Category: Interesting Reads

The short version: A definition of terrorism, how the media magnifies terrorist acts, and why we only see the negative side of war on television.

Continue reading “On terrorism, the media, and the Iraq war”

The Internal Revenue Service and private tax preparers have agreed that a free electronic filing program will be offered for 2006 tax returns without solicitations for refund loans that sometimes carry high interest charges and fees.

The I.R.S. said Tuesday that the Free File Alliance, a coalition of tax preparation software manufacturers that make their software products available free, would no longer include side offerings like Refund Anticipation Loans in their programs.

I see this as a smart move. The people most likely to be hurt by this system in the past were the lower income earners in our country. While taking away the loans program will mean these people will have to wait longer for their refund, it also means they are less likely to be preyed upon unscrupulous tax shops. Many of these loans had exceedingly high interest rates, putting a hefty penalty on people who traditionally are less financially savvy and therefore less likely to realize they are being taken advantage of. (via The Consumerist)

[tags]IRS does away with loan adverts alongside free e-filing service[/tags]

I’m guessing almost anyone who knows anything about the pyramids in Egypt thinks they were built via masses of slave laborers, pulling huge blocks up ramps around the structure and dragging them in to place. However, this is an often contested theory of pyramid building. Recently, The Times Online put up an article with more about what we know (or think we know) and think about how the pyramids were built. Using X-Rays, a plasma torch (no, I don’t know how that figures in to the work) and electron microscopes, scientists at the French National Aerospace Research Agency have declared there are two kinds of blocks: natural cut quarry-stone and man-made cement blocks.

Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist.

The stones, say the historians and archeologists, were all carved from nearby quarries, heaved up huge ramps and set in place by armies of workers. Some dissenters say that levers or pulleys were used, even though the wheel had not been invented at that time.

. . .

The pair [behind this study] believe that the concrete method was used only for the stones on the higher levels of the Pyramids. There are some 2.5 million stone blocks on the Cheops Pyramid. The 10-tonne granite blocks at their heart were also natural, they say. The professors agree with the “Davidovits theory” that soft limestone was quarried on the damp south side of the Giza Plateau. This was then dissolved in large, Nile-fed pools until it became a watery slurry.

Unfortunately:

The concrete theorists say that they will be unable to prove their theory conclusively until the Egyptian authorities give them access to substantial samples.

I propose we have a dance-off to settle the controversy, winning dancers’ theory becomes fact!

An extra bit of interesting pyramid building trivia is available via a clickable pop-up. I really liked this theory:

A character called Seth is said to have communicated through a Ouija board that in Egypt, “people would visualise a pyramid in their imagination, then through their chanting, the use of certain vowels and picthes, they actually changed the air where that building was going to be”

Rawk 0n!!! Man, I wish I could learn the proper chants, vowels, and pitches necessary to cause air to change into a pyramid wherever I visualized it. That would sooooo help me score points with the chicks. And because this information comes from a Ouija board, you know it has to be true.

[tags]Pyramid building theories, How the pyramids were built, Ouija board and the building of the pyramids[/tags]

I know this is old news. I still want to post it.

I despise Nancy Grace nearly as much as I despise Bill O’Reilly. So I was not at all upset when I heard that she’s being sued for the wrongful death of Melinda Duckett. You might remember Ms. Duckett as the young lady from Florida whose 2-year-old son disappeared mysteriously. Nancy Grace suckered this young lady into giving an “interview” on the disappearance only to spend most of the time badgering her.

The parents of a woman who committed suicide shortly after a grilling by Nancy Grace today filed a lawsuit against the TV host, claiming that their daughter was driven to her death by the hard-charging former prosecutor. In a wrongful death lawsuit, the parents of Melinda Duckett charge that Grace duped their daughter into an interview about Duckett’s missing two-year-old son, Trenton. That interview, which aired on Grace’s CNN Headline News show after Duckett’s death, was more of a cross-examination, with Grace peppering the 21-year-old woman with questions about her whereabouts at the time of her son’s late-August disappearance. On September 8, a day after her interview with Grace, Duckett used a shotgun to kill herself.

Ms. Duckett may indeed be responsible for her child’s disappearance. I don’t know. There certainly are some legitimate questions raised in the whole situation based on what has gone on and what has been found during the investigation. But Nancy Grace is a damn (annoying) talking head now, not the investigator responsible for finding out what happened. She needs to quit acting like she actually matters and go back to just annoying viewers rather than viewers *and* guests. The Smoking Gun article has all nine pages of the legal complaint.

[tags]Nancy Grace named in wrongful death suit, Nancy Grace sued for annoying someone to suicide[/tags]