Sometimes you read something that just utterly depresses you. I have been sick lately, and I didn’t especially need more depression, but today I read this story at Wired, and it made me sink even lower. To summarize, researchers have studied some supposed dinosaur flesh that was recovered with some fossils and concluded […]

Just returned to Beijing after a little mini-visit to Chongqing and Shanghai. The trip was good; Chongqing is probably the #1 up-and-coming city in China, and Shanghai, it turns out, is much better when you have friends there. (Go figure.)
This being my second visit to Shanghai, I wasn’t as concerned with traipsing around […]

This BBC article gives some sense of reassurance to someone like me who is constantly frustrated by people’s desire to see what they want instead of what is right in front of them.
Paraphrasing Aldous Huxley: “facts do not cease to exist because we ignore them”.
The environment is obviously a tremendously important topic for human beings, […]

This BBC story relates that archaeologists excvating China’s Lajia site have found the oldest noodles ever found, and they are touting this as proof that the Chinese invented noodles.
Now, listen, I’m not going to argue whether the Chinese invented noodles; they probably did. But there’s something about archaeology that I find utterly idiotic. And the […]

In a nutshell, according to optics.org: Japanese researchers have figured out a way to etch data onto fingernails.
Thiis conjures all sorts of interesting ideas, which for me are revolving about Hollywood “action thriller” screenplays. You wake up in a dark room…you have no idea where you are….but all of a sudden, strange things start to […]

More cool mind control stuff.
Not “mind control” like…The Man controlling your mind. No, this means you controlling things with your mind. (Just felt I had to clear that up.)
The BBC is reporting today about a guy in the USA who became paralyzed after a stabbing, and who underwent surgery to implant electrodes into […]

Humans have control issues. We reside in a basically chaotic universe, where shit just happens, all around us, all the time, and we have absolutely no control over it. Mother nature erupts lava into our neatly organized towns, she moves the ground under our feet and topples our carefully constructed buildings. An asteroid might come […]

Why can’t the CDC and the government do just that?
Under what study would scientists have concluded that anthrax spores would remain neatly confined inside envelopes?
What envelope have you ever known that sealed perfectly?
Were I a relative of one of the two postal workers in Washington who probably dies from anthrax, I’d be asking why the […]

So I just read this story at BBC Online:
I live in Manhattan, and I can tell you that 50m high waves hitting this city would be a very bad thing. NYC would be…hmmm…what’s the word…oh yeah…NYC would be fucked.
Oh, and 9 hours of warning? Ha - that might be enough to get […]