A great post from Making Light about why we immunize.
UPDATED 2009-02-24 to add: Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy links to what he calls "the be-all and end-all of posts about the antivaxxers". It's a great post, and would be so even if all it did was summarize all the bad science and bad journalism that went into the making of Andrew Wakefield into the famous fraud he is.
This is just going to be stuck in my head for weeks.
(via boingboing.)
A (now-Baroness) doctor in the UK created a hoax condition "cello scrotum" back in the 1970s, and had to come clean when people started actually citing it.
Obama's going to fix everything, right? I can stop paying attention, right?
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has compiled a list of 8 years worth of Bush-related Onion articles.
It's a stunning feat, superseded only by the actual writing of all those articles. (And, perhaps, by the supreme clusterfuck that is the Bush Administration itself.)
(Other than being annoyed at the Senate and/or Rod Blagojevich, that is.)
Physics-based online games!
First up: Orbit.
Next: Assembler.
Last: Assembler 2 (much harder than original Assembler).
WARNING: these are serious timesinks!
It's that time of year again -- time for Don't Shoot Your Eye Out! Actually, www.dontshootyoureyeout.com isn't up yet, so I wonder if it's not quite that time of year yet according to Office Max (who sponsors the game).
Mmmm...timewasters....
John Scalzi lists some stuff he wants, including an update to Descent. Descent was one of the few video games I lost time to for a long time. It's one of the few things that would get me to buy a game console.
Mmmm...six-degree-of-freedom controls....
A wonderful series of photos of our next president at the Boston Globe. (My favorite is #27.)
(Via BoingBoing.)
Holy shit. I woke up this morning and Obama was still President-elect. It actually seems real now.
Yes, we did!
I'm looking forward to another long, national nightmare of peace and prosperity.
I feel like I can breathe again.
Now, to go sleep the sleep of the just — or at least the sleep of the victorious.
Because he narrated this No-on-Prop-8 ad.
Please consider donating to No On Prop 8.
And I sure wish that Obama would point out loudly that his parents would have been legally prohibited from marrying in a lot of states in 1961, and thus Prop 8 should go down in flames.
PZ Myers has figured out that the homophobic fundamentalist Right Wing is really writing slash SF.
I expect that the XKCD vs. The New Yorker cartoon-off will be all over the place by tomorrow (if it isn't already), but I figured I'd link to it anyway.
(Via Neil Gaiman.)
ME: "We can't do what you're asking with the current technology. In order to do what you're asking for, we'd have to invest a large amount of time. Please explain why you need it in order to justify the amount of work that would be involved."
PHB: "Here is my .02 on what we need to get working to release our project on schedule. I'd like to propose that we make this work now so that testing may be completed."
(That's a direct quote from the PHB, by the way.)
What kind of polling outfit has a phone poll that asks you to rate something (like your likelihood of voting) on a scale between 1 and 10, and then fails to tell you how to specify 10 on a touch-tone keypad? ("1" then "0" didn't seem to do it.)
It seems a lot easier to do 1 to 9 or 1 to 5.
Feh.
