'In that regard, I think the big discovery is that 90% of all the carbon that's taken up in life in the oceans is taken up in microbes, and a large number of those may be in the deep-ocean sediments buried beneath the sea floor,' he told BBC News.
1,877 African American students nationwide scored higher than 1300 out of a possible 1600 on the SAT last year, compared with nearly 150,000 students overall who achieved that score.Almost 80 to 1. Should be about 20 to 1 based on population. This is really bad. I'd love to know what the comparable ratio is in Canada -- a country with decent public education.
Then Bush either realized he was missing something, or he heard the commotion. The president, who is rarely alone, even in his own house, turned and walked back to the front door unaccompanied, facing the backs of a sea of dark suits. Bush, with his right hand, reached over the suits and pointed insistently at Trotta. At first the officials, with their backs to him and their heads in the rumble, did not realize it was the president intervening. Bush then braced himself against someone and lunged to retrieve the agent, who was still arguing with the Chileans. The shocked Chilean officials then released Trotta.
Trotta walked in behind Bush, who looked enormously pleased with himself. He was wearing the expression that some critics call a smirk, and his eyebrows shot up as if to wink at bystanders.
...CNN's Mark Walz had his camera trained on Bush when a thundering herd of Asian reporters hit him in his blind spot. Walz, who has covered the White House since the last year of the Reagan administration, said it was the first time he had been knocked down. The cameraman landed on his feet and kept shooting, with an Asian reporter wedged under his right bicep.Bush has indeed united the world. Even our allies hate us now.
Walz's colleagues commended him, both for keeping the camera on Bush and for not making a jerk of himself in front of the president. "I didn't want to embarrass myself or the American press by kicking it up a notch," he said.
In the hall afterward, a couple of pairs of journalists went at each other like a locker-room fight.
Marriage affords a vivid example. In some states it is evidently more imperiled than in others. The Bible Belt states, in particular, have a shockingly high divorce rate, around 50 percent above the national average. Given such marital instability, these states are anxious to defend the institution of heterosexual matrimony, which may explain their hostility to gay marriage. The state of Massachusetts, by contrast, has the lowest divorce rate in the nation. So its people -- or at least its liberal judges -- perhaps feel more comfortable allowing some progressive experimentation. It will be interesting to see how this experiment plays out, assuming the Bush administration does not succeed in choking off the right of a state to recognize same-sex marriages by getting the Federal Marriage Amendment enacted...
... One of the most striking differences among states is in their levels of wealth. Liberals tend to live in more economically productive states than conservatives. The top five states in per capita personal income (Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland and New York) all went to Kerry; the bottom five (Utah, New Mexico, West Virginia, Arkansas and Mississippi) all went to Bush. Since the blue states are generally richer than the red states, they must bear a greater portion of the federal tax burden. Most of them pay more to Washington than they receive, whereas most of the red states receive more than they pay. Some liberals in blue states must wonder exactly what they get in return for subsidizing the heartlanders, who are said to resent them.
Here is where President Bush is their friend. According to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, as much as two-thirds of the benefits from the income tax cuts he pushed through in his first term go to taxpayers making more than $100,000 a year. These well-off Americans tend to be concentrated around New York City, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and other liberal enclaves. By contrast, relatively few of the benefits from the Bush tax cuts go to the Southern and Prairie states, where low-income working families with children are more the norm. At present, the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire by 2010. If the president succeeds in making them permanent, as he has vowed to do, it will mean lasting relief for the blue states. The money they had been sending to the red states could then be spent locally, according to their own liberal values -- say, on public schools (where they already spend more per pupil than the red states) or stem-cell research.
The more conservatives succeed in reducing the size and scope of the federal government, the more fiscal freedom the blue states will have to pursue their own idea of a just society....
/// Meanwhile, blue-state liberals should stop despairing and start thinking locally. Instead of saying, ''The United States is. . . . '' try saying, ''The United States are. . . . '' See? You feel better already.
They might have said that it is a deeply uncontroversial fact that the United States has from the beginning had too few troops in Iraq: too few to secure the capital or effectively monitor the borders or even police the handful of miles of the Baghdad airport road; too few to secure the arms dumps that litter the country; and too few to mount an offensive in one city without leaving others vulnerable.
They might have said that it is a deeply uncontroversial fact that the insurgency is spreading: when I arrived in Iraq 13 months ago, the insurgents were mounting 17 attacks a day; last week there were 150 a day. If the old rule of thumb about counterinsurgency warfare holds true - that the guerrilla wins by not losing and the government loses by not winning - then America is losing the Iraq war. The Iraqi insurgents have shown 'outstanding resilience,' as a Marine intelligence report compiled after Falluja put it, and 'will continue to find refuge among sympathetic tribes and former regime members.'
Congress debated legislation Saturday giving two committee chairman and their assistants access to income tax returns without regard to privacy protections, but not before red-faced Republicans said it was all a mistake and would be swiftly repealed.
In their report, the researchers noted that the skeleton showed that those early great apes 'retained primitive monkeylike characters' and thus did not seem to support 'the theoretical model that predicts that all characters shared by extant great apes were present in their last common ancestor.'
...The U.S. electoral system looks increasingly dysfunctional, and those of us who used to mock the old Soviet or Iraqi 'elections' for lacking competition ought to be blushing.
In Arkansas, 75 percent of state legislative races this year were uncontested by either the Republicans or by the Democrats. The same was true of 73 percent of the seats in Florida, 70 percent in South Carolina, 62 percent in New Mexico.
And Congressional races were an embarrassment. Only seven incumbents in the House of Representatives lost their seats this month. Four of those were in Texas, where the Republican Legislature gerrymandered Democrats out of their seats.
The current academic publishing system is slow, tedious, and error prone. David Zetland, a clever economics graduate student at UC Davis, has a better idea. Zetland suggests that journal publishers should buy manuscripts in an auction. You probably already have some objections, Where would the money come from? Why would journal editors buy what they can get for free? etc. But wait. Here comes the clever part:
The money paid in the auction would flow not to the author of the paper but to authors cited by the paper and their publishers. For example, if a journal buys a paper by A.Tabarrok for $1000 which cites an article by T.Cowen published by Oxford University Press and an article by M. Friedman published by the University of Chicago Press then Cowen, Friedman and their publishers would each receive $250 (the author/publisher split could vary.)
