Feb 12 2013
Yes; misinformation works. Places like Fox News excel at it. Nutjobs like Pam Geller and her ilk have been very successful at promoting fear of anything associated with Islam. They achieve this by simply lying, and playing into the xenophobia already present in many members of the far-right-wing. I follow someone on Twitter named Joe …
Sep 13 2011
On 11 August 2011, there was an article in The Daily Mail [Yeah, I know it sucks as a source of anything but bird-cage liner.] with this headline: ‘We’re not like normal teenagers’: Meet the exorcist schoolgirls who spend their time casting out DEMONS around the world. The funniest part of the article was that …
May 12 2011
During the past several days, I’ve noticed a new (to me) bold jumping spider (Phidippus audax) in my living room. This one appears to be an adult, judging from its size and the fact that its markings are all white rather than a reddish-brown color. It’s a pretty big spider. This species gets to be …
May 07 2011
While I was receiving chemotherapy treatment on Wednesday, 2011-05-04, a tweet from a friend of mine caught my interest. [Yes, I play on Twitter while the chemotherapy drugs drip into my veins.] Looking back in my timeline, I found that the tweet from @zeno001 followed this brief exchange: Wow! It appeared that Mr. Kirkland was …
Apr 10 2011
The spiders that I notice around the house are usually on the ceiling or high up on the wall. This guy was in the bathtub. I enjoy getting pictures of the little guys that find their way into the house. If they’re the ones I conclude could be dangerous, though, they don’t last long.
Jan 11 2011
Sometimes I have an exchange of words, comments, ideas, etc. with someone, and I am left wondering why I even bothered. I’d like to show you just such an exchange so that you can get an idea of why I feel this way at times. Twitter is an interesting medium for conversations. The limit of …
Jan 09 2011
This advertisement is being promoted by WorldNut Daily. Surprise, surprise. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqRqwU5oeLA …in an economic meltdown, non-hybrid seeds could become more valuable than even silver and gold. I love the “graph” that purports to show the value of gold, silver, and “Nonhybrid Seeds.” It’s odd that there aren’t any numbers on that graph, isn’t it? I …
Nov 11 2010
Many people are not familiar with the term Dunning-Kruger Effect. The linked Wikipedia article begins with a very good description: The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer …
Oct 22 2010
While driving east on University Avenue in Champaign, Illinois, I was presented with the sight of this billboard. I found that I was not the only person in town who noticed the billboard, and was a bit insulted by it. [I’m not offended by it, as it takes much more to actually offend me.] A …
Aug 13 2010
I really don’t know how else to describe this group of people who call themselves “Operation Save America”. Christian Supremacists sounds very much like how they think of themselves. They were rather busy in Bridgeport, Connecticut on Friday, August 6, outside the Bridgeport Islamic Society. From a news article, Angry protesters descend on mosque: “Jesus …
Recent Comments