A comment from the Raving Atheist on the topic of giving to Catholic charities who provide disaster relief: “If you’re hesitant to give to the Catholics, recall that your dog’s head is full of crazy ideas too, but that doesn’t stop him from helpfully fetching the Frisbee.”
Category > pleasant
The United States government has pledged between US $200,000 and $300,000 per American family to relocate those who have lost their homes in New Orleans. Additionally, the United States government has pledged nearly US $200 billion and twelve years or more toward the reconstruction of Louisiana. Disaster relief agencies of all sorts are listed at the FEMA Web site for those who want to support hurricane victims in the South.
Whoops, sorry, my mistake: The United States government has pledged between US $200,000 and $300,000 per Israeli family to relocate those who have lost their homes in occupied Palestine. Additionally, the United States government has pledged nearly US $200 billion and twelve years or more toward the reconstruction of Iraq. Disaster relief agencies of all religions are listed at the FEMA Web site for those who want to support hurricane victims in the South.
Print your photographs from flickr.com (like these) starting at $15.95 for a perfect-bound book or $9.99 for a poster at the live beta of QOOP.
Does anyone else think it is weird that they use the ‘What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor’ in a car commercial?
From a remarkable Guardian Unlimited commentary by Ben Goldacre titled A Tonic for Sceptics: “Sceptics, and the placebo effect, are easily misunderstood. Since I’ve made a modest second career out of rubbishing alternative therapies (or rather the pseudoscience of the claims behind them), you might expect me to be pleased with a new analysis of 110 placebo-controlled randomised trials of homoeopathy, published in the Lancet, showing there is no evidence that homeopathic tablets perform any better than placebos. Obviously, it’s an important and useful finding. But it misses the mark.
“The placebo is arguably the most interesting phenomena in medicine, because it goes far beyond the effectiveness of little white sugar pills, into the cultural meaning of treatment. It has been shown, for example, that green sugar pills are a more effective treatment for anxiety than red sugar pills, because of the cultural meaning, we might parsimoniously assume, of the colours green and red.
“Likewise, studies have found that salt-water injections can be a more effective placebo treatment than white sugar pills – not, I might add, because there is anything particularly useful about salt water injections, but because the ceremony of performing an injection is a far more invasive, authoritative and dramatic intervention.
“It gets far stranger. A placebo operation in the 1950s was found to be as effective for the treatment of angina as the real operation it was being compared with. Reading the paper 50 years later, the most striking part is the discussion section, where they quietly drop the operation and nobody stands up to point out the incredibly strange discovery that a placebo operation works for anything, let alone angina.
“Branding, of course, is the key to the efficacy of little white sugar pills. Marketing, after all, is nothing if not engineered cultural meaning. A four-way comparison among sugar pills and aspirin, in either unbranded aspirin boxes or packaging mocked up to look like the Disprin brand, showed that the brand-name packaging works, because of the huge wealth of cultural background material – the adverts, the word-of-mouth endorsement, the childhood experiences – that packaging plays on. The change in packaging had almost as big an impact on pain as whether the pills actually had any drug in them.”
It take a good deal of science to run a railroad. There are all sorts of challenges in mathematics, physics, geography, cartography, ecology, metallurgy, and on and on and on. You don’t want just anybody building bridges over towns or blasting tunnels through mountains. You want men and women of science. It also takes a good deal of money to run a railroad. Materials to buy, rails and trains and stations to build, permits to file, oh goodness but it takes some money to run a railroad. So I’m sure the Cascadia Project was glad to get a USD $9.35 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Cascadia Project wants to build ‘a long-term initiative to develop balanced, seamless, and expanded transportation systems among Washington, Oregon and British Columbia.’ Sounds good to me! They’ve got the money, now let’s look at the science. Hmmm… it looks like the Cascadia Project is an initiative of the Discovery Institute. They have that science channel on television, right? No, that’s not right. The Discovery Institute is ‘a non-profit, non-partisan, public policy think tank headquartered in Seattle and dealing with national and international affairs.’ That sounds fine. What sort of thinking do they do in this think tank? Let’s see… oh my, you mean to say that The Discovery Institute is the main agent behind ‘intelligent design?’ Is that the sort of science you want running the railroads? Bill and Melinda, what were you thinking?
In the movie 28 Days Later, ‘animal rights’ activists steal animals from a laboratory only to learn the animals had a fatal disease that can affect humans. In Manawatu Australia… [link].
I likes me some Matthew Barney. So huzzah for Drawing Restraint 9, a new movie!
“Stupid Stuff, Faster!” See you at the Portland Adult Soapbox Derby.
Want to get some postage stamps with an image of your choice on them? Try PhotoStamps or ZazzleStamps. The cost is the same, both encourage you to make ‘special deliveries’ (GET IT?), both have pictures of weddings and babies and babies and weddings and puppies to inspire people who don’t know what to put on a stamp. And neither would be happy if you tried something like this.
The Pricelessware list is a compilation of software collected through a yearly vote by the participants of the “alt.comp.freeware” newsgroup. It is a list of what people have voted as “the best of the best in Freeware”.
Domino Pressure. Shockwave game, neat.
We’re laughing because it’s Spiderman with different words.
Kax. You’re going to see many copies of this game in the near future.
New York Changing. Fifty pairs of photographs by contemporary photographer Douglas Levere and world-renown photographer Berenice Abbott. Abbott’s iconic photographs, drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, were taken in the 1930s and first published in her landmark book, Changing New York (1939). More than six decades later, Levere used the same camera Abbott had used and returned to the same locations at the same time of day and the same time of year. Indeed, he took on the role of detective as he successfully sought to understand and replicate every aspect of Abbott’s process. When seen side by side, these two remarkable bodies of work reveal much about the city and the nature of urban transformation. Perhaps more than anything else, these carefully crafted images powerfully suggest that in New York, the only constant is change.
