Rotundus.com

Friends of the Earth urges end to 'land grab' for biofuels

I tend to think that most biofuels aren't a great idea. Here's one reason why: "Charity predicts more food shortages in Africa because of EU target to produce 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020."

Two Men on United Flight from Chicago Arrested

Given that they let them on the plane even after noticing "a cell phone taped to a bottle of Pepto Bismol" (amongst other things), I tend to think this is overblown

Medical treatment carries possible side effect of limiting homosexuality

I sense a controversy erupting

BPA Linked to Higher Testosterone Levels

BPA has been argued as functioning some like estrogen, but now it seems that it may also lead to higher testosterone levels in men. A reaction to the estrogen-like behaviour or something else?

You're now on the new site.

Westerners vs. the World: We are the WEIRD ones

Science rediscovers that culture matters: "The article, titled "The weirdest people in the world?", appears in the current issue of the journal Brain and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Henrich and co-authors Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that life-long members of societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic — people who are WEIRD — see the world in ways that are alien from the rest of the human family."

Minneapolis will pay $165,000 to zombies

Not sure if they'll also be paying out to vampires or other such creatures.

Out of fashion: Green lawns

I've never quite figured out the "why" for these things. Seems like a waste of time to me. It you want to spend time growing things you might as well concentrate on something other than grass.

Minimizing marriage

"To be crude and economics-y, when a man and a woman have a child together, you're asking that they invest a long period of time cooperating in order to bring that child up into adulthood. Right now, with no-fault divorce, you have less contractual protection for the activity of bringing up a child than you have to build a house together. You couldn't get out of a mortgage contract as easily as people get out of their marriages." - a brief excerpt of an interesting interview

Looks like my web host is supposed to be migrated to a cloud-based solution which should hopefully speed up the site and improve its reliability. Anyways, what that means at the moment is that things may be a little wacky with DNS servers in the next week or so. Hopefully it'll go off smoothly, but no guarantees.