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Have a Poor Diet, Blame the Kids

I knew the children were up to something -- with their beady little eyes: Adults who live with children eat more fat, and more saturated fat, than those who do not, according to a new study. The report, published online last week in The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, was based on data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Survey, a six-year nationwide study of more than 33,000 people carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to background information in the article, the correlation between adults' and children's diets has usually been…

Most Important Headline: Behavior Change

Each of the major papers has to choose one story to have the most prominent headline.  Today, USA Today chose this one: href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-17-gas-prices_N.htm"> href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-17-gas-prices_N.htm">Drivers cut back — a 1st in 26 years By Paul Overberg and Larry Copeland, USA TODAY The average American motorist is driving substantially fewer miles for the first time in 26 years because of high gas prices and demographic shifts, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal highway data... The growth in miles…

Eager For Better E-Book Deals

I'm eager to start reading more e-books. I rarely re-read books (except for work), and my friends rarely borrow paper ones from me, so I have little reason to hang on to paper books. E-books would be just the thing. But the prices aren't any good. I either have to pay more for an e-book than what it costs me to order a paperback from England, or I can get it for free through illegal file sharing. It's amazingly easy: just try googling a book's title, your preferred file format and the name of a file sharing service like Hotfile or Megaupload. I am well aware that I wouldn't be supporting the…

More on that really bad experiment by Blizzard

Blizzard, makers of the games Starcraft and World of Warcraft, is about to change their forum policies and require the display of real names, basically creating a massive privacy leak if you buy a silly game and go online to get some tech support. There's an excellent summary of why this was a really bad idea here, and apparently Blizzard has an inkling of possible problems — they're waffling about whether to publish employee names under their new terms. If it's not a problem for users, why should employees get an exemption? Also, I've been sent a few links to sites where people are…

Rebecca Black and The Teenage Celebrity Industrial Complex

Fourteen year old internet sensation Rebecca Black just released a follow up video "My Moment" after her debut of "Friday" that went viral with more than 167 million views. Attention at this scale landed her a spot on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and a music video with Katy Perry, "Last Friday Night". Such opportunities for seemingly instant fame can affect these teens, and pre-teens, in a profound way: IRL (In Real Life)... Rebecca Black has had to endure the backlash of cyberbullying after her first video. And Black, 13, certainly never anticipated the social media uproar, mainstream…

Links for 2012-06-19

In which we look at an impassioned plea from a gay seminarian, a satirical video about the Singularity, and two more dispatches from the imminent death of traditional publishing. ------------ Letter from a gay Christian classmate « Mercy not Sacrifice I am asking you to set aside your quiet whispers for a potent disquietude; I’m asking you to turn over a few tables in the temple; I’m asking you to upbraid the violent language of your church; I’m asking you to openly speak truth to power, as one you said you would; I’m asking you to do risk crucifixion within your order; I’m asking for your…

The accidental deity

Once again those feisty young fellows at Frink Tank have caused my withered ovaries to twitch with faint lust. As a Simpsonophiliac, casual (and sometimes cynical) Dawkins observer, and admirer of All Things Irreverent, I was sent over the edge by this blog gobbet from Not Shitashi. Crazy Cat Lady. Ha! I will never think of Dawkins as Darwin's Rottweiler again. That cephalopodean dude wrote a review of The God Delusion which appears in the November '06 print edition of Seed Magazine. We coddled Science Bloggers get freebie print mags but you readers will have to rush to your…

Friday Grey Matters: African Grey Numbers Declining, EU to Blame

The wild bird trade, which is where exotic birds are trapped in their natural habitats and shipped away for pets, has devastated many types of parrot species. Thankfully this practice is now illegal in much of the world, however many parrot species have the unfortunate luck as to live in countries where these laws are enforced somewhat less that stringently. Up until now, African Greys have been spared this fate. However, recent data on their populations in the 23 countries in which they reside show their numbers rapidly on the decline. In fact, they may soon be added to the official 'red…

Might Be Bad...

