Friday Links (4-Dec-09)

• We’re closer to getting laboratory grown meat: yum! Looking forward to a day where I can go crazy…
• Researcher studies effects of porn on males, needs a control group of men who haven’t watched porn and is unable to find any. At all.
• Atheists have been too vocal, shrill, uncivil, disrespectful, brusque and assertive. Tangled Up In Blue Guy gives us an insider’s view on why this must stop. Immediately!
• Scoring an 11 on the geek scale, a calculator made entirely of wood and marbles
• An amazing history of a single US cop’s work record which shows that you just can’t get fired from the police no matter how many criminal acts you commit.
• In case you haven’t heard, “homosexual acts” are punishable by life imprisonment in Uganda and now they’re proposing a bill that would upgrade this to execution for people with HIV. You know, as punishment for spreading the disease and all. Oh, and the initiative has ties to The Family (the secretive fundamentalist group that’s one of the biggest unseen influences in Washington DC on both parties). Sweden says this could put its aid to Uganda in jeopardy. Obama is silent.
• A look at Bhopal 25 years later: a separate article and pictures. Predictably nothing’s improved and uncompensated birth defects abound for another generation.
• Also dogs to make your heart break.

The last for points are especially dark, in fact things look bleak. The Flight of the Concords have a bit about the future: “There are no more elephants/There is no more unethical treatment of elephants either/The world is a much better place”. Maybe we humans are just a passing shadow, a momentary nightmare for the universe. And when our time ends, there will be a huge sigh of relief as a million tortures and cruelties will expire. At least it makes me feel a bit better about the possibility of humans annihilating themselves in the next century.