My friends on the right who are complaining about those black mothers saying my kids didn’t do nothing should take a moment to read about the Kübler-Ross model of grief. Those mothers are not clueless idiots unaware of the child’s actions. They are not monsters who care not about the victims of their child. They are in grief and acting exactly how the model suggests they would act.
Category: science
Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless
Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless
The characteristics measured by the test have almost no predictive power on how happy you’ll be in a situation, how you’ll perform at your job, or how happy you’ll be in your marriage.
I view the Myers-Briggs as an updated version of the horoscope.
The Koch Attack on Solar Energy
The Koch Attack on Solar Energy
For the last few months, the Kochs and other big polluters have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy, which have been adopted by most states. They particularly dislike state laws that allow homeowners with solar panels to sell power they don’t need back to electric utilities. So they’ve been pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive.
Not surprised.
Creationists Demand Airtime On ‘Cosmos’ For The Sake Of Balance
Creationists Demand Airtime On ‘Cosmos’ For The Sake Of Balance
The Creationist group Answers In Genesis, which was already incensed about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s revival of Cosmos, is now complaining that the show lacks scientific balance because it fails to provide airtime for evolution deniers.
Do the followers of Zeus get a booth at the creationist museum?
What happens when you don’t get vaccinated
What happens when you don’t get vaccinated
My two vaccinated children, on the other hand, have rarely been ill, have had antibiotics maybe twice in their lives, if that. Not like their mum. I got so many illnesses requiring treatment with antibiotics that I developed a resistance to them, which led me to be hospitalized with penicillin-resistant quinsy at age 21 – you know, that old-fashioned disease that supposedly killed Queen Elizabeth I and that was almost wiped out through use of antibiotics.
I realize that this is just one person, and should not be treated as a anything more than anecdote, but this is not what the anti-vac people say happens to an immune system with and without vaccines. They insist that people who are not vaccinated will develop a healthy immune system via some natural process. Modern medicine disagrees, and so does her experience.
4 states confirm water pollution from drilling
4 states confirm water pollution from drilling
Over the past 10 years, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has led to a boom in oil and natural gas production around the nation. It has reduced imports and led to hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for companies and landowners, but also created pollution fears.
Its called an externality. But I’m sure the right will insist that this problem can only be solved by tax cuts and deregulation.
Criminals don’t turn violent. They stay that way.
Criminals don’t turn violent. They stay that way.
The rate of violence peaks at 24 months, declines steadily through adolescence and plunges in early adulthood. But as Dr. Tremblay and Daniel S. Nagin, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, found in a pivotal 1999 study, a troublesome few do not follow this pattern.
This is worth reading.
Plant intelligence
In a recent experiment, Heidi Appel, a chemical ecologist at the University of Missouri, found that, when she played a recording of a caterpillar chomping a leaf for a plant that hadn’t been touched, the sound primed the the plant’s genetic machinery to produce defense chemicals. Another experiment, dome in Mancuso’s lab and not yet published, found that plant roots would seek out a buried pipe through which water was flowing even if the exterior of the pipe was dry, which suggested that plants somehow “hear” the sound of flowing water.
I’d like a vegan’s opinion on this. If plants try not to be eaten, when is it moral to eat them? When is it moral to raise them with the purpose of eating them?
farmers are growing world record amounts of rice – with no GM, and no herbicide
farmers are growing world record amounts of rice – with no GM, and no herbicide
In a village in India’s poorest state, Bihar, farmers are growing world record amounts of rice – with no GM, and no herbicide. Is this one solution to world food shortages?
…
“Farmers use less seeds, less water and less chemicals but they get more without having to invest more. This is revolutionary,” said Dr Surendra Chaurassa from Bihar’s agriculture ministry. “I did not believe it to start with, but now I think it can potentially change the way everyone farms. I would want every state to promote it. If we get 30-40% increase in yields, that is more than enough to recommend it.”
Worth a read
CDC official: we’ve reached “the end of antibiotics”
CDC official: we’ve reached “the end of antibiotics”
You know how when you first hear a joke it’s the funniest thing ever and then you hear it a second time and it’s less funny and then a third, fourth, and fifth times and it just keeps getting less and less funny until you’re not laughing at all and it actually becomes annoying? That’s how antibiotics work across the entire human population.
Brilliant description.