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10. oktober 2003
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Israel's Christian allies
An interesting article about the historical background for the support for Zionism among American evangelical Christians.
8:12:18 PM 
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Science no friend of abstinence
An article with the headline is sex necessary? may just invite the obvious "d'oh" response, but it's actually a quite interesting summary of the health benefits of sex, and why abstinence is not good for you.
Fans of abstinence had better be sitting down. "Saving yourself" before the big game, the big business deal, the big hoedown or the big bakeoff may indeed confer some moral benefit. But corporeally it does absolutely zip. There's no evidence it sharpens your competitive edge. The best that modern science can say for sexual abstinence is that it's harmless when practiced in moderation. Having regular and enthusiastic sex, by contrast, confers a host of measurable physiological advantages, be you male or female.
However, a rather important caveat in paranthesis follows
(This assumes that you are engaging in sex without contracting a sexually transmitted disease.)
Well, somebody always have to be spoiljoy. You still have to watch out who you are having sex with, but I guess most of us already knew that from experience.
6:11:34 PM
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Free science journal
Non-scientists are normally deterred from reading online science journals like Nature or Science by prohibitive subscription prices. There are enough freely available popular science magazines and sites, but until now, there has been no peer reviewed scientific journals available for free online.
PLoS Biology is set to change all that. It takes on the big journals, hoping to attract quality science to its free online journal. It will open on Monday, October 13. Some previews are already available.
5:00:36 PM
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From the very large to the very small
This is a very cool visualisation of the extremely large and the extremely small: the power of ten.
View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.
 What is perhaps the most striking is how many orders of magnitude are outside our normal perception of things. At the scale of 1 mm (10-3), we are starting to get close to the limit of what is so small we can't see it with our eyes. When we get down to 10-5, we can see individual cells in a plant, and this is what we consider the microscopic world. But we have to magnify many orders of magnitude, down to 10-10, to see an individual atom "cloud,. An atom is still mostly empty space, so we have to go three orders of magnitude further, to 10-14, to see the actual atom nucleus close up.
One the other end of the scale, say 10 meters, the normal limit to where we can keep a conversation with another person, we are actually as far away from the world of the atom nucleus as we are from a view that would give us the entire solar system in a bird's eye perspective, from 100 billion kilometers away.
Very roughly, we are to an atom what the whole solar system is to us.
3:28:34 PM
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Chinese astronaut getting ready
Li Qinglong is named as China's first astronaut (or yuhangyuan), set to make China the third nation to send a human being into space. An obvious prestige project, with little scientific value but having a lot to do with China's ambitions to become the next superpower.
China's first manned space flight is set to launch on October 15.
2:45:11 PM
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And the Nobel Peace Prize 2003 goes to...
Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Muslim lawyer and former judge who has been an outspoken human rights and democracy activist over many years.
Update: here is a short biography.
11:05:58 AM
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Chaos
The country has been ravaged by strikes and protests, thousands have died due to a breakdown in healthcare, and just today there was a bomb attack against security forces.
Yup, sounds like a quagmire to me.
9:13:15 AM
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Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women
"Women who perform the act of fellatio on a regular basis, one to two times a week, may reduce their risk of breast cancer by up to 40 percent, a North Carolina State University study found. [...]
"I think it removes the last shade of doubt that fellatio is actually a healthy act," said Dr. B.J. Sooner of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research. "I am surprised by these findings, but am also excited that the researchers may have discovered a relatively easy way to lower the occurrence of breast cancer in women."" [Read more]
PS: Pay a bit of attention to the names of the researchers...
8:01:58 AM
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No sympathy for overpaid football players threatening strike
 The English premier league is in a serious confidence crisis. Shortly after the serious gang rape allegations, another football (soccer) player, Leeds United's Jody Morris, was arrested over rape allegations.
As if that wasn't enough scandal, earlier this week Manchester United's and England's Rio Ferdinand "forgot" to turn up for a mandatory drug test. In principle, not taking a drug test is the same as testing positive. It is cheating. The Football Association (FA) thus decided that Ferdinand was not eligeble for the upcoming, and extremely important, European Cup qualifier against Turkey on Saturday. The England stars badly misread the public and threatened a strike, but quickly backed down considering the consequences would have been that England could be disqualified.
The Mirror pictures the country's pride on its front page (picture), with the headline "Who the HELL do you think you are?"
Our message to this jumped-up collection of egomaniacs is simple.
If you ever threaten to strike again then we will demand you are never picked to play for England in the future.
Now shut up, get back to work on your £50,000 a week salaries, and beat Turkey.
Other newspapers are also full of scorn for the young men who receive astronomic salaries for kicking a ball around. Most fans are not more generous, one writing on Football365 calling them "Nothing But Childish, Spoilt Brats."
The England players have had the worst possible prelude to the important away game against Turkey. But in the end, unless the association, the teams and the players look carefully at their own attitudes and behaviours, it can only go downhill from here.
7:28:26 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.11.2003; 03:19:07.
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This is my blogchalk:
Norway, Bergen, Norwegian, English, Jan, Male, 31-35.
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