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Sunday, December 12, 2004 |
 Allawi on Iraqiya radio: ''They strike the economic positions and the infrastructure network in a way that harms the whole Iraqi society,'' he added. ''Whenever we make progress in (the fields) of oil and electricity, there are attacks that hinder this progress.'' This follows a fire at the Beiji power plant that left nearly the entire country in darkness (except the Green Zone). The cause of the fire is in dispute. Iraq's Ministry of Electricity shut down connections running from the plant as a precaution. This caused a system-wide cascade that collapsed power deliveries in the country. Attacks have recently spread to cell phone towers (which effectively converts the million plus phones that have been sold in the last year into paperweights).
6:08:17 PM 
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AP. Warplanes pounded Fallujah in response to a surprise attack. Unfortunately, it looks like Fallujah is still under partial guerrilla control despite 3 door-to-door sweeps of the entire city's 21,656 structures. UPDATE: 8 US Marines died on Sunday. The US military won't release information on these deaths. It's likely they died in Fallujah.
5:56:26 PM
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Biotech acceleration from my friend John Smart. In 1977, Richard Dickerson, then a professor of physical chemistry at Caltech, noted that the number of protein crystal structures had risen from one solved by the end of 1961 to 23 solved by the end of 1977. His formula predicted that by March 2001, scientists would have solved the 3-D structures of a grand total of more than 12,000 proteins. Prof. Arthur Arnone found that the equation predicted that there would be 12,066 crystal structures solved by March 27, 2001. By that date, the Protein Data Bank (PDB) had posted 12,123 protein structures, only 57 more than Dickerson's forecast. The Dickerson formula was accurate to within 0.5%.
3:15:41 PM
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© Copyright 2005 John Robb.
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