• Sugar causes hyperactivity in children
• Suicides increase over the holidays
• Poinsettia is toxic
• Not wearing a hat causes excess heat loss
• Eating late in the day makes you fat
• You can cure a hangover
• People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
• We use only 10% of our brains
• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
• Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
• Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
• Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
• Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.

Fascinating…

I once had a fantasy. I would devote a whole year, perhaps a sabbatical, just to reading and thinking, and would not write anything. I mean really nothing: no papers, no articles, no op-eds, no contributions to collected volumes. I would turn down all invitations to contribute papers to conferences or books by saying “Thank you. but I am just reading and thinking this year, not writing.” The idea was to force a fundamental correction in the balance of trade between what went in my head and what came out.

I really don’t think it works that way, unless you have a total recall. You read a book by A, and you get really intrigued how it resonates with another book written by B twenty years ago on a completely different factual material (and with your own thinking on the subject). If nothing else, it begs a note to self…

The fire is said to have spread to the area of 5,400 acres and shows no signs of abatement…

Well, not all of it, if course… The photo above was taken today in Goleta, CA, from approximately this location:

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Password:

global $user_ID;
get_currentuserinfo();
if ($user_ID == '') {
  header('Location: ' .
    get_bloginfo('wpurl') .
    '/wp-login.php?redirect_to=' .
    rawurlencode($_SERVER["REDIRECT_URL"]));
  die();
}

Generally, a good place to put this code is the header file, although this will ultimately depend on the theme.

Essentially, this snippet checks if the user is logged in and if not, redirects the browser to the login page, while also telling the login page what page the user wanted to retrieve, so that the user could be redirected there after successful login.

A later addition: Sure enough, someone actually created a plugin that addresses this very problem…

Oh my God. How could I have missed the fact that Suzanne Vega is blogging for the Times?

In my next life I want to be a songwriter — precisely because I can’t imagine how it’s done. I’d give up the whole first page of my Google Scholar listing to have written “The Queen and the Soldier.”

Well, the song may well be worth it:

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This particular performance is from the 1997 Das Fest in Karlsruhe.

Is eugenics rooted in and inspired by evolutionary theory?

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines eugenics as “the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis.”

I would say that eugenics is rooted in misunderstanding evolutionary theory…

Evolution theory postulates that only the fittest (meaning, the best adapted to the surrounding environment) survive. Human beings, however, inhabit many natural (and quite a few artificial) environments, so there is no single set of traits that ensures survival in all circumstances. So for the human race to survive, it must remain diverse, if for no other reason, then simply because its habitats are diverse. Eugenicists never understood it…

http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/

The book that first got me there was Plan B 2.0 (since redeveloped into Plan B 3.0).  Lots and lots of things to think about…

Are we not advanced enough to perceive alien life?

Do you think the reason we can’t find life on the moon, the sun, the 70 sextillion stars, and the decillions of moons and planets that revolve around them is because we are not advanced enough to be able to perceive alien life, just like bacteria is not advanced enough to percieve human life. Maybe all alien life is so advanced that us primitive humans who evolved from monkey’s and have only been advancing for 100 years can’t comprehend civilizations of the moon and Mars, and Venus that are billions of years old and more advanced than us. Maybe they project their world as lifeless on to our eyes so that we won’t invade their planet. Maybe they are holographic images. Bacteria can’t percieve human life, but human life exists. Maybe humans just can’t perceive alein life even though it exists throughout the universe. Any comments or suggestions?

There are all kinds of possibilities…

Maybe space travel is a phase that advanced civilizations outgrow, choosing instead to focus on something more important, such as teaching their children to appreciate the beauty of the world they live in.

Maybe advanced civilizations are impossible in principle, because producing enough energy for interstellar travel would irreparably damage the environment on a planetary scale.

Maybe advanced civilizations can only be built by learning (and evolving) machines floating in outer space close to a star (to draw energy from it), as living beings on planets don’t have enough lifespan to learn what needs to be learned to build an advanced civilization and don’t have enough energy to power their spacecraft.

Maybe there is a Pan-Galactic Pact Against First Contact; all intelligent races agreed to leave the emerging intelligent life alone to evolve as it would (we set up wildlife sanctuaries, why can’t we be in one as well?)

That’s why good science fiction is so much fun; it makes you wonder about these things…