Charlie Rose is playing the other room and it's his repeat of Friday's tribute to New York Socialite Brooke Astor, who died last week. As I'm listening, I was initially reminded of my post from last January about her family and thus far, I haven't heard much of anything about the controversy which was such a large part of her final years and my ( Read more... )

This just flashed onto my Yahoo! and I thought it worth clipping;
On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600. A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original ( Read more... )

We've all heard the administration's disavowals of the recently published study that attempts to enumerate the "excess mortality" in Iraq, since the invasion. The study, which can be found in the current issue of the respected international medical journal The Lancet (free reg req), attributes the overwhelmingly largest part of this increase to ( Read more... )

This Just In...Senate Republicans discover that environmentalists tend to vote Democratic and often assemble in groups.

Everyone has their pet peeves and I am no different ( Read more... )

Scientists have discovered that people who seek emotional highs and lows are more susceptible to alcoholism. Duh.

If I posted an update for every entry, I'd never get anything else done.

Sometimes it's as simple as an obscure angle or story getting picked-up by mainstream media; I've occasionally seen a direct reversal and sometimes it's just something neat. For example, last year on "International Darwin Day", I linked to a study about the willingness of ( Read more... )

When I logged into the Pipeline this morning, I was offered a choice of watching hurricane predictions, Air Force One land , a "Town Meeting" with the results of an investigation into New Orleans levee failures and continuous helicopter coverage of a seven year old swimming from Alcatraz. Well, two of the stories aren't interesting and the ( Read more... )

My daughter has been "training" for a March of Dimes walk-a-thon, so we've been trying to walk her at least a mile a day. We're thinking that by incrementally increasing the distance, she may be able to walk the three miles for charity. Because it's my wife and some other mothers that'll be on her "team", usually I don't have anything to do with ( Read more... )

I'm assuming it wasn't someone known, who mailed me a petition link in support of Dr Frank Ellis, a suspended professor at the University of Leeds. Instead, I'm guessing that my @livejournal was farmed from a search on the "education" tag or from one of the blog catalogs. I did not click your link as a precautionary measure, but because you felt ( Read more... )