Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff has helpfully compiled “A guide to surviving Obamacare debates at Thanksgiving,” and it starts off with a good one: “Your mom wants to know whether Obamacare is a total disaster.” Kliff’s response focuses on the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov, the online marketplace that was supposed to allow for easy health-insurance enrollment for people who need to get coverage. With the website improving but by no means problem-free, the enrollment numbers so far are dismally low. Kliff points out that some states that built their own online marketplaces have successfully enrolled thousands of people.
I’d add to this that Obamacare is far more than the online marketplace. The Affordable Care Act has already made important changes to health insurance, like allowing children up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ plans, eliminating lifetime limits on the dollar value of coverage, and requiring insurers to spend 80-85% of their premium dollars on clinical services or refund the difference to plan members. It has advanced delivery and payment reforms that could put us on a path to paying for the quality of healthcare services, rather than just quantity. The expansion of Medicaid coverage in participating states will offer coverage to millions of people who’ve been unable to afford needed healthcare.
It’s perfectly appropriate to criticize the terrible Healthcare.gov launch. We shouldn’t let that overshadow everything the Affordable Care Act has accomplished, though.
The Kepler telescope was relieved of planet-hunting duties back in August, when researchers determined that failed alignment hardware, necessary for the spacecraft's proper function, was beyond saving. At the time, NASA said it was open to ideas on how the otherwise functional spacecraft might be put to new use. Now, the Agency has settled on a proposal that could see the scope resume its planet-hunting mission.
This is the $600 meteorite and dinosaur leg bone wedding ring made and sold by Etsy purveyor JewelrybyJohan. Is $600 expensive for a wedding ring? Correct answer: Not if there's dino bone and meteorite involved. I do think it's a little insensitive though that they chose to pair dinosaur with the very thing that caused their extinction. That would be like making a Geekologie Writer bone and demon blade ring. "You're going to die by a demon blade?" It is written in the prophecy. "What prophecy?" I read it on a stall door in the bathroom. "Show it to me." Fine. "This says, 'For the tightest butt call 555-4943.' Wait, isn't that you number?" *wink*
Thanks to T.J. O. and A, who agree the best rings are the ones that double as secret decoders and/or magic talismans.
Paleontologists working in Alberta have unearthed a nearly complete fossilized skeleton of a tiny rhinoceros-like dinosaur. The little guy was only about 3-years-old when it died — and its pristine condition is providing scientists with important clues as to how it met such an untimely death.
Read something about this yesterday. Interesting stuff.
A dig at the suspected birthplace of the Buddha has led to the discovery of an unknown timber structure beneath a series of brick temples. Remarkably, it's the first known archaeological evidence linking the life of the Buddha to a specific century.
“Simply assuming that this is an interesting controversy that we should check in on occasionally is not correct. The survival of human civilization is at risk. The news media should be making this existential crisis the No. 1 topic they cover.”
That was Vice President Al Gore being quoted in a New York Times piece by the newspaper’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan. Sullivan’s article, “After Changes, How Green Is The Times?” examines environmental reporting since the Times dismantled its environmental reporting facility last January. Sullivan’s analysis, which seems fair, actually shows the Times as not having entirely dropped the ball, but it is clear that coverage of environmental issues since the Time scrapped its special team (called, ironically, a “pod”) to have diminished in both quantity and depth. Environmental issues have become more numerous and more important nearly every month over the last few years, and as Vice President Gore notes, there is no longer any question that these issues are existential. Seeing a drop in environmental reporting at America’s Most Important Newspaper now would be analogous to seeing a drop in reporting of World War Two after the invasion of Normandy. It is impossible, in fact, to see the New York Times being relatively blasé about the environment as something other than bad management or sloppy journalism. Seeing this sort of thing sends one to Wikipedia to find out who owns the newspaper. So I did. I was surprised. Murdock and Big Oil don’t own them, they don’t own stakes in coal mines, nothing. The company that owns the Times seems to also own the Boston Red Sox. That doesn’t explain much.
