I have written before about the Nigerian 419 scams (see here, here, and here). These are the ones that, in the most common variant, ask you to help in the recovery of a large sum of money that has been hidden or no one is claiming and for your help you get a pretty significant cut. [Read more…]
Brian Keith Dalton, whom most of us know Mr. Deity, takes on an issue that is close to my heart, and that is the proper etiquette for driving in the passing lane. I totally agree with him. It is so infuriating, especially when driving on a highway with just two lanes of traffic, to find the left lane occupied by a car that is cruising along in it with clearly no intention of moving to the right lane. [Read more…]
The internet age has spawned huge numbers of incidents where people have sent emails that have inadvertently offended the recipient because the sender was not sensitive enough to the absence in written messages of the important cues that accompany the spoken word, where facial expressions and tone of voice and inflexions can provide helpful clues to the speaker’s benign intent. [Read more…]
John McWhorter is a linguist who wrote an excellent book The Power of Babel on the evolution of language that I discussed about five years ago. He writes good essays on rhetorical styles and has analyzed the differences between the Clinton and Obama speeches at the Democratic convention. [Read more…]
Many of us have argued that people Like George W. Bush and Tony Blair should be tried for war crimes. There was even a British TV film called The Trial of Tony Blair that had this as the plot. I saw that film and it was good but it was clearly fantasy. Since war crimes prosecutions are only for those whom the US government views as undesirable, it was unthinkable that this would ever occur. [Read more…]
You may recall TV evangelist Kenneth Copeland when he was featured in the Australian satire show The Chasers War on Everything. [Read more…]
The Mitt Romney campaign must surely be concerned about the lack of support for it in the black community, with some surveys putting it at an astounding zero percent. In response, they have set up a Black Leadership Council, no doubt to bring more African-Americans into the fold. [Read more…]
Thanks to physicsphdstu in a comment to the earlier post on mixing and unmixing in fluids, this video explains in further detail, using a variety of experiments, what is going on. The experiments are conducted by G. I. Taylor, a pioneer in this area of research. [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald reports on what happened to a CNN investigative report that it had commissioned on the Arab spring in Bahrain in 2011. On arrival there, the CNN news team was shocked at the harsh treatment being meted out to everyone including them and they turned in a story that was highly critical of the Bahraini government. [Read more…]