ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

Especially for online debates: Never quitting an argument does not equal having won. On learning Dragon Dictate (a speech recognition s...

Here's a fun story (from a week ago)  about the lives of female academics.  Well, not all their lives and perhaps nowadays even only sm...

When is the best time for my annual fund-drive (aka begging)?  That is really asking when you (sweet, erudite and generous readers) have the...

What might the statue we call the Venus de Milo depict?  What is she doing? Given her missing arms it's hard to know.  The most recen...

A ten-year-old girl was raped, allegedly by her stepfather, and cannot get an abortion because of the Catholic church, ultimately.  Aborti...

He thinks the LGBT movement would be more understandable if there were more LGBT people.  Like how did a small minority take over our poli...

Don't fall down the stairs.  You can break your shoulder bone in the more sentient of your arms.  It's not only somewhat painful, b...

I read this UK Daily Mail article with a very strong sense of déjà vu again .  Didn't I fairly recently write about it ?  In last Septe...

1.  This study on the fear of the other political party in the US sounds interesting.  I have not read the study itself, so I can't sa...

The city of Baltimore is recovering after demonstrations and rioting this weekend.  The cause of them was the death of Freddie Gray :  Au...

You can send funds.  The New York Times gives a list of aid organizations. I was told that the Lutheran World Federation of Churches is...

So I start this post with the title and have to Google "miscreant!"  That's how directly my posts are channeled from that god...

The Economist has a long and pretty fact-filled article on the consequences of the missing girls in India and China (sex-selective abort...

This is an interesting question, even if I write so myself.  The case for your consideration: The New York Times, The Washington Post an...

Don't you just adore governor Brownback?  He's such an extreme believer in his own little right-wing religious fundamentalist reali...

I've been re-reading many of Terry Pratchett's books, in his memory.  I often come across little jewels (or chocolate truffles) of ...

1.  This article about feminist foreign policy is worthwhile.  A quote: Last month, Saudi Arabia abruptly cut ties with Sweden, recalli...

It's a year since Boko Haram, an extremist Wahhabist terrorist group, captured a group of schoolgirls in northern Nigeria.  More than t...

Economists often argue that this is the ultimate function of corporate profits:  They reward those who bear the risks, and the losses punis...

A couple of readers forwarded me summaries of an evolutionary psychology study about what angle of lower back men * view as the most beauti...