Hasan Minhaj looks at why there seems to be so much contradictory reporting on this question and says that one problem is the pressure to publish papers that result in some researchers finding ways to hype results that are not firmly grounded in the evidence.
I myself drink just one cup of coffee and one cup of tea a day, or two cups of coffee if no good tea is available.
(Thanks to Jeff Hess.)
(Via)
This story describes a couple of grandmothers in Russia who took the law into their own hands and vandalized a children’s playground.
Two women in Russia’s Leningrad region have been filmed destroying a children’s seesaw after complaining about the noise.
Brandishing a saw, the two women took turns cutting the playground equipment into pieces.
…On social media, critics condemned the behaviour of the two women.
These “vandal grannies will now need to either set up a new seesaw at their own expense or fix this one,” one social media user declared.
“They should have brought some oil to stop the seesaw from screeching,” another commented. “But they took a saw and now they are all over the news like some vandals.”
It reminded me of this Monty Python sketch
John Oliver looks at how the Trump administration is trying to limit the services provided by this very important agency because the private sector cannot compete with it. It is doing so by trying to appoint the head of a private weather company AccuWeather to head the NWS. So much for the claims that the private sector can do things much better than the government can. This comes after the earlier failure in 2005 of another attempt to prohibit the NWS from giving its information away for free.
Pearls Before Swine produces another one.
Ricky Gervais is an atheist, stand up comedian, and actor. He made a pretty funny film with an interesting premise called The Invention of Lying that I reviewed favorably back in 2010. More recently, though, he has joined with those comedians who are ticked off with audiences who do not find humor aimed at marginalized groups to be funny. They claim that they are being silenced for their edgy humor by those who can’t take a joke.
[Read more…]
Yesterday there was a town hall style forum with nine Democratic presidential candidates talking about LGBT issues, similar in format to the earlier town hall on climate change where each candidate came on serially for an allotted time. During it, Elizabeth Warren showed that she is becoming increasingly comfortable thinking on her feet and dealing with difficult questions.
Here she is responding to one such question.
The climate activist group Extinction Rebellion has organized protests that shut down central London and elsewhere to highlight the need for urgent action on climate change. Jonathan Pie takes aim at those (including newspapers like the Guardian) that snicker at the supposed hypocrisy of the people involved in the protests and moan about the disruptions caused, while ignoring the biggest issue, that those who have known about the climate change crisis for a long time and could have done something about the problem, refused to do anything. (Language advisory)
After the election of Donald Trump as president, the bar for this position has become so low that pretty much any sentient being that has shown any signs of intelligence (and I include apes, dolphins, and crows in that category) would be better. So it is irritating to see any Trump supporter asking questions of the Democratic candidates as to whether they are qualified for the job, whether they have the requisite experience, skills, etc.
I am not saying that the public should not value expertise and wisdom and experience. I am only saying that Trump supporters have forfeited the right to raise such questions. I think cartoonist Jen Sorensen agrees with me.