Consider for a moment what some of the most influential or important news stories have been. Looking at “top ten stories” internet lists for just 2010-2012, here’s what people have listed as the most important stories (I’ve added the term at the beginning of the phrase to place them into categories):
Environment: World flooding
Environment: Deepwater Horizon
Environment: Mass animal deaths
Environment: Ajka Alumina Plant Accident
Environment: Superstorm Sandy
Nature: Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull
Nature/Animals: Bedbugs take over
Energy: Copiapo Mining Accident
Leaks: Wikileaks
Leaks: Snowden
Sports: Death of Nodar Kumaritashvili
Crime: Capture of the Grim Sleeper
Crime: Sandy Hook
Crime: Penn State, Jerry Sandusky
Crime: Trayvon Martin Shot, Zimmerman Acquitted
Crime: Aurora Shooting
Politics: Obama Re-elected
Politics: Obamacare Passed
Social Justice: Gay Marriage Normalization
Economy: Fiscal Cliff
Economy: Us economy upswing
World: Libya government turns over
World: Syria
Eight of the 23 stories would be top headlines covered by the science and environment “pod” reporters. Two of the stories are cases of people doing things the New York Times should probably have done, like in the old days, but didn’t. Of the other stories, one or two, including Syria and possibly Libya, have strong environmental connections. This list does not include a lot of other environmental stores such as reaching 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, not because they are not important, but, possibly, because new agencies like the New York Times didn’t say they were important. And the New York Times isn’t even owned by Big Oil!
And there’s another problem at the New York Times. Michael Mann wrote about this just a few days before Margaret Sullivan’s piece came out (making me wonder if Mann’s article prompted Sullivan’s) in a piece at the Huffington Post called “Something Is Rotten at the New York Times.” Mann notes, “When it comes to the matter of human-caused climate change, the Grey Lady’s editorial page has skewed rather contrarian of late.” Mann goes on to document a particular case of a broader phenomenon we see at the Times and elsewhere: The “hones broker” phenomenon. This is where all the science tells us that A is true, but there is a bought and paid for (or sometimes, just cranky “get off my lawn” motivated) “viewpoint” that is utterly wrong claiming that B is true, and the “honest broker” tries to mediate between the two views as though simply throwing out “B” wasn’t the appropriate thing to do. Mann:
The New York Times does a disservice to its readers when it buys into the contrived narrative of the “honest broker”…Especially when that white knight is in fact sitting atop a Trojan Horse–a vehicle for the delivery of disinformation, denial, and systematic downplaying of what might very well be the greatest threat we have yet faced as a civilization, the threat of human-caused climate change.
So, with that, here’s my open letter to the New York Times:
How did Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul react to learning the ultimate fates of their Breaking Bad characters? This short video shows the pair reading the last few pages of the finale script for the first time, and getting a little choked up.
Indonesian researchers have just discovered the remnants of a torpedoed Nazi sub off the main island of Java just west of Indonesia. It's the first time a German submarine has been found in the area — a discovery that's giving historians new clues about what went on in the region during the war.
By drilling a 1.5 mile hole deep into an Antarctic glacier, physicists working at the IceCube South Pole Observatory have captured 28 extraterrestrial neutrinos — those mysterious and extremely powerful subatomic particles that can pass straight through solid matter. Welcome to an entirely new age of astronomy.
This is a series of coloring book pictures with the characters' skeletons drawn in by artist Chris Panda. I don't think the pictures are actually from coloring books though, I think Chris drew the black ink part too in the STYLE of a coloring book. What I do know is I'll never be able to look at Ariel the same again. It just goes to show, you should always be careful what you wish for. "You wished you could see what was under her shell bra, didn't you?" F*** genies, man.
Keep going for a ton more including Spider Man, Iron Man, Fiona and Cake, a bunch of Disney characters, Popeye, and I forget who else.
Thanks to my pal Terry, who's a great guy and really deserves the best in life.
Did you really have to circle it?
Because who doesn't want some all-seeing Eye of Sauron constantly tracking their pecker, Mark Wilson of Fast Company Design has discovered the XBox One's new Kinect sensor was powerful enough to see his penis. Which, judging from that picture, means it had to be SUPER powerful. Not to brag or anything, but even the original XBox Kinect was strong enough to see my penis AND mistake it for a leg.
Keep going for the video.
Thanks to PYY, who agrees if people can't see the outline of your penis through your jeans you're doing it wrong.
"I don't expect to get Christmas cards from the archaeologists who have been excavating at the wrong place all these years,"
For the past 90 years, archaeologists have been scouring Pembrokeshire's Preseli Hills in search of clues that could shed light on where the bluestones used to build the famous monument came from. But it turns out that the rocks may have originated from another hill — one that's just a mile away.
In his new book Renewable, science writer Jeremy Schere offers a fascinating history of renewable energy in the United States, and a look toward its future. In this excerpt, he tells the almost-forgotten story of how President Jimmy Carter tried to make the White House run on solar power.
Every story needs a protagonist, who's noble and well-meaning and clever, and who struggles against darkness... freeing up the supporting cast to be just awesome and kick tons of ass. What's your favorite example of a supporting character who steals the hero's thunder?
