Your implication is the his lack of experience led to the adoption of policies that you don't agree with. That's hardly a condemnation of his ability to be president. Overall, his approval ratings are far better the GWB's at the end of his second term - a guy who at that point had plenty of executive experience.

Obama also had no military experience and little foreign policy experience, yet even most conservatives think that he is doing well on the "war on terror."

I agree with your last point, but experience is overrated in a presidential candidate. They bring a team with them and their ability to succeed in a primary and federal election is a reasonable proof of basic competence. Now, if a candidate has experience running a large organization and seriously screwed it up, that's another issue.

Unless you never circulate the coin and melt it down once the debt level falls below that of the debt ceiling.

The point is that the debt ceiling is a made up limit. Most countries don't have one.

Increasing this arbitrary limit does not let us spend more money - it allows us to BORROW more money in order to pay for those things that we already bought!

In other words, the fight we're having over the debt ceiling now should have taken place over the BUDGET. That's were the spending decisions take place. By not raising the debt ceiling now, all we are saying is that we won't pay back the money we HAVE ALREADY SPENT. That sends a bad message to those that might lend us money in the future - raising our rates - and actually makes us SPEND MORE MONEY in the future to service our debt.

If you want to reduce the deficit, fix the budget (more revenues, less spending). Don't shoot yourself in the foot as a punishment for already having spent more money that you have in the hopes that it will force you to budget better next time.

There is an open source DNA sequencing project out there: http://www.polonator.org/

But the fact is that it is still expensive as a hobby.

Love it! I'm in for one.

Combine it with the kinect so all you have to do is sit down and I'll buy two.

Sure you have to do a complicated dance routine to flip through channels and change the volume, but maybe, one day soon, we'll be able to operate basic television controls from across the room using only a single thumb!

Wake when my TV can figure out what I want to watch and puts it on before my ass hits the couch.

It doesn't quite work that way, but the answer to your question is that the database is stored in the DNA of immune cells.

Essentially, the newborn cells of the adaptive immune system (B and T-cells) undergo rearrangements of their DNA to produce a incredibly wide variety of receptors.

Then, they go through a selection process - if they react strongly with self, they die (negative selection). After a few more maturation and selection steps, the surviving immune cells are sent throughout the body.

If one of them later binds strongly to something (which is presumably foreign) in the right context, they activate. They trigger an immune response and proliferate. A subset of these daughter cells become essentially immortal - outlasting the immune response they fought in, but ready to quickly mobilize should that foreign substance be encountered again.

So, the memory cells are the hardware, but the rearranged antigen receptor gene they harbor is the information they need to work.

Bingo!

But that's a huge point to prove. As obvious as it may sound, it's evidence that validating patients and their concerns may be among the best things we can do as physicians. It's absolutely not billable, so many docs don't do it - instead focusing on seeing the next person quickly or doing another billable procedure.

Maybe with more studies aimed at understanding the effect of doctor-patient interactions, we'll start reimbursing MD's for what works and patients find valuable.

But he has a point. Several psychiatric drugs have been shown to be no better or worse than placebo. We didn't hear about it because these negative trials were suppressed by the drug companies. They only published the positive ones - do enough studies and one will work!

Even the open placebo used in this study appeared as good as the leading therapy for IBS (although they weren't compared head-to-head).

This is fascinating to me.It proves how much we don't know about how people work.

As a physician I have on several occasions wanted to prescribe a placebo, knowing that time would be the best remedy and that simply feeling like the patient is doing something might improve their outlook immediately. Of course, I consider that misleading and unethical. To know that it might work even if you are up front about it is amazing. I'm not sure that it would work outside of a clinical trial though. I'd love to know how/if it really works.

Several possibilities -

1) Just a statistical fluke - it won't be born out in repeat studies.
2) Specific only to disorders like IBS which has a highly variable course, subjective symptoms, and is hard to diagnose. This isn't going to work with leukemia.
3) An example of "active" intervention where a person feels like they are being helped to help themselves even if they cognitively don't believe it. It's what underlies the "healing touch" in medicine and maybe even the power of meditation/prayer (praying for yourself that is, not being in a coma and having others pray for you).

I also don't know how they got the study past the scientific review board, which I thought, would laugh them out of the room.

What if we ran universities like Wikipedia?

Then education would work like the media does today. The loudest or hottest or most in-line with what you already think "professors" would dominate those that actually know more about their field. You wouldn't be learning as much as concreting your world view - exactly the opposite of what higher education should do.

In fact, why not skip the university concept and meld education into the media entirely? Sign me up for the Daily Show Community College.

Daddy - why didn't our ancestors start working on a way to colonize the solar system before the Sun started expanding?

Because your great-great-great-great-google-grandpa was really into NASCAR and porn and couldn't spare the dough to fund our species-saving research.

Oh - I see. I'm glad he had his priorities straight. The entire sum of human existence shouldn't be forgotten for nothing, you know?

Retarded headline. It would be as valid to analyze his iPhone to see how electronics deal with toxins. Sequencing his genome is a publicity stunt. Nothing more.