Luke.stirling

Hovertext: By the time I finished this comic, I was disgusted with myself.

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Over 2/3 of BAHFest Seattle general admission tickets are gone! If you don't buy soon, you'll have to look in through the window! 

We had another mass murder in America this week, and there’s no way around it: it was by a “none”, someone who hated organized religion, and who described himself as Not Religious, Not Religious, but Spiritual. If he were participating in a survey, we’d embrace him as one of us, part of our growing majority. He was also a Conservative Republican, and if he were attending CPAC, we have atheists who’d enthuse about a possible recruit to the cause. But instead, he slaughtered innocent people, so we turn around and pretend his disbelief had absolutely nothing to do with it. It’s all very convenient. If he’d been a Christian we’d all sneer at the hypocrisy of all the believers who’d reassure us that he wasn’t a True Christian™, but now it’s only reasonable that we rationally and calmly divorce ourselves from any responsibility.

I don’t accept that.

I agree completely with Ashley Miller’s point that the myth of atheist superiority is dangerous, and leads to terrible consequences. Even if it isn’t causal, it leads terrible people to do terrible things to achieve that affirming sense of being better than everyone else. It has to stop. And the first step is acquiring some sense of responsibility.

But of course, some of our self-appointed ‘leaders’ want nothing to do with that. It never fails that if you want to see the insufferable smugness of delusional atheists, all you have to do is turn to Sam Harris.

No rational atheist (or “New Atheist”) holds religion accountable for every idiotic or unethical thing religious people do. We blame a religion only for what its adherents do as a direct result of its doctrines, such as opposing gay marriage or killing apostates.

Atheism has no doctrines. It does not demand that a person do anything, or refrain from doing anything, on the basis of his unbelief. Consequently, to know that someone is an atheist is to know almost nothing about him—apart from the fact that he does not accept the unwarranted claims of any religion.

Atheism is simply the condition of not believing in Poseidon, Thor, or any of the thousands of dead gods that lie in the graveyard we call mythology. To that extent, everyone knows exactly what it is to be an atheist—he has simply added the god of Abraham to the list of the dead.

If a belief in astrology were causing people to go berserk—to deny medical care to their children or to murder unbelievers—many of us would speak and write about the dangerous stupidity of astrology. This would not be bigotry or intolerance on our part. It would be a plea for basic human sanity. And that is all that an atheist’s criticism of religious tribalism and superstition ever is.

If you understand this, you will recognize any attempt to blame atheism for specific crimes, great or small, for what it is: A fresh act of religious demagoguery.

Christ.

Humanity is suffering under a collection of half-assed ethical and moral principles, assembled with no rational foundation but superstition, and with awful, damaging, exploitive rules mixed in with a few good ones. Religion is primitive and lacking in any tools to address deep injustices and correct errors in its formulation. I am all in favor of tearing it down and replacing it with…what? According to Harris, nothing. Atheism has nothing constructive or productive to replace the bad system most people are limping along under — rip it all out and apparently, brute reason can then be trusted to evolve something better.

Never mind that the same atheists who adore the irresponsibility of the idea that their beliefs impose no demands on them are also the same atheists who so detest equality that they spit on feminism; that they so obliviously love their privileges that they scorn the whole concept of social justice; that they are so authoritarian that they rush to the defense of their Leaders with a capital “L” no matter how egregiously offensive their bigotry might be, and any who dare to criticize them are “harming the cause”.

Reason is not enough. Reason can show you the best way to achieve a goal, but if your goal is mass murder, or denigration of women, or the perpetuation of an oppressive hierarchy, it’ll help you do that, too. We need purpose and value and meaning as well, and if a prominent Leader of atheism is saying that atheism doesn’t do that, that’s a declaration that atheism is bankrupt, and has failed totally. It has become a Great Nothing.

That’s not my atheism, though. I argue that the absence of gods gives greater prominence to the interdependence of the human community, and adds greater weight and urgency to the importance of empathy and equality and all those human values — but if atheism is now a label that allows us to nonchalantly disavow responsibility for the actions of those within our own group, perhaps it’s time to disband the whole idea of an atheist community.

But then it’s also clear that my vision of what atheism ought to be is a minority view. The majority are doing their damnedest to confirm the poor opinion the believers have of us.

