A growing peeve of mine lately, which I attribute to rubbing off from Christine (soon to be doctor of Biological Anthropology), has been how mainstream media and even publications with a more science/technical readership (like Wired) make blatantly wrong statements about Darwinism/evolution in relation to the religious right's attempts to have schools teach "Intelligent Design" as part of its larger "moral" crusade of telling Americans what they can and can not do/think. (Yes, I am the king of run on sentences) In contrast there is a great article in the latest New Yorker about "Intelligent Design" that everyone should check out. It does a good job going over just exactly what the "science" behind the political movement is and makes well informed responses to them.

You really have to just go see this for yourself.

According to the website:

The Features of Vitamin C Hand Shower
1 Perfect Chlorine Removal.
2 Change the Water(weak acid)
3 Water Saving (50%)
4 Convient to use in low water pressure.
5 Anion radiation.

Vitamin C Hand shower is effective for
* Atopy skin and allergy sufferers
* Infant and children
* Asthma sufferers
* Irritated-eyes after shower
* Shining your hair
* Women and children with sensitive skin
* Skin disease
* Who dyes hair often

(From the user blogs because there's a whole lot to the "organic" issue. Check out the USDA's National Organic Program and the California Organic Foods Act of 1990. -chris)

Just wanted to point out an interesting article about Horizon's "organic" milk over at Salon.com. (If you don't have a subscription to salon.com you can click the link to see one of their ads for a free single day pass.)

... Horizon is emblematic of 21st century agriculture. It's a brand of White Wave Foods, itself a division of $10 billion Dean Foods, the largest milk bottler in the country.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is a system of remotely storing and retrieving it using devices called RFID tags/transponders. An RFID tag is a small object, such as an adhesive sticker, that can be attached to or incorporated into a product that contains a unique identifier. The RFID transponder then read the tag wirelessly via radio frequency. You've most likely to have come across them as anti-theft tags on DVDs in the form of a square sticker that has a spiral shaped metal foil inside, cards you hold up against a reader to access secure areas (ex: buildings, parking lots, rooms, etc), or electronic highway toll payments (ex: EZ Pass, FasTrak, I-Pass, etc). RFIDs are currently being researched as a potential replacement of UPC (Universal Product Code) barcodes. The idea being that if every item in a store/warehouse had a RFID one could in theory have a real time inventory of what is on the shelf/warehouse and what needed to be stocked/reordered. The biggest constraint keeping retailers from using RFID at the moment is the cost, currently a RFID tag costs about $0.40 each. Ideally if the cost dropped below $.05 it would become more economically viable and adopted.

New York City is trying out a new high tech trash called "Big Belly" that runs on solar power, automatically compacts trash to 1/4 of its size, displays a red light when its full and wirelessly calls the to get emptied when needed. In theory these "smart trash cans" would be more efficient and reduce the consumption of diesel fuel used by only being picked up when full.

Cell Phone Turns Into Sunflower
A materials company, Pvaxx Research & Development, and the University of Warwick in the UK have developed a biodegradable polymer and used it in a prototype cellphone case. The cover of the case has an actual sunflower seed embedded in it. Theoretically, when you're trading up to a new phone, you plant the cover of the case and it provides nutrients to the seed as the gigantic sunflower grows. Of course, the rest of your phone still goes to a landfill where it leaches out heavy metals into the municipal water supply while the "green" cover is grabbing all the media attention on CNN.