This is why I have a profound dislike of religion and all other forms of superstitious thinking. They make good people do bad stuff; to lose touch with reality is a dangerous thing…
Parents sacrifice 4-yr-old girl to become rich
Sanjay Pandey, Lucknow, Aug 18, DHNS:
Lust for wealth drove a poverty- stricken couple to sacrifice their own four-year-old daughter at a village in Uttar Pradesh’s backward Sitapur district, about 90 km from here.The couple, identified as Srikrishna and Ramdevi, were told by a “tantrik” exorcist that they would become rich if they sacrificed their daughter, according to police sources here. Acting on the advice of a “tantrik”, a “havana kund”a pit in which the fire is lit and yajna is performed, was prepared in the courtyard of the couple for the rituals late on Monday night.The parents then put their daughter Kanni into the pit amid chanting of “mantra” and lit the fire. The girl, who was also mercillessely beaten, was half buried in the pit. The parents had stuffed a piece of cloth in the mouth of the little girl so that her cries could not be heard by any one in the village, sources said.The badly burnt body of the girl was later buried on the same spot by digging a deep pit, sources said. The grandmother of the girl was also present during the rituals, sources said.The ghastly incident came to light on Tuesday when neighbours found vermillion, flowers, incense sticks and other items used in the rituals and suspected that some “exorcism rituals” might have been performed there.As the crowds of villagers swelled before Srikrishna’s house, the couple, sensing trouble, and others fled from there through the back door. The villagers informed the police, which dug the area and brought out the badly burnt body of Kanni. “The body had injury marks on the head and neck, which shows that she must have been beaten for offering resistance,” according to the police.A case had been registered by the police and a massive manhunt had been launched to nab the culprits, who have been absconding.Barely a couple of days back a nine- year-old girl was buried alive by her own uncle in Uttar Pradesh’s Gonda district to please the goddess so that he could become rich.
I have 850,000 Aeroplan (Air Canada/Star Alliance) frequent flier miles and now it looks like they are not worth all that much. Yesterday I decided it was time to start using some of them for two return tickets Panama City – Montreal. Last time I booked Aeroplan tickets was about 5 or 6 years ago and there was one simple cost: a $25 admin fee. So when we went to Thailand on points, it was actually free for all intents and purposes.
This time around, things started pretty good as the lady announced to me that there would be a $30/ticket booking fee. Not bad, $5 more after 5 years, but once we were done with finding and selecting suitable flights she announced that I had to pay airport taxes and security fees in all three involved countries (Panama, USA, Canada) as well as the infamous “fuel surcharge”. Grand total? $800.24 CDN.
So my two “free” tickets obtained through frequent flyer miles ended up costing me only $400 less than if I had purchased them outright from Continental or Mexicana, and then we would have received about 12,000 miles back for this instead of spending 80,000.
I think from now on I will use my miles for car rentals and hotel rooms, which may be what the airlines are hoping for.
We went to Isla Contadora in the Pearl Islands last week, hoping to see some humpback whales and dolphins. We unfortunately got rained-out, but on the way back we saw these 12 boobies resting on a floating log. We thought they were all the more common yellow-footed boobies, but on closer examination, one of them was a blue-footed booby, trying to blend in!
12 boobies on a log
Blue-footed Booby
Adobe has just released anew version of my favourite photo processing software, Lightroom 3 and it really kicks butt. I’ve been using it since Beta 1 came out and I can tell you that it is a big step forward. They have improved and streamlined the UI, improved performance, added new features like lens correction and a greatly improved watermarking facility, etc.Press Release
Adobe Lightroom Site
Free Lightroom 3 Learning Center
I watched PBS’ Frontline – The Vaccine War last night. Overall a pretty good show well put together and well balanced. Of course in their attempt to provide a balanced view they gave a bit too much time to unfounded points of view, but that’s the nature of the beast.
