The town of Parma, MO that I wrote about yesterday that had a population of just 740 and yet six police officers is not the only small Missouri with such a weird ratio. Beverly Hills, MO (not to be confused with its better known California counterpart) has easily bettered that, having 13 police officers for its population of just 600, or one officer for every city block.
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Next to heart disease, cancers are the leading cause of death in the US. But Richard Stevens writes that unlike with most other cancers where the major causes are known, identifying what primarily causes breast cancer remains stubbornly elusive.
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Some commenters have had problems logging in to their accounts ever since Google shut down the Open ID accounts. The people behind the scenes at FtB are aware of the problem and working on a fix, such as trying to convert the Open ID accounts to regular FtB accounts
Sorry about that.
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The selling of bottle water in the developed world has to be the biggest con job ever pulled on the public. Getting people to shell out an exorbitant amount of money for something that flows freely out of faucets has to be the most successful heist ever pulled by the advertising industry, persuading the gullible that a freely available commodity becomes a symbol of status if you pay for it.
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For no reason whatsoever, here is one of my favorite songs, Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress by The Hollies, released in 1972. The song had a great beat and music but the lyrics were hard to decipher by just listening to them, and reading them later did not help because they seem to make little sense.
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The Journal of the American Medical Association has published a major study today that once more shows that there is no link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism. You can read the paper here. As this news report on the study concludes:
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Missouri has been a lot in the news recently and not in a good way. In addition to the terrible situation in Ferguson, now comes another story from the small town of Parma where for the first time a black person was elected to the office of mayor. Tyrus Byrd, who was born and raised in the town and has also served as city clerk in the past, was elected mayor displacing the incumbent who had held office for 37 years.
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Thanks to reader Norm, I received a copy of the above book and it is incredible. It is a compilation of all the people in the world who are known to be atheists or skeptics of some sort, along with biographical sketches as to their beliefs. The book is by Warren Allen Smith and it is clearly a massive labor of love, clocking in at 1,237 large 8½ x 11 inch pages in two column format, on good quality paper with clear font and not a single typo, at least in the entries that I have read.
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What has emerged about the state of policing in the town of Ferguson, MO in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown has been ugly, revealing a city in which the police and legal system has been treating the residents, especially poor people and people of color, appallingly. Now a class action lawsuit has been filed in the US District Court in the Eastern District of Missouri by people who charge that they have been abused by the city, and the descriptions by the individuals in the suit make for appalling reading.
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In his latest investigative report on the show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver takes a look at the mess that the US patent system has become and why it needs to be reformed. His report just looks at the way that patent trolls use the legal system for what is in effect a shakedown.
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