I may have been if it had given me a lower score. Then I wouldn't trust it so much. It seems work the money, and is something I'm going to do every few months, perhaps half way between my 6 month doctor visits. But since I can't get the coupons from the Mac's Safari, chances are I'll go to a different brand.
8:51:44 PM
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By far the most common method employed by psychics who have been put to the test is called cold reading. This method involves the psychic reading the subject's body language etc, and skilfully extracting information from the subject, which...
(Via Cynical-C Blog.)
8:22:17 PM
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Philadelphia Inquirer | 06/12/2005 | Public starts to get a fix on 'fixing' intelligence
When a Republican tells you that the Downing Street Memo has been discredited because "the 9/11 Commission already looked at it," they are lying. Tell them so.
From the Philadelphia Enquirer today: But the Bush camp is working hard to deny the memo's fixed-intelligence passage - a sign that the White House is sensitive about the issue. Last weekend, GOP chairman Mehlman stated: "That [memo] has been discredited. Whether it's the 9/11 Commission, whether it's the Senate, whoever's looked at this has said there was no effort [by Bush's war planners] to change the intelligence at all."
Mehlman's claim is undercut by the facts.
The 9/11 Commission never looked at the administration's behavior; commission vice chairman Lee Hamilton said last year, "[Under the law] we were to focus our attention on 9/11 and those events, and not on the war in Iraq." And while a 2004 Senate panel did criticize the prewar intelligence as "a series of failures," it didn't look at whether the Bush team had misused the material. That task was postponed until after the election; today, in the words of Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, it's still "on the back burner." [via Eschaton]
(Via The Liberal Reality-Based Avenger.)
8:18:15 PM
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The military announced the killing of four more U.S. soldiers on Sunday, pushing the American death toll past 1,700, and police found the bullet-riddled bodies of 28 people -- many thought to be Sunni Arabs -- buried in shallow graves or dumped streetside in Baghdad.
(Via Sploid.)
8:17:34 PM
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Lovely:
More than a year before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the FBI nabbed two Arab grocers loading boxes onto a tractor-trailer outside a drab gray apartment building here. The cargo: stolen Kellogg's cereal. More than a year and a half before Sept. 11, 2001, Ali Alubeidy was caught up in an investigation of fraudulent Pennsylvania commercial driver's licenses. It wasn't until after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon that the FBI pursued his case as having a possible link to terrorism. Although the connection soon unraveled, Alubeidy, an Iraqi immigrant, lives with the stigma. Agents did not charge the men that day, and set them free. But 16 months later, soon after hijacked planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FBI was back. This time, agents arrested the pair and a third Arab grocer. After they were grilled about the terrorist attacks, the men were charged and pleaded guilty -- to conspiracy to possess the pilfered cornflakes. To this day, the three grocers remain on the federal government's list of terrorism cases, although they never were charged with a terrorism-related crime. Often cited to emphasize the government's success fighting terrorism, the list that includes Nasser Abuali, Hussein Abuali and Rabi Ahmed is made up in large part of men caught up in the post-Sept. 11 dragnet that targeted Middle Easterners.
(Via Liberals Against Terrorism -.)
1:12:38 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 7/2/2005; 2:39:34 PM.
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