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POPSGiant Turkey Chases Boston Woman, Pecks Bottom Repeatedly When dispatched to the scene of a turkey, Verrier offers advice instead. He tells people not to feed them, not to be intimidated by them, and to keep their distance. Still, some people cannot help themselves. They need to be near the turkeys. Distance-shmistance, we want to be near the turkeys. I, for one, am against the city of Boston trying to regulate mutually consensual human-turkey behavior. A light ass-pecking never hurt anyone, am I right? Even though this incident happened right near my apartment, I have not been lucky enough to experience any super-sized turkeys on my errands, sadly. Look at the size of that sucker...he's gotta be like 12 feet tall! :)
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POPSThe Biggest Threat to the West Lies Within Itself, Not with Islam Simon Jenkins on threats to peace and democracy. This defeatism led the American Congress to allow its president to authorise torture and detention without trial in what Senator Robert Byrd called “the slow unravelling of the people’s liberties”. It enabled a British Home Office to curb free speech and habeas corpus. It arms police, fortifies buildings and impedes the free movement of citizens. It makes every Christian suspicious of every Muslim.
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POPSAmazing Shark Pictures Off South African Coast "To see a perfectly streamlined great white slowly cruising in clear water with shafts of light bouncing off its back is like watching a sports car effortlessly cruise past you on the freeway. It is just one of those moments that makes you appreciate a beautiful creation."
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POPSScientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol “Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.
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POPSCan the Singularity Save Us From Ourselves? Persons who believe firmly in the inevitability of The Singularity might be surprised to learn that the default human society is the closed society, resistant to change. Most of them have never known anything but open societies, born of western civilization’s restless urge to expand intellectual horizons. They live in an exceptional time, in an exceptional society, yet somehow believe it to be the human default. That type of blindness comes from forgetting to study history.
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POPSPolygamy is the key to a long life Men, by contrast, can reproduce well into their 60s and even 70s and 80s, and most researchers assumed this explained their longevity. But Lummaa and colleague Andy Russell wondered whether other factors explained the long lifespan of men, such as a grandfather effect. If female survival is the main explanation for male longevity, then monogamous and polygamous men would live for about the same length of time. Instead, it seems that fathering more kids with more wives leads to increased male longevity. Men, then, live long because they're fertile well into their grey years. The explanation could be both social and genetic. Men who continue fathering kids into their 60s and 70s could take better care for their bodies because they have mouths to feed. But evolutionary forces acting over thousands of years could also select for longer-lived men in polygamous cultures.
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POPSBrave New World of Digital Intimacy 
It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.
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POPSFish have personalities "The recognition that behavioral syndromes exist in a wide range of animal species is a key development in the understanding of animal behavior,"
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POPSI believe "I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." Neil Gaiman
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POPSAn awesome way of putting it... i was raised to feed both "wolves." On July 6th, 07, i killed the first one. P.S. i will never forget that date. JayGurl (Thanks to my first clipmarks follower: righthand)
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POPSDrug tries to offset 10,000 years of evolution Gene therapies, expected some time between 2015 and 2020, promise to correct this genetic problem caused by nature, but many obese people do not want to wait. They are hoping that Nastech’s new nasal spray can provide a solution now. Within 20 to 35 minutes after taking a whiff, this new drug moves quickly through the nasal lining and into the bloodstream, sending a message to the brain that our tummy is full. So far the drug has had no negative side effects. PYY is undergoing clinical trials now, and is expected to be in drug stores by 2009 or 2010. Obesity is the 2nd leading cause of preventable death in America, so this drug offers a great chance for more people to improve their health and get ready to enjoy our “magical future”.
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POPS15 Hacks To Enhance Google Reader Some useful hacks to enhance Google Reader experience; like being able to read the actual feed within reader (not just excerpt), adding a searchbox to the reader or changing the look and feel. You need Firefox for all and also GreaseMonkey extension for some.
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POPSAsk the Atheist This site was created to provide a resource for people who are curious about atheism and to counter some misunderstandings about this way of looking at the world
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