Simon Norfolk is a war photographer, but in a slightly different sense than you’d expect; Norfolk doesn’t focus on images that convey, e.g., a sense of immediacy or suffering, but on scenery and landscape, putting the destruction of war into a different context. It’s interesting stuff, and a curious approach. You can see two of […]

Something brought a Scientific American article entitled “Rethinking Green Consumerism” bubbling to the surface (it’s actually a 2002 article), and I chanced to stumble across it. It’s an interesting article, in a generic and superficial feel-good way. The sub-headline boldy declares “Buying green products won’t be enough to save biodiversity in the tropics. A new […]

Starbucks. It’s a corporate symbol that some people love to love, and others love to hate. So what is it: epitome of the evils of globalization or a righteous sign of progressive business practices? Kim Fellner investigates.

Iraq Coalition Casualty Count offers something it calls fatality metrics, which allows you to instantly create a graph that, say, shows how many coalition forces, by age, have died so far (19.1% of fatalities being 20 or 21). Or you could graph fatalities by state (California leads, but PA’s #4, right after England—which I didn’t […]

In what was a potentially fatal gaffe, some HIV-positive US military personnel were vaccinated against smallpox; had any of the vaccinees been anything more than HIV-positive (i.e., had they had full-blown AIDs), even the weakened smallpox virus present in the vaccine might’ve put a serious crimp in their, um, living. (On a more positive note, […]