Space fans, rejoice: today, just about every image captured by Apollo astronauts on lunar missions is now on the Project Apollo Archive Flickr account. There are some 8,400 photographs in all at a resolution of 1800 dpi, and they're sorted by the roll of film they were on. (more…)

A favored tactic of Tea Party governors this decade has been the imposition of a poll tax in the form of voter ID laws that required voters to present a state-issued ID (usually a driver's license) in order to exercise their franchise. (more…)

In the 2015 Sense About Science lecture (MP3), Tracey Brown discusses the worst casualty of politicization of science, from fluoride to climate change -- the truth. (more…)

The Kindle Fire comes with a SDXC card slot that outclasses every other tablet in its price range, accommodating storage cards that can hold as much as 128GB of media -- but it won't read ebooks from the slot. (more…)

IBM division Lexmark (which, a decade ago, lost a key copyright case that tried to ban ink-toner refilling) is headed to court in a patent case called Lexmark v. Impression, where it argues that patent law gives it the right to restrict your use of your property after you buy it. (more…)

Volkswagen's cars didn't have a fault in their diesel motors -- they were designed to lie to regulators, and that matters, because regulation is based on the idea that people lie, but things tell the truth. (more…)

The European Commission is probing whether Samsung televisions' sensed when they were being tested for energy efficiency and changed their power consumption to get better ratings than they deserved. (more…)

Wired's Angela Watts reports on something that's been rather widely noted with respect to the forthcoming Matt Damon film "The Martian." It, contra to the usual outcome, is markedly better than the novel it's based on. (more…)

 Chris Mintz, 30-year old student, took five bullets while charging the gunman.  He is recovering.

Photo via imgur.

“Admire the Chief’s feather headdress, his wives’ shameless outfits and the adorable little faces of their red-skinned offspring. Feeding time is not to be missed!”

If that excerpt from the XIXth Century Search Engine hasn’t caused your sides to split, don’t worry – there’s more. Ubisoft sent news of their latest AssCreed [official site] marketing initiative this morning, calling it “a rich historical research tool designed to look just like the search engines our great-great-great-grandparents used in 1868″. I clicked on it expecting an irritating collection of steampunk iDevices and mustachioed memes. What I found was somehow worse than that.

… [visit site to read more]

By now, you’ve likely heard about the embarrassingly bad abortion chart Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) tried to use as a “gotcha” at the congressional Planned Parenthood hearing last Tuesday. If you haven’t, I recommend reading the excellent take-downs by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones and Timothy Lee at Vox.

I’m not going to rehash everything wrong with that particular chart, because the source of the chart, Americans United for Life* (AUL), provides oh so many more hilariously bad, misleading charts in their recent report The New Leviathan: The Mega-Center Report—How Planned Parenthood Has Become Abortion, Inc.

In this report, AUL describes how Planned Parenthood is actually a giant female sea monster shattering the glass ceiling of corporate America with one tentacle while performing coerced abortions with the others.

Kidding, kidding. The actual report is much more ridiculous than that.

The entire premise of The New Leviathan is the claim that Planned Parenthood is covertly trying to increase abortions and decrease the other health services it provides. The evidence? Larger clinics opening up, what AUL calls mega-centers. What else could this possibly mean but an aggressive plan to lure more women into having abortions? Just like with the Mayo Clinic’s recent expansion, which is clearly part of a plot to increase its cancer patient numbers.

Holy crap! Maybe Mayo Clinic and Planned Parenthood are in cahoots to give people cancer via abortions! Except for the fact that abortions are not linked to cancer. At all.

But let’s not get distracted by factual information. AUL certainly doesn’t. The other “evidence” they provide to support their contention that Planned Parenthood is deliberately coercing people into having abortions to increase their abortion business are statements and charts showing an increase in abortion and a decrease in other services.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. There are many different reasons for these fluctuations that don’t require concocting an evil Planned Parenthood conspiracy theory, but look at how dramatic the increase in abortions is!

Except it only looks like a dramatic increase because AUL truncated the y-axis. Here are the data again without the manipulation:

Still an increase, sure, but not dramatic enough to require some nefarious explanation, especially taking into account population growth (which neither chart above does).

The decrease in services claim is supported by charts like this one:

Except that the chart doesn’t show what the title claims it shows. Once again, the changes shown do not require paranoid assumptions about Planned Parenthood deliberately slashing cancer screenings. The decrease is in keeping with the changes in U.S. cancer screening guidelines, which call for fewer screenings (often at later ages) among women with no history of cancer or previous positive tests. The decrease also makes sense considering more people have insurance with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and they are likely getting these screenings from their regular doctor rather than through Planned Parenthood.

