Dog Walk Musings: "Cod Liver Combover"

"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
-- William Wordsworth 1770-1850
: "The Tables Turned" (1798)

Credit Card Offers 79.9% Rate!!

Yes, it's true. It's not a joke or a misprint. First Premier Bank is offering a "Premier Card" credit card with a 79.9% APR. That's right, 79.9. And it's not just the interest rate that's outrageous. The fees are pretty hideous, too.

As part of a project to understand how the brain learns, biologists have written memories into the cells of a fruitfly’s brain, making it think it had a terrible experience.

WASHINGTON — People who use marijuana for medical purposes and those who distribute it to them should not face federal prosecution, provided they act according to state law, the Justice Department said Monday in a directive with far-reaching political and legal implications.

In a memorandum to federal prosecutors in the 14 states that make some allowance for the use of medical marijuana, the department said that it was committed to the “efficient and rational use” of its resources and that prosecuting patients and distributors who are in “clear and unambiguous compliance” with state laws did not meet that standard.


"A century’s worth of experiments suggest that people’s actual behavior is not driven by permanent traits that apply from one context to another. Students who are routinely dishonest at home are not routinely dishonest at school. People who are courageous at work can be cowardly at church. People who behave kindly on a sunny day may behave callously the next day when it is cloudy and they are feeling glum. Behavior does not exhibit what the psychologists call “cross-situational stability.” The psychologists thus tend to gravitate toward a different view of conduct. In this view, people don’t have one permanent thing called character."
-- David Brooks NYTimes 10/20/09