You're fine if you stop breathing, as long as you don't start again.

This article is amazing. We all know that you can live for weeks without food, days without water, hours without blood, and minutes without air. It's commonly accepted that if you're without air for five minutes you're dead because the cells of your heart and brain have been damaged.

Apparently, new evidence refutes this. It's not the *lack* of oxygen that kills cells, it's the reintroduction of oxygen. And, get this, it's not even just a dumb chemical reaction -- your body apparently kills the cells intentionally.

Apparently it comes down to the mitocondria (I control your arms!) inside the cells. Mitocondria are fascinating little things that I really want to learn more about. Not only are they responsible for regulating cell metabolism, they're also in charge of (vocab word!) apoptosis, the mechanism by which the body destroys abnormal cells (and thus protect itself from cancer). It appears that the body can't tell the difference between a cancerous cell and one that's being reintroduced to oxygen after being deprived of it, so the kill switch is hit and the cell is destroyed.

(Another interesting fact is that one theory of cellular something-or-other holds that mitocondria -- which contain their own DNA, distinct from that of the cell they inhabit -- are actually stand-alone organisms in their own right. It's a bit odd thinking that processes so basic to our existence as cell metabolism and destruction would be relegated to another organism. Makes me think of jellyfish...)

Taking a page from the RIAA: alienate and attack your supporters.

So, I'm not generally a political guy, but I really can't stand it when people bully one another, and that's what This basically boils down to.

In short, this Anthony guy voluntarily started up a pro-Obama website on MySpace and put a lot of effort into it over the last two and a half years. It started making a big stir, got lots of unsolicited Friends requests, and in Februyary the Obama campaign moved in to make it 'official.' They started bullying Anthony, presumably telling him what to do and how to do it, and he came to feel that they were just using him because he'd gotten them a nice position to work from.

According to Anthony's Story, the campaign eventually said, why don't we just buy it from you? Anthony offered them a proposal, and they immediately accused him of using his site for commercial purposes, which is against the MySpace usage agreement, and had the site deleted. Then they managed to get the URL to redirect traffic to their own site, the weasel-y sons of bitches.

Whither shall I wander? The Travel Meme.

Bold the places you've been; italicize the places you want to go. From the Forbes magazine list of most-visited places.
The stuff that's bolded *and* italicized, I've been to, but I was small, so I wanna go back :)

( Unsurprisingly, I've hit a few. )