What this chart does show us (aside from how ugly and misleading 3D charts are) is that Planned Parenthood does around three times as many cancer screenings than abortions, even with screenings decreasing, supporting the fact that abortion is still a very small percentage of the services PP performs.

It also demonstrates deliberately dishonest cherry picking, as Timothy Lee pointed out in his article about the AUL chart Rep. Chaffetz attempted to use with a straight face in the congressional hearings. The AUL leaves out many other services Planned Parenthood provides, including care involving contraception and sexually transmitted infections. Lee notes that the total non-abortion services Planned Parenthood provides have gone down from 10.29 million to 10.26 million from 2006 to 2013, which is barely a decrease at all and actually much less of a change than I would expect considering the decrease in cancer screening.

The AUL report is full of 3D charts, an excellent way to exaggerate differences and obfuscate what the actual numbers are, as in this abortion skyscraper chart:

Here, Americans United for Life helpfully shows us that more and more Minnesotans trust Planned Parenthood over other providers to perform this sensitive and private medical procedure. Thanks, AUL!

And pie chart fans won’t be disappointed—the AUL goes above and beyond with its pie chart, actually managing to show no information whatsoever in the chart itself.

Even the pie chart is embarrassed about how bad it is. You can see it blushing.

The pullquote next to the chart does provide some info that kind of explains what they are trying to do with this chart, although I’m honestly surprised that Planned Parenthood only performed about a third of abortions in 2011. I would have guessed a much higher proportion.

So to recap, misleading charts are the rule, not the exception, with Americans United for Life. But even if these charts were accurate, they wouldn’t demonstrate any of the claims AUL is making. An increase in Planned Parenthood abortions does not tell us anything about whether PP is deliberately trying to get more people to have abortions. We could just as easily claim that abstinence-only education proponents are deliberately increasing the abortion rate by putting more teenagers at risk of pregnancy.

Honestly, between the selling baby parts nonsense and the conspiracies promoted by AUL, anti-abortion organizations and activists have become indistinguishable from 9/11 Truthers and people who believe the moon landing was a hoax.

The pro-life* movement has become a movement of conspiracy theorists. Maybe it always was.

*Some restrictions apply. “Life” does not include women, existing children, or people with diseases, especially the terminally ill.

The newly released bugs are part of the Stagefright family of vulnerabilities, disclosed by Zimperium Zlabs. (more…)

Companies like GM have engineered their cars so that it's a felony to make independent diagnostic tools for them, or to investigate the official diagnostic tools rented to mechanics in exchange for a promise to only buy GM's hyper-inflated replacement parts. (more…)

Jon Hendren, @fart, was mistakenly summoned onto Headline News instead of journalist John Hendren, to talk about whistleblower Ed Snowden. He talked about Edward Scissorhands instead. The clueless, scripted anchor didn't seem to notice the difference.

Bill Nye talks about the realities of reproduction, and the right wing completely loses its shit.

It is not Nye at his most eloquent, but…he’s actually right about everything important. Read this title for an example of the inanity of far right responses, titled WATCH: Bill Nye, Science Guy Makes An Idiot Of Himself On Reproduction. Nye is clearer and more correct than whoever wrote that, making it particularly amusing. It makes a lot of claims.

Not that this writer had all that great an affinity for Bill Nye anyway, but the video below has to be the most smug, snide, atheistic diatribe displaying outright willful ignorance and leftist talking points to grace youtube at least since Hillary Clinton talked about this subject.

No, no…that’s my schtick. How can you watch that video and come away thinking Nye’s attitude is offensive? Probably the same way one can watch it and think he got everything wrong.

Over at National Review, a trio of physicians pick apart the arguments using actual peer reviewed medical journal articles, but we can sum up what they have to say pretty easily.

When a single sperm fertilizes a human egg, the resulting zygote – the one cell being – has its own unique DNA.

Life begins for any one human being at that moment of conception when this fertilization occurs.

Errm, if you look at the National Review article (which I’ll return to shortly), it’s by two authors, a lawyer and a bioethicist at a Catholic university; there are several other articles by a Fellow of the Discovery Institute. This isn’t exactly a stellar, well-qualified lineup.

