3-31-12 Hodgepodge

Don't Forget to Turn on the Lights!

This evening, at 8:30 p.m., I'll be celebrating human achievement during "Edison Hour" while too many people in my benighted "blue state" will be pretending to save the world. As I said in answer to a comment recently, after a two-day blackout I had to endure:

I thought more than once during my ordeal -- which is really nothing compared to the kind of world these idiots will achieve if they succeed -- that anyone who celebrates "Earth [Hour]" deserves to do so this way: caught almost completely off-guard at a time definitely NOT of their own choosing, and for an indeterminate amount of time.

Regarding the image, follow the link at "From the Vault", below.

Weekend Reading

"In other words, restricting physicians' freedom to practice is not some 'unintended consequence' of ObamaCare, but rather an explicitly desired goal." -- Paul Hsieh, in "It’s Not Just the Mandate: ObamaCare's Other Infringements" at PJ Media

"A parent has to be prepared to let a grown-up child go -- even if it means throwing him out." -- Michael Hurd, "Childhood Is Not a Lifetime Debt" at DrHurd.com

"[B]laming traders because you happen not to care for a market's prices is like blaming the mailman because you don't like the mail." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "What the Bond Market Is Telling Us" at SmartMoney

From the Vault

By a happy and instructive coincidence, I posted the photo at the top right exactly four years ago today, under the title, "Every Hour is 'Earth Hour' in North Korea".

Pop Those Knuckles!

Futility Closet relates the story of a boy who ignored his mother's admonitions against knuckle-cracking and published his results fifty years later.

In 1998, California physician Donald L. Unger wrote to the editors of Arthritis & Rheumatism to report a "50-year controlled study by one participant." His mother had told him that cracking his knuckles would lead to arthritis, so for 50 years the science-minded Unger had cracked the knuckles of his left hand at least twice a day, more than 36,500 times in all, and left the right uncracked as a control. After 50 years he found no arthritis in either hand and no differences between the two hands.

Another author, invited to respond to the article, made the amusing speculation that knuckle-cracking might even prevent osteoarthritis.

-- CAV