What Should You Do If You Find an Atheist In Your Neighborhood?.
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My name is Jeff, and I write this blog. I work as an interface designer in Denver, CO. I am also an amateur musician and an atheist.
Monthly Archives: August 2010
Heavy drinkers outlive nondrinkers
According to a new study, heavy drinkers outlive nondrinkers. Their sample was 55-65 year-olds who had had some kind of recent outpatient care. They followed them for 20 years.
But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.
One possible explanation is that non-drinkers are likely to be less social and more depressed.
Tagged alcohol, death, drinking, health Leave a comment
Taco Bell’s current logo is inspired by Demolition Man
Taco Bell got some huge product placement in the Stallone movie Demolition Man as the only remaining fast food restaurant. The movie featured a futuristic Taco Bell logo with a purple-dominated color scheme.
After the movie, Taco Bell changed their color scheme to match the movie and updated their logo as well.
Tagged demolition man, logos, taco bell 1 Comment
Mosquitoes prefer beer-drinkers
Drinking beer makes you a more attractive prospect for mosquitoes. Or so says Science.
The attractiveness of each volunteer was tested twice: before (first trial) and 15 minutes after (second trial) the consumption of either one litre of dolo (the average amount ingested by consumers at a “cabaret”) or one litre of water. Following oral administration, alcohol is quickly absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract into the blood and metabolised. Fifteen minutes is a sufficient interval for alcohol to be present in blood, breath, urine and sweat.
Dolo is a sorghum beer in Burkina Faso, an African country.
Tagged beer, dolo, mosquitoes Leave a comment
Orgy queen attacked by deposed orgy king
Helen and Kenneth were a couple who hosted orgies together. Then they broke up but tried to continue the whole orgy thing. Unfortunately, Kenneth got jealous when he saw Helen doing it with other people at one of the orgies. I’m not sure what he was expecting.
So that wasn’t working out, and Helen started holding the orgies on her own. Then this happened:
Helen Shields, 43, said Kenneth Stewart squirted lighter fuel over her as he chased her through a house where she was staging a night for members of “The Black Man’s Fan Club”.
Tagged fire, orgies, violence Leave a comment
Cordoba’s logo has the peace sign in it…. for what it’s worth
The designer who made the Cordoba Initiative’s logo by arranging western peace signs in a Muslim-ish flower pattern sighs over the insignificance of his design in the Ground Zero Mosque controversy. For him, the Initiative’s embrace of this western symbol is evidence of their good intentions.
Oh but this is the culture war, and nothing is uncontroversial in the culture war. Back when the Peace symbol was becoming ubiquitous, conservative and Christian groups warned about the nefarious meanings encoded in it. From Time Magazine, 1970:
American Opinion magazine, published by John Birch Society Founder Robert Welch, compared the familiar peace symbol to an anti-Christian “broken cross” carried by the Moors when they invaded Spain in the 8th century. A recent national Republican newsletter noted an ominous similarity to a symbol used by the Nazis in World War II; some experts say it was a letter in an ancient Nordic alphabet. Any resemblance, however, is probably coincidental. The peace design was devised in Britain for the first Ban-the-Bomb Aldermaston march in 1958. The lines inside the circle stand for “nuclear disarmament.” They are a stylized combination of the semaphore signal for N (flags in an upsidedown V) and D (flags held vertically, one above the signaler’s head and the other at his feet).
Which sounds an awful like the present-day right wing’s conspiracy theories about Obama’s nuclear summit logo and this missile defense logo:
Says Big Government’s Frank Gaffney:
Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.
What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.
The evidence is conclusive.
PS I think the lesson for designers in this is that people will receive the message they’re looking for in your design long before they receive the message you actually put there.
Via The Morning News, Wikipedia.