Their first point is a non sequitur. Fertilization produces a new unique genetic combination, but so what? This is the case in every organism — we don’t swoon in awe at the fact that fertilization in zebrafish produces a new combination of DNA. We don’t declare meiosis a privileged, protected state because it produces gametes with a unique set of genes. We don’t look at the immune system and decide that antibody producing cells are human beings because they reorganize their genomes into a unique arrangement during maturation.

Their second point is a standard elision: the process that will eventually produce a human being begins at fertilization, just like the process that will produce a chair begins when a tree is chopped down. We can apply the same adjective to both the tree and the chair — “wood” — but it doesn’t make them synonymous.

This is the pure science of when human life begins. It is true that not every time an egg is fertilized it implants, and babies are lost due to natural causes every day. This is called an act of God, or if one is not religious, Mother Nature. Mr. Nye’s statements on that topic calling for the prosecution of women whose fertilized eggs do not implant in the uterine wall are patently stupid on their face.

It’s a distortion and over-simplification of the “pure science”. When Nye talks about prosecuting women whose eggs fail to implant, he’s pointing out the fucking absurdity of such an argument, but if you’re going to call them patently stupid, say it to lawmakers in Indiana and Georgia and many other places that want to criminalize contraception. How can you not know that one of the grounds for hating some forms of contraception is the idea that they prevent implantation?

“You wouldn’t know how big a human egg is if it weren’t for microscopes.” Uh, Bill…the human ovum is the only sort of cell in a woman’s body that can be seen with the naked eye.

It is true we would not know the gory details of the beauty of human reproduction without medical doctors putting cameras in some pretty private parts of women, but that does not cancel out the actual science itself that tells us a human being is created at fertilization.

That was written by a guy who’s never had to find an ovum. They weren’t even discovered in mammals until the 1830s. Identifying one relatively large cell in a tissue populated with trillions of cells isn’t easy, and while mature follicles are even larger and easier to spot, it’s still non-trivial to identify them without some magnification. I’ve got slides of ovaries in my lab, all nicely stained to make it even easier, but still…a dot that’s only 100-150µm in diameter (a tenth of a millimeter) isn’t something you’ll be able to spot without a microscope.

Bill Nye might be a science guy (engineer, actually), but he’s no more an expert on human reproduction than Todd Akin is. What Nye is is a leftist tool who is spouting the feminist line that simplifies down to stupidity the excuses the left offers for why abortion should be tolerated in polite society, and why abstinence is undesirable as a way to prevent pregnancy when it is really 100% reliable as a way to do so. Without medical intervention, so far as we know, only one child was ever conceived without his mother knowing man. That has to say something for God.

At least we get an admission that Akin isn’t an expert on human reproduction! But the rest is an evasion. Why shouldn’t abortion be tolerated? He doesn’t say. And the reliability of not having sex to avoid pregnancy is not under debate; it’s that human beings are not reliably abstinent. We should endorse methods that allow people to be sexual beings without requiring them to be saddled with an unwanted pregnancy.

But let’s go to that National Review article with the over-hyped authorities. It’s not very good or convincing. The heart of their claim is that scientific publications acknowledge and justify that zygotes are human at fertilization.

All the texts used in contemporary human embryology and teratology, developmental biology, and anatomy concur in the judgment that it is at fertilization, not — as Nye ignorantly claims — at implantation, that the life of a new individual of the species Homo sapiens begins. Here are three of many, many examples:

“Human life begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” “A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo).” (Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 7th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 2003. pp. 16, 2.)

“Fertilization is the process by which male and female haploid gametes (sperm and egg) unite to produce a genetically distinct individual.” (Signorelli et al., Kinases, phosphatases and proteases during sperm capacitation, CELL TISSUE RES. 349(3):765, March 20, 2012.)

“Although life is a continuous process, fertilization (which, incidentally, is not a ‘moment’) is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte” (Emphasis added; Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Mueller, Human Embryology and Teratology, 3rd edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000, p. 8).

To which I can only say: NONSENSE. “Human” in these cases is a general descriptor for the origin of the cells; it’s a statement about the type. You might as well say that that one quote about a “male and female haploid gametes (sperm and egg)” clearly states that sperm and egg are human, therefore science says we ought to criminalize menstruation and masturbation.

