1. Homeopathy petition

Readers may recall Deepak Gupta in India who asked for help in producing a documentary debunking homeopathy, a practice that has quite a following in India. He said that he received a good bit of support thanks to that appeal and has been able to complete the project. It is in post-production and should be released soon. [Read more…]

I have written before about the phenomenon of ‘sockpuppetry’, where people adopt another identity and use that new identity to praise and otherwise provide support to their real selves. Basically, you create your own fan club and the internet allows people to do that somewhat anonymously. [Read more…]

The Steubenville rape case highlighted the disgusting phenomenon of men who seem to think that they can do anything to women who are unconscious due to having drunk too much, and of communities who seem to condone such behavior if the perpetrators of such rapes are prominent athletes. It seems as if people think that when a woman is unconscious, she has no rights or dignity. [Read more…]

Here is a silly but clever dance that depends upon optical illusions. I am always impressed by the people who think up such things. This looks like a group of middle school students somewhere in the world. The music sounds German.

Kevin Drum discusses the issue of Twitter addiction and the anxiety that some people have about trying to keep abreast of all the feeds and worrying about what they might be missing otherwise, and the withdrawal pains they suffer when for one reason or another they fail to keep up or try to quit. [Read more…]

I hate corporal punishment. I was fortunate to have parents who did not believe in it and have never used it on my own children. I did go to a private boys school in Sri Lanka that allowed its principal and vice-principal to cane students and there were some teachers who also hit students with rulers or slapped them even though they were not authorized to do so. [Read more…]

You may recall that I posted a video of Ravi Fernando solving a Rubik’s cube while juggling it along with two balls. [Read more…]

Some time ago I wrote about the tragic situation in which a school nurse would not let a student use his asthma inhaler, even though he had collapsed in front of her, because the school did not have a medical release form on file. I later discussed a study about how these kinds of situations arise when people see their roles as primarily that of rule enforcers, fearful of repercussions if they use their judgment to defy the rules. [Read more…]

As I have mentioned before, I am not a very sociable person. It is not that I am anti-social, shunning all human contact. It is that I am better described as asocial, someone who can interact with others on occasion and when necessary, but am perfectly comfortable being alone with my books, my thoughts, and of course the internet, where you can interact with the world without interacting with actual people. [Read more…]