Linkee-poo loves the smell of links in the morning

So, what's been happening while I was gone? :: looks at news feeds :: Oh gods. Whelp, better get these outa the way cause it looks like it's going to be a bumpy night.

"Actress Roseanne Barr says she was 'Ambien tweeting' at 2 in the morning when she posted a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser in the Obama White House, that caused ABC to cancel her TV show." Oddly, being racist actually isn't a side-effect of Ambien. And once again we learn the real victimization culture in the US is dominated by conservatives.

"The board of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has voted to fire its longtime president, Paige Patterson, who was ousted from the top post last week amid controversy over past counsel he had given women concerning marital abuse and rape." Well, that only took a few decades (and "new" information).

"The poop is sealed inside a plastic bag and hauled off the next space trash day, Whitson said. When it's too full, astronauts must 'put a rubber glove on and pack it down.' That's what happens when the ISS toilet is working. When it malfunctions, astronauts will occasionally have to deal with floating poop." Wonder why we didn't see that in Starship Troopers (or really almost any Space Opera)?

"This ancient lizard was the direct ancestor of approximately 10,000 species alive today that have inhabited the planet for more than 240 million years."

"An alternative to storage involves turning the carbon that's captured into a useful product—something the XPrize has made one of its challenges. Doing so requires two things: overcoming the chemical stability of CO2 and making a product that sells at a profit. We recently stumbled across a bit of creative chemistry that turns carbon dioxide from the air into a product that should be profitable: high-quality carbon nanotubes." We're saved! No, not really. We're still boned, even if they figure out how to make it work well. (Grokked from John)

"One particularly intriguing line of research seeks to train computers to diagnose one of the deadliest of all malignancies, pancreatic cancer, when the disease is still readily treatable." Prostate cancer is one of the hardest to diagnose and it's often missed by radiologists until it's too late. Adding an AI to look over all abdomen CT scans for its signs is an excellent step forward. Also, it's good to see some thought being put into how to train learning programs.

"There’s no question that exercise is good for the body, and there is growing evidence that staying physically active can help slow the normal declines in brain function that come with age. Health groups recommend that adults try to get at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-intense activity a week to keep their hearts healthy — but is that the same amount that’s needed to keep the brain sharp?"

"A Middletown woman who worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative testified in court Wednesday that as a New Jersey sales representative for Insys, an Arizona-based pharmaceutical company, she participated in a scheme in which doctors were paid kickbacks and bribes in exchange for prescribing Subsys, a powerful fentanyl-based opioid painkiller." And there's the smoking gun. Also this whole "speakers' fee" battle has been going on for decades. I'm surprised to see pharmaceutical companies still using it.

"In March 1968, a journalist from France's Le Monde newspaper claimed that the French were too bored to take part in the upheaval that had begun sweeping other countries that year. There was peace and prosperity in France. But there was also an entrenched, patriarchal society led by a deeply conservative president, Charles de Gaulle, who in 1968 had already been in power for 10 years. And there was a generation of young people yearning for greater freedom." How did that work out?

"If fresh elections are required, furious Italians could be expected to vote in even greater numbers for the same anti-establishment politicians who nominated the euroskeptic minister in the first place. Only this time, those leaders may make a fight with Brussels the centerpiece of their campaign, targeting the euro and European rules that tightly restrict how governments spend their money." Drunk and angry ain't no way to go through life.

"'Italy’s fate does not lie in the hands of financial markets,' European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said this week. The bond vigilantes might have something to say about that."

"The president and his top officials have been at odds with each other — and sometimes even themselves — when it comes to defining the U.S. negotiating position with Kim Jong Un." Policy? What policy? Also, we have a meeting, we don't have a meeting, Un cancelled before Trump did, it's all a shit show. Also, there's no way we're going to get a "complete, permanent" nuclear solution in N Korea.

"But when it comes to selling Trump’s Iran strategy and other foreign policy initiatives, the White House has been blasting out its talking points to an uncharacteristically inclusive list of foreign policy heavyweights — including former Obama administration officials, advisers to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and critics who have publicly accused Trump of being, across the board, 'bad at playing president.'"