Leaving on a Jet Plane

I’m flying out to Katie in a few hours, which means I have to start packing an hour ago. I know that flying from one side of the continent to the other isn’t the best opportunity to complain about North America’s laconic rail network, which wouldn’t get me to Victoria any faster if there was a direct TGV-speed train, but I’m still going to do it sometime tomorrow.

Meanwhile, go play on other people’s blogs:

Pam links to a pseudo-outrage piece on CBN about employees who were fired for anointing a coworker’s desk with olive oil.

On her own blog, Pam also complains about young people who aren’t good enough at acting and hence cause inconveniences to prejudiced employers who hire people based on how they’re dressed during the interviews.

Go to Appletree and watch Donald Trump threaten Rosie O’Donnell with a lawsuit for saying he was bankrupt (which is true). Then complain to Gordo that Appletree is becoming too much of a vlog. Bonus points to the person who can come up with the most creative phrasing meaning, “Youtube is overrated.”

Ezra explains why R&D funding isn’t everything when it comes to health care. Much of the USA’s pharmaceutical R&D is for copycat drugs, which mimic patented drugs whose brand names belong to other companies. Even if Japan and Europe really do have less R&D spending than the US, which I’ve seen no evidence for, they’re almost certainly more efficient with the spending they have because of their reliance on generics.

Echidne complains about the recent change in the mainstream debate about Iraq, which has pitted various reformists trying to argue how to win the war. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind that nearly as much if the war was even winnable.

PZ writes about the putative discovery of finely preserved 580 million year old embryos, and the subsequent realization that the embryos are actually bacteria. After explaining the evidence that they aren’t embryos, he concludes,

As I’ve said before, I love the idea of being able to see 580 million year old embryos. Should I be disappointed at learning that perhaps these fossils are not of embryos?

Why, no.

I like reality and evidence. If further data demonstrate that not one of these fossils is a metazoan embryo and that all of them are interesting and unusual examples of large, specialized bacteria, that will be cool in a different sort of way. We follow where the evidence leads us, not where our predispositions want us to go.

Finally, Bora wants to put together an anthology of the best science blogging of 2006. If you have any suggestions, go over to his blog and give him a shout.