Who says sharks can't be fun? Jacob Langston knows they can. He works for the Orlando Sentinel and was shooting some footage but didn't notice this spinner shark until he heard another surfer say, "Dude! Did you see that?"
Writing in Media Psychology, Markus Appel discusses a study where 63 Austrian college students who read a short about someone stupid then did worse on a test than a control group - they became more stupid - but the effect did not occur when the readers had to outline how they differed from the stupid character. The stupid character was in "Slow on the Uptake," about a hooligan named Meier, and students either summarized the story or underlined passages where Meier differed from them. A control group of 18 read a story with a protagonist who didn't do something stupid like go to a football match, get drunk, get into a fight and miss the actual game he attended.
Had an argument with a kook who believed that vaccines were bad for them, animal research did not benefit humanity or that organic food was somehow different than any other food? You may have asked them if they believe the Earth is flat also.Well, some people do believe that also. Orlando Ferguson made the rounds in the late 19th century, reciting a 92-page lecture with his flat planet theory of geography - his last remaining map, painted with watercolor and which represents the Earth as a giant, rectangular slab with a dimpled upper surface was just donated to the Library of Congress.
From The Blogess, whose husband apparently has the patience of Job:This morning I had a fight with Victor about towels. I can’t tell you the details because it wasn’t interesting enough to document at the time, but it was basically me telling Victor I needed to buy new bath towels, and Victor insisting that I NOT buy towels because I “just bought new towels“. Then I pointed out that the last towels I’d bought were hot pink beach towels, and he was all “EXACTLY” and then I hit my head against the wall for an hour.
Addiction is a beast, I am told. Perhaps I am addicted to coffee - I have given it up on occasion for a few months, like I have meat, pastas and breads, but never quit like people quit smoking or heroin. If it's my only vice, and it would seem to be, that is likely not so bad.Pathology is something else. Some people say addiction is a disease, as in people who pathologically lie. What about pathological coffee drinking?
Writes Jeremy Yoder at Scientific American blogs:
When TIME recently ranked Darth Vader #3 on their "Top 10 Worst Fictional Fathers" (what we call link bait, since people love numbered lists and you have to scroll through each one and see an ad each time) they did so because he was the ultimate deadbeat dad. Not only was he never there for a single "Life Day" celebration (1), but when he does finally show up, he expects some kind of relationship and then cuts the kid's hand off.
If you have kids of a certain age, you know who Spongebob Squarepants is - if you watched the show with your kids, you probably wanted them to watch something else. Anything else. But scientists occasionally like to try and shake their own square image by getting zany and naming a new species in some clever way - and so we get a new mushroom discovered in Borneo named Spongiforma squarepantsii.Spongebob Squarepants is seemingly a sea sponge but the show did nothing for science awareness, since he looks like a kitchen sponge. S. squarepantsii is a mushroom yet they say its similarity to a sea sponge means the name makes sense.
Jose Antonio Vargas has a good story - he is an educated, literate man with a flair for writing. But he is also an illegal alien who, despite being 30 years old, could never figure out how to become a legal one.Is the process that hard? Well, no, the problem, as you will see if you look at his story objectively, is that his grandfather was trying to take shortcuts, buying him an illegal green card, falsifying data to get him a Social Security number, encouraging him to lie so as not to endanger the chances of other family members - none of that is due to American immigration policy, it is due to wanting to circumvent the process millions of others went through. In short, it is selfish.
The great thing about being a Nobel Laureate, an Academy Award winner and not in politics is that you can speak plainly without anyone cautioning you that criticizing your own is helping the opposition. Former Vice President Al Gore's own party is not helping much anyway and that 'you are with us against us' mentality hasn't paid him dividends; Gore engineered a global warming bill in 2009 that would put limits on CO2 but it died in the Democratic-controlled Senate, even though it would not have needed a single Republican to not only pass, but be impervious to veto.
