13 Mar 2006
Woman Gets Beer From Her Kitchen Faucet

Does Norway accept economic immigrants?

AP - It almost seemed like a miracle to Haldis Gundersen when she turned on her kitchen faucet this weekend and found the water had turned into beer.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Strawberries by design

Are we sure we want to stay in the business of "redesigning" Nature? (I say "stay in" because we've been at this type of thing for a while now.) Should we just sit back and let everything get redesigned by agricultural "scientists" to be "better"? Is todays new design for strawberries really just trying to fix our previous design errors? Consider this:

In spite of what Mother taught you about the benefits of eating broccoli, data collected by the U.S. government show that the nutritional content of America's vegetables and fruits has declined during the past 50 years -- in some cases dramatically.

Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas, said that of 13 major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the Agriculture Department from 1950 to 1999, six showed noticeable declines -- protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. The declines ranged from 6 percent for protein, 15 percent for iron, 20 percent for vitamin C, and 38 percent for riboflavin.

"It's an amazing thing," said Davis, adding that the decline in nutrient content has not been widely noticed. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

The real questions here are : What is "better"? And "better" for whom? The farmer? The consumer? The government? The "agribusiness" conglomerates? Qui bono? You supply the answer...

Researchers have developed a new procedure for the efficient transfer of specific DNA sequences into the genome of strawberry. By helping researchers establish the function of large numbers of strawberry genes, this method could, in the long term, be extremely useful in enhancing the nutritional value of these plants as well as the amount of health-enhancing antioxidants that they may contain.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

00:00 /Agriculture | 1 comment | permanent link

Goldie's Boy

The second calf of the season has arrived: Goldie had a bull calf about 10am in the south pasture. Here's the first photos:

Goldie's Boy
Goldie's Boy		Hungry Boy
Get up, mom! I'm hungry!

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Bill Could Restrict Freedom of the Press

How dare we allow mere citizens to know what the government is doing? Why, if we let the plebes in on the secrets, next thing you know they'll want some say in who runs the show, and how much it costs! No, we couldn't allow that!

If this law had been on the books in 1972, the Watergate scandal never would've happened. Well, OK, it would've happened, but nobody know about it, because instead of a Pulitzer Prize Woodward and Bernstein would've gotten 5 to 10 in Allentown.

The Washington Post is carrying an article about a disturbing Senate bill that could make it illegal to publicly disclose even the existence of US domestic spying programs (i.e. NSA wiretaps). An aide to the bill's author assures us it's not aimed at reporters, but the language is ambiguous at best. From the article: "Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the measure is broader than any existing laws. She said, for example, the language does not specify that the information has to be harmful to national security or classified. 'The bill would make it a crime to tell the American people that the president is breaking the law, and the bill could make it a crime for the newspapers to publish that fact,' said Martin, a civil liberties advocate."

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link