Saw this writeup in the Times this morning – another fascinating look at what doctors are learning about our relationships with bacteria. Bet you’ve never heard of a fecal transplant…
Great stuff, glad to hear that someone is thinking about the implications of the rapid changes in our human flora and fauna. If you hadn’t heard, only about 1% of the cells that make up your being are ‘human’ in that they share your DNA… the other 99% are made up of various types of microbes that we don’t really understand yet. Thanks to Scientific American.
I would like to personally thank the WFTL 850 AM chopper pilot for hovering just about right over my house for a good 30 minutes this morning, helped me start my day just right…
Here is a Polydamas Swallowtail that was visiting our yard today a little after 5 pm:
Polydamas Swallowtail Butterfly on Firebush
The first three are from the backyard this afternoon; and the fourth, the Mangrove Skipper, is from last weekend over on Hollywood Beach. Happy Mother’s Day!
N. Gregory Mankiw wrote this interesting op-ed piece in Saturday’s New York Times. We’re going to have to look at all of the tools in our monetary arsenal to tackle the current crisis, and here Mankiw talks about ways you can continue to lower effective interest rates below zero using monetary (and other) policy. I personally prefer the option where the Fed pursues an inflationary policy over the one where we create new taxes on held currency but I haven’t studied the issue in detail. Check it out.
William Jelani Cobb has written a concise piece,
“Commentary: A lesson of Somali pirate attacks” (posted at CNN.com), that helps express the need to get a thorough understanding of the ‘why’ behind problems before trying to come up with solutions to them. We can definitely come up with more comprehensive, effective, and humane solutions to these types of problems if we use our brains. We need to keep up with current events, and we need to understand the history that puts these events into context; otherwise, our opinions aren’t worth a whole lot.
My father-in-law sent me a link to the Pandora Radio Music Genome Project today – you can find it here: http://www.pandora.com/. I’m trying it out right now and so far so good… you basically tell it what kind of music you like, and it tries to put a custom ‘radio station’ together for you, serving you up music that you should like. I’ll get back to you when I have played with this a bit more.