23 Mar 2006
Finding Humor in Meat Patents

A very funny take on two of my favorite targets: intellectual property and factory farming! And more - be sure to check out this guys site: Patently Silly.

Most comedians go to great lengths to find fresh material. An aspiring New York City comic, however, says funny stuff is easy to find with a few mouseclicks on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website. By Joanna Glasner.

(link) [Wired News: Top Stories]

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Top Muslim clerics: Convert must die

More news from the "religion of peace" ... the fruits of "democracy" must be sweet indeed:

"Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hard-line regime was ousted in 2001.

And this bozo is a "moderate" ... right. Withdraw all coalition troops and equipment from Afghanistan immediately. Let the Taliban or whatever other band of barbarians crawls out of the hills hang this old coot by his testicles, for all I care. If they try to pull another 9/11, we send 1 Minuteman missile with MIRVed warheads and take out the entire freaking country. Problem solved.

Which is not to imply at all that we were wrong for going in in 2001 - we were completely justified as Afghanistan had essentially committed an act of war against the United States. If we made any mistakes, it was that we didn't go in hard enough. We were too worried about "collateral damage" and world opinion. And this is what we end up with. We've simply replaced one gang of murdering thugs with another. But now they're a democratically elected gang of murdering thugs...

I'm over spending American lives and treasure to save the worthless hides of the likes of Abdul Raoulf, and I'm over being a party to executing an innocent man who's crime was a mere change of religion.

Nuke'm all and let Allah sort'em out.

Senior Muslim clerics are demanding that an Afghan man on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity be executed, warning that if the government caves in to Western pressure and frees him, they will incite people to "pull him into pieces."

(link) [CNN]

00:00 /Politics | 3 comments | permanent link

Consumption of risky foods declines

This is more interesting for what's not said. Note the list of unsafe foods:

  • pink hamburgers
  • pink ground beef
  • raw fresh fish
  • raw oysters
  • raw/unpasteurized milk
  • runny eggs
  • alfalfa sprouts

What's not said is why these foods are considered unsafe.

First off, aren't "pink hamburgers" and "pink ground beef" the same thing? These are considered unsafe because they're undercooked, which may not kill off any harmful bacteria in them. How did the harmful bacteria get in there? Usually through unsafe handling practices in the processing and distribution chains. And they left undercooked chicken completely off the list. Why?

Furthermore, color is not a good indicator of cooking safety: temperature is the only reliable indicator of cooking safety.

Raw fresh fish is called sushi and is eaten extensively in east Asia - why is it considered unsafe here and not there? Again, handling and processing.

Raw oysters are unsafe because of modern pollution.

I've posted about raw milk on previous occasions.

Runny eggs? Again, processing and handling, and in this case, the environment the egg is gathered from and the length of it's storage. Fresh eggs from free ranging (and nesting) chickens pose no threat because the bloom is intact. The bloom degrades over time.

Which leaves us with alfalfa sprouts. An uncooked vegetable. In its 40 year history, only twelve incidents of bacterial infection in sprouts have been recorded, and nine of them came from the same seed source.(link) And if sprouts are unsafe, why isn't any raw veggie considered as such?

In short, while this study may be entirely accurate as to the numbers of Americans consuming these foods, it grossly misleads about food safety and makes no case whatsoever for the listed items actually being unsafe. It would be like a study listing travel by horseback as an unsafe mode of transport, and concluding that road tripping Americans are safer now than they were a century ago because we use automobiles.

Americans are eating safer. The number of people who reported eating one or more foods associated with an increased risk of foodborne disease declined by a third from 1998 to 2002, according to survey results released today at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Can Apple turn the tables on Microsoft?

I doubt that the increase in Mac market share will be anything resembling "dramatic", even if it should be. Business is just to entrenched to change their ways overnight, and there's the whole issue of legacy applications that would need migration to take into account. But still ...

I read somewhere yesterday that one of the reasons for the delay was to decrease the number of times a machine must be rebooted: I've never had to reboot my Powerbook due to a software or operating system error, and we've only rebooted Big Mac a couple of times: both when it was running "Virtual PC".

My Windows box, on the other hand, running XP SP2, gets rebooted at least once a week, and frequently more often than that.

Now that Windows Vista has been delayed, it's time to ask a once-unthinkable question: Can the Macintosh finally take back business...

(link) [CNET News.com]

00:00 /Technology | 2 comments | permanent link