# oddities
Stephen Fry has a message for pedants who crawl through many a blog's comment threads.
# politics
Newly minted atheists are joining skeptical groups and those groups are not happy about it...
# science
Humor can be the beast way to show the shortfalls of a pseudoscientific idea as shown by XKCD and Scenes From A Multiverse.
# science
Often times, the loudest defenders of a belief aren't trying to convince you. They're trying to convince themselves.
# space
An extrasolar Hot Jupiter called Upsilon Andromedae b has a hot spot in one of the strangest and most awkward possible places in its atmosphere and scientists aren't quite sure why.
# space
The UN is musing about a giant sunshade to cool the planet by reflecting 1% of the light that reaches us. They really don't want to know the price tag...
# politics
The Tea Party is gladly willing to sabotage science, education, technology, and anything else that reminds them that the world is changing because to them, change is scary.
# science
Administrators are drowning in papers and statistics, but they're still incentivizing scientists to keep producing a tsunami of marginally useful papers.
# politics
Christopher Hitchens accurately dissects why very few sane people want to go into Western politics anymore.
# science
Genetic studies confirm that the Black Death was a strain of the bubonic plague making its way through Europe with outbreaks in trade hubs.
# tech
Tron's human/computer gateway certainly seems cool, but it's going to be pretty much impossible to build, ever.
# science
Ragbir Bhathal responds to Weird Things to set the record straight: the story about his detection of laser signals from Gliese 581g are pure fiction.
# politics
Could Earth's population be slowly but surely shrinking over the long term?
# politics
Amazingly, Harrington High School will not be prosecuted for spying on its students at home through school-issued laptops and creating child porn in the process...
# astrobiology
Astronomer Ragbir Bhathal supposedly claims he received a signal from Gliese 581g, but the story behind the claims doesn't seem to make much sense.
