I do loves me some periodic tables, and this might be my favorite one so far. (via Boingboing)
All 50 states, ranked by religiousness, along with other statistics. Now we all know that correlation does not equal causation, but damn. (via Digg)
One jackass sticks an M80s worth of low-grade explosives in his underpants, and everybody loses their shit about the horrible threat of terrorism. Then the TSA ups the overreaction ante by enacting rules so infuriatingly pointless that even the recently exhumed and reanimated corpse of Niccolò Machiavelli suggested “They may be taking this whole ineffective bureaucracy thing a bit too far”.
Thankfully, someone who isn’t a complete fuckwit decided to crunch the numbers and see what sort of threat terrorism actually poses. The answer is, of course, almost none. Your chances of dying in a terrorist attack are so infinitesimally small, you would need to fly to the moon and back twenty four thousand times before you were likely to see someone blow up their own crotch in the name of Allah.
So here we are, pissing away half a trillion dollars a year on “homeland security”, while the actual risk posed by terrorism practically zero. Meanwhile, when the first guy in 8 years actually does try to sneak a bomb onto a plane, none of the security theater at the airports manages to catch him until after he detonates his skivvies.
Man, those two unnecessary wars may have been expensive, and we may have lost the good faith of the world by torturing and killing people for no particular reason, and sure, we’ve given up most of our constitutional rights for the illusion of security, but at least the system works, right?
For fuck’s sake.
(infographic via Gizmodo, but you can’t blame them for the rant)
This lovely infographic from Susanna Hertrich’s Reality Checking Device illustrates the nearly-perfect inverse relationship between how dangerous something is, and how big a fuss the media makes about it. Gotta love that “infotainment”. (via Information is Beautiful)
Memes have a short lifespan. They’re the coolest thing in the world for about a month, and then you’re so sick of them you want to kill the entire internet for not dropping it already.
The song chart meme is the exception to the rule. This will never stop being awesome.
I haven’t seen the film yet (likely won’t until it is available from the Usual Sources), but having read the comics, I suspected this would be a hotly debated issue. (via Digg)
