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So, when I went out with my coworkers, we ate somewhere where there was a current Current. I finally took a look at it and found that there are several places in Ypsi that have karaoke. Just what I've been looking for! Also, I saw that there was a writing group that was meeting tonight. After making sure I could go to both the group and karaoke, I set out early in the evening and got back fairly late (i.e., now).

The writing group was small, but apparently it was large by normal standards. There were three people who were there for the first time. I shared two of my poems ("The Difference" and "The Feminist Submissive") and found myself shaking bodily as I did so. I never used to shake so much when I'm nervous. I don't like this newly acquired trait.

( I navigated my way to Powell's Pub )

So, yeah, me being social. Odd.

a page I googled for a discussion in philosophy

One of the states of matter is the Bose-Einstein condensate. It has zero thermal-energy. We should give the number zero to it (table below); also because of its proximity to the 0K. Its popular name of the “fifth state of matter” is clearly incorrect since heated plasma will never be transformed to this Bose-Einstein condensate.

Taking this into consideration, the filaments should belong to “the fifth state of matter”. Sparks, electron beams in TV, lightnings, ion jets in the spacecraft Deep Space 1, in accelerator machines like CERN, ions in the future fusion-reactor, solar coronae, flares, jets of young stars, jets at black holes and at neutron stars (electric magnetars) belong to this most energetic state of matter. . . . Filaments are the largest bodies of the Universe. These filaments and jets have an exact circular cross section, can oscillate and are produced electrically from e.g. plasma. Its particles move in only one direction i.e. without the thermal zig-zag. The fifth state of matter is also a non-thermal state! Interestingly, particles in the most energetic state of matter do not emit heat due to their flight along straight lines.

The Electric Universe: Six States of Matter

taken from ytterbius

Nations Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue

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Journalists hit by new US visa rules

A crackdown by US authorities on issuing visas to foreign journalists threatens to cause chaos for overseas broadcasters and newspapers just five months before the presidential election.

The new rules, which come into force next week, will ban overseas reporters and news crews stationed in the US from renewing their visas without leaving the country first.

Just five months before American voters decide who will be appointed to the most powerful office in the world, the US state department said it would no longer allow overseas journalists to renew visas from within the country.

From next week the estimated 20,000 foreign journalists stationed in the US, who used to be able to renew their visas with ease in any major city, will be forced to leave the country to do so.

Rather than applying to renew their visas in Washington or New York, they will be forced to leave the country and re-apply at a US embassy or consulate abroad, delaying their application for between four weeks and six months.

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More abortion talk over here in abstractthought. This discussion deals with Plan B (though the original poster has it confused with RU486--a confusion that many conservatives would like to have happen).

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Contrary to the stereotype, welfare moms in 1996 averaged two children per family, not six, and in surveys always expressed a desire to work, should child care become available. Incidentally, only a minority of them were African-American.

As for the black youth who so exercise Cosby, their pregnancy rates aren't "soaring," as he reportedly claimed; in fact, they're lower than they've been in decades. Ditto with crime rates. And if Cosby's worried about poor grammar and so forth, why isn't he ranting about the Bush 2005 budget, which would end a slew of programs for dropout prevention, recreation and school counseling?

Or, if he's looking for tantrum fodder, what about the fact that a black baby has a 40 percent chance of being born into poverty? You can blame adults for their poverty — if you're mean-spirited enough — but you cannot blame babies, and that's, in effect, what we're talking about here.

As the sociologist Michael Males, who monitors youth-bashing outbreaks, told me: "Younger black America today is struggling admirably against massive disinvestments in schools, terrible unemployment, harsh policing and degrading prejudices, and they're succeeding amazingly well. They deserve respect, not grown-up tantrums."

But it must be fun to beat up on people too young and too poor to fight back, or the elderly rich wouldn't do it.

The New Cosby Kids

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Resistant Strain of Syphilis Found

A fast-spreading mutant strain of syphilis has proved resistant to the antibiotic pills that are offered to some patients as an alternative to painful penicillin shots.

Since the late 1990s, doctors and public health clinics have been giving azithromycin to some syphilis patients because the long-acting antibiotic pill was highly effective and easy to use. Four pills taken at once were usually enough to cure syphilis.

But now researchers at University of Washington in Seattle have found at least 10 percent of syphilis samples from patients at sexually transmitted disease clinics in four cities had a strain resistant to azithromycin.

[...] Penicillin has long been the recommended treatment for syphilis. But it must be given in two buttocks injections much more painful than typical shots, because a large amount of the solution must be forced into the muscle.

[...] Lukehardt studied 114 syphilis samples from Seattle, San Francisco, Baltimore and Dublin, Ireland, finding 28 percent were resistant to azithromycin, including 88 percent of the Dublin samples.

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Promising New AIDS Treatment

Offering a promising new way to attack the AIDS virus, research on monkeys suggests that an experimental drug helps keep HIV in check by blocking an enzyme that is crucial to infection.

The target is integrase, an HIV enzyme that the virus needs to hijack a patient's cells and spread. Repeated attempts to inhibit integrase's function and stall the virus have failed.

But Merck & Co. researchers report Thursday in the journal Science that they have developed an integrase inhibitor that significantly protected monkeys when given early in infection, and provided some benefit to the very sick, too.

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Dementia has dictated our history

The course of history might have been very different if some of the world's past leaders and dictators had seen a psychiatrists, according to doctors.

Consultant psychiatrist Dr George El-Nimr said World War II might not have happened if past US president Woodrow Wilson had bowed down to his dementia.

Stalin and Franklin D Roosevelt most probably had dementia too, he said.

Dr El-Nimr and colleagues spoke at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' annual conference in Harrogate.

Dr El-Nimr, from Haywood Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent, and his colleagues Dr Baseem Habeeb, at Mersey NHS Trust, and Dr Emad Sulib, senior lecturer in psychiatry at Liverpool University, looked at the possible impact dementia may have had on seven world leaders.

( Read more... )

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President Declines NAACP Invite to Speak

President Bush declined an invitation to speak at the NAACP's annual convention, the group said.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People expects more than 8,000 people to attend the convention opening Saturday.

Democratic challenger John Kerry accepted an invitation to speak next Thursday on the final day of the convention, the NAACP said.

Bush spoke at the 2000 NAACP convention in Baltimore when he was a candidate. But he has declined invitations to speak in each year of his presidency, the first president since Herbert Hoover not to attend an NAACP convention, John White, a spokesman for the group, said Wednesday.

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stupid, dirty girl