Shermer and Chopra traded articles at Skeptic Magazine, but they really didn't communicate. Shermer got me on board with comments like this: Here is the reality. It has been estimated that in the last 50,000 years about 106 billion humans were born. Of the 100 billion people born before the…
What I actually did was to pay $199 for a Western Digital “MyBook” 500 Gb external hard drive. While comparing hard drive prices, however, I stopped a moment to consider how incredibly far hard drive prices have fallen over the years. I concluded that I was getting a windfall no…
Missouri's overloaded public defender system is threatening to stop taking new cases, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This is “an unprecedented move that could put courts from St. Louis to Kansas City into turmoil.” With an average workload of 305 cases, the lawyers who represent 80 percent of the state's…
I've previously written about the enormous number of synonyms for poop, speculating on why there are so many synonyms. I don't know if my suggestions were convincing to others, but the issue still intrigues me. As an epilogue to that earlier post, I offer this video, one of many elaborate…
According to a little noticed change in the Patriot Act, the Bush administration is firing (not promoting or commending) some of its star prosecutors. Why? Because they became inconvenient. Worse, the fired prosecutors have all been replaced with political hacks whose jobs will include NOT prosecuting law-breaking friends of the…