“Democracy as a historical phenomenon” is at its core and argument against the wig view of history. It won’t change the way you view history nor does it represent our views. But if reading the thoughts of a highly intelligent weirdo does not stimulate your own thinking nothing will.

I found this embedded in one of Michael Totten’s essays. It takes awhile for anything to happen, but it is worth waiting for.

This is why I have always been a little skeptical of trying to build mine proof vehicles for the troops. Amour has never managed to win the arms race with modern explosives.

I am always surprised to find out how dangerous certain chemicals can be. In his latest post Derek talks about a chemical so dangerous that it can set metal on fire just from contact. The whole post was fascinating, but the best part was where Derek quoted John Clark as saying….

”It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

What do interesterified fat and prenatal urination have in common? Nothing, except I learned something new about both of them recently. It would be very interesting if they had something more in common than that. As it is, I found what I learned about both to be both educational and interesting. Perhaps you will also […]

The Silverware thief sent this link to a New York Times article on a strange disease that occurred in a large scale slaughter house. The heart of the article is this….

On Nov. 28, Dr. DeVries’s boss, Dr. Ruth Lynfield, the state epidemiologist, toured the plant. She and the owner, Kelly Wadding, paid special attention to the head table. Dr. Lynfield became transfixed by one procedure in particular, called “blowing brains.”

As each head reached the end of the table, a worker would insert a metal hose into the foramen magnum, the opening that the spinal cord passes through. High-pressure blasts of compressed air then turned the brain into a slurry that squirted out through the same hole in the skull, often spraying brain tissue around and splattering the hose operator in the process.

Read the whole article if you want to find out how this process caused some factory workers to come down with serious medical problems.

Here is question to confound the theologians of our modern civil religion.

It is an article of faith in our civil religion that democracy should be imposed in any and all situations. No other form of government is valid. Therefore, should we not be pushing hard for democracy in Rwanda?

Read this excellent essay and consider the question.

Derek has an interesting post up discussing the failure of the drug torcetrapib in clinical trials. I found these two paragraphs particularly interesting….

And that’s about where knowledge of this field stops among the general population, and I can understand why, because it gets pretty ferocious after that point. As with everything else in living systems, the closer you look, the more you see. There are, for starters, several subforms of HDL, the main alpha fraction and at least three others. And there are at least four types of alpha. At least sixteen lipoproteins, enzymes, and other proteins are distributed in various ratios among all of them. We know enough to say that these different HDL particles vary in size, shape, cholesterol content, origin, distribution, and function, but we don’t know anywhere near as much as we need to about the details. There’s some evidence that instead of raising HDL across the board, what you want to do is raise alpha-1 while lowering alpha-2 and alpha-3, but we don’t really know how to do that.

How does HDL, or its beneficial fraction(s) help against atherosclerosis? We’re not completely sure about that, either. One of the main mechanisms is probably reverse cholesterol transport (RCT), the process of actually removing cholesterol from the arterial plaques and sending it to the liver for disposal. It’s a compelling story, currently thought to consist of eight separate steps involving four organ systems and at least six different enzymes. The benefits (or risks) of picking one of those versus the others for intervention are unknown. For most of those steps, we don’t have anything that can selectively affect them yet anyway, so it’s going to take a while to unravel things. Torcetrapib and the other CETP inhibitors represent a very large (and very risky) bet on what is approximately step four.

A while ago, we did an article on super maneuverable jet fighters. This clip does a better job of showing how they work then the ones we previously linked to. Notice how the individual exhaust ports on the jet engine move.