Details
Category: Swift
Hits: 19994

Genewize http://www.genewize.com/ is a new company offering "100% Product Personalization from Your Personal DNA Assessment." They analyze your DNA to identify certain selected SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and use the data to tweak the ingredients of the nutritional products they want to sell you (containing everything from vitamins to spinach powder).

They previous offered a therapeutic skin health regimen linked to DNA-based skin health assessment. "First introduced in 2005, the Dermagenetics Skin Care System is the first comprehensive system of personalized (mass customized) skin care product manufacturing based on genetic testing that measures single nucleotide polymorphisms (pronounced "snips") in DNA."

Details
Category: Swift
Hits: 10568
Reader Malcolm Dodd informs us that the UK Bus publicity campaign has now raised nearly $300,000, which has enabled them – at this point – to place their “There’s probably no God” signs on over 800 buses throughout the UK, and over 1,000 signs inside the London Underground trains. Stay tuned for more developments!

Details
Category: Swift
Hits: 12191

Reader Pascal Poirier tells us:

I am sure you are aware of the bus ads in London, UK.  In case you were not aware, we had recent developments in Halifax, NS, Canada, with the attempt by Humanist Canada to put the toned-down slogan "You can be good without God" on our buses.  It appears that this true statement was too controversial for the transit authorities.

This campaign was undoubtedly inspired by the currently successful bus-ad campaign in London, England, encouraged and supported by Richard Dawkins. Signs stating "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" are seen all over that city, though Dawkins had reservations about including the word, "probably" in the text...

Details
Category: Swift
Hits: 12690

A correspondent in Norway, Ragnar Borsheim, has excellent news for us. He writes:

I am happy to inform you that the suggested new blasphemy law is not going to happen in Norway. The person behind the new law, the leader of the smallest coalition party the Senterpartiet has withdrawn the whole law and realized that it was all a huge mistake.

Details
Category: Swift
Hits: 11942

Hey, just for fun – for which we have to make room, from time to time – courtesy of reader Steve Ilett in Australia, we’ll send you to www.whitepages.com.au, which gives you a search facility to find businesses in that country.  Some wag – an eminently sensible person, as I see it – has been at work. Go there, and enter “magic shop” in the “Business Name” slot, and “Queensland” in the “State” box, then click on “Search.”

See….?

And Matthew Hu Xinyu, my good friend in Beijing who is with the Beijing Cultural Protection Center [CHP], has informed me that the current year-designation in China incorporates a subtle joke – which you may wish to spring on your Chinese-speaking friends.  The word for “ox” – and this is the Year of the Ox, in China – is “niu,” pronounced “nee-oo,” which is very similar to our pronunciation of the English word “new.” Thus, when you say “Happy New New Year,” you see…  But I’m sure that you can figure it out…

  1. Two big TAM news items!
  2. A Clean Rant
  3. Norway Retreats Back Into the Middle Ages
  4. Quick Clicks on Advanced Silliness