Thoughts on Father’s Day

Today is Father’s Day.

In our family, I resolutely discourage celebration of Father’s Day, seeing it as a purely marketing gimmick to get people to buy useless stuff. I have said this so strongly that my children know not to give me a gift or even send a card and that it is perfectly fine by me if they forget it altogether and not even wish me on the phone, since I too usually forget it until I read the newspaper comics for that day, since some cartoonists use it as a theme, often in sappy ways. [Read more…]

Is the paleo diet good for you?

I am surprised at the fascination that Americans have with food and the number of my friends and acquaintances who avidly watch cooking shows. Food is one of the great pleasures in life and I like it as much as the next person but watching it get made carries with it as much interest as watching a carpenter make a cabinet. Once you have admired the skill of the expert, interest wanes, at least for me. I would never have guessed that one day there would be entire TV channels devoted to just food. [Read more…]

Courting the white vote

Jon Stewart and Larry Wilmore of The Daily Show have one of their always worth watching discussions on race issues, funny on the surface but also making serious points.

(This clip appeared on June 11, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)

A variation on the Nigerian 419 scam

Remember the infamous Nigerian 419 scam? I wrote three years ago about how annoying it was to get these bogus offers practically every other day and expressed surprise that anyone would still fall for it now that it was well known. Thankfully I seem to have been dropped from the mailing lists and have not received any such offers for well over a year now, but it turns out that a variation of the scam using cashier’s checks has been used to defraud even fancy law firms for hundreds of thousands of dollars. [Read more…]

Double standards for irrational beliefs

Via Jerry Coyne, I came across an excellent 2006 essay titled My God Problem by science journalist Natalie Angier in which she tackles something that also bothers me, which is the way that so many scientists seem to be so concerned about surveys that show low levels of acceptance of the theory of evolution while ignoring, let alone trying to counter, evidence of much worse anti-scientific thinking. [Read more…]