Friday TOON Roundup 3- The Rest

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Science and Religion

Friday TOON Roundup 2 - More Willard toons

Friday TOON Roundup 1 - Mitt in a Bind(er)

Toon- Mitt Explains his economic plan!

Today's Non Sequitur Toon

Savannah voters flock to the polls early

snip:
Another early voter — who asked not to be identified because she didn’t want her neighbors at The Landings to know whom she voted for — said the debate brought her to the polls as well.

“I wanted to get down here and cast my vote for President Obama as quickly as possible,” the voter said. “I hope his performance last night got some of the people on the fence better informed and prepared to vote.”

So far, Williams said, there have been few problems with early voting, but, she said, people need to remember to bring photo identification and leave their campaign buttons, T-shirts, and even bumper stickers at home.

“It’s a no campaigning area,” she said. “So that means none of that. We can’t let you in if you have that stuff on, and you can’t park within 150 feet (of the building) if you’ve got a (campaign) sticker on your vehicle.”

rest of the article
http://savannahnow.com/news/2012-10-18/savannah-voters-flock-polls-early/

Mitt Romney’s Math Problem

By TERESA TRITCH
In Tuesday night’s debate, Mr. Romney again refused to say which deductions he would limit to pay for his tax plan (including his pledge to cut tax rates by 20 percent and eliminate the AMT) which would cost some $5 trillion over ten years. Instead, he said one way to curb deductions would be to cap the total amount that taxpayers can claim against their deductible expenses. “I’ll pick a number,” he said, “$25,000 of deductions and credits, and you can decide which ones to use.”

When President Obama pointed out that Mr. Romney’s numbers did not add up and would not even begin to pay for a $5 trillion tax cut, Mr. Romney got huffy, “Well of course they add up. I — I was — I was someone who ran businesses for 25 years, and balanced the budget. I ran the Olympics and balanced the budget. I ran the — the state of Massachusetts as a governor, to the extent any governor does, and balanced the budget all four years.”

So does it all add up because he says so?

No.

The Tax Policy Center did the math yesterday. Capping deductions at $25,000 would raise $1.3 trillion in tax revenue over 10 years, $3.7 trillion short of what Mr. Romney needs to pay for his tax cut promises. Capping deductions at $17,000 – a level the Romney campaign floated a few weeks ago – would raise $1.7 trillion, a shortfall of $3.3 trillion. Even if Mr. Romney eliminated all itemized deductions, his plan would raise only $2 trillion, a deficit of $3 trillion.

Under any scenario he has sketched so far, Mr. Romney’s proposed tax cut would blow a hole in the deficit. And for what? To preserve and enhance immense tax cuts for the already wealthy.

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/mitt-romneys-math-problem/

Tom Daley’s sponsorship with British Gas causes an awkward moment

Sponsorship for Olympic athletes usually helps both the Olympian and the company sponsoring them. The Olympian gets money to train and live, and the sponsor gains valuable exposure.
But in the case of British Gas' sponsorship of bronze medal-winning UK diver Tom Daley, the company could have benefited from checking out their company's placement on his swimsuit.



http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/tom-daley-sponsorship-british-gas-causes-awkward-moment-174550810--oly.html

Could a moon of Uranus harbour an underground ocean?

Since 2005, astrobiologists have considered Enceladus a possible haven for life, after the Cassini mission found that the icy moon of Saturn shoots out plumes of water through fissures in its crust. But planetary scientists Elizabeth Turtle of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and Julie Castillo-Rogez of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are now turning their eyes to an even more distant Solar System locale: Ariel, a moon of Uranus that they think could also harbour an underground ocean.

Like Enceladus, Ariel’s surface appears relatively blemish free, with few large craters, as though recent activity had erased or buried older pockmarks. Flow-like features on Ariel suggest icy volcanism may have been responsible for the facelift, as it has on Enceladus. But in the frigid depths of the outer Solar System, what could maintain an ocean beneath the surface of Ariel?

In a presentation at a meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences in Reno, Nevada, Turtle and Castillo-Rogez calculate that tidal heating — the flexing of Ariel owing to the gravitational tug of other moons — is five times greater on Ariel than Enceladus. In addition, both moons contain a relatively large amount of rock, which generates heat through the decay of radioactive elements within it. Heat from the rock would increase the internal temperature of Ariel to the point where ice would be soft enough to respond to tidal flexing, Castillo-Rogez says. Although the Uranian system is colder than of Saturn system, the Uranian moons are more likely to have captured impurities that would decrease the melting temperature of ice, Castillo-Rogez notes.

Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, is intrigued. “I’ve always thought Ariel was the more interesting of the [outer] satellites,” he says. But the best current images of Ariel, from the closest approach of the Voyager spacecraft in 1986 (above), aren’t good enough to show precisely how smooth the surface is. Better images could help planetary scientists to decide whether the ocean spills out onto the surface today or has been trapped in place for a billion years. “I can imagine an ocean is possible … but I’m not sure the surface is young enough to be active right now,” Schenk adds.

more
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/10/could-a-moon-of-uranus-harbour-an-underground-ocean.html

To sleep, perchance to forget fears

Traumatic memories can be manipulated in sleeping mice to reduce their fearful responses during waking hours. The finding, announced by Stanford University researchers at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, suggests that sleep-based therapies could provide new options for treating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“We have an ethical obligation to study this because PTSD is so hard to treat,” says Daniela Schiller of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, who studies the human neurobiology of fear and was not involved in the study. “It’s definitely promising,” she says.

Currently, one of the most common treatments for PTSD requires the patient to recall the original trauma — an explosion, for example — in a psychiatrist’s office. With repeated ‘safe’ exposures to the memory, patients may learn new associations that reduce the power of loud noises and other cues to trigger flashbacks.

Some patients are daunted by the task of intentionally recalling their traumatic memories. And many patients who undergo the therapy eventually relapse, says lead author Asya Rolls, perhaps because the technique becomes strongly associated with the psychiatrist’s office and does not generalize well to the outside world.

more
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/10/to-sleep-perchance-to-forget-fears.html