jenk

The Ferrett has some interesting musings on evaluating news content by signal-to-noise ratio - and on how it's affected by an individual's reading vs listening capacity.

NY Times' buzzwords list, including "lolcat", "e-mail bankruptcy", "FTW" and "walkshed".

Also from the Times, 101 appetizers in 20 minutes or less and a review of a book on how discredited treatments may work for individuals anyway.

[P]lacebos have as venerable and honorable a history as just about any medication, and are better studied than most.

Dr. Bausell explores the science behind placebos in detail: the pain relief they afford is reliable and reproducible, and for some reason tends to linger in memory as even stronger than it really is.

But is that placebo-generated pain relief real or imaginary? Patients generally roll their eyes when the argument gets to this stage, for as Dr. Bausell points out, one perfectly reasonable response to the question would be, “Who cares?”

And from The Onion: Web-Browser History A Chronicle Of Couple's Unspoken Desires :)