I knew the economic news was bad, but I did not know how bad, until I saw href="http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8079134">this article in The Economist, thanks to a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/the_economist_g.html">link from Brad DeLong. EVERYONE knows that America's economy is slowing. Thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble, overall GDP growth has fallen back sharply. The biggest short-term uncertainty for the world economy is whether American consumers stop spending and drag the country into recession. But beyond the business…

Flying Blind

From a Fox News online report: LOS ANGELES -- Jimmy Kimmel is going bicoastal as a TV talk show host. The host of ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" will fill in for a vacationing Regis Philbin on "Live with Regis and Kelly" in New York while still hosting his namesake show from Los Angeles. During the week of Oct. 22, Kimmel will fly back and forth across the country daily, co-hosting with Kelly Ripa in New York each morning and taping his own show in Los Angeles each night. That's two cross-country flights a day for five days. "I am a little bit insane," Kimmel told The Associated Press. "It will…

The future of bookstores is the...

...present of public and academic libraries? What got me thinking along these lines most recently was the recent Clay Shirky blog post, Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization. It's a pretty good post that puts a particular kind of physical retail into the context of current online retail and media shift realities. In the first section of the post, Shirky basically outlines the trouble that physical bookstores are in, caught between the rock of the competition of online/big box store and the hard place of the coming media singularity. Like record stores and video rental places,…

September Pieces Of My Mind #3

Ben Aaronovitch = Benjamin Aaronson wrote The Rivers of London. I wonder if it's a pen name for my grandpa's grandpa Aaron Benjaminson, who was a farmer in Tanum. Two students are trying to play verbal chess while digging. The board is in their heads. "Well, I'm not the world's most physical guy / But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine / Oh my Lola" /Ray Davies Sudden thought: Christianity is a 2000-year extension of a state of spiritual emergency that Jesus thought would last a year or two. Sweden has recently reformed its coinage. Convenient for me and the students: when…

Pundits Aren't Experts (Usually)

Matt Bai doesn't get that. In the NY Times Magazine, Bai writes (italics mine): The emergence of the Internet age has been accompanied, in general, by a steady devaluing of expertise. A generation ago, you went to the doctor to find out about the pain in your knee; now you go to WebMD, diagnose it yourself and tell him what medicines you want. People used to trust stockbrokers and insurance agents; now they buy and sell at E*Trade and compare policies online. American voters who once looked to newspaper columnists for guidance on politics now blog their own idle punditry. Suddenly,…

Royal Society Science Prize for Books returns

Very pleased to discover that after much uncertainty, the Royal Society Science Prize for Books has returned after securing a sponsor. They're currently seeking submissions for this year's award: Entries for the 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, the world's leading science books prize, are being accepted from today 16 February 2011. The 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books will celebrate the best of 2010's new popular science writing for a general adult readership. The Prize is open to science books written for a non-specialist audience. The winner will receive…

Extra, Extra

Links, links, and more links. Lots of good stuff this week. Science Brains and Beauty: a three-movement concerto was written inspired by a poem written by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and set to images culled from the research of Hanna Damasio. How does beer become whiskey? At the Guardian Science blog, Andy Connelly describes this delicious transformation. Fascinating musings on comparative medicine from our friends over at the Dog Zombie. What is a wallaby? Blog bff Scicurious writes about PCR - a technique that shouldn't work, but does. In the NY Times, Carl Zimmer has probably the…

Change.gov, Boyle's Public Domain

Hope all the Americans had a good holiday, and that the rest of the world finds peace in a troubled week. To my friends in India and Pakistan, to my colleagues at the Internet Governance Forum this week in Hyderabad...my thoughts are with you all. Two quick links of much importance in my world: 1. Obama's transition site is under CC-BY. Via Lessig's blog: Consistent with the values of any "open government," and with his strong leadership on "free debates" from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license. Wow. Obama's team,…

Beer

Daniel Davies stakes out a controversial position at Crooked Timber: I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber's online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century[1]. I'm a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes,…

Blue Brain

My article on the Blue Brain project is now online*: It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that…

An award and some announcements

We won an award Some of you may know that I write for another blog - Cancer Research UK's Science Update blog - as part of my day job. There, I write about new cancer research together with my colleagues Kat and Henry. Tonight, we won a Science Communication award from the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC) for our work on the blog, in the category of Online Research. Blogging for an organisation is a very different ball-game to this - you have to still be readable and engaging while exercising a certain amount of restraint in order to maintain the charity's reputation and…

