New survey explores who is blogging, how and why.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project survey on blogging, published July 19, 2006 contains lots of good data on who all of those bloggers are.  The survey contains lots of statistics, charts and commentary.  Here's the summary. The Pew Internet Project blogger survey finds that the American blogosphere is…

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George Carlin on God, religion and sun worship.

I just happened upon this 1999 George Carlin comedy routine -- a slick, pointed and . . . well, Carlinesque . . . critique of religion. I found the Carlin video on a sassy site populated by lots of non-believers: "God is for Suckers," a site that makes Dangerous Intersection's presentation look rather…

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The land of milk and money: How milk producers fool most of the people most of the time.

Humans are creatures with limited attentional capacity.  We don’t have the time or brainpower to personally investigate every claim that comes our way.  We don’t like questioning ideas to which we’ve become accustomed.  Evil-minded people only need to get those lies into our heads.  Once in there, those false ideas rattle around for a long time. How to best get false information into people’s heads?  Employ a Trojan horse maneuver, i.e., plant credible-seeming information into our brains when we are young using credible intermediaries (such as our parents) through the use of the mass media.  And it always helps if the proponents of deceit are well-financed while the proponents of the truth are not. Once false information is safely in their heads, humans are willing to carry it around for decades, disseminating it to yet others and even fighting for it. No, I’m not writing about Iraq. Today’s case study is cow milk. Yeah, the kind of milk you probably drink.  Why drink milk?  You’ve probably seen lots of those slick ad campaigns.  You’ll hear lots of claims that it is important for humans to drink cow milk. Before I go further, here are my disclaimers.  For my first 4 ½ decades on this planet, I poured milk on my cereal.  About five years ago, my wife and I began to suspect that our youngest daughter was lactose intolerant.  People who are lactose intolerant can’t properly digest milk. We thus switched over to soy milk for her.  I also switched …

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What’s more threatening, terrorism or environmental issues?

Is terrorism really the biggest threat facing the United States? TomPaine.com recently commented on a report of the libertarian Cato Institute arguing that terrorism is really just not that big of a threat to the average person. For instance, about as many Americans have been killed by terrorists as have been…

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A word about some new navigation features here at Dangerous Intersection

Our designer, nicksmithdesign.com, has added a few new features.   On each post contained on our homepage, you can see the number of "views."  This feature refers only to the number of times that someone has clicked on the permalink of that specific post.  It thus vastly underestimates the number of views for…

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