Scientific American:

In a coarse way, dirty living is good for you and clean living is bad for. You are part bacteria, if you got rid of the life on your skin or in your gut, you would almost certainly die. But, what I had envisioned was an expansion of the slightly more complex idea called the hygiene hypothesis, whose argument goes something like this… Humans moved from rural lifestyles outdoors to hyper-clean lifestyles indoors in city apartments with central air, sealed windows and surfaces scrubbed clean, at every opportunity, with antimicrobial wipes. That transition led us to spend less time getting “dirty” outside. It also “cleaned up” many of the species we need around us indoors that would allow us to get dirty with life. This combination prevented many of our immune systems from developing normally2. As a consequence, our immune systems tend to get “messed up” when we live in cities. They revolt against us in the form of asthma, allergies, Crohn’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease and, depending on who you ask, maybe even MS and autism.

In other words, clean living of one sort or another may be at the root of the majority of modern, chronic, diseases.

Joint Summits on Translational Science:

These days scientists have a much clearer picture of our inner ecosystem. We know now that there are a hundred trillion microbes in a human body.

You carry more microbes in you this moment than all the people who ever lived. Those microbes are growing all the time. So try to imagine for a moment producing an elephant’s worth of microbes. I know it’s difficult, but the fact is that actually in your lifetime you will produce five elephants of microbes.

You are basically a microbe factory.

X-47B, not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but with no pilot at all.

[Many] believe that autonomous armed robots should force the kind of dialogue that followed the introduction of mustard gas in World War I and the development of atomic weapons in World War II.

1) A view which is very common among mainlanders is that “without China’s economic support, Hong Kong would have been dead long ago.” But many Hong Kongers now think that the “mainland invasion” has done more harm than good to Hong Kong.

2) There is also a fear of the erosion of traditional Hong Kong values like the rule of law.

3) Hong Kong has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world.

4) Hong Kong people could realize the fact that they, like most mainlanders, live in an unjust political system under which the rich and the powerful collude. They share the same destiny, that is, to end this injustice.

NYTimes:

…a leather case for the Kindle Fire was receiving the sort of acclaim once reserved for the likes of Kim Jong-il. [!]

Hundreds of reviewers proclaimed the case a marvel, a delight, exactly what they needed to achieve bliss. And definitely worth five stars.

Reviewers are paid for?! Yuck.

When the package arrived it included a letter extending an invitation “to write a product review for the Amazon community.”

“In return for writing the review, we will refund your order so you will have received the product for free,” it said.

Birnbaum: He wasn’t a predator.

Russel Banks: No—a dumb kid. Sexually confused. Alienated. Lots of things. Not angry. Basically an honest kid. Trying to figure out how to be a good person. Not very well equipped to do that. An abandoned kid, essentially. Benignly neglected. The mother takes credit for provided him with shelter, food, and an iguana. He’s a feral child in a way. You have an awful lot of them out there. Latchkey kids we used to call them. One parent—she’s working all day. Comes home then goes out at night, and she’s still a child herself in some ways. It’s a country that has fewer and fewer adults in it.

here’s an item as we all waste away stumbling upon needles in the haystack of the Internet:

Farts: an underappreciated threat to astronauts.

Zombies too.

Phooey on words when video is better.

“what is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?”

You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.

Yes you should see this, know this, feel this, do this.
Bobby McFerrin at TED, the natural appeal of the pentatonic scale.

Wow!

Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth

The Atlantic:

…solid pieces of evidence that Japan’s nuclear industry is a black hole of criminal malfeasance, incompetence, and corruption.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the monolithic corporation that controls all electric power in Greater Tokyo, and runs the Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant that experienced a triple meltdown following the March 11 earthquake, is on the brink of nationalization according to Japanese government sources.

The official reason is that the firm may not be able to handle the massive compensation payments it owes to victims of the meltdown without going bankrupt. Unofficially, the firm has such long-standing ties to anti-social forces, including the yakuza—that some members of the Diet, Japan’s national legislature, feel the firm is beyond salvation and needs to be taken over and cleaned up.

…in other words, “When a man is has to survive doing something, it’s the nuclear industry; for a woman, it’s the sex industry.”

12 minutes of Sydney’s extraordinary fireworks of 2012

The Massachusetts Congress declared Christmas illegal from 1659-1681.

Another fact: The early Christian church did not celebrate Jesus’ birth at all.

In other words, there were no Christmas Eve services and no pageants and no ministers trying to make sense of it all! Only over centuries, and only after solstice feasts turned really wild and really out of control did Christians seek to offer an alternative, calling it “Christ’s Mass,” or Christmas.

Another fact: Nobody was as hard on Christmas as the Puritans.

Christmas wasn’t biblical. And Jesus wouldn’t have approved of celebrations. Puritans ordered shops to stay open on Christmas. They banned holiday cakes and candles.

There’s more.

Ahh, forget it. Wingnuts don’t use facts !

For the rest of us, love is on our minds during the holidays.

But we can correct our history thought by thought, image by image.

For example, instead of a rowboat on Christmas Day in 1776, George Washington crossed the Delaware on a ferry pulled by a cable and crowded with troops.

OK, here’s the weird part.

Vowels pull on our brains.

“I”s pull us differently than “O”s.

A curious pattern shows up.

Ice cream companies mix lots of “O”s and “A”s

Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge, Chocolate, Caramel, Cookie Dough, Coconut

But the cracker brands stick pretty much to “E”s and “I”s.

Cheez It, Wheat Thins, Pretzel, Ritz, Krispy, Triscuit, Chips, Biskit

But Why?