One other point I have to make about their sources: the Moore and O’Rahilly texts are specifically medical embryology textbooks — they are not good sources for information about general developmental biology, and are a bit blinkered in their perspective, and tend to focus on superficial aspects of descriptive morphology. That’s fine for medical and nursing students, I suppose, but if you want to actually understand the mechanics of development, they’re useless. They’re doubly useless if you read them with an agenda that refuses to be budged by the facts.

I can troll the scientific literature, too. Here are some titles.

Pass F, Janis R, Marcus DM. (1971) Antigens of human wart tissue. J Invest Dermatol. 56(4):305-10.

Warts are human! Ban squaric acid, laser surgery, and topical liquid nitrogen treatments! (Warts actually are human: they are made of skin cells stimulated into benign overgrowth by incorporation of genetic material from a virus. They also therefore have a unique genetic combination.)

Kim HB, Lee SH, Um JH, Oh WK, Kim DW, Kang CD, Kim SH. (2015) Sensitization of multidrug-resistant human cancer cells to Hsp90 inhibitors by down-regulation of SIRT1. Oncotarget. 2015 Sep 25. [Epub ahead of print]

Cancer cells are human! They are also genetically distinct from their host, with a unique molecular signature. All the arguments used by these people denying Nye’s statements can also be applied to cancer.

Finch CE, Austad SN. (2015) Commentary: is Alzheimer’s disease uniquely human? Neurobiol Aging. 36(2):553-5.

Uh-oh. Scientists refer to diseases as “human”, too? Do we need to get informed consent and a signature from neurofibrillary plaques in the brain before we can try to treat it?

My point is not that warts, cancer, or diseases need to be regarded as persons. It’s that “human” is a very broad term that is applied to a lot of kinds of cells, and it takes a particularly naive person to browse through the literature and go “A-ha! My biases are confirmed by this quote!” We clearly have an understanding of the distinction between the general term “human” and “person deserving full civil rights and the protection of society”. If we didn’t, everyone would have to go around the house collecting shed skin flakes to give them a properly reverent burial.

And please, can this fascination with genetically unique combinations just curl up and die? It’s irrelevant and meaningless. A human being is not a cell or a listing of the nucleotide sequences of their genome. We leftist tools have a deeper appreciation of the breadth and depth of experience and information that makes us fully human than “right-wing ignoramuses”, it seems.

Wait, what about the idiot from the Discovery Institute? What does he have to say? He’s ignorable. Well, so are the other babblers at the National Review, so I’ll just mention one thing. Wesley Smith says:

A sperm is a cell, it is alive but it isn’t a living organism. Ditto an egg.

Wha…? How does he define “organism”? That statement is so stupid it hurt to read it. I would like to see his definition, because it will require some twisty ad hoc bullshit to avoid being used to claim a zygote isn’t an “organism”.

Speaking of ignorable, one thing these critics ignore is women. Everything spins around how they can redefine terms, and how they can distort the scientific literature as an authority to back them up, but the primary argument for abortion is that women — human beings that we can not dispute are fully functional, aware members of society — must have autonomy and the right to control their bodies, and that society is better for everyone when women are respected as something more than baby-makers. They don’t even try to touch that point.

Daniel Handler (who wrote the excellent "Series of Unfortunate Events" books under the name Lemony Snicket) and his wife, Lisa Brown, announced the $1 million gift to Planned Parenthood on the eve of a possible Congressional shutdown over funding to the agency. (more…)

Wired has a nice article up today about bus stops built in the Soviet Union, as photographed by Chris Herwig. Some of them look beautiful, some of them look like dead robots, and some look positively dangerous to be under.

Photographer Christopher Herwig first discovered the unusual architecture of Soviet-era bus stops during a 2002 long-distance bike ride from London to St. Petersburg. Challenging himself to take one good photograph every hour, Herwig began to notice surprisingly designed bus stops on otherwise deserted stretches of road. Twelve years later, Herwig had covered more than 18,000 miles in 14 countries of the former Soviet Union, traveling by car, bike, bus and taxi to hunt down and document these bus stops.

The local bus stop proved to be fertile ground for local artistic experimentation in the Soviet period, and was built seemingly without design restrictions or budgetary concerns. The result is an astonishing variety of styles and types across the region, from the strictest Brutalism to exuberant whimsy.

The book, Soviet Bus Stops, is available from Amazon and elsewhere.

Dear Friends, Fans, and medical practitioners to whom we owe money,

For the month of October, we here at the floating island of Katering HQ will be running the The Katering Show Border Force Bonanza Sale!

