Donna Ricci: Photoshopped

Above are photoshopped images of Donna Ricci, a gothic model, as widescreen 1280x800 wallpapers. The original images are from her modeling management company, Wicked Talent, website. Her claim to fame is being the model for the the character of Death in the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. A claim that has been disputed on Fetish Gossip and the Goth Bible.

Tenure the Hard Way: Hunger Strike

James L. Sherley, a biomedical engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology will start a hunger strike on February 5th unless he is granted tenure. Sherley stated:

I will either see the provost resign and my hard-earned tenure granted at MIT, or I will die defiantly right outside his office.

Sherley, an adult stem cell researcher and winner of the $2.5 million dollar Pioneer Award, believes he is a victim of racial discrimination. MIT provost, L. Rafael Reif has say there would not be any further consideration and Sherley would have to leave next year.

Common disease-common variant

The common disease-common variant (often abbreviated CD-CV) hypothesis predicts common disease causing alleles will be found in all populations. Variations in the human genome in the form of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are common in independent populations. Common variations are concentrated in coding and regulatory sequences in genes. Evolutionary neutral diseases, complex polygenic diseases, are caused by these variations. Each variation in a complex disease will have a small effect on the disease phenotype resulting in additive or multiplicative effect of many susceptibility alleles. The hypothesis has held true in the case of putative causal variants in the apolipoprotein E, APOE ε4, associated with Alzheimer's disease. IL23R has been found to be associated with Crohn's disease; the at-risk allele of has a frequency 93% in the general population.

Americans by the Numbers

Based on the 2007 Statistical Abstract of the US

Americans

• Are the fattest people on the planet.
• Drunk 23 gallons of water per person in 2004; 10 times as much as in 1980. They now drink more water than beer.
• Consumed 2 times as much high fructose syrup than in 1980.
• Spent 8.5 hours per day watching television, using computers, listening to radio, going to movies, or reading. They spend 64 days watching television, 41 days listening to the radio, and a week on the Internet.
• Are taller. Only 10% of people in their 20s are shorter than 5-foot-6.
• Are injured by by bicycles more than any other consumer product; beds come in second.
• Are splitting up at the rate of 3.7 divorces per 1,000 people. People in Nevada divorce at a rate of 6.4 divorces per 1,000 people. The number of both marriages and divorces has been declining except in Conneticut.
• Produce more solid waste: 4.4 pounds per day up 0.7 pounds since 1980.
• Tend to pay off their credit cards: 56% "almost always" paying off the balance, while 24% "hardly ever" paid off their balance.

American

• Men had 6% same-sex sexual contacts while women had 11.2%
• Men earned 42,000 professional degrees and 41,000 women earned professional degrees compared to 2,000 in 1970.
• Men have 5.4 sexual partners and women 3.3 partners by the age of 44.
• Newborns have increased life expectancy by 2 months.
• Wiccans have skyrocketed in numbers up to 350,000 from being unregistered in 1990.
• Had an median household income of $65,000, and 75% of college freshman said their primary objective was to be financially very well off. Nearly half of freshman had earned an average grade of A in high school.

One Man's Opinion

Former House Speaker and Representative from Georgia's 6th district, Newt Gingrich, made the following remark during a keynote speech at the Manchester Republican City Committee Christmas dinner concerning the removal of six Muslim imams from a US Airways flight after a passenger raised concerns about the imams evening prayers:

Those six people should have been arrested and prosecuted for pretending to be terrorists. And the crew of the U.S. airplane should have been invited to the White House and congratulated for being correct in the protection of citizens.

As of late, Gingrich hasn't been known for defending First Admendment rights. Speaking at the annual Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment award dinner celebrating individuals who stand up for freedom of speech, Gingrich stated that the US may require a "different set of rules" to prevent terrorists from using free speech to recruit and get their message out using the Internet.

In a "Special Comment" retort, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann compared Gingrich's ideas to to Nazism.

The Names of Deceased Iraqi Civilians

On December 12, 2005, President Bush put the number of deaths of Iraqi civilians at 30,000. Later, an estimate by the Hassan Salem of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) put the figure at 150,000, while a study in the British medical journal The Lancet published in October puts the figure at 655,000. In all these estimates, the lives of these Iraqis have been turned into mere figures stripped of the hopes, ambitions, and the contributions these individuals might have made to a future Iraq. The image above presents the names of about 400 individuals gathered from a list created by Iraqi Body Count, which contains approximately 3,700 names. Individuals under 18 are highlighted in red, and the larger a name appears the younger the victim was.

I Think I'm Learning Japanese

Learning Japanese is a challege for many people due to the number of characters involved. There are about 80 characters for each set of hiragana and katakana. And in all there about 50,000 Japanese kanji about 2,000 of which are needed for general use. Knuckles in China Land and Slime Forest are two RPG games that can help you memorize characters and learn vocabulary.

Knuckles in China Land - The game features Knuckles from the Sonic the Hedgehog series. This game tests you by using characters that sound similar ka, ke, ko, etc. It includes about 6000 kanji with 1000 of them ordered from "more common" to "less common".
Slime Forest - This game throws characters at you based on similar looking characters like hiragana's sa and chi. It only lets you die 3 times every 8 hours, so you don't over do your practice. You can download additional still in development games to practice vocabulary and verb tenses.