Is DDT really good for me?
Michael Crichton relays that we should never have banned DDT in a lecture of his at CalTech (among lots more meaty claims) while calling out environmentalism of religious zealotry.
When a magazine article in “21st Century Science Tech” I ran across made a parallel claim I was interested.
The 1972 U.S. ban on DDT is responsible for a genocide 10 times larger than that for which we sent Nazis to the gallows at Nuremberg. It is also responsible for a menticide which has already condemned one entire generation to a dark age of anti-science ignorance, and is now infecting a new one.
I did another google search to collect my research. I found one back-patting environmentalist group page on DDT, it’s problems, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Also, thankfully a posting on The Straight Dope (which previously has shed light on terrible confoundings like the scroll lock key) addressing 21st Century Science.
and testing the wonderfully easy, minimalist php gallery script, qdig. See my pics.
More inside.
Continue reading ‘New Camera’
From Ars Technica, Men “stop thinking rationally” in the presence of “beautiful” women, hotornot.com:
Discounting the future… we all do it. If you setup an analytical tension between the immediate fulfillment of wishes/wants/desires and the future benefits one may gain by not fulfilling them, one can see that humans (and indeed most animals) routinely chose the present over the future. Such analytical approaches then seek to evaluate whether or not the choice in favor of the present is rational or irrational. Using pictures from hotornot.com, researchers tested men and women’s reactions to accepting prize money in the following scheme: they could accept a check for US$15-35 tomorrow, or they could wait and get paid US$50-75 “at a variable point in the future.” The kicker is that the students were shown pictures of attractive members of the opposite sex before being made to make a decision.
Men consistently chose irrationally when shown a “hot” women beforehand. Women did not. I probably shouldn’t link this. Warning: not particularly PC, my opinions don’t closely parallel it. But I immediately noted this study goes a little ways as proof for the infamous “Ladder Theory”’s supposition that Men have a hard time with ‘hot” female “friends”. Women don’t, with male friends that is.
Also, Serial Dating bad for womens health. Good for men.
