June 7, 2010

BP Deepwater Horizon disaster: who's to blame? A handy and informative pie chart.
(Sara Palin says environmentalists caused the disaster.)

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"Enhanced" interrogation techniques (that is to say, techniques that don't leave physical scars as evidence of torture) cause "severe" or "serious" physical and mental harm to detainees. It's torture, folks. Always has been, always will be.

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Toxoplasma: induces rats to commit suicide by making them sexually excited by the smell of cat urine. (True.) Turns human men into risk-taking, impulsive motorcycle riders, and human women into affectionate, seductive sex kittens. (Maybe.)

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The "Hedge Fund" tax loophole.

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OK, so maybe it wasn't a huge asteroid after all: 65 million years ago, continental drift blocked global oceanic circulation. This dramatically cooled the Earth and caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.

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Cool, manly, leather bags, fit for a globe-trotting archeologist. They are pretty but they ain't cheap.

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"Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop."

Take a picture of a cop, get busted big time, even if the encounter involves you and recording it may be necessary for your physical safety and legal defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists. Prove the cops beat you up for no reason, go to jail because you filmed them.

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A cave painting of this really large extinct bird may be the oldest piece of art in the world: 40,000 years old.

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One milkshake, 2010 calories, 68 grams of saturated fat.  But trust me, you can do even worse.

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Sunscreen; good idea, mostly bad execution. Ratings and advice.

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Igor Stravinsky got arrested for writing his arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner. How weird is that? (alert reader pointed out that this was a hoax...)

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The phenomenon of supremely confident incompetent people. (I won't mention any names.)

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I bought a tiffin -- got the bamboo utensil set, too. Love them. Found some great recipes.

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Do it right, guys; how to fold a pocket square.

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May 3, 2010

Steven Hawking tells us how to build a time machine, but  warns us not to talk to aliens.

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Cool stuff: Mighty Bright, one of the more innovative LED light companies, making handy lights for crafts, reading, music stands and laptops.

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How to pronounce that dang Icelandic volcano.

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Rapid healing of wounds; suction works. You can rent the $100-a-day machine, or you can use this $3 gizmo invented by an MIT student.

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From an anonymous blogging executive at one of America's 10 largest banks: "The system is built to be gamed."

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Yellowstone Park, before and after the wolves came back.

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Glutathione is good for you.

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Treating women like second-class citizens; Saudi Arabia and the Vatican.

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Bush and Cheney “had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent."

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The "Tweed Run" looks like ripping fun; it's on bicycles, not on foot, and it involves tweed. Organize one in your town.

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Somebody really needs to explain this to police nationwide: TASERS are a weapon. TASERS injure. TASERS kill. Using them, for example, on thirty high-school students so they'll know "what it feels like" is idiotic. But the following examples (all true) also apply:

• Using them on people in a diabetic coma is idiotic.
• Using them on pregnant women is idiotic.
  
• Using them on deaf people because they didn't answer a shouted question is idiotic.
• Using them on drivers who don't produce their license "fast enough" is idiotic.
• Using them on someone for refusing to sign a parking ticket is idiotic.
  
• Using them on peaceful, compliant protesters is idiotic.
• Using them on an elderly man in a wheelchair is idiotic.
• Using them on a frightened retarded man hiding in bathroom is idiotic.
• Using them on "suspects" who are already handcuffed is idiotic.
• Using them on a nine-year old handcuffed girl is idiotic.
  
• Using them on a mentally disturbed man who has soaked himself in gasoline -- causing him to burst into flames and burn to death -- is idiotic.
  

Or maybe idiotic isn't the right word...
With over 300 TASER deaths, it's time for reform.

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Thursday, April 8, 2010

My old IBM M4 keyboard is still a bit flaky; works pretty well most of the time, but occasionally needs a tap or two over the place where the keyboard circuits connect to the cord. Even so, they remain the best keyboards ever made. Look for one at your local second-hand store. And if you find two, I need a spare..

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Beautiful pictures of facial reconstructions; how our hominid ancestors probably looked. Startling and lifelike.

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The perfect Martini, at least as London sees it.

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How Sony is messing up big time; producing a bewildering array of redundant gadgets with more flash than utility.

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Getting the DNA of extinct birds from old eggshells; will we soon say of the Dodo; "tastes like chicken"?

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Self-explaining chart; Canadians really like their hockey.

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Twitter about the G-20 summit; go to jail.

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Fluir; the best hand lotions ever made, by hand, by a really nice lady who knows her stuff.

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Gene-expression; why stress changes your offspring's DNA.

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Getting your P.S.A. frequently checked is... maybe not such a great idea after all. Mostly it's all about BPE; "benign" being the important word here. And research shows that the frequently prescribed drugs have many troublesome side effects. Herbal remedies can do as well or better, although Saw Palmetto can cause whopping headaches. While mainstream medicine says prostate massage "doesn't work," over a third of men who have tried it say that they got substantial relief from BPA, and half said it helped. 

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Fail to "Promptly Obey" a customs officer, go to jail for TWO YEARS.
"This isn't about safety, it isn't about security, it isn't about the rule of law. It's about obedience."

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What the health-care reform bill means to Americans: the top 18 changes.

