Sunday breakfast links

I'm having a cozy, relaxing Sunday morning at home with coffee in my monster mug, a sausage, egg and cheese croissant, and the morning interthing-clicky-papers. I do sometimes miss flipping through the LA Times Sunday edition, with Calvin and Hobbes, and the book section helping to grow me up literate, Jonathan Gold (one of the best LA writers since Raymond Chandler, even though he lives in New York now) and his musings on obscure lunch counters on Pico Boulevard, and Robert Hilburn's generally idiotic concert and record reviews ... but the interthing-clickies make sharing much easier.

Some items:

Good grammar saves lives!!

Some short chains of amino acids have been found to kill antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Gregory Stephanopoulos at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues reasoned that if the amino acid sequences of these peptides were treated as a language with grammatical rules, the rules could be used to create new peptides with similar properties.

Itty-bitty (albeit extinct) water buffalo!

The extinct creatures were similar to a modern species of small water buffalo that lives on the nearby Philippines island of Mindoro. That animal—the middle outline in the drawing—reaches about 3 feet (0.9 meter) tall. It is related to the Asian water buffalo—the topmost outline—an even larger modern species that stands about 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall and can weigh up to a ton.

You've probably heard of Pat Tillman, the NFL player who left football to join the Army after September 11 and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. He served with his younger brother Kevin, who has remained silently out of the media until now:

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Dismiss that, Mr. Bush. Condescend to that. I know you will, but when you do, I hope your supporters feel queasy.

Kevin Tillman's whole piece is worth reading.

And, finally, so as not to end this entry with tooth-enamel-splintering rage, the best wildlife photos of 2006.