Monthly Archives: June 2010

Inside the mind of the anonymous online poster

Interesting piece:

…Certain topics never fail to generate a flood of impassioned reactions online: immigration, President Obama, federal taxes, “birthers,” and race. This story about Obama’s Kenyan aunt, who had been exposed as an illegal immigrant living in public housing in Boston and who was now seeking asylum, manages to pull strands from all five of those contentious subjects….


Here at the Boston Globe.

HT Virgil Samms

Given enough time, the most improbable things happen. Probably.

Is it possible for all the oxygen molecules in the room, which are moving around randomly, to randomly all move to one corner so everyone is breathing just nitrogen for a while and they die?

Is is possible for a World Cup soccer game to have a score of, say, 24 to one?

Is is possible for a tennis match to go on for several days because, after all, there is no limit on how many times they can bounce the ball back and forth across the net?

Yes.

Skeptically speaking: Cosmetics, transhumanism, TAM, falsehoods

The podcast for The Cosmetics Cop: Paula Begoun has materialized here.

Paula Begoun is the bestselling author of “The Beauty Bible” and “Don’t Go To The Cosmetics Counter Without Me.” We’ll examine the science behind some popular beauty products, and find out what real research says about makeup myths.

That also includes this segment: The Amazing Meeting with Austin Luton, Jeff Wagg and K.O. Myers

This Friday:’s show is:

Transhumanism

We explore the predictions and the problems in the quest to “enhance” human beings. We’re joined by George Dvorsky of Sentient Developments and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and blogger Greg Fish. How will advancing technology affect our bodies, our lives, and our society?

And that show will include this segment: …another installment of “Everything You Know is Sort Of Wrong” with Greg Laden. This week: Did Humans Evolve from Apes? which deals with The Falsehoods

No, emails you send me are NOT private

I have an ex facebook friend with no sense of proportion, no sense of humor, and very little sense of her own lack of importance. We disagreed on guns. She wants unfettered gun ownership. We disagree, apparently, on anthropogenic global warming. She thinks its made up. I don’t. And now, she wants the whole world to know that I treated her badly, and she will do so by posting a screen shot of our last interaction on facebook “everywhere she can”

Well, I’d like to help with that:
Continue reading No, emails you send me are NOT private

A mite bit of a problem

Did you know that there is a mite problem? Among other things, they appear to have infested the dog food supply chain, and it may even be that through this vector, mites may affect both humans and dogs with allergy more widely than previously. This is an interesting emerging disease, in a way.

To start to get a grasp on this squishy problem (squishy because mites are weakly sclerotized, obviously) check out this post: Mold Mites at Jafsica.com.

Drill, Baby, Drill

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Biologist fears Gulf oil threat to dolphins

“We will brace for the worst if the oil comes here, but we don’t think there is any protection we can give to the dolphins if it does. What will happen if they can’t move away from it? It scares the hell out of me,” Randall Wells said in a telephone interview this morning, shortly after returning to his Sarasota laboratory after a morning on the water conducting an emergency survey of dolphins he has studied since 1970.

source