“Hundreds of Human Genes Still Evolving”
Proponents of evolution have always thought that it stopped working on humanity as we became more intelligent, all the way back to Darwin himself. But apparently he had a bit more to learn.
Archive of posts filed under the Interests category.
Topics on my particular interests.
“Stop Trusting Your Future Self to Get Stuff Done. Do it Now.”
Good advice.
“World’s Greatest Homeless Sign Ever!”
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, …
The History and Opponents of Evolution
(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 — …
“30 Old PC Ads That Will Blow Your Processor”
I wish these ads were dated, or at least put in order of their release. I recognize a good portion of the hardware — and the prices — but some of the ads look very sixties-esque, a decade I wasn’t around for. (Via Lifehacker)
“Water Freezing and Boiling Myths”
Interesting chemistry facts and fantasies about that most-useful of chemicals, H2O. (Via LifeHacker)
“Quantum Time Machine Lets You Travel to the Past Without Fear of Grandfather Paradox”
It’s rather fascinating, and pretty non-intuitive. The intuitively obvious scenario is that, if someone could time-travel to their own past, there would be nothing to stop him from killing his own grandfather before his father was born. But there actually would be something stopping him: the fact that he exists to go back at all …
“Detect A Good Liar By Knowing Their Most Effective Tactics”
Although I might object to the term “good liar,” the idea is sound.
Spin
I never realized, until I started reading the Bad Science blog, just how much “spin” there is in science papers. Spin is great when shooting pool, but it’s simply dishonest when someone uses it in a scientific paper. And when that paper is about the efficacy of a medicine or the safety of a product, …
“Canadian man replaces his false eye with bionic camera eye, is putting eye video feed online for all to see”
This is the sort of thing I expect will become commonplace, as replacement body parts become a lot less expensive. (I’d love to claim credit for the prediction, but I’ve seen it before, in science fiction novels from at least two authors. One was William Gibson, the other I can’t recall the name of.)