“Mars once was wet and fertile. It’s now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
Oh, it’s true alright, something bad did once happen on Mars. And although there isn’t any real danger of that happening to Earth, a little conversation I had earlier this week made me think that it’s time to tell all of you a story about our red neighbor, and why it is the way it is today.
You see, when we think about Mars, we think about the smallish, red, desolate world that fascinates us today. We mostly think about the tremendous impact craters, the large mountains and the dry, rocky terrain.
Image credit: NASA / Viking Orbiter.
But Mars wasn’t always this way, and we know it. There are clues to that, even today. Aerial views from orbiting spacecraft show us phenomena like dried up riverbeds with oxbow bends in them,
Image credit: ESA / Mars Express; yes, that’s false color!
polar ice caps and occasionally atmospheric clouds,
Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA).
and recently, landers and rovers have found sedimentary structures in the terrain, silica-rich layers beneath the surface, and even hematite spheres, all evidence that water once flowed freely across the Martian surface.
Image credit: NASA / JPL / Cornell / Mars Opportunity Rover.
But no longer, and not for more than a billion years, to the best of our knowledge. In fact, liquid water is pretty much an impossibility on Mars today! You probably remember that like all substances, water exists in the solid, liquid or gaseous phases dependent on the pressure and temperature of its environment. While all three phases are common on Earth, only two of those phases — the solid and gaseous ones — are possible if the pressure is below a certain threshold, occurring at the triple point of water.
Image credit: Science Education Resource Center @ Carleton College, via http://serc.carleton.edu/.
Unfortunately, the average atmospheric pressure on Mars is just 0.6% of what it is on Earth, placing it below the triple point of water and making the liquid phase an impossibility at all locations, excepting the depths of the deepest Martian trenches.
But the overwhelming evidence for a watery past tells us it wasn’t always this way. In fact, if we go back to the early Solar System, Mars and Earth likely weren’t all that different.
Image credit: Don Dixon, via http://fineartamerica.com/.
We know that our home world — in its infancy — was different from Earth today in a number of important ways. The atmosphere was rich with hydrogen, as the most common gases were water, ammonia, methane and hydrogen gas, all excellent at trapping heat. Even though the Sun was only about 80% as luminous as it is today, Earth still had vast oceans and liquid water throughout its surface, bombardment by asteroids and comets was many orders of magnitude more common than it is today, and all the organics necessary for complex life — the building blocks of everything in our biosphere today — was in place.
And to the best of our knowledge, aside from being a bit smaller and farther from the Sun, so was Mars.
Image credit: Kevin M. Gill of flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmgill/.
We know that life took hold on Earth relatively quickly, within the first few hundred million years. We also know that life was able to sustain itself on Earth; Mars, to the best of our knowledge, was not so lucky. At some point — perhaps after the first billion or two years — those similar conditions on Earth and Mars, those conditions that were so conducive to life, became very different. We’re not certain what happened, but we have a leading (and compelling) hypothesis.
Image credit: NASA.
We don’t think about it on a day-to-day basis, but the Sun is constantly spewing out a stream of ionized, high-energy particles in all directions. If all we had, instead of Earth, was a big rock covered in gas, that stream of particles — the solar wind — would strip that gas away in short order. But that doesn’t happen! The main reason that the Earth still has an atmosphere that’s as thick as it is is because we’ve got a powerful magnetic field generated in our planet’s core. We typically think of the magnetic field as it is on the Earth’s surface, deflecting compass needles and aiding in navigation, but the reality is that it extends far into space! As high-energy, ionized particles stream towards us, the magnetic field deflects them, and protects us mightily from the solar wind, keeping our atmosphere intact.
But the Solar System is 4.5 billion years old now, and Mars is much, much smaller than Earth.
Image credit: NASA/JPL; Galileo orbiter / Mars Global Surveyor Orbiter.
Planets radiate heat away according to their surface area, and with a radius of just 3,390 km (or just 53% of Earth’s), Mars has just 28% of Earth’s surface area. But it’s much lower in mass; Earth is approximately ten times as massive as Mars! Due to its much smaller mass-to-surface-area ratio, Mars has cooled much, much more quickly than Earth, all the way down to its core. At some point, the dynamic magnetic field that Mars once had (and it had one; we’ve already seen the relic magnetic field imprinted in Martian rock) ceased to be, and when that happened, the atmosphere of Mars was no longer protected from the solar wind.
