When we got Baxter as a puppy, he learned to up the steps to the next floor quite easily but was scared to come down and had to be carried. One can see why. If anyone of us got down on all fours, it would be easy for us to go up a flight of steps but quite scary to come down head first. I don’t think I could do it, frankly. [Read more…]
NPR is having a series of reports this week around the theme ‘Losing Our Religion’, on the rise of those now being referred to as the ‘nones’, people who say they are unaffiliated with any religion. In their report today they showed a graph with a sharp rise in the nones in the 1970s, a plateau until 2000, followed by another sharp rise. This trend is especially pronounced among young people. [Read more…]
To be eligible to be president of the US, one must meet the ‘natural born citizen’ constitutional requirement of Article II, Section 1. It is accepted that if one is born in the US, then this status is automatically conferred on you. This is why the birthers are so desperate to show that Obama’s birth occurred elsewhere. [Read more…]
Via Machines Like Us I came across this demonstration by Audi of a car that will, by itself and without a driver, find a parking space in a parking garage and park itself and then return to you at the entrance when you call it. [Read more…]
Joel Diaz recounts a remarkable experience in Columbus, Ohio when he and a gay friend started being harassed when they were holding hands and chatting while waiting in line at a popular pizza truck. A man in front of them told them to stop doing stuff that indicated that they were gay. This is when things got interesting. [Read more…]
Not being very technology savvy, I had never heard of Aaron Swartz before his suicide yesterday at the age of 26. It turns out that he was a computer whiz who had developed at a very young age, among other things, RSS and Redditt. His main passion was to enhance the free flow of information and he was a fierce advocate of internet freedom and critic of those who would privately profit from the free work of others, which is what eventually led to actions that put him in the cross hairs of the legal system. (See the history of the case here.) [Read more…]
I wrote recently about religious people getting freaked out the introduction of yoga in the elementary schools of a California school district because of its associations with non-Christian religions such as Hinduism. [Read more…]
The so-called ‘debt crisis’ has spawned a lot of groups ostensibly for the purpose of suggesting ways to reduce it. But as this news report suggests, the members of one such group known as ‘Fix the Debt’ may not be as disinterested as they claim to be, because they simultaneously serve other businesses that are directly affected by the measures they propose. [Read more…]
News has emerged that a young Sri Lankan housemaid Rizana Nafeek in Saudi Arabia was executed by beheading on the charge of killing a four month old baby in her care even though she was under 18 when the crime was allegedly committed, she denied that she was guilty, and had been denied access to a lawyer. [Read more…]