Seth Godin has a striking little graph based on these stats and this image. Randall Munroe of XKCD fame did something similar.
With all of the hype and scares currently flying around the media about the Fukushima nuclear power plant, it is worth bearing in mind that humans are very bad at risk assessment.
Always look at the data before leaping to conclusions.
Via The Freethinker comes the news that Stephen “Birdshit” Green is demanding Tesco withdraw a Twilight advent calendar.
According to the one-man movement:
It’s sickening to see the message of Jesus Christ being hijacked to peddle a brand like Twilight, which to all intents and purposes proclaims an anti-religious cult. [...]Twilight may be fiction, but it is dangerous to mix-up such a story in the minds of impressionable children with that of the Nativity.
I do have some sympathy for Green here because, as everyone knows, Jesus is a zombie, not a vampire.
… comes from The One-Thousand
Dear Some People On The Internet,
You get upset at stupid things.
Many people die horrible and unjust deaths in this world. Many starve. Babies are beaten to death.
And you throw shitfits when someone offends you with their words.
Go read the rest.
Concerned about rowdiness and anti-social behaviour, Mayor Luigi Bobbio of the Italian seaside town of Castellammare di Stabia has gotten it into his head that the best course of action is to ban miniskirts.
There will also be a ban on sunbathing, playing football in public places, and blasphemy, if the proposals are approved at a council meeting on Monday.
The mayor is making use of powers handed down by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government and which have led to even more bizarre regulations elsewhere.
In other places they have banned sandcastles, kissing in cars, feeding stray cats, wooden clogs and the use of lawn mowers at weekends.
How long before they start banning music, dancing and other unIslamicChristian values?
Archaeologists have recently translated a copy of the Neolithic Mail, it makes for some interesting reading:
The case for proper checks on farming
By any standards, the farming of cattle represents a revolutionary departure from traditional food production.
It is also a scientific leap in the dark, whose implications for human and animal health have yet to be fully investigated.
How extraordinary and disturbing, therefore, that the practice is spreading in Britain without public debate and with only the lightest regulation.
Indeed, as the Food Standards Agency admitted yesterday, such few rules as exist are so feebly enforced that meat from a bull born in a farm has already been sold for human consumption.
Meanwhile, the FSA is investigating the Mail’s disclosure that milk from a farmed animal’s offspring has also gone on sale illegally.
But if these breaches are worrying, so too are the rules themselves.
Incredibly, no special checks are required on any animals apart from those directly produced by farming and their first-generation offspring.
This means that cattle descended from farms are allowed to enter the human food chain without monitoring, labelling or regulation of any kind.
Hunters, who have to have to think of the children, are not even obliged to notify the authorities of the whereabouts of farms’ descendants – meaning that their genes may be passed through the generations to herds across the country.
True, a five-year study in the U.S., where the agriculture industry barons are so powerful, found no ill effects on humans.
And yes, with their high yields of meat and milk, farmd cattle may make food production more efficient.
But we also note that farming can cause suffering to animals, with its links to miscarriages, organ defects, gigantism and premature deaths.
And how can society yet know the long-term effects of reduced genetic diversity on cattle’s immunity to disease?
It was only after a public outcry that rigorous checks were ordered on farmed vegetables.
With animal as well as human welfare at stake, the case for proper regulation and monitoring of farming is unanswerable.
Nothing ever changes
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