Ninja Monkie Bacchanal

Just one more reason I enjoy libraries and real books.

Google Books currently tracks: a reader’s initial search, a specific book browsed, a specific book’s pages viewed, the date and time of a search or page view, and the reader’s IP address/browser/and computer operating system. Note, one or more cookies can uniquely identify the reader’s browser.

Amazon currently tracks: the time that each Kindle is logged onto Amazon’s network, specific books/magazine subscriptions/newspapers/or digital content saved onto the device, each reader’s interaction with content (e.g., the last page read, any annotations/notes/or highlights the reader made to the content), and a record of any content deleted from the device.

This is depressing.

Five days before a 2007 article in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the diabetes drug Avandia was linked to a 43% increase in heart attacks compared with other medications or placebos, a group of scientists and executives from the drug’s maker, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), gathered in a conference room at the offices of the Food and Drug Administration in White Oak, Md. The GSK goal: to convince regulators that the evidence that the company’s $3 billion-a-year blockbuster drug caused heart problems was inconclusive. To do that, the GSK officials focused not on heart-attack data but on a broader, less well defined category of heart problems called myocardial ischemia. The most recent studies of Avandia, the GSK officials told the FDA, had “yielded information that is inconsistent with an increased risk of myocardial ischemic events,” according to sealed court proceedings obtained by TIME.

What GSK didn’t tell the FDA was that on May 14, 2007, two days before the White Oak meet
was that on May 14, 2007, two days before the White Oak meeting, GSK’s Global Safety Board had noted that a new assessment of Avandia studies “strengthens the [cardiac-risk] signal observed in the [previous] analysis.” Or that eight days earlier, the company’s head of research and development, Moncef Slaoui, had sent an e-mail to its chief medical officer saying Avandia patients showed an “increased risk of ischemic event ranging from 30% to 43%!” Or that the day before the meeting, the company had produced a preliminary draft report that showed patients on Avandia had a 46% greater likelihood of heart attack than those in a control group.

From CarnalNation.com:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of “curvature of space” to promote a broad legal right to abortion. As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments. Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common. Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.

Apparently, it is not enough to be against just evolution, now Conservation Douchebags are now against Einstein’s Theory of Relatively as well. 

This is from Kevin Drum @ Mother Jones:

On an intellectual level, I can sort of get this. If I were a conservative Christian I’d be unhappy with the increasing secularization of society and the 60s-era Supreme Court decisions that largely removed religion from the public square. If I were a white guy stuck in a sucky job and heard stories of blacks being given preference in promotions and school placements, I’d be pissed. If I were socially traditional and my school district insisted on a curriculum that endorsed tolerance of gay lifestyles, I’d be horrified. If I only heard the Fox News version of Climategate, it would seem like truly terrifying proof of a massive global conspiracy and fraud.

But on an emotional level, it just seems nuts.

This is how I feel every freakin’ day.

Some of these are fun.

We’ve written a lot lately about serious, geeky topics, like virtualization.  But we here at WorksWithU also like to have fun from time to time.  To prove it, here’s a look at some of the hilarious–or at least amusing–Easter eggs and other jokes hidden in Ubuntu that you may never have heard of.

Just watch and weep people.

Sometimes, I wonder how the largest state in the lower 48 functions in the modern world:

[T]he state’s Republican party has voted on a platform [PDF link] by which their candidates will stand, and it includes the reinstatement of laws banning sodomy: otherwise known as oral and anal sex.

The party’s platform also seeks to make gay marriage a felony offense, which may be confusing to most given that the state does not sanction or recognize same sex marriages, meaning any such ceremony conducted does not bear the weight of law. Whether this means the GOP wants gay couples married in other states to be pursued through Texas as dangerous criminals, the party did not specify.

In addition to this, the Texas GOP seeks to end the state’s lottery, which provides millions in funding to public education; restrict citizenship to children born in the United States whose parents are citizens; end federal sponsorship of pre-kindergarten schools; impose a jail sentence on any illegal immigrant in the state; shut down all day-labor centers; cut off all bilingual education after a student’s fourth year in a U.S. public school; legalize corporal punishment in public schools; mandate that evolution and global warming be “taught as challengeable scientific theory”; and demand that Congress evict the United Nations from U.S. soil and end American membership in the global body.

Well, duh.

Linux has a powerful booster in the never-ending debate over what OS is safest from malware and spyware: Dell.

Dell’s Ubuntu site has a “Top 10” list of “things you should know about Ubuntu.” No. 6? Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft Windows

Why has it taken them this long anyway?

Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees.

The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google’s Chinese operations were hacked, and could effectively end the use of Windows at Google, which employs more than 10,000 workers internationally.

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” said one Google employee.

Yup. Organic fruits and veggies are still the best way to go:

Children exposed to higher levels of a type of pesticide found in trace amounts on commercially grown fruit and vegetables are more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than children with less exposure, a nationwide study suggests.

Researchers measured the levels of pesticide byproducts in the urine of 1,139 children from across the United States. Children with above-average levels of one common byproduct had roughly twice the odds of getting a diagnosis of ADHD, according to the study, which appears in the journal Pediatrics.

Exposure to the pesticides, known as organophosphates, has been linked to behavioral and cognitive problems in children in the past, but previous studies have focused on communities of farm workers and other high-risk populations. This study is the first to examine the effects of exposure in the population at large.

Yes, organophosphates were originally designed to be nerve agents. Nice, huh?

After World War II, American companies gained access to some information from Schrader’s laboratory, and began synthesizing organophosphate pesticides in large quantities. Parathion was among the first marketed, followed by malathion and azinphosmethyl. The popularity of these insecticides increased after many of the organochlorine insecticides like DDT, dieldrin, and heptachlor were banned in the 1970s.

This is interesting. I might have to buy the book.

[I]t isn’t just contraception that delays childbearing in liberal states, and it isn’t just a foolish devotion to abstinence education that leads to teen births and hasty marriages in conservative America. It’s also a matter of how plausible an option abortion seems, both morally and practically, depending on who and where you are.

Whether it’s attainable for most Americans or not, the “blue family” model clearly works: it leads to marital success and material prosperity, and it’s well suited to our mobile, globalized society.

By comparison, the “red family” model can look dysfunctional — an uneasy mix of rigor and permissiveness, whose ideals don’t always match up with the facts of contemporary life.

Sigh.