It's absolutely amazing what big pharma gets away with, but it seems like so few people are aware or the least bit concerned.  We might never know how many people Merck & Co. killed with Vioxx (maybe half a million?).  The more you read, the more you find one scary story …

Now THIS one definitely sounds appropriate for a blog with "conspiracy" in the title!  I've been collecting a bunch of related stories for several months now with the intention of turning it into a blog post.  Sadly I've had way too much other stuff to do lately, so I thought …

"AMERICA has a proud history of drinking on the job. Craftsmen who built the first government buildings in the 17th century were sometimes paid in brandy. The 19th-century railroaders who laid the foundations of modern America were notoriously thirsty."

The Economist

Obviously for the sake of our country I need …

If you have kids, you probably love playing with them and making things together.  One of the best things you can do for them is to encourage imaginative play, and few things enable imagination in a young mind better than a nice lump of play-doh.

After experimenting with several different …

[EDIT 20120-05-13: You can follow these steps (though by now they're already fairly outdated), and end up with a mostly functional home phone system connected to a free Google Voice number.  It will break often, as Google makes changes, and your Asterisk box needs updating, and who knows what else …

This David Foster Wallace speech (read here, or watch here) is one of the most inspirational things I've ever read.  It's great to be reminded to be mindful, to be aware of those knee-jerk reactions and consider whether or not they're completely off base.

"The point is that petty, frustrating …

Can you make yourself smarter?  There's a lot of evidence you can, but it takes a little effort on your part (15 minutes a day is enough to yield pretty significant improvements.)  You can no doubt find something each day that you're spending 15 minutes (or more on) that you …

The harder someone tries to sell you something, the more suspicious you should be.  Why don't more people realize that?  When something is truly great it sells itself.  When it doesn't, throw marketing at it!  Got milk?  Seen a McDonalds add lately?

If you've ever wondered why food makers switched …

I LOVE this excerpt from a Richard Feynman interview (transcribed here) where he responds to a question about the "feeling" of magnets repelling:

"Of course, it's an excellent question. But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example …

It's easy to lose sight of your dreams when you're neck-deep in the day to day stuff you need to do just to survive.  If you are at least taking time to make lists of things you need to get done, and prioritizing them at that, Paul Graham makes a …