Shared Items through morning of 11/29

I haven't had much to share lately. Here are a few:

• A Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in New York. I've never understood why people would want to go out shopping on a day that's so crazy that it's generally known as Black Friday, just to save a few bucks. It just isn't worth it. This has me even more dumbfounded than usual.
• Scientists have found the mechanism for how resveratrol slows aging, and have demonstrated that it also works in mice. This could be huge. In the meantime, drink some wine and/or grape juice. Wow, we really loved run-on sentences when we wrote that thing (I can't remember whether I wrote it or edited it, but it was one of the first things I worked on at my current job).
• Foundation movies are coming! It'll be interesting to see if they pull them off. If I'm remembering the right book in the series, Foundation spans hundreds of years (the series certainly does). That's a tricky series to make.

Hopefully that's enough to let everyone know that I'm still alive.

Barack Obama is Center-Right... nudge nudge, wink wink

There's a meme going around that Obama's policies are surprisingly center-right, supposedly to the consternation of those of us who supported him. At first my reaction was to resist that, since, ya know, it's BS. But I realized I'd rather embrace it. Here's why.

As far as I've ever been able to tell (and I have no good data to back this up, mostly because I don't feel like spending a lot of time researching this post), Americans tend to gravitate to the center without necessarily knowing what that means. That might be just as unfair as the Obama=center-right meme, but it feels true. I even thought I was moderate until I started to really learn what words like "liberal," "conservative," (politically) "left," and (politically) "right" meant.

So, what the heck, let's call Obama center-right. Closing Gitmo? Fine, let's call that a center-right position, and pretend that the real centrist position is fixing the FISA courts (nudge nudge, wink wink). Putting people to work through a public works program that simultaneously repairs our infrastruture? Sure, what the heck, that's a center-right position. Raising the minimum wage and extending unemployment, that's the real centrist position.

What do you think, would that work?

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 11/26

I skipped yesterday, so here are some shared items from the last couple days. I'm going to try to limit the ones I post to my very favorites, so check my shared items for the rest if you're interested.

Technology:

• Researchers at Georgia Tech are developing emotionless killing machines to better apply ethics rules, such as the Geneva Conventions, on the field of battle. I'm mostly blogging this so the resistance in the future will have another spot in the archive that they can recover to figure out where in time to send their soldiers to try to save us all.
• The San Francisco Bay Area is planning to install an electric vehicle grid (charging stations and such) to make electric vehicles more viable. I like this idea a lot, although it annoys me that people think of electric vehicles as if they get infinite miles to the gallon. The energy still has to come from somewhere.

Atheism:

• I love PZ Myers' blog about atheists and thankfulness. Thank you, PZ Myers (a real human being) for expressing this so well.

Politics:

• The economic bailout is costing a really, really insane amount of money, currently roughly $4.6165 trillion. To put that number in perspective, it's a good chunk of everything we've ever spent on just about everything in your American History book.

The Internets:

• I love this song about the future of things like MySpace. Her other videos are also awesome.
  

That'll do it for today. Comment on these or any other shared items (or, really, whatever) below.

No Blog

I'm dog-proofing. I'll cover shared items tomorrow night. Feel free to comment here if you're itching.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 11/24

Oops, I almost forgot to post today. Here are today's shared Google Reader items.

Miscellaneous:

• I don't often share the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, but I read everything they post, because grammar mistakes make me point and laugh. When said mistakes occur on the sign for an elementary school (not even, semi-excusably, on the part that changes; no, this is on the permanent part), I have to share it.
• This isn't a shared item, but I'm watching Rachel Maddow without a DVR buffer since the Daily Show and Colbert were repeats, and I just saw a commercial for some hair-removal device. If you act now, you get a smaller one for "lips, chin, and sensitive areas." Do you really want to use the same hair-removal device on your lips, chin, and "sensitive areas?"

Atheism:

• Could it be? Is Obama as non-religious as I hoped he might be?? Didn't the right-wing nutjobs realize calling him an atheist would make him even more hated in America than calling him a Muslim??? Woot to Scientologists moving below us, at least.

Politics:

• Palin 2012! No, seriously, there are still people who want to get Palin on the ticket in 2012. I may have to give them money.
• Somehow it surprised me that Biden was replaced in the Senate by his former chief-of-staff, rather than by his son, Beau. Apparently everyone knew this was going to happen; that the chief-of-staff is holding the seat for 2 years presumably to allow Beau to run for it when he gets back from Iraq/finishes his term as Delaware Attorney General. How did I miss that?
• Bush has begun his end-of-term pardons. I shared this mostly for this sentence (emphasis mine): "Those issued reprieves had been found guilty of mostly garden-variety offenses, like Leslie O. Collier, who was issued a pardon for a 1996 conviction for the unauthorized use of a pesticide in killing bald eagles.

Science:

• A study has shown that napping boosts "sophisticated memory." I don't really have anything to add to that, except that it's awesome news; I'm not being lazy, I'm just pumping up my memory. Oh, and in the other story linked from that page, it says not to watch TV and/or read stuff off of a monitor just before going to bed. So, of course, I'm blogging and watching MSNBC before heading to bed. Oops.
• We're going to Jupiter in 2011, but not Europa. Why not Europa?? We know Europa is probably the best bet for finding life in the solar system. I can't imagine a bigger scientific find than extraterrestrial life. Why aren't we checking the place that we think offers the best chance of finding life??? To answer my own question, I know they're terrified that they won't properly sterilize the mission, and we'll find life only to have it killed off by bacteria on the probe. Well, that and we need to send some sort of drilling machine if we do it, because it'd have to go through tons of ice to get to the possible ocean. But we should at least plan to spin any probe that goes to Jupiter over to Europa to help us map that moon out for a future mission.

Technology?

• [most recent] McDonalad has applied for a patent for a "method and apparatus for making a sandwich." If it's as ridiculous as it seems to be, just... wow.

That's it today. Comment below.