Measuring meme speed

Ok, I’ll play. The post at Acephalous, Measuring the Speed of Meme, asks bloggers to link to it and then ping Technorati. Always willing to be a human test subject, this post is my contribution to the experiment. The author intends to use the results as the basis for a presentation at [...]

More on flying imams

At Texas Hold ‘Em Blogger, a compilation of items painting a better picture of the intent of those intentionally in-your-face muslims on the US Airways flight.
…their behavior was clearly designed to frighten passengers and could conceivably have been deliberately carried out to create conditions for a lawsuit.
Turns out among those attending their conference was Rep.-elect [...]

Religious right, atheist left, both want control of you and me

Seen on Pure Pedantry,
The problem with religion and atheism isn’t that they exist or that they naturally push one towards violence. The world is much more complicated than that. The problem is fanaticism: the exultation of one creed to such a degree that every other creed becomes not only fundamentally wrong but a desecration.
That is [...]

rule #1: you may do nothing that might help you win if people will complain about it

Rule #2: People will complain about everything you do.
Expat Yank asks, with regard to Iraq (and surely with tongue in cheek), Are Our Views of “The Rules” a Problem?  Why, yes, they are.  And there you have it.  We are only allowed to do just enough (and we only have just enough people and resources) [...]

In the valley of the shadow of death: Roger Brent on revolutionizing biosecurity

Biosecurity efforts are in no way keeping pace with the revolution in biological capability that promises just a few years from now to provide any weekend biohacker with extremely low-cost, low-footprint tools to construct and disseminate novel pathogens that could precipitate a global bio-catastrophe.
Roger Brent, molecular biologist and director of the nonprofit Molecular Sciences Institute [...]

Juicy conspiracy theory fodder: gang stalking

File under freakin’ crazy: I just learned the term “gang stalking.” Someone over at Gangstalking World and Gangstalking World Blog may need some professional help, but at least their incredibly grandiose paranoid-schizophrenic delusions make for entertaining web content.
It seems “Masons” or other invisible people in “gangs,” for reasons unknown, are harrassing targeted people [...]

Scratching my head over Litvinenko case

So they finally figured out Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210, the most radioactive of the Po isotopes. A couple of small points in case you haven’t read them somewhere else about 50 times already: 1) Po-210 exists only in trace amounts in nature, so the amount it would have taken to cause this drastic [...]

A couple of Litvinenko poisoning links

I found a few intriguing articles about the Alexander Litvinenko poisoning case at the A Step at a Time blog, including Alexander Litvenenko: The Poison of Power and Litvenenko Poisoned: III which has an interesting excerpt from a Nigerian newspaper about the alleged radioactive thallium poisoning of Nikolai Khokhlov (I make no claims of accuracy [...]