It’s hard to follow American politics from ten thousand miles away (I live in the rural Philippines, and we get the news a day late), but as a Democrat, I was bemused to read in today’s papers that Rick Santorum just won in the Republican primaries of Minnesota and Missouri.
Santorum? I wasn’t aware he […]

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To watch the film “The Iron Lady” is like trying to learn about a person from a list.
Grocer’s daughter, check. Politician, check. Anti Thatcher demonstrations, check. Falklands war, check. Going to celebrate the fall of the Iron curtain, check.
For anyone not aware of the history of the 1970’s and 1980’s, the quick scenes depicting some […]

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I get a gazzillion offers for great stuff in my email. If I jumped into some of the offers I would be a billionaire several times over, and my personal measurements would embarrass an Elephant! Because of a love of my wife, small rented house, and a dwindling bank account, I tend to ignore these […]

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Here in the Philippines, thanks to Wikileaks, we know that not only American money is behind our “Reproductive Health Bill”, but that the American State Department is pressuring our president to pass the bill.
Heaven knows that the Philippines does need access to cheaper Birth control, but it’s not as if it’s not available: they sell […]

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(London, UK) Autism Sunday celebrates 10 Years (2002 - 2012) on Sunday the 12th of February this year. Autism Sunday is the brainchild of British autism campaigners Ivan and Charika Corea - what started as a small acorn of an idea in their front room has turned into a massive global event, celebrated in many […]

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I always enjoy interviewing Charlie Boswell, he is one of the most colorful people I know. I would write a short biography, but that is impossible. Is he engineer, musician, film maker, thinker, futurist, or what?
Officially he holds the title of Director Of Digital Entertainment at AMD. Unofficially I class him as the AMD Energizer […]

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I hate air pollution.
When I travel in Manila, I have to use an asthma inhaler to stop an attack. Here in the provinces, I only have to use an inhaler in spring, when they burn off the weeds in the fields.
However, science reporting on “green” issues often is so inaccurate that a lot of […]

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It rained last night, and more coming. In some ways, this is good news, because it means we don’t have to pay so much to irrigate our “dry season” crop. But it is bad news for the south, which is still recovering from the devestating storm that killed over a thousand people..
Superficially, the storm makes […]

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An Interview With AMD’s Charlie Boswell

Every family has Christmas Traditions, how they start is often unclear, but whatever it is does become part of the festive season. For some inexplicable reason I have one. How it started is long long lost in the annals of time. But every Christmas Season I seem to do an […]

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While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people…

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Who is Boswell I hear you ask? I think two words come to mind Enigma and Anathema. He is part musician, part filmmaker, technologist, and artist. In someways you might even call him a creative nerd. He somehow dropped out of Music in college and came away with a BSEE.  He is also a Producer […]

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As if there are not enough wonderful ways to fritter the day away online, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube to name but a few, Google has now got into the act.
In a glorious piece of high tech nerding they have rolled out a truly amazing piece of nerdery with the latest upgrade to Google Analytics.
For the […]

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The NYTimes has an article about problems with the Global fund to fight AIDS.
It seems that they checked the books and found some of the money was stolen or diverted, and as a result, a lot of European donors are not giving any more money until the problem is cleared up.
You want honesty at […]

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Please read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4
Contrary to recent media reports, the Brazilian Blowout hair treatment is safe for use.
Here is a review of all the studies done on Brazilian Blowout.
Oregon OSHA: Pass
Federal OSHA: Pass
Health Sciences Associates: Pass
Dr. James Haw - USC: Pass
FDA: Conducted no studies
ChemRisk: […]

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Contrary to recent media reports, the Brazilian Blowout hair treatment is safe for use.
Oregon OSHA and Federal OSHA had already attacked Brazilian Blowout’s product, steering the media to focus on faulty aspects of their respective studies, and burying the truth — that the product does not release formaldehyde in amounts that […]

