It's common knowledge that I don't like orange vegetables. It should also be equally well known that i love corn. Well, look at what they've done!
Torbert Rocheford, the Patterson Endowed Chair of Translational Genomics and professor of agronomy at Purdue, led the study that made findings in yellow and particularly orange corn, a type he said likely originated in the Caribbean and is popular in some Asian and South American countries as well as in northern Italy. The orange color comes from relatively higher levels of carotenoids, one of which is beta-carotene. Humans convert beta-carotene, which also is abundant in carrots, into vitamin A during digestion.
Rocheford is using simple visual selection for darker orange color combined with more advanced molecular natural diversity screening techniques to create better lines of the orange corn.
"We're sort of turbocharging corn with desirable natural variation to make it darker and more nutritious," Rocheford said.
Oh, sure, it's supposed to reduce blindness. Pfft! I ask you, is that any reason to ruin corn?
But former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill "the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times," Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Do you think the Democratic party regrets enacting Civil Rights legislation?
Activists staged "competing rallies" outside of Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy's (D-OH) district office yesterday, in a noisy, often confrontational attempt to influence the undecided congresswoman's vote. At one point, a man with a sign saying he has Parkinson's disease and needs help sat down in front of the reform opponents. Several protesters mocked the man, calling him a "communist," with one derisively "throwing money at him." "If you're looking for a handout you're in the wrong end of town," another man said.
To close a deficit that he asserted was approaching $11 billion, Governor Christie called for the layoffs of 1,300 state workers, closings of state psychiatric institutions, an $820 million cut in aid to public schools, and nearly a half-billion dollars less in aid to towns and cities. He also suspended until May 2011 a popular property-tax rebate program, breaking one of his own campaign promises.
...
The budget would probably mean higher property taxes for most homeowners, at least in the short term, as local governments try to make up for the diminished state financing. But the governor is also proposing constitutional amendments and legislation to cap property taxes and spending at the local, county and school-district level.
But don't worry. The Fighting Democrats still control the state congress, right?
Democrats greeted this with dismay, while vowing to work closely with the governor on the budget
This article has Kuwaiti scientists predicting peak oil by 2014. It's a Yahoo news article sourced from "LiveScience". First time i've seen an acknowledgment that peak oil is even a reality outside of lefty fringe websites.
Zack: Also, who makes skin-tight underpants for giants?
Steve: Oh, you're just gonna go on and assume because giants are 50 feet tall they don't know how to craft up some underpants? That's racist.
Zack: Dungeons & Dragons is a series of overlapping race wars. You roll the dice to see how many orcs there are, do you think that's for purposes of hiring them to build a barn?
He's absolutely right. Why don't we ever hire orcs to help us carry our giant friggin mirror, for instance?
Steve: If you think orcs ever successfully exterminate anyone then you've never played D&D. Maybe in some game where they spell it with a "k" and all the orks are super beefy, but in D&D they are always the genocided, not the genociders.
We will soon be the exception to this rule when the Broken Bone clan of orcs takes over the world with their giant orc army, in large part helped out by the truce we made when we decided not to kill them. Oopsy.
I don't really understand why someone would want to do this.
A group of gamers from around the world created a 100,000+ keystroke script for speedrunning The Legend of Zelda, which was used by a blind gamer in Ontario complete the game. Jordan Verner, who is blind, posted a video of himself playing Zelda and asking for help to complete the game. This inspired other gamers to spend two years composing a script that Verner could follow...
I mean, i can understand the desire to play a video game. What i can't understand is how this would be in anyway fun for this guy. He's basically just following instructions on pushing buttons for several hours. What's the reward? He doesn't get the fun of figuring out the puzzles himself. And Zelda wasn't designed so that he could hook it up to a machine that would describe what was going on in the game, so what's the pay off for successfully completing a dungeon?
Wouldn't playing on the MUD be more entertaining than following a 100,000+ list of button pushing instructions?
