Category: General Discussion

The Washington Post had a fascinating article over the weekend entitled The Sacrifices of Albania’s ‘Sworn Virgins’. It turns out that in the rural and mountainous regions of Albania, there developed a custom several hundred years ago by which women could assume all the rights of men, but in return had to sear to never…

Responding to a commentor on a thread about animal rights, I again encountered this funny view of nature that some people have. Two sentences in particular just struck me as being out of touch with reality. The alternative may be to try to live in harmony with nature. … Trying to dominate nature has only…

For all the encomia made by banking industry lobbyists to the value of the “free flow of information,” one finds examples where the industry restricts information sharing when it benefits them. Capital One was one of the worst offenders. It’s complex, but the company was restricting information flow in such a way that it lowered…

In the bogus legal claims department, one finds this blub from Consumerist. What’s the deal here? A pretty aggressive consumer group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, created model menu for Wendy’s that demonstrates how the “restaurant” can display calorie information. It’s pretty clear, and very useful. Of course, Wendy’s hates this stuff.…

Jesse McKinley reports in the Times: It was a good day for the Devil in San Francisco on Tuesday, as the Taxicab Commission voted to keep the Dark Lord’s favorite number — 666 — affixed to an allegedly cursed cab. The vote, which came after an amused period of public comment and annoyed looks from…

Seth Stevenson over at Slate describes all 12 types of ads in the world and urges us to resist them all: To me, the 12 formats serve…well as a weapon of defense for the consumer under assault from endless advertising messages. It’s like learning how a magic trick works: Once the secret’s revealed, the trick…

Steven Novella at Neurologica has written a thoughtful essay on where the limits of academic freedom should lie in light of the firing of Ward Churchill based on allegations of plagiarism and research falsification. Of course, many believe that calling 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns” might have had something to do with it as well. Novella…

Gene Sperling in the WaPo points out that holding the NIH budget flat is like a cutting our budgets as inflation forces budget cutbacks. He forgets to mention the wasted expense of the NIH roadmap and the significant portion of the intramural budget devoted to security, but otherwise he’s dead-on. The steady ramping of funding…

I know that my earlier post on Gen Y kids was a bit bogus. There are huge generalizations and no real data in the argument. But I’m going to stir the pot more by posting portions of an earlier column by Jeffrey Zaslow on Generation Y that has a bit more anecdote and information about…

The Wall Street Journal continues its campaign against Generation Y with an article by Jeff Zaslow that tries to explain why so many young people act with such a sense of entitlement. It pins the blame on, among other things, California, indulgent parenting, and consumer culture. But I suspect that the culprit is the last…