My previous post on an effort to debunk homeopathy triggered a memory that I had written about this topic some years ago and this sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look. [Read more…]
Mano Singham
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My previous post on an effort to debunk homeopathy triggered a memory that I had written about this topic some years ago and this sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look. [Read more…]
Deepak Gupta (under no circumstances could you, or should you, confuse him with the notorious Deepak Chopra!) is based in India and is the founder of the website Savvy Skeptic. He is in the process of raising funds to distribute and market a documentary that debunks homeopathy, a practice that has quite a following in India. [Read more…]
Senator Rand Paul conducted an old-fashioned six thirteen-hour long talking filibuster on the floor of the US Senate against the nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA because he was rightly concerned that the Obama administration would not state unequivocally that the answer was ‘no’ to the question “Do you believe that the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a US citizen on US soil, and without trial?” [Read more…]
A lot of the most useful information that is generated these days comes courtesy of the government and is funded by taxpayers. This is particularly true about basic research, which is mostly funded by government agencies like the NIH and NSF. But quite often, private sector interests lobby lawmakers to allow them to take that information out of the public domain and make it proprietary and charge people huge amounts of money to gain access to that information, even though we have already paid for that information through our taxes. That was one of the things that infuriated Aaron Swartz and for which the justice department hounded him until his death. [Read more…]
3D printing is the hot new thing. I have not used one myself but a colleague of mine says that the cost of such things is dropping rapidly (you can now get one for less than $1000) and he has several in his lab because the cost of repairing the older, more expensive ones is now often greater than the cost of buying a newer and better one. He says that they come in extremely useful for creating customized items for his research. [Read more…]
Much of the stated opposition to raising the marginal tax rates on the top two percent of income-earners was that it would hurt ‘small businesses’, the presumed engine of economic growth. But the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says that this gives a seriously distorted picture of who belongs in that category. [Read more…]
If you want a good source of news, check out The Real News Network, which, in order to maintain their independence, does not accept advertising, government, or corporate funding. They rely on donations. One of the people the network regularly features is Michael Ratner, the former head of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Julian Assange’s lawyer in America. He attended the Bradley Manning hearing at Fort Mead where the latter read his statement explaining what drove him to download the documents and give it over to WikiLeaks, and spoke about what he drew from it. [Read more…]
While not deep or demanding, this comedy touches on some serious issues and makes for enjoyable watching. It tells the story of seven aging English people each of whom is in the twilight of their lives and trying to come to terms with that brute fact. One has unresolved issues from his boyhood in India that he wants to settle before he dies, two are lonely and seek companionship, another feels useless and discarded after a lifetime spent working hard, a couple in a long loveless marriage sense that tensions are reaching breaking point, and a recent widow whose husband had made all the decisions in their lives now suddenly finds herself left to fend for herself in a modern technological world for which she is totally unprepared. [Read more…]
… a letter to the editor in the Plain Dealer yesterday complained about the disrespect shown to Catholics by the Non Sequitur cartoon strip by Wiley that had appeared the previous Wednesday. The letter began:
I thought the mass media were in agreement that insults based on race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation or creed have no place in civil discourse. Apparently, the creator of the comic strip “Non Sequitur” believes the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics don’t deserve such consideration.
An imposter dressed as a bishop tried to get into the meetings being held at the Vatican prior to the papal conclave. Using easily obtainable clothing such as a fedora hat and a purple winter scarf, he managed to look enough like a bishop to fool at least some people.
