This screams "urban legend". I know it's in Xinhua and other sources, but...still...it strains credulity. Perhaps because of the nationalities of the people involved.

I like Chip's suggestion ("If the London police force wants reports of people taking pictures, acting "unusual" in their own homes, or using cell phones, then give them some. Better yet, give them lots.") but I would implement that in a different way: Get out there on the street looking as ODD as possible and snap away. I'm going to dress is Little Bo Peep!

Another beautiful interview with Gygax was recently published in The Believer; the piece is whimsically entitled Destroy All Monsters. Paul La Farge traveled to Lake Geneva with a college friend to talk with Gygax, and ended up playing D&D with him. It's a clever piece and probably one of the most recent extensive interviews with the man himself.

Ditto. Fungi are not plants. Definite reporter error. Time for a boingboing strikethrough correction! :-)

And that sandwich clocks in at about 0.1% of the cost of attending TED...truly a conference for the rest of us. Way to trickle down, MF!

Kudos to Tor, of course, and de gustibus non disputandum, but: Yeesh. Old Man's War was a snore and a half, not to mention derivative (of Haldeman's Forever War, for those of you in the < 30 age categories). It's groundbreaking only in the sense that one has the plow the fields every spring.

I guess at least now you don't have to pay to find it out, though, so if you end up disagreeing then you can go ahead and read the other books. And I understand that's the point, and I do think Tor is doing a great thing here.

"I can make it on my own!"

Aww. li'l brudda.

Guy: Hm. I see your point about population and TB -- though I think there are social reasons why dense populations in China are more likely to be associated with increased disease transmission, e.g. the belief in traditional Chinese medicine that expectoration (spitting out mucus) is healthy.

That made me think, though: Coal use has risen to record">http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2007-10-28-coal_N.htm>record levels in the USA, during a time when TB is on the decline in that country. Does that data then mitigate the significance of your conclusion?

Incidentally, whether you use the Pearson is irrelevant to whether you're detecting causation, so I'm not sure why you mention it.

Well (and diplomatically) put, Marisa.

What is the compelling reason to believe that these two trends are connected? China has also gotten more crowded over the same time period, especially in urban areas, a trend that could cause both increase demand for coal and increased transmission of TB.

Readers might be interested to learn of another interesting correlation between piracy and global warming. Clearly, the historical data support a hypothesis linking the two.

Cypherspace is wrong; Absent is right. The "buds" are the female flower of the Cannabis plant.

Incidentally, here is some hilarious vintage Arnold.

Hey all of you "meditation ≠ religion" people: You're wrong in this context.

This isn't just generic meditation of the "anyone can listen to his breathing and do biofeedback" school. This is Transcendental Meditation, a specific set of mystical beliefs that involves a lot of supernatural claims, including yogic flying.

For example, the Lynch quote about 250 people protecting Scotland is based on a TM precept that goes something like "If the square root of one percent of a population does TM, then there will be peace". See reference on this page under the section "Bringing peace to the world". Note that the TMists attribute this to "scientists" but of course that's hooey; no reputable scientist has ever put their name behind this nonsense.

Curious, the typos. Everyone knows it's CHEEZBURGER.

KTHXBAI

There's clearly some serious value that smart, ethical people derive from participation in spiritualism and even organized religion.

I see it differently: It's no surprise that there are some good lessons and stored wisdom in the tales told by the religious; otherwise, the stuff would be really hard to sell.

On one hand, you're telling me that the invisible entity who made the universe in 6 days cares how much skin I have on my penis -- but on the other hand, who can argue with 'Thou shalt not kill'?

or

I don't believe people can come back from the dead, but that line about treating other people the way I'd want to be treated -- you can take that to the bank!

As memes, religions need the sensible material that everyone can appreciate in order to carry along the nonempirical theological beliefs; otherwise they wouldn't propagate.

So I'd reframe the quote above:

There's clearly some serious value that spiritualistic and religious people derive from intelligence and ethics.

Mmmyeah...#2 is substantially inaccurate.

It's not true that soap is good at growing germs: if it were, there would be visible colonies all over the bar in your shower, especially if you let it sit for a few days.

Nor is it true that surfactant slipperiness is the only mechanism by which soap acts to kill bacteria: surfactants (also known as "detergents" in technical parlance) disrupt microbial cell membranes, directly causing bacterial death.

If you need more convincing of this, split a quart of milk between several dishwasher-clean jars or tupperwares, to which increasing amounts of liquid soap have been added (0, 1/8 tsp, 1/4 tsp, 1/2 tsp...etc.). If soap were good for bacteria, the highest soap dose should noticeably spoil (i.e., have a detectable bacterial load) first. On the other hand, if soap kills bacteria by some means other than washing them away, then the lowest dose of soap (0) should spoil first. (Milk, even pasteurized milk, has enough bacteria that it will spoil eventually, as we all know from leaving cartons in the fridge for too long.)

My qualifications, in case you care: B.S. in biology, Ph.D. in biochemistry. But don't believe me; believe the experiment.

It is true that antibacterial soap is next to useless, since the bacteria aren't exposed to the antibiotic for long enough for killing to take place. As the author points out, these products are worse than useless, since the low-level antibiotic exposure does re-jigger the bacterial fitness landscape enough to encourage the evolution of antibiotic resistance.

Cory -- your post made me sad. I'm sorry to hear that you see this as a good thing.

Bobo -- To assert that "religion and religious people are not the enemy of progressive causes" is to deny a good deal of history, much of it on the civil rights front (from slavery through integration to the modern struggle for gay equality). I think that "religion and religious people are sometimes the enemy of progressive causes" seems a much more defensible statement, certainly more defensible than "closed-minded progressives often are" enemies of progressive causes (examples?).

Painting anti-religious thinkers as "believing that all believers are ignorant rednecks" seems to be the same sort of straw man argument that it purports to warn against. Speaking for myself, I don't think all believers are ignorant rednecks. I think they all believe in something that occupies the same epistemological ground as Santa Claus and Zeus. I disagree with them. I don't have to call them names to do that, and I generally don't.

As I see it, the problem with welcoming collaboration with evangelicals per se (as opposed to 'religious people'; let's take a moment and reflect on the definitions of these terms before proceeding) is that their belief system will, in the end, lead them to attempt to convert the nonbeliever. My fear is that eventually, allying with them will result in something bad happening. Witness what happened to the GOP when they allied themselves with evangelical Christians in order to achieve power. For a time the common goals were the focus, and then...

And by the way, Bobo, I'm sure Richard Dawkins loves you, even if you hate him.