A group of Swedish scientists have announced that they have figured out (or rather, confirmed) part of the cause of aging: mutations in the mitochondria of our cells.
By implication, if a way can be found to protect the mitochondria from these mutations, folks might live longer.
Or we could all just move to Sweden . . . land of natural cryogenic suspension.
Typepad supposedly upgraded its servers last night, so this should cure the slow response times we’ve been having on the blog lately.
Let’s hope so. I don’t want to have to move the blog again after getting it settled in here.
Thus far it *does* seem on my end that the server is responding much faster and without the long hang times that were plaguing it the last few days..
Article in The Weekly Standard citing evidence that there were extensive ties between Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden, including some evidence of involvement in 9/11 by Saddam.
From the Superhero Day Jobs 3 contest at Worth1000.Com.
Brumley has a good piece on the recent displays of intestinal fortitude by bishops vis-a-vis pro-abort (and other pro-evil) politicians.
The same page (father down) also has an interesting interview with Bishop Bruskewitz on the national conference’s Review Board (dealing with the aftermath of the sex abuse scandal) and the problems that the bishop sees with it. He’s quite displomatic in how he phrases things, but if you read between the lines he’s severely slamming the way the board has been set up and run.
(Now if Brumley would just migrate to a board that has built-in permalinks so people could point directly to individual stories. . . . And if he would only post more regularly. His content is too good to be allowed not to exist.)
Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.
Here’s the scoop: The earth’s albedo (i.e., the amount of light it reflects) is increasing. It had been doing down. Now it’s going up. Scientists don’t know why.
Since a higher albedo means a cooler planet, maybe it’s a sign that global warming ain’t gonna warm. Maybe it’s all a big cycle.
Or maybe not.
Was refreshing to see the scientists in the story saying that their findings neither confirm nor disconfirm the greenhouse effect and that more study is needed. A little scholarly caution does the soul a world of good.
Here’s a handy online tool for calculating your exact BMI or Body Mass Index. This is the standard figure used for reckoning overweight and obesity.
The system is open to some criticism in that it doesn’t take into account all the relevant factors (e.g., is the person a body builder who has extra muscle in his weight, or a person who has suffered muscle wasting and has less muscle than normal inhis weight, or a person who is large or small boned), but it’s still nice to be able to calculate your exact BMI and see how you stack up against the idealized numbers in common use.
From the Superhero Day Jobs 3 contest at Worth1000.Com.
I can tell I’m going to post several of these. They’re really good.
From the Superhero Day Jobs 3 contest at Worth1000.Com.
I can tell I’m going to post several of these. They’re really good.
I’ve been having slow server response times on the blog the last couple of days. This appears to be a temporary problem that the service is addressing. They have a server upgrade scheduled for Saturday, at which point things should (hopefully) return to normal.
Sorry for the problem. It’s been frustrating for me, too, but at least they seem to be addressing it.
Here’s the notice they put up:
Scheduled Downtime May 28, 2004
We apologize for the intermittent slow performance of TypePad web sites over the past 2-3 days. We’re having some problems with our storage servers, so we’re scheduling a hardware upgrade for the early morning of Saturday, May 28, 2004, from 12:00am to 2:00am Pacific time. During that time, TypePad-powered sites and TypePad itself will be down for maintenance. Thanks for your patience!
I’ll still be blogging in the interim, though.