Funkbase Alpha

Most of the science stuff I post comes from The Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait. You can visit is outstanding blog at:

 

 

Between posts about letting you know how the earth will be destroyed, or pimping his books he fights the good fight against the epic stupidity of the celebrity fueled wooo medicine movement. His primary target: the anti vaccination movement. Or, in the interest of framing the argument: the pro-disease movement.

 

So:

 

And (not the BA):

 

Simply put: the anti-vax crowd aims to set back public health a century. They aim to bring back polio. Their actions are already having consequences.  Parents are refusing to vaccinate their children due to the irrational fear that vaccines cause autism. A fear fueled by discredited research, "experts" in "alternative medicine," lawyers out to make a quick buck and of course: opinionated, yet ignorant celebrities.

 

Under the guise of "making a personal decision for their families" people are putting others at risk. The effectiveness of vaccinations is dramatically reduced when the percentage of vaccinated individuals drops below a critical threshold. It is fully possible to get a disease that you are vaccinated against when enough people around you are not vaccinated.

 

Think about that.

 

 

 

Clicky Clicky - While you can.

 

The happy news is we just bought a new house. The bad news is that it is not served by Verizon's awesome FiOS service. Having spent almost two years on FiOS moving back to Comcast is a real jolt, and I don't mean that in a good way.

 

With fios you just had a super big net pipe. Want to stream that HD demo from Gametrailers? No problem. Click and watch. With Comcast it just sits there buffering, throwing up numbers like a random number generator.

 

Miss this weeks BSG? No problem. Go up to your fav torrent site and grab it in HD. On Comcast? Good luck not blowing your ratio as they nerf your seeding.

 

Comcast's DNS servers are slow. Using OpenDNS results in odd behavior with my router.

 

But the worst part? The advertising for Comcast and their "fiber optic network." What fiber? In the ground a few miles from here? I've got old school copper coming out of the ground here.

 

Comcast tells me they are serving up 16/2 service. And their caching transparant proxy makes it look that way when you hit speedtest.net, but in reality it is nowhere near that fast.

 

Update: it's midnight a few days after the original post. I'm getting decent speeds now. I guess the neighbors have gone to bed. Still, not the best experience.