Daily Archives: January 20, 2011

There but for the grace of dog go I

Fountain Lady, Imma let you be upset and all in a minute, but right now I’ve got to say that there is not a single one of the 37 million people who watched you fall in the water ‘cuz you were texting and not watching where you were going who has not at some time or another in their life ran into a light pole or stepped off a curb they didn’t see or something similar. The only difference between you and the rest of us is that your misstep matched a modern meme … misadventure due to texting … and it got totally YouTubed. Rather than being upset, you should do what that homeless guy did and get a job as a TV game show host or whatever.

Oh, and it could have been worse. You could have been driving a school bus down by the river or something.

New England Faculty vs Students on Acceptance of and Teaching Evolution

ResearchBlogging.orgA new study compares “acceptance of evolution” by highly educated adult academics with college students in various categories, with all those sampled being in New England, which has the highest overall acceptance of evolution in the US (a mere 59 percent). The results are interesting.

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Van Jones: The economic injustice of plastic

Van Jones lays out a case against plastic pollution from the perspective of social justice. Because plastic trash, he shows us, hits poor people and poor countries “first and worst,” with consequences we all share no matter where we live and what we earn. At TEDxGPGP, he offers a few powerful ideas to help us reclaim our throwaway planet.

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Elizabeth Lesser: Take “the Other” to lunch

I don’t know about this …

There’s an angry divisive tension in the air that threatens to make modern politics impossible. Elizabeth Lesser explores the two sides of human nature within us (call them “the mystic” and “the warrior”) that can be harnessed to elevate the way we treat each other. She shares a simple way to begin real dialogue — by going to lunch with someone who doesn’t agree with you, and asking them three questions to find out what’s really in their hearts.

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Milk allergy is the most common form of food allergy found in humans, but you don’t have one and neither does your baby

Well, maybe, but probably not. Even though milk allergies in infants and very young toddlers are the most common food allergy, they still occur in only about 2.5 percent of the population in the US and other Western groups. For this reason, I was rather perplexed some months back when I encountered a group of eight mothers randomly assembled, three of whom had infants with milk allergies. Two of the mothers had started to eliminate all dairy from their diets, including eggs, in order to reduce the effects of the milk allergy on their infants. Who were breastfeeding.
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