Month: May 2013

Scientology Photoshop

thankfully for religions everywhere, photoshop is there to help with any miracles you may wish to procure.

The Washington Times reported that the Church of Scientology denies that it doctored this photo. We compared Scientology’s photo of the crowd (which it estimated at 2500) against photos taken by our correspondents (the crowd was more like 450 people) and pointed out that an entire row of shrubs had somehow been erased and there were people seemingly standing in a street that was actually empty. The church has been caught manipulating crowd shots in the past to inflate attendance at its events.

Mars is brutal

Mars One wants to establish a human settlement on Mars, and fund this decade-long endeavor by involving the whole world as the audience of an interactive, televised broadcast of every aspect of this mission, from the astronaut selections and their preparations to the arrival on Mars and their lives on the Red Planet.

There are already over 80k applicants and there is only one way to get voted off the island: out the airlock.

2023-01-12: A cogent anti-Mars case

we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.

The Underground Recovery

Not only is a cashless society farther away than some think, we are actually seeing an increase in the use of cash all over the world. Off-the-books activity also helps explain a mystery about the current economy: even though the % of Americans officially working has dropped dramatically, and even though household income is still well below what it was in 2007, personal consumption is higher than it was before the recession, and retail sales have been growing briskly. The difference probably reflects workers migrating into the shadow economy. “It’s typical that during recessions people work on the side while collecting unemployment. But the severity of the recession and the profound weakness of this recovery may mean that a lot more people have entered the underground economy, and have had to stay there longer.”