Due to various reasons, I became a member of various social networking groups such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, even though I do absolutely nothing with any of them unless I am forced to. I joined the last one because I was invited to a few of its so-called hangouts to discuss some issues. Of course, all these groups keep sending me messages about what other people are doing and people whom they think I would like to connect to. I completely ignore these messages and often delete them without reading. [Read more…]

Via Mark Frauenfelder, here is civil rights and criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate explaining why you should never talk to the FBI without a lawyer present AND a tape recorder running.

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Although everything I know about it is based on information that I read in the media and have no special insight, I feel obliged to comment on the latest bizarre case that has emerged in Cleveland, since I live here.

Three unrelated women separately disappeared in 2002, 2003, and 2004 when they were aged 19, 16, and 14 respectively. (You can read profiles of the three women here.) There were intense searches for the two younger women, less so for the oldest who some thought had run away on her own. When the searches failed, hope that they were alive also faded. [Read more…]

Sometimes people like me focus too much on what is wrong with the world. It is done with the best of intentions of trying to improve things but it can leave one depressed, with the sense that everyone and everything is in bad shape. I needed something to cheer me up and I found it. [Read more…]

Recently there emerged the weird story of 43-year old Brenda Heist, a Pennsylvania woman who one day in 2002 dropped off her two children in school and then disappeared. Her husband was initially suspected of her murder and lost his job as a result and was shunned by the community. But eventually he was not charged with anything and he and his children went on with their lives. Heist was later declared legally dead (in Pennsylvania it takes a minimum of seven years) and her husband remarried. [Read more…]

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…]