Flu Vaccine Efficacy

Science-Based Medicine » Flu Vaccine Efficacy
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The influenza vaccine is not 100% efficacious in preventing disease, but it is as close to 100% safe, and much safer than the disease.
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Read the whole post (very detailed) at the above link.

Welsh Language

Watch What You Say About Welsh - Boing Boing

It does have vowels, it's not the oldest language in Europe, and, yes, it does have words for modern technologies. Welsh, or Cymraeg as we probably ought to call it, is spoken by more than 580,000 people and was one of the 55 Earth languages chosen to represent our global culture on the Golden Record launched with the Voyager spacecraft in 1977.

But it's still very much a small language and, to English speakers, a weird-looking one, so it's no surprise that tall tales abound. Garic, an evolutionary linguist and Welshman, is out to change that. He's written a series of posts that debunks pop-culture's worst Welsh fallacies and, along the way, makes some interesting points about the way speakers of common languages view the rare and unique tongues of the world...

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New collection of Robert E. Howard stories

Robert E Howard collection, HEROES IN THE WIND: revisit your heroic past - Boing Boing
Yep, my mom used to read me Conan stories when I was a kid (she used to read them herself too).

Beautiful cave video - Lechuguilla (part of the Carlsbad Caverns)

A Tour of the Deepest Cave in the United States - Boing Boing