Grape seed extract active against human colon cancer xenografts in mice

The real news in this story is how the lead researcher responsibly tempers the interpretation of his 15 October report in Clinical Cancer Research. From United Press International: Grape seeds may help attack colon tumors DENVER, Oct. 18 (UPI) -- Chemicals found in grape seeds have been found to inhibit growth of colorectal tumors in both cell cultures and in mice, say Colorado researchers. "With these results, we are not suggesting that people run out and buy and use grape seed extract. That could be dangerous since so little is known about doses and side effects," said Rajesh Agarwal of the…

Luxury Goods

Saks and Barneys and the rest of those luxury retailers have discovered that nothing destroys a luxury brand like a sale: All around Saks Fifth Avenue, merchandise is sold out. The $2,520 Marni shearling vest? Gone. The $5,295 Brioni leather bomber jacket? Only one left. The $1,995 over-the-knee Christian Louboutin boots? The $1,995 over-the-knee Christian Louboutin boots at Saks have sold out, unless you can wear the only pair left -- a size 11. "All gone, except for this," said Nick Passerelli, a Saks employee, dangling a size 11 boot from his fingers. After a brutal year in which the…

My Kid's an Anglophone Spaceman

My kid's spacy English writing assignment makes me so proud! He's nine, he's only been once for a few days to an Anglophone country, and we rarely speak English at home. Yet he seems to have picked the language up from on-line gaming, and he's long been able to read e.g. the Harry Potter books in English. With his permission, here are his ideas about space colonies. I think that in the future those who want to will be able to move onto another planet, or into a space station. People will breathe using space suits, and at home they will have air inside their houses. They will get food by…

ID in 2007 - from the horses mouth

In the shadow of The Year in ID, Dembski gives us his predictions for ID in 2007. Three simple things: A new ID friendly research center at a major university. (This is not merely an idle wish -- stay tuned.) [Prediction by me: This will be at Baylor and no biology will be involved.] The publication of Michael Behe's book with Free Press: THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION. [Prediction by me: No new science here, shoddy peer review, and Behe will ignore previous criticisms.] The publication of the sequel to OF PANDAS AND PEOPLE, authored by Jonathan Wells and me and titled THE DESIGN OF LIFE:…

A bibliography that's Too Big to Know

David Weinberger of Everything Is Miscellaneous">Everything is Miscellaneous (review) fame is working on a new book. It's going to be called Too Big to Know and over the last year or two he's blogged quite a bit of the thought processes that have gone into the writing of the book. Here's a brief sort-of description of what the book's going to be about from way back in December 2009: The opening looks at the history of information overload, going back to the book Future Shock, and pointing to the coining of "sensory overload" in 1950. I look at how pathetically small was the amount of info…

The Best Science Writing Online 2012

I've been practicing little idiosyncratic rituals on this corner of the web for years: learn something new, obsessively research, get lost in the idea, scribble, converse endlessly, then write. This blog, Universe, has never been about garnering hits or materializing an audience because, for me, thinking and writing about science is a personal tic. I can't help but yell into the void; I understand science as a poetic language for explaining reality, and when I see changes in that language all I want to do is unfasten myself into them. I definitely don't seek any form of recognition for what…

Chronicle on askjohnlott.org

Scott Carlson at The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story (subscription required) about askjohnlott. He quotes Lott: "Someone called me up a couple of weeks ago, very angry, claiming that they got an e-mail from me, telling them that I was advising them to do illegal things," like buy guns illegally, he says. "I just thought the person was joking. After I was done talking to them, I found this crazy Web site." This doesn't make sense. If the person believed that the email was from Lott, the natural thing would be to reply to it, not phone Lott.…

Online Life Is Real Life, Aleph-Nought in a Series

Back before The Pip was born, our previous departmental administrative assistant used to bug me-- in a friendly way-- about how Kate and I ought to have another kid. (She had two kids of her own, about two years apart in age.) "When are you guys going to have another baby?" she would ask, and I always said "We're thinking about it." About a week passed between the last time we had that exchange and the day I came in and taped ultrasound photos of the prenatal Little Dude to my door. "You sonofabitch!," she said (again, in a friendly way), "You were expecting this whole time!" "Yeah," I said…