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Contrary to recent media reports, the Brazilian Blowout hair treatment is safe for use.
You’d never know it, though, because the mainstream media has been perpetuating one myth after another about Brazilian Blowout while ignoring the facts. Last time, I wrote about a hatchet job made to appear as a legitimate study […]

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“Traumatic grief, with its unanswered questions, its numbing shock, its horror, its ability to sear disturbing images into our souls that cannot be erased by sleep or by time–this process follows the same general path both for persons and groups.”
When 12:30 struck, none of us fourth graders knew that our young president was being […]

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Contrary to ongoing media reports, the Brazilian Blowout hair treatment is safe for use.
The company is caught in a perfect storm of faulty private and government studies, absurd regulatory definitions, environmentalist hoopla, Liberal politics, and verifiable governmental incompetence. Add in the tsunami of a mainstream media eager to fearmonger and water-carry for […]

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I read a name from the past in today’s news: Medgar Evers.
The name takes me back to the days of when as a child we visited our aunt who lived in the deep south, and I was astonished that there “colored only” restaurants and water fountains.
Evers was one of the heroes who fought for the […]

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I have a good friend who works for AMD, he is an engineer by trade, and a damn good one. His mission at AMD though is far different from what a traditional engineer might do. It is all about bringing the power of the computer into the hands of the user. A computer is just […]

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I am bemused to see that there is a moderate earthquake in Oklahoma making the news.
Such things are not unknown, of course, but the “Green” oriented blogs are all blaming the earthquake on “fracking”.
This is a “hot” item, since the oil shales of North Dakota and Pennsylvania are potential “black gold” that will rewrite the […]

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The LATimes has a story that India has now produced a thirty five dollar tablet computer for it’s students, or sort of…
The plan is to distribute thousands of the computers in coming months to students at a government-subsidized rate of $35.
It has taken several years to develop, faced a lot of skepticism and received […]

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I have been involved in the computer industry for almost four decades. During that time I have seen huge changes, but have I really? The computer industry is very cyclic, sure the technology gets smaller, cheaper, faster, the do more for less syndrome.
At the very core of the technology is not little black chips but […]

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A lot of Republican bloggers in the US are rolling their eyes up in mockery at the report that President Obama plans to send in US troops to fight the so called “Lord’s Resistance army” in Uganda.
A typical response is this, from the National Review Blog The Corner:
This is even crazier than getting involved in […]

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While CNN International is the “Michael Jackson trial” 24/7, and Google News’ major story is about someone called Amanda Knox, the story here in SE Asia is the floods from the typhoons.
Here in the Philippines, large areas remain flooded, partly due to the fact that the irrigation dams are still open to drain the run […]

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The New York Times had an interesting article about HIV and artificial birth control.
There seems to be a statistical increase in the risk of getting HIV with the shot:
The most popular contraceptive for women in eastern and southern Africa, a hormone shot given every three months, appears to double the risk the women […]

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In my previous post, I wondered if the protesters on Wall Street had proposals of how to fix things, or if they were theoreticians from Nephelokokkygia.
So exactly what do those Wall Street protesters want?
A proposed list of demands can be found at their website. They don’t want much.
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This […]

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Here in the rice lands of Luzon, the latest news is bad. You probably read in the news that we were hit by Typhoon Pedring, but this time Manila was not devestated as in Typhoon Ondoy two years ago.
Manila Bay’s affluent waterfront properties were damaged when the storm wall failed, but Manila was not as […]

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Yum! Mushrooms. Who doesn’t like them (if cooked properly, even kids will eat them).
The problem? Well, the Epicurious blog has an article on the joys of mushroom picking.
It seems that a lot of yuppies in the Pacific Northwest have decided that the economic downswing is a good reason to take up this hobby.
Professional foragers […]

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Paranoia kills. And the internet, which allows anyone to post any conspiracy theory without having to include minor things like facts, is a growing problem for doctors, because our patients who google sometimes end up at conspiracy theory sites for their medical information.
And this ignorance is one reason why Bachman is now no longer […]

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