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No Danger, How A Stranger Can Be A Game Changer - A New Book About Making 'Small' Talk

The future career arc for my house is a library bed-and-breakfast. It will be just like it sounds...

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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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On a science site, we can make anything about science, including religious holidays.    Of course, there are some things that we can never know, because they involve the subjective nature of people and a history that's necessarily muddled.    We can't get people to agree on what happened during the Bush presidency despite millions of monkeys writing about it on the internet so deciphering what happened and why some 2,000 years ago is a special sort of impossible.(1)
There was a time when it was virtually impossible not to believe in God.   That made sense; life had (and certainly still has) many mysteries and a divine hand made sense of an irrational world, at least in the sense that you could believe in one supernatural thing rather than many.

But over time two important things happened that should have killed religion; the world got 'smaller' in the sense that a lot more information about people and cultures became available and science was able to explain a much larger, very fundamental and far-reaching set of things about the world in terms of natural laws.
Every once in a while people ask me about various features or functionality so, since it's a Saturday on a holiday weekend and there won't be as many people reading as usual (who want good science and not rubbish from me) I figure this is a good time.

1) The comment tracker in the upper right is my default way to know what is going on.   Why?  Because I have a lot of people on my friend list so if one of you has commented on an article, the comment tracker tells me; that basically means the community has already done the work telling me what is worth talking about.
It's an idea so brilliant, I wish I had thought of it (though that gimmicked Google street view art project Josh linked to made me a bit jealous as well) ... in preparation for the upcoming Star Trek movie you can make yourself into a Star Trek character.   Is it perfect?   Well, no, anything that requires some manual input in a system I don't yet understand will be quirky but that is mostly my fault.    Side by side, the pic I gave them and what they said is my Star Trek character. Not too bad, actually, though I seemed to have set the width for the eyes strangely (you'll see what I mean if you try it).
I'm not usually much for video - text allows me to do three other things at the same time whereas video occupies two of my senses and annoys me when I am playing guitar.    And I would like to ban all use of "X Whisperer" after the name of every person who thinks they have something clever to say.

  But when someone I have never heard of (which means nothing, I am no microbiology expert) on a site I have never heard of(ditto regarding pop science) does something terrific in an interesting, elegant fashion,  I am willing to kill 18 minutes of my life not being ADD, or whatever they call people like me who usually have to do multiple things at once.  


So thanks Bonnie Bassler ... and you too Ted.com.

A team of Oregon State University researchers say they have implemented a classroom-based intervention that reduces the amount of violent TV that children watch - by 18 percent among first- through fourth-grade children.  And that's good, they say, because youth violence is a big issue, though not so much as 30 years ago when everyone assumed we would be living out scenarios from either "The Warriors" or "Escape From New York" by now.