Nothing makes a video go viral like having a famous person ridiculing the Internet and viral videos and memes.  Jennifer Aniston is a pretty good sport during the whole thing - I would start giggling every time they asked me to even say "Smart Water" - sorry, "nutrient enhanced vapor distilled water" - because, you know, it's really dumb.   And their calling it Jen Aniston's sex tape will make you laugh too.

It's not going to be a big secret to any of you over the age of 25 that court cases are often not about right versus wrong but about convincing a jury.    And if you want to convince a jury, it helps to make sure you have the right one so choosing members is an art.

NPR, which claims to be for all people, pretty much hates Republicans.  We all know this but they give a wink-wink pretense to being objective.   No one is really fooled and in the modern age of 'gotcha' gonzo journalism, where video footage is available immediately without any need for big media companies to post it, it can occasionally become really obvious.

In the debate over whether or not Medicare should be available to everyone, like it is to really poor people, soldiers, old people and members of Congress, one thing gets lost in the cost discussion;  things are so expensive because lawyers love to sue.By vilifying doctors and hospitals and insurance companies, as populist efforts to jam through healthcare reform have done, advocates are reaffirming the notion that it's okay to sue over everything because the medical community are all just greedy corporations we are being told to hate.

Is everything built from information?   It's a recurring topic in science and philosophy.   John Horgan in Scientific American says it isn't but John Wilkins says he is wrong, even though he agrees it isn't.   Wilkins touches on hylomorphism and the longstanding logos mentality of the western world.   Horgan delves into John Wheeler's "it from bit" idea that all physics can be re-molded into a framework of information theory.

Self-loathing Americans occasionally get concerned about evolution acceptance in America - like with Republicans who accept climate change but not global warming, the issue is more one of nuance and some don't like any nuance at all.    Leaving the possibility open that some divine entity may have created the spark of life and man evolved from there gets people lumped in as 'creationists' with the kookier 'young earth creationism' minority by angry atheists, so people shut down when a hot button question like evolution is asked - they are looking for the linguistic catch.

Want to cloud a health and privacy issue?   Label it "male genital mutilation" and wage an expensive marketing campaign to get it outlawed.   If you have no taste for irony, do not consider the fact that San Francisco, which practically has "women have the right to choose" in the city charter, would look odd telling women that the right to choose only applies to making babies dead and not giving them a circumcision.  

I understand we are not the mass market but is there any piece of technology you're going to get educated on by walking into a brick and mortar retail store?   If you look on the Internet to get questions answered first, like which you might prefer in a television, DLP or LED or Plasma, you probably also looked at prices.   And that is why Best Buy is in a tough position even though its top competitor, Circuit City, went out of business.  There's no market niche they hold, no technology cutting-edge enough it requires expertise (3-D television is a non-starter and HD-DVD is long dead) which means Best Buy has terrific people (I was there on Saturday - they really are terrific, even if I don't need them) and a cost that corresponds to that.

Science 2.0 fave Andrea Kuszewski has a piece in Scientific American on ways to (yes, not just hype on infomercials) increase your brain power.

During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when some parts of America applauded heavy-handed government actions like banning cars (except for important people) to curb pollution, Chinese communist officials made some concessions in other ways - namely allowing journalists (from other countries, that is) to operate with some freedom.