Thursday, June 25, 2009

Like pee in the peanuts

Facts that cannot be supported sprout up everywhere. Sometimes they get debunked.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Well, duh...

The current meme around these parts is to say that 1 in 20 drinks in bars is spiked with something or other, leading Andy Parsons to opine that it's a great excuse for bunking off work the next day as statistically speaking one of your drinks must have been spiked.
But, like the pissy peanuts in a bar studies, no one knows where these numbers come from. They just seem to have shown up one day in the manner of a stray cat and now you have to feed it and acknowledge it as your own.
And then some one checks it out.
Drink spiking a myth: WA study : thewest.com.au
Drink spiking is largely a myth and far more likely to be an excuse young women use after they become heavily intoxicated, according to WA research.

A Perth study of suspected drink spiking victims found claims of being given sedatives or illicit drugs without consent are exaggerated and that alcohol is often the real culprit.
[snip]
On average, people in the study had a blood alcohol concentration of .096 and reported having consumed between 3.8 and 11.6 standard drinks. The researchers said they did not identify a single case where a sedative drug was likely to have been placed illegally in a drink in a pub or nightclub.


Another flowchart

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Torture Apologia Chart

Your complete guide to obfuscating weaseldom.
Hullabaloo


Sunday, June 21, 2009

The drug warriors strike again

Just go read this.
Too much panic on the dance floor if you ask me.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Google Maps Controversy

Google has been getting itself in occasional trouble a lot with Google Maps.
First there were the nude sunbathers that obsessives found in various back yards. At my lowest points, I've never had the kind of free time that would allow me to search every green space on the planet in search of low-res boobs.
Then came StreetView with its car-mounted cameras zooming around getting photos of men walking in and out of Soho sex shops or chundering up their last few pints outside the pub. With Google around it's coming to the point where you can't have a balcony wank any more without people looking in.
The latest controversy, or controversy as the English would pronounce it, has to do with Japan.
A while back Google allowed some historical maps to be layered over GoogleEarth, normally just a tool for discovering if your parked car is visible from orbit. The Japanese ones could be layered over Kyoto, Tokyo and Osaka.
For me it's a fun way of seeing how neighbourhoods have changed and developed, especially to see how green the fields were around my old flats 2 centuries before I moved into them.
But, and there's always a but, old maps were not politically correct. Sections of the old towns were marked off as Etamura, or "village of the filthy masses." In other words, they showed burakumin villages. The burakumin are the Japanese untouchables, and their descendants still face prejudice.
Showing where the old burakumin areas were is a god-send to companies because they can look at an employee's address and see that they might have accidentally hired a burakumin; if they have they can find a reason to fire him. Or they can screen potential hires for the same reasons.
Lovely.
For some reason this has caused a controversy.
Google Earth maps out discrimination against burakumin caste in Japan - Times Online

Old Japanese Maps On Google Earth Unveil Secrets





Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Just wow

Bogus, dude.

Now I understand...

Saturday, June 06, 2009

A use for the internet…

At last, the internet can give you the answer:

image

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Bizarre...

Several years ago during my university days, a lady I knew got married and seemed happy, at least in the short term. Then my girlfriend and I didn't see her for some amount of time. I ran into her waiting for an OCTranspo bus and we got to talking. In the few months she'd been married to her husband, they'd come to a crisis of some form or another. She got out of it by becoming a born-again christian. Born-agains were a fairly rare species in Canada in those days. We re-established contact and the four of us got together a couple of times, but she'd become so annoying that we couldn't spend any time around her. Her personality had disappeared, replaced by platitudes and doctrine.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. The Athiest Bus campaign had been going on here for a little while. Most people didn't seem to notice outside some mild interest in the media. In one of our local pubs I spotted a couple with a button from the campaign. We had a pleasant chat and the woman gave me her button, which I proudly display on my lumbar pack out and about town. I'm not fashionable.
But the point is that my stories tend not to really go anywhere.
Except that the athiest couple I would speak to again; born-again wives, like all doctrinaires, I could barely tolerate.
So this campaign launched by Answers in Genesis (no fucking link), that bunch of anti-education dweebs who, I'm assuming, could use Barbie jewellery as cockrings, have launched a reprehensible campaign stating, no implying involved, that atheism leads directly to murder.
New Humanist Blog: Creationist ad campaign suggests atheism leads to murder
Bizarre Christian Billboard Compares Atheism To Murder?
As always, P. Zed is there
If George Tiller doesn't matter to you, does god? : Pharyngula
Reverse it all and ask yourself: If only God matters to him, what do you?

Nice...

Good analysis of Darth Cheney and his inability to STFU and enjoy his Haliburton millions.
Foreign Policy In Focus | World Beat | Vol. 4, No. 21 | Nightmare on Cheney Street
Horror movies usually follow the same script. The monster — whether genetically modified, abused as a child, or flown in from Alpha Centauri — picks off the frightened teenagers one by one. After many thrills and chills, the hero drives a stake through the heart of the beast. Finally, just as we're finishing off the last of our popcorn in relief, the not-quite-dead monster makes one last attempt to dispatch the hero. It fails, but not before we've dumped popcorn all over our laps.

If Wes Craven decided to make a horror movie out of the last year of U.S. politics, he would definitely cast Dick Cheney as the monster that can't be silenced. The former vice president is Leatherface, Jason, and Freddie Krueger all rolled into one: lawless, methodical, and unpredictable with firearms.