It never fails to amaze me, how amusingly credulous idiots can be. Mix that with pseudoscience, and you’ve got both the scam and the victim.
My high-school best friend and I both ended up in Virginia in the very early nineties, a few years after we graduated, he in the Air Force and I going to tech school. We decided to make a trip back to Connecticut to meet up with the old gang. Among the people we met were …
Continue reading ‘“Human hive-mind game whups computer boffinry ass”’ »
I’ve often wondered just how Microsoft could be so incompetent. This quote might just shed some light on it: […] Notwithstanding Kin’s shortcomings as a product, the most entertaining aspect of the cock-up is that it appears to be the result of ego battles in Redmond: rumor has it that Kin was throttled in its …
Continue reading ‘“Microsoft writes down $240m on Kin debacle”’ »
Being homeless is no laughing matter. But pretending to be homeless in order to cash in on peoples’ charity… that’s big business. Find the right street corner, in the right city, and you can make a bundle. The startup costs are low: all you need is a piece of cardboard, a marker, a hard-luck story, …
(This is not about evolution, it’s about a small group’s attempts to subvert democracy for their own purposes. Evolution is just their first target.) This four-part series of articles (here, here, here, and here) make it very clear that attacking evolution is just the tip of the iceberg. The goal of the very small — …
If this sort of thing appeared in a science fiction/fantasy novel, people might just blink and accept the premise. If it appeared in a history text, they’d shake their collective head over it and silently thank the deity of their choice that no one is that stupid anymore. But if it’s spouted by a modern-day …
This gives me hope, because no matter how stupid people seem to be nowadays, they’re not quite as stupid as they were a century ago. It also saddens me about just how far we still have to go.
I never knew how the vaccination/autism link first started. It seemed to be ridiculous: a plausible idea that was tested and found lacking, but that a few very loud voices insisted on believing anyway. So I was interested to hear about The Facts in the Case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a short comic-strip-panel-style treatise which …
(It’s Tax Day! Have you filed your taxes yet? And no, this isn’t the NSFW part. 😉 ) Oh, this is a fun one… so many creative ways that the world is on the edge of destruction! So many things to fear! Yes, fear them! “But,” says this Robert Vicino fellow, “if you give me …
Continue reading ‘“Fear 2012? Bunker hustler has you covered” — NSFW commentary!’ »
As I’ve long suspected, the scientists sounding the Global Warning alarm have been playing fast and loose with the data. Deliberately. I understand some of the reasons for it: if they had told the truth, intelligent people would have dismissed the problem, quite reasonably demanding more information before taking the problem seriously. And by the …
Short answer: not bloody likely. At least not in my lifetime.