Berenstain Bears co-creator, Stan Berenstain, dies

Link to CNN story. Stan Berenstain, who with his wife created the popular children's books about the Berenstain Bears, has died. In more than 200 books, the Berenstain Bears, written and illustrated by Stan and Jan Berenstain, helped children for 40 years cope with trips to the dentist, eating junk food and cleaning their messy rooms. The first Berenstain Bears book, "The Great Honey Hunt," was published in 1962. The couple developed the series with children's author Theodor Geisel -- better known as Dr. Seuss, then head of children's publishing at Random House -- with the goal of teaching…

Alternaworld Redux or World of Warcraft Ate My Wookie

I talked before about how I think the Internet represents the possibility for Alternaworlds -- worlds facilitated by social interaction on the Internet with their own rules and standards. Well, this World of Warcraft business may be rapidly careening out of control, but it is beginning to fulfill most of the criterion for what I would call an alternaworld. MSNBC gives this rather late-to-the-party or Dad-has-just-discovered-how-the-mouse-works description: In the physical world we vainly scrounge for glory. Bin Laden still taunts us, the bus doors close before we reach them and leave us…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - It is Live!

Yes, the day has finally arrived! The anthology is now up for sale! Just go ahead right now and click on this link right here, then click on the "Add To Cart" button and one copy (or more!) of this amazing book will be yours! SciCurious did a fantastic job as this year's editor - and it shows. You'll see when you get your copy. Really. Also, huge props to Blake and his LaTeX and generally tech-savviness for putting the book together so it looks really good (and is actually loaded on the site!). Cover art was done by Glendon Mellow who used the cover design by Dave Ng. The list of judges is so…

The Future of Terrorism

The July issue of Discover Magazine has an excellent article on The Future of Terrorism. You should readthe whole thing, online or in hardcopy. Here are some choice quotes by people interviewed for the article: "The war on terrorism is really a proxy for saying what is really a war on militant Islam. If we can't confront the ideology, if you're not willing to take on the ideology and try to develop a reformist, moderate Islam that makes militant Islam a fringe element, we haven't much hope to stamp it out." Andrew C. McCarthy, former federal prosecutor who led the case against Sheik Omar…

The Open Laboratory 2008 is here!

I know you have all been trembling in anticipation! But the day has finally arrived - the third science blogging anthology, The Open Lab 2008, is now up for sale! This year's guest editor, Jennifer Rohn, did a fantastic job of putting together the best anthology ever! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Jennifer is a pro, so she assembled a team: Richard Grant was the assistant editor (yes, the posts were really, professionally edited this year, and thus much improved in the process). Maria Brumm did the technical part, the typesetting, starting out with the template designed last year by…

Stupid legislature tricks: Tennessee

There's a lot of stupidity in state legislatures, and the responsibility for that stupidity rests squarely with the people who voted for these morons. Take Tennessee. Please. Combating music piracy at Tennessee's public university system is more important than hiring teachers and keeping down tuition costs. Just-signed legislation requires the 222,000-student system to spend an estimated $9.5 million for file sharing "monitoring software," "monitoring hardware" and an additional "recurring cost of $1,575,000 for 21 staff positions and benefits (@75,000 each) to monitor network traffic" of its…

"Do you honestly believe God would allow humans to destroy the earth He created?"

Chis Allen is a weatherman for WKBO in Kentucky. He is also an idiot. Witness: My biggest argument against putting the primary blame on humans for climate change is that it completely takes God out of the picture. It must have slipped these people's minds that God created the heavens and the earth and has control over what's going on. (Dear Lord Jesus...did I just open a new pandora's box?) Yeah, I said it. Do you honestly believe God would allow humans to destroy the earth He created? Of course, if you don't believe in God and creationism then I can see why you would easily buy into the…

scio10: Online Civility and its (Muppethugging) Discontents

Dr Free-ride, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and Isis the Scientist SK â definition of civility at your site â if you want children to feel welcome, for example. You have to set the tone. Some topics seem more important to be civil about. F-r -  politeness or is it being a decent human â in philosophical circles someone may rip your heart out and jump on it in perfectly polite language â so itâs not just being polite. Itâs more like taking each other seriously, assuming good faith, considering others feelings. Hard to engage when you donât feel welcome.* Hard to engage when you donât feel welcome â…

Not the Eye of Argon!

