So Google’s made me “upgrade” to some version 2 blog thing, right in the middle of a migration to WordPress (via Movable Type because of some conversion issues). I hope this doesn’t fuck things...

I found this old video online of “2001” guy Arthur C Clarke going on about fractals. It’s very early 90s retro, when I skimmed through it I kept seeing Altern-8 and early Prodigy videos…

Death by firing squad … came to be regarded as too bloody and uncontrolled … Hanging came to be regarded as still more inhumane. Under the best of circumstances, the cervical spine is broken...

Blame CanadaTrimSpa!

Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other country: 70,000 for a population of 11 million … Life expectancy in Cuba is the same as that of the United States, and its rate...

The fundamental organization of the reproductive part of the vertebrate urogenital tract is straightforward: it’s a tube with a funnel at one end that captures eggs released by the ovary, and conducts them to...

There is no straight path from the renunciation of meat to a politics of virtue. Nazi vegetarianism raises obvious problems in this regard … Hitler’s strict adherence to a vegetarian diet was largely medical:...

Most drugs are developed by Big Pharma–Brobdingnagian corporations with vast teams of scientists who have, to date, failed to cure the common cold. Airborne’s creator is “Knight-McDowell Labs”–Victoria Knight-McDowell is a schoolteacher and her...

The low-tax, high-income countries are mostly English-speaking ones that share a direct historical lineage with 19th-century Britain and its theories of economic laissez-faire … Budgetary outlays for social purposes average around 27 percent of...