Jzoe Blog

Certain people from Crockett Hall my freshman year might remember something i did, and might get a kick out of this article:

http://www.mcalesternews.com/articles/2004/07/31/news/local_news/news02.txt

What I don’t understand is how republicans can keep denying that Bush lied about Iraq. I will readily admit that he never said all at once, “We are going to invade iraq now because if we don’t, they will use weapons of mass destruction on us.”

But do you remember anybody saying that we were going to invade because saddam was a brutal dictator? That seems to be the line now…. but if that’s true, then why did we torture Iraqi prisoners? What gives?

Part of me wants to say, “Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t”… maybe not to go so far as to support bush- but possibly to just shut up and let things happen. I’m not crazy about Kerry, but I see him as a lesser of two evils. Any sort of restraint Bush has had as he’s been thinking about re-election will be gone in a second term. That’s a devil I don’t want to know.

The month of August is Spinal Muscular Atrophy awareness month. Please take a moment to look at http://www.curesma.com/.

Quick Facts:
- SMA is the #1 genetic killer of children under age 2.
- 1 out of 40 Americans carry the gene for SMA.
- 1 out of 30 Canadians carry the gene for SMA.
- A child born to 2 carriers has a 25% chance of being affected with SMA and a 50% chance of being a carrier.
- 1 out of every 6,000 babies are born affected with SMA in the US.
- 1 out of every 4,000 babies are born affected with SMA in Canada.
- 50% of children born with SMA will die before age 2.
- 2 children in the US are born with SMA everyday. Within the next 2 years of their lives, at least 1 of them will die.
- SMA can strike anyone of any age, race or gender.
- In the last decade, scientists along with help from Families of Spinal Muscular Atrophy have been successful in many discoveries, including:
*identifying the chromosome containing SMN (Survival Motor Neuron)
*identification of the SMN protein
*developing a blood test to diagnose SMA and identify carriers
*developing model mice affected with and successfully cured from SMA
*identifying a pathway capable of restoring full length SMN2.
- It is estimated, if appropriate funds are available, a cure or treatment will be found within the next five years.

So go check out that website, then once you know what’s up you should tell someone else about this disease(that’s the point of having an awareness month!), or maybe even tell your state representatives to support research for a cure, or donate a couple of bucks to the FSMA foundation.

Goodbye everybody! I am moving from NY to IL now. I’ll try to post again in a few days.

Yes, I found my old senior picture from high school. I am definitely wearing a silly hat and holding a graphing calculator. That’s my real senior picture.

Lexington Herald-Leader | 07/28/2004 | Meltdown over a burning issue

Key quotes from this: “I didn’t know you could burn ice cream”

A woman brought her two small kids to the ice cream burning, and said: “It was kind of hard to explain to them why the ice cream was bad,” she said. “We do support the president, but they like ice cream.”

I’ve been packing to move out of Phi Sig, and I came across some of my old notebooks from highschool. Ha! crazy drawing.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Miracle on Probability Street — The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America

Having read this, I would actually be interested in a newsletter describing in detail the top 3 most unusual occurances each day. It wouldn’t mean much, but it might be fun to go along with the comics and breakfast.

This Land Is Your Land (manuscript version)

Random link! God bless America!

Browser update:

Now I’ve got 50.1% of my traffic from the Mozilla browser. 30% is from Internet Explorer, an 15% from search engine robots, mostly google. 1.17% of the hits are from some nerd using linux, and I’ve got seven hits from some super-nerd using lynx.