I know, I know. I write too much about my anti-pharmaceutical company stance. That’s why I want to show you an issue where I’m actually anti-anti-pharmaceutical company. But first, can I just slip in one little anti-pharmaceutical industry article? In last Saturday’s Guardian, Ben Goldacre wrote about a terrible practice of burying studies. It’s really [...]
I had listened to Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs from beginning to end. I may have been absorbed with something else while I was listening but I didn’t notice this until today when someone posted the youtube non-video for Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). It was too much of a coincidence to not be [...]
For me, Googling has become basically smashing the keyboard at the approximate locations of the letters I need in the approximate order I need them. Google always seems to know what I want even though I’m spelling in four-year-0ld equivalents. I never even really think about how I’m spelling things anymore. I type in typos. [...]
This is the way I like my writers: “A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.” – Samuel Johnson This is the way I like my music: And this is the way I like my galaxies (via Starts With a Bang):
The day after the WHO officially announced that the H1N1 pandemic is over, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published an article about what health scientists are calling NDM-1 (which stands for something that is so scientific it has a Greek letter in it) but what the media is calling the “Indian Superbug”. Cynical comments [...]
Whenever I have gone east of my hometown it has always been for wilderness. It’s where I go to climb a mountain or get away from the internet or thoughts more complicated than, “those are some nice dutchman’s breeches.” This past weekend I drove east to catch Canada’s indie-country darlings The Sadies playing at one [...]
Is Radiolab a science radio show? I’m not sure. Certainly the topics they cover are scientific but the dialogue and production are so well done that it just feels like two guys talking about interesting stuff. They talk about science but all the while highlighting where it meets the life we’re all familiar with. Radiolab [...]
I’m fascinated by the creative process because it’s so important to…to everything. It can’t be analyzed. It just is. Here’s a Ted Hughes poem (via 3 Quarks) followed by an interview with Hughes where he explains where this dark poem came from. How this poem came to life:
I was going to write about churches that have been revamped because I like the idea of a secular community meeting area. I’ve always liked the idea of spending Sundays afternoons sitting in a place with inspiring architecture with people from the neighbourhood, listening to an invited speaker (a la Ted) and sipping on a [...]
Not much time today but here’s something to think about. Stewart Brand, who used to be a poster boy of environmentalism, now espouses a different kind of pragmatic environmentalism that supports nuclear power and genetically engineered food. Techonomy has a quick description of his beliefs: According to Brand, environmentalism has a “legacy resistance” to nuclear [...]
