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I will put some extra pepperoni on my pizza tonight
thanks to John Tierney's column
on the fading evidence linking dietary fat and heart disease. On his
blog, John points out that the low-fat mythology was simply one
example of a fad mechanism called an "informational
cascade" where a "expert consensus" snowball develops around
an initial seed of speculative theory.
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Remember: just because this blog is called "Pun Salad" it doesn't mean
your blogger actually likes salad. (Or puns.)
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If you were looking for something to worry about, though, you might want
to check this New
Scientist article, which reports on an e-crime summit at
Carnegie Mellon last week. "Security experts" are quoted:
They predict voters will increasingly be targeted by internet-based dirty tricks campaigns, and that the perpetrators will find it easier to cover their tracks.
The article is long on speculation, but remember that a lot of botnet activity is linked back to organized crime and (even more speculatively) government officials in Russia and China. Spam "works" by exploiting a small fraction of gullible recipients. Vote fraud using the same techniques could swing a close election. Now are you worried? (Link via Slashdot.) -
Your mileage may differ, but I thought Professor Volokh's story
about left-wing (satirical) hate speech being
mistaken for right-wing (non-satirical)
hate speech pretty funny. Before the truth was
revealed, people were calling for expulsion of the evildoers, but
I would imagine there was a pretty quick about-face on that.
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I've always liked Whoopi Goldberg.
Because she's politically unpredictable.
(Also see this older item from Virginia Postrel.)
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James Lileks is predictable though, in the sense that reading
his Bleats is
predictably worthwhile. How does he do it? Anyway, I especially liked today's
throwaway comment about one of the stars of a B movie he watched.
There is no movie on earth that cannot benefit from the presence of Claude Rains. If I could redo the Star Wars sequel I would have made Yoda look like him and sound like him. Shocked. Shocked am I to gambling find here.
I put every movie that Lileks likes smack into my Blockbuster rental queue.
Oct
10
2007
URLs du Jour
2007-10-10