No, it can't possibly be true! Jim Theis's masterwork, The Eye of Argon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has actually been published? As a book? With pages and a cover and all of that? I've known of this legendary monstrosity for years, and have read it online and as a tattered and stapled faded photocopy, but to actually have a publisher commit resources and money to it … truly, we are in the End Times. You too can read it, but don't buy it: get it for free, and even then you are paying too much for it. This is what you get when you give a teenager a thesaurus, insist that every noun must have an…

Playing with the Truth

I recently landed a gig writing how-to articles aimed at college students for a website that shall remain nameless. The site is predicated on the notion that recent grads are hapless fools, incapable of grappling with real world responsibilities, like renting an apartment or choosing an appropriate 401K plan. As it happens, I really was this clueless at the age of 21. What a brilliant idea, I thought! Sign me up. The first article I was assigned was called something along the lines of "Online Dating: It's not just for losers anymore." Beyond sending the message that cyber-hookups had gone…

A paucity of inconvenient proof

Laurie David claims that National Science Teachers' Association (the NSTA) is inconveniently hooked up with big oil because they won't spend the money to send out 50,000 copies of the "An Inconvenient Truth" DVD. If I do the math and estimate that it costs $4 to mail each DVD, that includes packaging, mailing, the costs of hiring a distribution center, I get $4 x 50,000 = $200,000. I think that's an expensive gift. Is there really a smoking gun? For the record, I saw the movie and personally, I would like a large number of teachers and students to see it, too. But, I'm bothered by Ms.…

Holiday chemistry shopping on a budget.

I was marveling at the Chemistry gift guide at MAKE. It has lots of cool items for your budding chemist/mad scientist of any age looking to equip his or her basement/garage/treehouse laboratory. (It's pretty hard to get fume-hoods installed in a treehouse, but who are we kidding? Most people who dabble in chemistry at home don't have fume-hoods either.) The glassware in the pictures is so bright and shiny. (Flashback to the "breakage book" in my high school chemistry class. Also to the hours upon hours of washing glassware in grad school. Still: shiny!) The kids in the pictures from…

Links for 2012-02-20

Online Python Tutor Gives a nice visual representation of what's going on in a Python code snippet. If only it handled VPython... Chip MacGregor .com: Does the publisher lose money if my book doesn't earn out? Remember, every business can lose money. Retail shops, service business, even publishers. I mean, if you own a shoe store, you order in shoes that don't sell, and you have to drastically reduce prices, you can lose money on each pair of shoes sold. Publishing is no different. The publishing house pays out advances, they pay an editor, hire a cover designer, buy ink and paper, then pay…

Look out, Phoenix!

In a few weeks, on January 3-7, I'm going to be attending the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Phoenix. I'm going to be part of a panel in a Media Workshop, along with a few other names you might recognize: Blogs are online "diaries" that are growing in popularity. Popular political and social commentary blogs are making the news, but is there more out there than chatty gossip and collections of links? How about some science? Can this trendy technology be useful for scientists? Come to the Media Workshop and find out! Experienced science…

Pain, privacy, and safety

Abel over at TerraSig dug up an interesting story about a man who was "murdered" killed rendered not-living (in the moral if not legal sense) by a "fake chiropractor" (although it's not clear to me what science separates a "real" from a "fake" chiropractor). One of the commenters wondered if lack of health insurance had driven the man away from standard medical care. Another bemoaned the inadequacy of treatment for chronic pain conditions. This got me thinking... In the case of the fake chiropractor, I'm guessing that many factors went into the decedent's seeking this particular care.…

Cephalopods: Octopuses and Cuttlefishes for the Home Aquarium

It's December, and Squidmas is coming. Maybe you're like me, and the kids have all moved out, so you're thinking having a little intelligent life at home would be nice. Or maybe you're kids are still home, and you think they'd love a pretty pet. Or maybe you just love cephalopods, as do we all, so you're thinking, hey, let's get an aquarium and an octopus! What a fun idea! One word of advice: NO. Don't do it. You can't just rush into these things. Here's a positive suggestion, though. Start reading TONMO, the octopus news magazine online, regularly. If you haven't been reading it already, you…

A new method of colon cleansing?