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Biketech: say goodbye to the bicycle chain, say hello to the carbon drive belt.

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Golden-ratio calipers; useful for... I don't know. But they sure are pretty, and I want one. Or rather, 1.618.

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Teens need sleep. Let them start school later in the day, and everyone wins. So why don't schools and school boards make the change?

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What hard-core Republicans believe is... just silly.

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And if you though the "Catch Me if you Can" kid was a young criminal mastermind, you should see THIS kid.

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The cycling universe: bang, crunch, repeat.

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X-Woman; neanderthal plus homo sapiens.

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Some reasons why the i-Pad may suck.

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The collapse of complex business models: "When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification."

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One ugly bug.

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Monday, March 8, 2010

OK, I've been bad. An "alert reader" finally noticed that nothing's been posted here for three months, and complained in a pathetic email. So here's some stuff.

Picture of the day: we just got another two feet of snow.

Science

• How to levitate by standing next to a wet spot on the sidewalk.
• Liquid glass will change everything, including how often you change your underwear.
• Geomantic nonsense.
• OK, so it WAS an asteroid, after all.
• I want a new Honda. This one.
• Your DNA may have already been collected.
• Cool tsunami prediction maps posted only hours after the Chile earthquake.
• Silent helicopter rotors.
• How Texas creationist wackos are dictating what is in your kid's science and history textbooks.
• How revealing are the new airport scanners? They are NSFW revealing. But you wouldn't mind having a picture of you stark naked on the internet, would you?

History

• Up Helly Aa sounds (and looks) like my kind of festival. Caption contest on this photo: I vote for "We All Live in a Yellow Submarine, Yellow Submarine, Yellow Submarine..."
• Found: a case of Mackinlay's whiskey; very old, kept in cold storage for 100 years. Cold, as in Antarctica. 100 years, as in Shackleton's expedition.

Health

• Go Barefoot (or as close as possible.) Everybody agrees: Nature (front cover, no less) and also US News and World Report.
• State of Colorado messes up Medicaid case, nine year old boy dies. State of Colorado: "Oops."
• OK, kids, go to bed. Really. Or else you'll get really sick and all messed up.
• Plastic fruit juice bottles leech dangerous amounts of antimony into the juice.
• Mainly designed to make fast, easy railings for handicapped access, this system also makes great furniture (people have been using it to make nifty canopy bed frames) and anything that needs a structural skeleton that sets up fast, can be disassembled and stored and transported. Interesting possibilities. Ideas, anyone?
  

Law and politics

• Young violinist who played for the First Lady got badly beaten by Pittsburgh police. Cops then pressed bogus "prowling" charges against him, -- which a  judge threw out, just yesterday. Playing the violin can be a risky pastime.
• The whole "CyberWar CyberTerror" thing was cooked up to sell $ billions in "mil-spec" computer tech to the US government.
• The idiocy of DRM: how to borrow a book from the library.
• The Criminalization of Protest.
• Britain's police "descending into obvious madness." A note on this link; a friend who lives in the UK says that this article -- and those like it -- are sensationalist and completely overblown, and that the UK is not becoming a police state. A handful of isolated incidents, no matter how egregious, compiled into breathless hyperbole, does not a national disaster make. However, I find the trends to be disturbing, and feel that the article is worthwhile.
• Everybody owes, nobody can pay -- and that was the plan all along.
  
• Conservative Christian extremists hate America.
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The Arts

• Good at writing short stories? Enjoy the SteamPunk genre? Want to get published?
• "Dear God:" Funny letters from kids.

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Saturday, January 16, 2010

Books:

• Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market
  
• The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
• The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World
• Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism
• American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
• The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
• Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan
• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
• Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded--and What We Need to Do to Remake Them

Science:

• Aerodynamics: make your car get better mileage by adding a long tail. (I have always maintained that if you own one of these car-top cargo carriers, you'll get better mileage by mounting it "backwards," that is to say, with the tapering thin end to the rear.)
• Plants use "mind control" drugs on ants.
• Blessed are the Cheese makers.
• Remember my November 21st article on human domestication? Here's one on how foxes are showing domestication traits after just ten generations.
• I keep telling you to read -- regularly -- John Hawks' weblog.

Law and Disorder:

• Banjo assault?
• Why was this guy still running around free? 
• Pennsylvania judges get caught for sending kids to jail -- in return for millions in kickback bribes. 
• Ohio limits how much wine you can drink.
  

Gadgets:

• Cool LED flashlights by Energizer.
• A must-have perfect ice-sphere maker for those who wish to ruin a perfectly good shot of expensive single-malt scotch. 
• (Darn near) undetectable theft from your bank account in your own bank lobby: ATM skimmer found in California CitiBank, capturing customer's cards and information.
  

General weirdness:

• "US Marine captain" goes all Taliban on Aussie babes; the Northern Territory responds by posting a perfectly lovely collection of said babes in bikinis, then it all turns out to be a probable hoax; nobody can identify the alleged jarhead captain. But whoever he is, thank you, sir, for inspiring the ladies of Australia. 
• This week's post from the "Oh, for Crying Out Loud" department: San Diego vice-principal overreacts, to say the very least.
• Sylvester Stallone breaks his neck. 
• Tommy Lee Jones throughout history.
  

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