Medary.com

Kansas City Star/AP:

On Wednesday, Scott Carson, chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said the first flight will be pushed well into the fall because of delays in completing assembly of the first plane and in finalizing flight-control software.

Even so, Carson said the 787 remains on track to be delivered to its first customer, Japan's All Nippon Airways, next May.

Sioux Falls Argus Leader (this time, avoiding the dreaded Lorem ipsum disease):

Patrick Hamman, 22, of Des Moines, was arrested on a charge of domestic assault after he threw a bag of Cheetos at his father, Michael Hamman, hitting him in the face Sunday night.

Methamphetamines are reported to be involved.  Chester Cheeto is being sought as an accomplice to the attack.

Sioux Falls Argus-Leader (get it while it's hot):

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Published: September 5, 2007

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(Reprinted in its entirety under Fair Use, a confidence that Lorem ipsum isn't copyrightable, together with a vague but satisfied sense of gentle mocking of our revered Mainstream Media.  Plus, this isn't the first time that South Dakota's Largest Newspaper has let out a Lorem Ipsum unto the Intertubes.

A picture is worth 1000 words.

Capitalism über alles

 

Photo credit: Club for Growth/Reason Hit & Run.

Sadly, the Wal-Mart expedition into Germany failed (the market works!). But, we'll know we've won in Iraq when Wal-Marts (Wal-Souks?) start popping up in Baghdad.

I just received this e-mail:

(Message redacted to protect my privacy, and hopefully to prevent other folks from buying into this lame stunt.)

Dear Rapleaf:
I didn't ask you to keep track of my "reputation."  Nor did I ask you to send me spam.  Don't do it again.

ScienceDaily:

‘On our last trip, we found that bonobos were better cooperators than chimpanzees because they had sex and played a lot. This time we want to see how much thinking is going on behind the cooperation.’

Bonobos, like chimpanzees, are related to humans by 98.7%. But in contrast to chimpanzees who live in male dominated societies, where infanticide and lethal aggression are observed, bonobos live in highly tolerant and peaceful societies due to female dominance that maintains group cohesion and regulates tensions through sexual behaviour.

‘We’re always comparing ourselves to chimpanzees, but they’re only half the picture. Bonobos and chimpanzees are so opposite in many ways, that we really need to understand bonobos if we’re ever going to understand ourselves.’

Well, er, OK, the article didn't exactly talk about "handshakes."   "Daddy and Mommy are 'wrestling.'"

Science Daily:

“Each time we peer deeper into the human genome we uncover more valuable insight into our intricate biology,” said Dr. Venter. “With this publication we have shown that human to human variation is five to seven-fold greater than earlier estimates proving that we are in fact more unique at the individual genetic level than we thought.” He added, “It is clear however that we are still at the earliest stages of discovery about ourselves and only with additional sequencing of more individual genomes will we garner a full understanding of how our genes influence our lives.”

Within the human genome there are several different kinds of DNA variants. The most studied type is single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs, which are thought to be the essential variants implicated in human traits and disease susceptibility. A total of 4.1 million variants covering 12.3 million base pairs of DNA were uncovered in this analysis of Dr. Venter’s genome. Of the 4.1 million variations between chromosome sets, 3.2 million were SNPs. This is a typical number expected to be found in any other human genome, but there were at least 1.2 million variants that had not been described before. Surprisingly, nearly one million were different kinds of variants including: insertion/deletions (“indels”), copy number variants, block substitutions and segmental duplications.

Energy companies are snapping up newly graduated engineers and clamoring for more:

Management consulting firm Oliver Wyman says roughly eight in 10 global oil and gas companies forecast a shortage of petroleum engineers through at least 2011. The American Petroleum Institute said U.S. energy companies will need at least another 5,000 engineers by decade's end.

In Houston, home to scores of exploration, engineering and services companies, simply check the classified ads: Row upon row of job listings for engineers at ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp. and numerous others.

Petroleum engineers evaluate potential oil and gas reservoirs, work with geologists and other specialists to understand rock formations, determine drilling methods and then monitor drilling and recovery operations. One of their big tasks is to design methods that achieve maximum recovery of oil and gas.

"I can assure you, it's tight from a supply standpoint, hot from a demand standpoint and lucrative from a job searcher's standpoint," said Cary Wilkins, who leads Shell's recruitment efforts in the U.S. and Canada.

Division I FCS Appalachian State (two-time FCS champions, by the way) just went to Ann Arbor and defeated Division I FBS Michigan today.

Wow.

WTF?

Kansas City Star/AP story:
Phosgene from Iraq found in U.N. office (free registration required)

U.N. weapons inspectors discovered a potentially hazardous chemical warfare agent that was taken from an Iraqi chemical weapons facility 11 years ago and mistakenly stored in their offices in the heart of midtown Manhattan all that time, officials said Thursday.

The material, identified in inventory files as phosgene - a chemical substance used in World War I weapons - was discovered Aug. 24. It was only identified on Wednesday because it was marked simply with an inventory number, and officials had to check the many records in their vast archives, said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the U.N. inspection agency.

A team of hazardous materials experts from the FBI and the New York City police went to the office on Manhattan's east side, about a block north of U.N. headquarters, on Thursday with two steel containers to remove the materials and take them to a military facility outside New York for disposal, officials said.

While the disposal team was in UNMOVIC's sixth-floor office, its small staff was evacuated along with other tenants from that floor, Buchanan said.