Just Links

Vive la difference

March 11, 2008

Philippe Starck knocks ‘em dead at TedTalk 2007. And all the time I’m watching, I’m thinking, “is this possibly how Eddie Izzard comes over in France?”. Laughs, yes, and pathos too, but somewhere, deep beneath the surface, some rather stimulating ideas.

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Just catching up

January 4, 2008

It occurs to me, after the event, that this post’s title is also appropriate to Jessica Hagy’s indexed card I’ve copied at left. One of the hard parts of catching up after being away is deciding what to delete, unread, what to read now, and what to delay. Indexed is always a read now, not [...]

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Raw milk round-up

December 19, 2007

One hears so much baloney from both sides in the great raw milk debate that it is as refreshing as an ice-cold glass of the white stuff to come across a balanced, non-strident examination of the claims. Inkling has just such a post: Raw milk … clean and healthy?. I’m looking forward to part two.

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Aliens refuse to make circles in GM crops

March 11, 2007

I can do no better than to flagrantly copy this piece‘s headline as my own and send you there to read the original report. “Only the best, most natural crops are good enough for aliens.” From the Weekly World Inquisitor — motto: we waste no time in seeking the truth — a genetically engineered Onion. [...]

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Fishy follow-up

March 5, 2007

Almost two years ago a woman was arrested in Melbourne when customs officers heard suspicious “flipping” noises emanating from beneath her skirts. I remember it, because I blogged it. At last, the case has come to trial, but the report that alerted me does not give details of the sentence. She’s doing nine months.

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Eat the rich

March 3, 2007

No, my headline has nothing to do with the story, really. But I’m tired. Which is why I link without comment to Ben Goldacre’s dissection of the recent “GM-potatoes cause cancer” flare-up. I’ve got something cooking myself, which will go nicely with one of the comments Ben elicited, but it needs to simmer a few [...]

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Environmental groups hold nose, reach for long spoon

February 6, 2007

Ok, so they ignored my request to investigate the cost of using subsidized water to grow biofuel feedstocks, but I’m not bitter. The good folks over at Environmental Economics do a splendid bit of stiletto-work on who’s funding whom. Author Tim Haab says: I’m not saying one group is right or wrong here. I’m just [...]

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Methinks he doth …

February 5, 2007

It’s either an angry, slanderous lie, or Bill Gates is an uninformed jackass. You decide. Bill Gates in Newsweek, or John Gruber on Daring Fireball.

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Say it loud …

January 26, 2007

… nerd and proud. Communicatrix is the best. Bottom line: true nerds—Good nerds, if you will—don’t think the world revolves around them. They have a healthy curiosity about the world around them, are always looking for new, cool, interesting stuff, and are continually improving themselves, whether they call it that or not. Nerds are helpful [...]

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Don’t delay

January 6, 2007

That’s what I keep telling myself; don’t delay. If you have something to blog about, blog about it. But life gets in the way. So my high-minded thoughts on the whole “is cloned meat safe to eat” heat have been put aside in favour of Safe as milk?, an editorial in the New York Times.

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The value of everything

December 25, 2006

Ah, the bliss of an economic Christmas.

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Yeah, right

November 20, 2006

European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs. “The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior,” says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project’s co-founders. “The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.” [...]

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Oh those crazy scientists

October 19, 2006

What’s the difference between “cloning” and “somatic cell nuclear transfer”? Roughly double the public approval rating, according to New Scientist magazine. The article reports on research by Kathy Hudson of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC, who discovered that while 29% of Americans approve of deriving stem from embryos produced by cloning, [...]

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Well I’ll be blowed

October 4, 2006

That old joke about oral sex and lobster thermidor? Simply not funny any more. Tim Harford explains why giving head is now the dish de jour among certain groups of teenage girls. It seems to have little to do with the reasons advanced by a slightly overwrought Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic Monthly. Flanagan overwrote: [...]

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The end is nigh

September 19, 2006

“While the political and/or economic topics discussed herein could be very important, it’s also possible that they don’t matter jack squat because the world as you and I know it is about to be parboiled.” I mean, why get agitated about a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran if we’re all going to die in a [...]

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Way to teach biology

September 4, 2006

Michael C. LaBarbera at the University of Chicago has an archive of what must have been interesting lectures on The Biology of B-Movie Monsters. Maybe he’s the person to illuminate P.Z. Myers on Buffy’s biology?

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No comment

September 4, 2006

Below please find the two lead paras of a Guardian story filed last week. Thanks to Frinktank. I have no comment whatsoever. A Vatican official has said the Catholic church will excommunicate a medical team who performed Colombia’s first legal abortion on an 11-year-old girl, who was eight weeks pregnant after being raped by her [...]

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Celery and tomatoes lethal

August 23, 2006

I don’t mean to make light, but levity often stares back at the face of awfulness. Blue Wren reports: Recently, a National Public Radio reporter in Baghdad informed listeners that religious extremists murdered a shepherd because, well, he wouldn’t diaper his goats to hide their naughty bits. And a grocer was killed because the stalks [...]

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New Trix

August 17, 2006

[tag]Communicatrix[/tag] may be breaking new ground in the what-to-blog-if-you’ve-nothing-to-blog-about realm. Not content with that old standby of blogging the search terms people have used to find you (as I am) she’s sharing the sites she has Stumbled Upon using the fine Firefox extension of that name. Of course she has a reason: A part of [...]

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Loony Tunes

August 15, 2006

Don’t get me wrong. I like the iTunes Music Store and the way it seemlessly worms its way into my life. Plus there’s cool free stuff. So when I read that there was a new page listing free videos, I popped on over. iTunes, in its infinite wisdom, always transfers me to the Italian shop. [...]

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Jeepers’ cookies

August 15, 2006

Astounded by the news (via Harper’s Weekly) that one of the poor saps whose AOL internet searches had been revealed for all the world to see had been looking for easter cookie recipe for jesus’ suffering,” I popped that sucker into Google. And you know what? There is such a thing! One of the commenters [...]

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Perfect

July 18, 2006

Ah, how I remember my days as a CSICOP. If only we’d had to deal with completely sane nutters like Jennifer Dziura and her paranormal vagina then, I’d probably still be in the game. Another game I would love to have got into: Guerilla Gardening. They need a new website though, for sure.

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Brave, too

July 12, 2006

There’s an aspect of Jim Hansen’s piece on global warming in the New York Review of Books that I missed. The intro says: Jim Hansen is Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. His opinions are expressed here, he writes, [...]

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Love-bomb missed

July 12, 2006

Daniel Mosquin is a working scientist. He maintains a wonderful blog Botany Photo of the Day. The blog contains science. It ranks at 35 on the Technorati scheme that Nature used to puff the top 50 science blogs. But it isn’t in that list. I confess. I didn’t notice. And Daniel is very magnanimous about [...]

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