Auto-Tune the News

This is my new favorite thing.

[via Dave Holmes]

A Gaythering Storm

Heterosexual spouses beware! If you don’t act soon, your marriage will be undermined by…um…well…I guess it won’t be affected in the least bit, but…gay people shouldn’t get married, just because!

on open-mindedness

On occasion, when I’ve said I don’t believe (or believe in) something, someone will say I’m not being open-minded.

This video simply but thoroughly explains why not believing something has absolutely nothing to do with open- or closed-mindedness. It also demonstrates why being willing to accept things without evidence or allowing oneself to be easily persuaded is not exactly something to brag about.

[from kottke]

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

These two videos take about 11 minutes total to view and explain what’s happening to the economy in a way that’s pretty easy to understand.

[via BoingBoing]

Hang on to your hat.

“Predictions are that by 2049, a $1000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the entire human species.” …one of the many amazing (alarming?) statistics illustrated in this video that shows how quickly the rate of technological advancement is increasing.

[via Open Culture]

DIY RFID scanner for $250

This is why putting RFID tags in passports and driver’s licenses is a bad idea. It’s really easy to read the information from them at a distance without the “mark” knowing they’ve been scanned. Hacker Chris Paget explains how this could violate your privacy.

[via BoingBoing]

The Big Beer Bailout

For Immediate Release:

Statement by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., following Congress’s passage of today’s rescue package:

“As we all know, lax brewing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible brewing and irresponsible drinking. This simply put too many families into beers they could not finish. We are seeing the impact on drinkers and neighborhoods, with 5 million drinkers now behind on their drinking. Some are just walking away from beers they should never have been drinking in the first place. What began as a sub-prime drinking problem has spread to other, less-risky drinkers, and contributed to excess inventories.

These troubled beers are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of bars, brewpubs, and other drinking institutions, preventing them from serving drinkable beers. The inability to determine the worth of these beers has fostered uncertainty about beers in general, and even about the cultural condition of the institutions that own them. The normal buying and selling of nearly all types of beers has become challenged.

The role of the ratings agencies cannot be overlooked in the creation of this crisis. The Pulitzer, beerer and the National beer Foundation continued to award these beers their top ratings, even as empties piled up all over America.

These undrinkable beers are clogging up our beer drinking system, and undermining the strength of our otherwise sound beer drinking institutions. As a result, Americans’ personal refrigerators are threatened, and the ability of drinkers to store, and of refrigerators to dispense, has been disrupted.

To restore confidence in our beer markets and our beer drinking institutions, we must address the underlying problem – the loss of confidence in our nation’s brewers. That collapse in confidence is choking off the flow of ideas that is so vitally important to our beers. When the beer drinking system works as it should, ideas flow to brewers and home brewers who brew beers, ensuring an uninterrupted flow of beers to households and businesses. But stresses in our leading breweries have led to the current severe and systemic brewers’ block that threatens to undermine access to beers for working Americans.

This bill contains a broad set of tools that can be deployed to strengthen brewers, large and small, that serve businesses and families. Our brewers are varied – from large breweries headquartered in Milwaukee, to regional breweries that serve multi-state areas, to community home brewers that are vital to the lives of our citizens and their towns and communities. The challenges our brewers face are just as varied – from full-scale brewers’ block, to restructuring failed beers, to simply facing a crisis of confidence.

We must implement these new programs with a strategy that allows us to adapt to changing circumstances, and attract the private inspiration which has always made our cultural system so resilient and innovative.

In these difficult times, leadership – and sacrifice – must start at the top. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and I are agreed it is imperative we take the bad beers out of the system, and slowly work our way through these toxic assets. Yes, it will be painful; it will be difficult; but at times like this, the Government must step in and perform its duty, as drinker of last resort.”

Thanks to Julian Gough’s satire [via BoingBoing] for inspiration.

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Hippie Christmas

It’s the middle of August, which means it’s time for the UW-Madison students to arrive and for thousands of downtown apartment dwellers to toss most of their possessions to the curb and be homeless for a night until they can move into their new place the next day.

Right outside the front door of my building was a box marked “FREE” of discarded electronics including what are now my new alarm clock and subwoofer-equipped computer speakers. It doesn’t get any easier or cheaper than this.

Move Aware is here.

I’ve been interested in biomechanics, movement, physical therapy, etc., for a long time. After posting a few times lately about injuries and self treatment of trigger points, I decided to start a new blog dedicated to that area of interest: rehabilitating injuries and increasing my mobility, flexibility, and strength. The first thing I have to do is pay attention to how my body moves and feels, and I’ll go from there.

Here it is: Move Aware.

Coincidence? I think not…but maybe I should.

Anecdotes are entertaining and can be pretty convincing — I’ve been caught up in many of them myself — but they’re no substitute for scientifically-derived evidence. Michael Shermer explains why they’re so powerful:

The reason for this cognitive disconnect is that we have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old. So it is that any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful anecdotes in the form of testimonials.

[Scientific American via RichardDawkins.net]

Old habits die hard. Unfortunately, humans don’t. What’s the Harm? documents cases where critical thinking — as opposed to magical thinking, superstition, or trust in authority — could have saved people’s health, money, or life.