photo credit: Ryan Somma Old joke, updated: Do you have any Neanderthal in you? Do you want one? Ok, so you may have heard that all humans of non-African descent have a small percent of Neanderthal genes buried away in our double helix. So that’s exciting. Now, there’s a discussion about whether it would be […]
Simple Causes and Complicated Results
Last night I dined on smoked trout. Ended up with a mouth full of bones, most of which I pulled out. But one stuck. So I’ve got this bone lodged in my throat. I ate a ton of other food, solely intended to push the bone down. I felt like the old lady who swallowed […]
Seriously, Exercise Doesn’t Lead to Weight Loss
I’m on vacation, and writing this on my phone, so this will be short (and contain no pics or links). I just heard a BBC report about a study saying that children who are overweight are less likely to exercise, but children who don’t exercise are NOT more likely to become overweight. In short, we […]
Crime and Punishment
Incidentally, I read Crime and Punishment in my 20s and didn’t like it much. When I told that to a Russian guy, he assured me that I must have read a bad translation. A year ago I read a different translation and didn’t like it much. So there you go. It’s weird to start a […]
PSA: Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning
photo credit: Micah Sittig Would you know a drowning person if you saw one? This article (from Aviation Survival Technician First Class Mario Vittone) explains that there’s no sound, no flailing, no splashing. And of course, a person can get in trouble in just seconds. Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning
Of Mother’s Milk
photo credit: maessive It’s probably not news to anyone that in Saudi Arabia, women aren’t supposed to hang out with men they’re not immediately related to. But it’s also true that if the woman had breastfed the man when he was a child, then they’re considered related in a maternal/child way, and they’re allowed to […]
Guns!
photo credit: fauxto_digit There are exceptions, qualifications, and confusions, but in general, we all probably know that the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits the government from infringing on the right to bear arms. For most of American history, that prohibition has been against the federal government. States and localities could restrict however they […]
Interpreting God’s Word
photo credit: tiffany_stone Buried somewhere in the growing list of things that annoy me: People who will tell you that God didn’t really mean what he said. — For me, it’s kinda like Superman. I don’t actually believe that there’s a guy who wears a cape and flies around, but if you set up the […]
Sleep Around for the Good of Society
photo credit: stefg74 According to Steven Landsburg, writing in Slate, people who are NOT promiscuous should take on a couple more partners a year. Doing so could slow the spread of sexually transmitted disease. The idea is that they’d still be conservative, but slightly less so. They wouldn’t increase their own chances of getting sick very […]
Modern Medicine is Pretty Good
Alan Pinkerton, the founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, died from gangrene a few weeks after biting his tongue. That is all.