Airport Body Scanners won’t give you cancer

With the big holidays just around the corner, thousands of folks are about to get their first taste of the TSA’s new virtual strip search machines – X-ray body scanners. Privacy issues may be the main concern for most people, but the safety of these things has some people worried.

Back in April, a group of UCSF professors with a range of expertise in x-rays and biology wrote a letter to White House advisor John Holdren (PDF) raising some potential safety concerns about the TSA’s X-ray scanners. Continue reading “Airport Body Scanners won’t give you cancer”

Just Bit My Lip

So much for being made in the image of God according to the Second O’Briainian Disproof of Creationism (disproofs start at 3:50).

 

#IAmSpartacus

I’m wondering if the folks participating in the #IAmSpartacus protest of the “Twitter Joke Trial” remember that the original* “I am Spartacus” protesters were all crucified for their trouble.

*Incidentally, for similar reasons, I have no interest in running a marathon, as the original Marathon-er (Pheidippides) died after running a “marathon” from the battlefield (at Marathon) to Athens.

My Untestable Velociraptor Hypothesis

Photo: Heather Haupt Enos, taken on North Campus at Cornell University

I don’t really understand how this “guerrilla” bike lane art promotes bicycle riding or bicycle friendly driving behavior.

But, it did get me thinking about velociraptors on bicycles. Which, naturally, led to me wondering what I would do if bicycle riding velociraptors were overrunning my city (the most likely scenario leading to such regulation of velociraptor velocipeding). In particular, what if one of said pedaling raptors decided it had a taste for Josh, on the bone.

Could I kick a velociraptor’s ass? Continue reading “My Untestable Velociraptor Hypothesis”

Complainers

We’ve all heard, and perhaps uttered, some variety of a line designed to dismiss whiners along the lines of:

“Don’t complain unless you have a better solution.”
–someone named “virago”

For the sake of consistency in my life, I just phoned my wife and informed her that she is no longer entitled to tell me if the sink is leaking*.

*My lovely and talented soul-mate is both lovely and talented in a variety of areas. Plumbing is not one of them. We divide up responsibilities in our household, based on the distribution of skills. Therefore, I take the plumbing duties and she takes the singing duties, the latter of which, with small children, is the more important tasks.