Jenny McCarthy
I cringe every time I see Jenny McCarthy open her mouth and talk about science and medicines, two areas she’s completely unqualified to comment on. But here’s an interesting tidbit I found this morning: McCarthy changed her story as strong evidence that there is no link between thimerosal or the MMR vaccine and autism has been piling up. She went from:
“Right before his MMR shot, I said to the doctor, ‘I have a very bad feeling about this shot. This is the autism shot, isn’t it?’ And he said, ‘No, that is ridiculous. It is a mother’s desperate attempt to blame something,’ and he swore at me, and then the nurse gave [Evan] the shot,” she says. “And I remember going, ‘Oh, God, I hope he’s right.’ And soon thereafter — boom — the soul’s gone from his eyes.
To:
I don’t think it was just the MMR shot that caused any kind of trigger with autism. I think it was a compilation of so many shots to a kid that obviously had some autoimmune disorders. So I would saymaybe a couple of months, a month or so after the MMR, I started to notice some physical ailments such as constipation, rashes, eczema. That was like the first little sign. And then the train just kind of descended from there.
Now, that’s not really surprising, it is a hallmark of the pseudo-science crowd to move the goal posts every time their position becomes untenable. But it is despicable that people who rare totally unqualified to comment on the science and medical aspects of something like vaccines and autism use their celebrity as a platform to convince people that vaccines are bad. These folks don’t even understand the difference between correlation and causation. Because an event happened soon after another one, doesn’t mean the first one is the cause of the second one. It just so happens that autism is most often diagnosed right around the same time that kids receive several vaccines, but research shows clearly that the two are not related. As the evidence comes in, the anti-vax crowd just keeps moving the goal posts. Meanwhile, valuable time and money that could be spent on actual autism research is wasted on this instead.
Andrew Wakefield
In related news, Andrew Wakefield, the crooked doctor who started the whole anti-vax movement has lost his MD license.
This guy managed to see 219 different bird species and photograph 70 of them during a 4 day trip to Panama. Awesome!
The following gallery is of over 70 bird species I photographed on a short trip to Panama courtesy of Raul Arias de Para who invited me to stay at the wonderful Canopy Tower, on April 17 and April 18, the morning of April 21, and the Canopy Lodge, April 19 and April 20 (dates are linked to the blogs I wrote on the day).
Taxonomy follows Carlos Bethancourt’s “The Canopy Tower and Canopy Lodge Checklist” (a must-have on trips like this) which is based primarily on the “Seventh Edition of the American Ornithologists Union’s ‘Checklist of the birds of North America 1998′ ” (including revisions up to and including the 48th Supplement in 2007)
In total 219 species were seen well enough to be identified (the full trip list is here), either by myself or – more usually – by the guides (who are world-class) and then seen by myself. I photographed over a third of them (some better than others it has to be said!), and I’ll be adding more images below as I get a chance to format them. Conditions in forests are notoriously difficult to work with, but a good number of species gave reasonable views after some encouragement from the guides via recordings, and many of the birds around both the Canopy Tower and Canopy Lodge are habituated to people. It’s perhaps interesting to note that in less than sixty hours of birding I photographed all six species of Panama’s trogons, eight hummingbirds, three species of wrens, and a number of tanagers (inc Euphonias) and antbirds.
Burch’s conversation with his rowing coach epitomizes the problem:“I want you to keep your heart rate at 85% of max for the next hour and a half.” “Why?” “Because it’s the best way to improve your fitness.” “How do you know?” “Because I’ve done it before and it worked. Because that’s what the people who win the Olympics do. I know, I’ve trained some of them.” “But has anyone actually done an experiment?” “What on earth are you talking about?”
This book is Burch’s answer to his coach’s question. Medicine’s “beautiful idea” is that we should test all hypotheses and beliefs using the kind of tests that are reliable for determining the truth. Instead of going by tradition, authority, theory, common sense, or personal experience, we now have effective tools to find out for sure whether a treatment really works.
Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It
