Every year about this time we make a metric buttload of tomato sauce. Well, not quite tomato — mine has onions, garlic, peppers and stuff in it too. From a canning perspective this has been a problem because tomatoes alone are only borderline acidic enough to be canned without using a pressure canner and once […]
Category: Science stuff
The news, it burns
(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) Quotation of the Day for August 7, 2011 “A study of history shows that civilizations that abandon the quest for knowledge are doomed to disintegration.” – Bernard Lovell
Some updated H1N1 math
The CDC in the US have come out with some interesting new numbers on H1N1. They now estimate that 22,000,000 US residents have contracted H1N1. Of those, 98,000 have been hospitalized and 3,900 have died. Several weeks ago I very conservatively estimated an 11 in 1,000,000 chance of dying from H1N1 and a 176 in […]
Some H1N1 math
In which I play with some conservative estimates and conclude GET THE SHOT.
Ow, my back
Last week I did something to my back. For the first couple of days, I could barely move without insanely excruciating pain shooting up my spine, stopping my breath and making me gasp. It reminded me of back labour, except it was even more painful. I was creeping around very gingerly, holding my lower back […]
On the flu and the choice to panic (or not)
I’ve been doing my best to restrain my usual cynicism about the hysterical media coverage of health issues in the case of the swine flu, as until quite recently there have been too many unknowns to do much other than shrug and say “we’ll see”. But it seems now that we do know some things: […]
Turtles. Still an evolutionary mystery.
There’s been a lot out this week about the discovery of a proto-turtle with a plastron (front plate) but no shell. Very cool! Turtles are extremely interesting in an evolutionary sense because it is completely not clear how their shells developed. This new discovery begins to answer one part of that question — OK, it […]