Sunday, November 27, 2011

Fat Wallet

I have been using this site to get cash back on almost everything. I always thought stores like Land's End were for yuppies but they are probably about on par with an upscale Salvation Army once you take advatage of all the discounts. Fat Wallet will credit you a percentage back of your purchase if you click through from their site. They aggregate all the coupons and promotions in one place so I always start there to see if where I want to shop has a promotion or gives cash back. In a day or two the merchant reports the sale to Fat Wallet and after 90 days you can cash it out. I just got 30% off plus 3.5% cash back on the already clearance section of Land's End. I got a full ski wardrobe for two and a bunch of summer clothes for under $200 but I might lose my snooty credibility while I mill around the Swiss Chalet if I keep bragging about my bargains.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Scales, teeth, feathers, hair, rhino horn.

Lynnis' post on the keratin in rhino horn brings to mind a little known but recently established fact that a sequence of evolutionary steps evolved fish scales into teeth (calcified scales that moved into the mouth), scales into feathers (dinos/birds), and feathers into hair (mammals). Of course the keratin in rhino horn is just consolidated hair. The roughly same gene system is known to behind all those evolutionary variants.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Unicorns Declared Extinct


The western black rhinoceros has been declared extinct due to poaching. The javanese, white and black rhinos could follow soon. There is a tremendous demand for the horns in traditional Chinese medicine. I propose a measure to save these real life unicorns by altering the supply and demand for the horns. The horns are just keratin, and I think it could be pretty straight forward to grow rhino horns in labs if we can grow human ears on the back of mice. We could make rhino horn as plentiful as any other "pharmaceutical".