When I first saw this, I thought that it had to be a joke, but now I'm not so sure. I'm guessing you've all heard of ear candling, which can supposedly cure tinnitus, clean the ear canal of wax buildup, relieve vertigo, cure swimmer's ear, and provide a variety of other supposed health benefits? Well, an orifice is an orifice, so are you ready for....ButtCandlesâ¢? (I don't think that I am.) According to the web page: ButtCandles⢠are an exciting, and time honored, device for internal cleansing. We encourage you to peruse our site, read the referenced medical literature, and then make an…

Why I'm boycotting Hasbro and their Scrapulous app

This morning, Hasbro finally intimidated Facebook and Scrabulous into suspending the popular word game app. I love Scrabulous, and I'm mad as heck - not least because in my current game, I'd scored a whopping three Bingos (words in which you use all 7 letters) and was routing the usually dominant competition (my staffer). Scrabulous is an online pseudo-Scrabble - a godsend for those of us who can't meet to play real games in meatspace, but can squeeze in a word here and there over the course of the week. But Hasbro, the company which has the rights to most of your typical-American-childhood…

Boardgaming Groups and Game Stores

Listening to the Dice Tower and Spiel podcasts and reading forum entries on Boardgame Geek, I've come across two central aspects of US boardgaming culture that have me kind of baffled. One is the ubiquity of open-to-all gaming groups, and the other is the emphasis on the FLGS, the Friendly Local Gaming Store. * To begin with the gaming groups, to me gaming is something I do with my friends at our houses - usually mine. The varying cast of gamers having tea at my table once a week are my guests. A recent Dice Tower episode (#205), however, featured a long discussion about what to do if your…

Shhhh! Let's meet in the city this weekend

It appears that a number of bloggers who write under the ScienceBlogs.com masthead will be converging on New York City this coming weekend. For those of you who know my background, I simply call this "The City." I mentioned earlier that it was unlikely that I would be there due to family and job commitments (and the fact that my sister and her family were elsewhere that weekend when we could've otherwise had a lovely family gathering). But with the generous blessings of PharmGirl and PharmKid, I will indeed venture to New Amsterdam for about 32 hours that will include the highly-touted 'meet…

Can't Blaspheme Any More!

Have you been to Pandagon lately? Have you seen the brand new look, design and layout? Cool! Which reminds me that I have read Amanda's book, It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, on my first 2-3 flights in Europe last month. I left it with my cousin - let's spread the new, fun kind of feminism to the Balkans! I have been reading Amanda Marcotte online since before she joined the crew at Pandagon and I have to say that, as a white, middle-aged, middle-class man, I learned from her blogging a lot about things I used to take for…

Change.org Picks Up On The "Carwash" Story

Tim Foley at Change.org has picked up on the post I wrote about the Bridgeville shooting victim whose friends and family sponsored a car wash to help her pay her medical bills (with a link to a news story about the car wash). His take on the story is well worth reading. Meanwhile, on my original post, commenter ABM gripes: What if that uninsured shooting victim wasn't a young woman shot by a misogynist, but a grumpy, sexist, racist old man with no friends who didn't attend church and was generally unliked by all his neighbours? He doesn't get helped out because of who he is? I doubt the…

Google Play Books Ate My Apostrophes

Update 10 April: It pays to report problems like the one described below to Google's customer support. Seven weeks ago I discovered the problem. One week ago I reported it. Today the problem was suddenly gone, probably because Google updated the two ebooks involved and pushed new versions of the files to my phone. I usually shop around for a good price when I buy e-books, and lately Google's bookstore has received my custom. It's not a very high-profile store – you see, this isn't the well-known Google Books, where they offer scanned paper books in your browser. This is something called,…