A Fourth of Fireworks

I hope you had a delightful Fourth of July.

If it was a good one, I bet you didn’t have to work. Perhaps you caught up on some sleep. Cooked a real breakfast for once. Who has time to cook bacon and sausage and then cook your scrambled eggs in the pan still glittering with bacon-sausage residue? On the Fourth of July, you do.

Maybe you watched some television that you’d never allot time for: Law & Order reruns, History Channel specials on how states were formed, that new buddy-lawyer show starring Zach Morris and a short guy, a sporting event. Crazy contract fights have left baseball and hockey as the only popular American sports not locked out – and they don’t play hockey in this heat. Oh, the Women’s World Cup, you say? Yeah. Have fun with that.

By about mid-afternoon you were likely planning for a get-together. You were throwing one, your friend was throwing one – it doesn’t matter. You found a shirt that looks good and won’t make you sweat too much. Picked up the beer/soda/BBQ chicken/deep-fried-whatever. Grilled, tossed the old pigskin, and socialized in ways not afforded by office cubes or retail counters or telephone lines.

Then night started to fall. Lazily, as summer nights tend to do. What better way to cap off the day than with some fireworks?

[Author’s Note: There’s an outside chance your Fourth of July was not this delightful – you had to work, you hate freedom, or you aren’t from the United States and couldn’t care less. You can still hit the jump and read about fireworks. Just pretend you had a patriotic day filled with safe drinking, relaxation, and brightly colored explosions.]

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Insidious: A Scary-o-typical Horror Flick

Some horror movies try to surprise you. Not just that they make use of frighteningly surprising images, what with the demons and the things jumping out of closets and the scary LADIES! But a clever horror movie will play with the conventions, take you somewhere unexpected, and generally catch you off guard. Other horror movies will play into the most well-traveled conventions, but draw agonizing attention to just that fact in an effort to appear witty and "meta".

There is a third class of horror movies not characterized by convoluted plot devices, tricky twists and turns, or painful self-reference - they just present you with good, clean, old-fashioned horror situations, and challenge you not to be scared by them. I find these types of movies to be the most effective if done right. Such was the case with Insidious.

The movie is not overly clever or subtle or thought-provoking. It doesn't ask the big questions or make you question everything you thought you knew about horror movies. What it does do is make you jump out of your seat and prevents you from sleeping for nights on end.

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Steph’s Science Corner: The Raw Milk Debate

Send suggestions to science@charge-shot.com!

Public health has been a contentious topic in society since the era of mankind began. Issues such as what we eat, how we treat and prevent disease, and how to increase our lifespan take up more of our attention and occupy more of our news than nearly any other subject of public interest. It is as hotly contested, as violently inflammatory, and as cut-throat as any political, moral, or religious debate in today’s culture.

One of the most divisive topics in current public discourse concerns the body’s most essential need: food. Because eating is a staple of our existence, it ties in moral judgment, social responsibility, and personal freedom. Making the matter even more contentious, food science suffers from the weakness of being not just a science, but interdisciplinary. That means that not only does it bear the doubts, shortcomings, and restrictions of scientific investigation, but it covers a spread of experts from many different fields with vastly different priorities including biology, medicine, and agriculture.

Recently leading the charge in the battlefield of food science is the raw movement – the idea that cooking certain foods compromises their value. The argument asserts that heating destroys naturally-occurring nutrients, eliminating the good stuff with the bad. With vegetables, the matter is straightforward. Eating raw plant matter, if washed, is safe and often preferable. Animal by-products, however, are far more dangerous. Advocates have recently been emerging that reject the traditional treatment processes for milk (the kind we typically buy in the grocery store), preferring instead to drink – and hotly defending the advantages of – raw milk. In other words, milk that comes straight from the cow’s udder.

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Saturday Morning TV: Phoenix Jones

Oh man, Phoenix down!

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Location BS - A Safer Internet is Up To You

As I've said many times (on this blog, and other places too...often to bored faces at parties - oh how I drone on...), I think it's strange (strange in the least, possibly just plain crazy) that people feel the need to systematically document their entire lives on the internet. I don't want to venture into the minutia of the sociological causes/impact of this, not to mention the fact that people are posting things that, in hindsight, they might not want open to the entire world. Nevertheless, my calls for sanity and reason are being treated with the same disregard as all of my other rantings and ravings. That being said, I don't want to scare you, but at least one aspect of our compulsive documentation may be putting us at real danger.

I am discussing, of course, location based services (LBS). LBS's like Foursquare or even features on Facebook and Twitter and Yelp are awesome. They help us find out what our friends are doing, and in turn let us know of some cool ideas for stuff to do.

A site like Foursquare, for example, allows people to "check in" at their favorite restaurants, bars and clubs, parks, museums etc...you get the idea. Foursquare, in an innovative move, added two important aspects to their LBS. Firstly, users get ranked based on how often they use the service, in particular, striving to "check in" from specific locations more than anybody else to become "mayor" of that place. They add to this inclusion of a game like nature to the site by also offering users "badges" for consistent and extraordinary use. By the way,  Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley recently discussed the infancy of the "mayor" idea and how it almost didn't make it into the site - it is, in fact, one of their most popular and innovative features. 

The second incredibly smart thing they do is allow businesses to offer freebies and other coupons to repeat users or "mayors." Already with the support of the core group of social internet users who want to say where they are, along with the wholhearted support businesses, Foursquare is the leader in the field.

In response to the popularity of Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter and Yelp (and probably every other social network out there) have developed their own location services.

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