Image credit: Lundin et al., Science, Vol. 305. no. 5692, pp. 1933 – 1936, doi:10.1126/science.1101860, 2004.
On a world where a thick atmosphere and liquid water ruled for maybe a billion years or more, the death of Mars’ magnetic field meant that these high-energy, ionized particles would begin colliding with the particles in Mars’ upper atmosphere, giving many of them enough kinetic energy to escape from the gravitational pull of the red planet! In the span of just a few million years, Mars went from a world teeming with organics, liquid water and all the building blocks of life to the desolate, barren and mostly frozen world we see today.
Image credit: John Raoux / AP.
At least, that’s the leading hypothesis. The big news from earlier this week is that the mission that’s about to test that hypothesis, Mars MAVEN, was just successfully launched!
Image credit: Ken Kremer of Universe Today, via http://kenkremer.com/.
We’ve already got rovers on the ground, digging into the soil, returning photographs, performing analysis and exploring the terrain in unprecedented detail. But if we want to know the story of what happened to Mars’ surface, that means learning what happened to Mars’ atmosphere, and MAVEN is going to be the first spacecraft to attempt to figure that out by measuring what’s happening to Mars’ atmosphere right now.
Image credit: NASA / LASP.
When it reaches Mars in September of next year, MAVEN will enter an eccentric orbit around the red planet, spending most of its time a significant distance — thousands of miles (kilometers) — above the top of the Martian atmosphere, but once-per-orbit, dipping down into the upper atmosphere and taking data. By measuring the solar wind and the flux of atmospheric particles escaping from Mars today, it’s going to give us the first hard data that will allow us to extrapolate how Mars lost its atmosphere in the first place!
Image credit: Mark Thiessen / National Geographic.
One of the great things is that Mars Curiosity has similar instruments on board to the ones on MAVEN, so while MAVEN determines the atmospheric composition, elemental isotope ratios and presence-and-formation of volatiles (such as methane) in the upper atmosphere, Curiosity can do the same thing all the way down at the bottom of Mars’ atmosphere. With data combined from both missions, this incredible hypothesis will be scrutinized and possibly either validated or falsified by the forthcoming data!
Image credit: Brendan Alexander of Donegal Skies, via flickr.
So when you see this cold, dry, red planet hovering in the night skies, know that it not only wasn’t always that way, but that we just might be on the cusp of finding out how it came to be this way! And that’s a little bit of insight into the story of Mars!
Winona Ryder just spilled the beans that she probably going to return as the great Lydia Deetz for Beetlejuice 2. Okay, she didn't outright SAY that, but the implication is there, and it is awesome. Three important questions remain: What is Lydia Deetz up to now? What is she wearing? And where can I buy it?
A truly preposterous amount of Star Wars toys have been made over the last 35 years; during that time, Hasbro (and Kenner before them) obviously couldn't just keep churning out Luke, Han and Leia figures, so they've made toys of almost everybody who ever appeared in a single frame of the six movies. Here are 16 figures so dumb, absurd and useless only a Star Wars toy fanatic could love them (or buy them).
The first behind-the-scenes photo from Star Wars: Episode VII hit Twitter last Thursday, featuring director J.J. Abrams, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, and a certain blue and white astromech droid — who StarWars.com can now confirm will indeed be in the film. But who are the two men standing behind Artoo, looking very protective of the [...]
This is SUCH great news! The FX channel has just announced that they're ordering 13 episodes of Guillermo del Toro's vampire mystery book trilogy The Strain.
Theoretically speaking, a single atom could be made to represent one computer bit — a technological prospect that could lead to unimaginably small storage devices. But getting atoms to behave in the desired way is easier said than done. Until now.
On November 4, an earthquake shook the suburbs of Chicago. It was an incredibly rare event for the region, and now scientists say it was caused by human activity. Specifically, explosions in a quarry set off the quake — and could do it again.
Here's a clever piece of post-apocalyptic kit. You know that clunky drip-coffee maker you scored for like five bucks at your neighbor's yard sale? Turns out it's actually a pretty serious all-in-one culinary wonder machine – provided you know how to use it.
It's a song of fire and ice — an active volcano that's spewing magma at a depth of more than a half-mile beneath a massive sheet of ice. It's an unprecedented discovery that hints at the possibility for a huge eruption, but with completely unpredictable consequences.
This is the $600 
This 
Thanks to my pal Terry, who's a great guy and really deserves the best in life.
Did you really have to circle it?
Because who doesn't want some all-seeing Eye of Sauron constantly tracking their pecker, Mark Wilson of Fast Company Design has discovered the XBox One's new Kinect sensor 
