just a bit of a nitpick - papers accepted for presentation at the American Heart Association annual meeting are peer-reviewed. The acceptance rate is higher than some journals, lower than others, but there is most assuredly review. Also, if you want to hear the community's reaction, these meetings are among the best places to hear it.

Finally, I agree to some extent with Silenced - yes, seeing the biological mechanisms of the population association there before you on your lab bench is helpful but by no means necessary. Doll and Peto's seminal papers on smoking and lung cancer were sufficient to bring about public health action; even more so was Laura Koutsky's paper on cervical carcinoma in situ and wart virus - Dr. Koutsky showed risk of cervical cancer increased over 100 times with wart virus exposure - hard to argue for more study with a finding like that.

Otherwise there would've been no way to leave Erwin Schrott off the list. The man is amazing, especially in Don Giovanni. Terfel is often funny and deliberately almost buffoonish in the role; Schrott is power, overwhelming sexuality, and evil.

my college student daughter works part-time as an emergency med tech for 15 bucks an hour, but during the holidays picks up music gigs around town (LA) playing her violin or singing. She gets in the 60-80 buck range for this work, pretty good pay, eh? And last night she pulled down $250 for singing the Christmas section of Handel's Messiah, both the soprano and alto solos, at some church or other - not bad for an hour or so, eh?

The complexity of piloting is not so much the issue as understanding how it works at all. I enjoy sailboating, but it's definitely not something anyone can jump into and bring the sailboat back to the dock safely. A good friend of mine from Afghanistan commented on his first sailboat ride, "This is even more complicated than riding a camel!"

that I'd like your take on, Andrew, is the Alberta Heritage Fund. Not sure how sovereign that is, or what it invests in, but it does provide some services for Albertans - free treatment for any cancer, for example.

and he waxes wildly enthusiastic at parties about LEDs replacing everything that lights up, while saving tons of watts in the process. I'm semi-skeptical, but if he's anywhere near right this will be a very helpful change in terms of energy consumption.

make sure you also hang onto Rachmaninoff's Preludes (his ode to Chopin's Nocturnes) and Mahler's Second, the Resurrection Symphony. Mahler had a reason for what he does to the second basses, and it works. Still, that's a heckuva range to have to sing.

the lower ranges are bass, down to basso (profundo in the case of James Earl Jones). Bill Clinton is a definite tenor, and my recollection of King is that he was at the lower end of the tenor range as well. My voice teacher is a tenor with a solid, easy high C, but because he knows how to make his sound resonate well, people think his voice is lower than it actually is. We've talked about how that resonance can project authority in the speaking voice, regardless of the range being used.

at the onset of the war, which was also in the 4 trillion range. I believe that estimate came out of Stanford, and was put out there as the war began. Too lazy to look it up, but I do remember the cries of outrage that greeted that estimate.

In the recent presidential elections, up till the last month or so there were two prominent women, on opposite sides. One of them, Han Myungsook, was recently prime minister (a position similar to a powerful vice-president), and had held several other cabinet positions. The other, Pak Kunhye, was leader of the opposition party and a member of parliament. Further back in history when the culture was more "traditional", both Queen Min and Queen Yun played important roles in resisting the Japanese takeover and occupation. Queen Min was assassinated for that, and Queen Yun was kept imprisoned in her old age by the US-backed dictator Syngman Rhee because of the respect she was held in by the Korean people.

wrote a number of excellent alternate history books. One about WW2 that I admire is "In Presence of Mine Enemies"

http://www.amazon.com/Presence-Mine-Enemies-Harry-Turtledove/dp/0451529022/ref=sr_1_43?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205861121&sr=8-43

which posits a victory for Hitler and the effect this would have many years later on Jewish life in Berlin.

McCain is doing that deliberately - even the "oooops, I didn't really mean that" bit is a gambit to get the thought out there, just as when a lawyer will say something during a trial that he/she knows will be stricken and the jury will be told to ignore.