Purchase an apron* from our online store at www.thekateringshow.com and ALL profits go to The Human Rights Law Centre. They do excellent work advocating for the human rights of refugees and asylum seekers, in Australia and in Australian offshore activities/baby prisons.

So support a good cause, and look dashing in our patented** “Emergency-grade Orange” apron while you do it.

With hot love,

The Kates

*We’ve even got some signed ones, if that tickles your pickle.

** Technically a lie.

Get more Katering:
Explore Katering: thekateringshow.com
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My latest creation is a monolith made using a technique featured in The Cube by Max_Stav. When I saw Max’s creation, I immediately knew I wanted to make something similar, and the result is an otherworldly monolith composed of 3 of Max’s cubes. You can see more photos on my Flickr page.

Most areas of the globe are experiencing above-average temperatures.  So why are scientists especially concerned about an anomalous area of record-LOW temperatures near Greenland?

First of all, it’s no error. I checked with Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, who confirmed what the map above suggests — some parts of the North Atlantic Ocean saw record cold in the past eight months...

And there’s not much reason to doubt the measurements — the region is very well sampled. “It’s pretty densely populated by buoys, and at least parts of that region are really active shipping lanes, so there’s quite a lot of observations in the area,” Arndt said. “So I think it’s pretty robust analysis.”..

There is strong evidence — not just from our study — that this is a consequence of the long-term decline of the Gulf Stream System, i.e. the Atlantic ocean’s overturning circulation AMOC, in response to global warming.

More at the link and in Wikipedia:

In 2005, British researchers noticed that the net flow of the northern Gulf Stream had decreased by about 30% since 1957. Coincidentally, scientists at Woods Hole had been measuring the freshening of the North Atlantic as Earth becomes warmer. Their findings suggested that precipitation increases in the high northern latitudes, and polar ice melts as a consequence. By flooding the northern seas with lots of extra fresh water, global warming could, in theory, divert the Gulf Stream waters that usually flow northward, past the British Isles and Norway, and cause them to instead circulate toward the equator. If this were to happen, Europe's climate would be seriously impacted.

New comic!

This comic was originally posted on Everyday Feminism. 

NOTE: I know this comic came out kind of weird and small and i’m sorry about that.

This comic was created in response for an ask for something that explores what happens when someone belongs to a marginalized group but doesn’t share the experience of that group in some way. We see this from time to time – a woman CEO speaking about how gender discrimination can’t exist because she’s ‘made it’, for example.

This comic explores how not all of us experience a marginalized identity in the same way, how there may be invisible factors in place that shield us from the discrimination that other members of our groups experience, and how the fact that we don’t feel something as keenly or passionately as other doesn’t mean that that isn’t a worthy issue for our attention and activism.

It’s a complicated topic. But ours is a community of multitudes. That’s what intersectional feminism and intersectional activism means, really.

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Man, the first few paragraphs of this Washington Post story about a mentally ill man who died in a jail while waiting for medical care are so devastating. (more…)

petitetimidgay:

stop asking

This is magnificent.

“The point is, the Muppets have always had bits of adult humor sprinkled in among the kid-friendly laughs. So when the Moms claim that The Muppets “is not what Jim Henson created or imagined,” they’re completely off-base. The Muppets co-creator Bill Prady actually worked with Henson on a number of Muppet projects before Henson’s death. Who would know better what Jim would’ve wanted: Prady, or these moms?”

- One Million Moms Are Completely Wrong About ‘The Muppets,’ And Here’s Why.

https://youtu.be/OaohPXGZG-s

Rahat and his buddy are very good at quickly switching places in the driver's seat. They put this unusual talent to good use by driving to fast food places and making the drive-up workers think they are hallucinating.

The Earth is round, and maps are flat. While we have may mapped nearly every inch of our world, figuring out how to translate that information from three dimensions to two remains a problem. (more…)

The Metadata+ app which tracks U.S. military drone strikes by was created by Josh Begley, research editor for The Intercept. Begley changed its name from Drones+ after it was rejected as "objectionable" by Apple five times. (more…)

I cheered the news that the Federal Trade Commission was suing Roca Labs, the sleazy "weight-loss" company that sold people industrial food thickeners as "non-surgical gastric bypasses" and made them sign contracts promising not to post about any negative experiences they after trying the scammy, high-priced "treatment." (more…)