a waste of money

In the category of wasting time and money, we have a not-surprising DNA study conducted on Thoroughbreds. It concluded that all Thoroughbreds were descended from three stallions and about twenty-five mares. The study also concluded that one of the stallions was the most influential.

Okay, perhaps if you’re not a horse-person, this is news. It doesn’t take much research on Thoroughbreds to discover that the breed was indeed founded by the breeding of the Byerley Turk, the Godolphin Barb and the Darley Arabian to a select group of mares. It also doesn’t take much research to discover that although he had a book written about him, the Godolphin Barb isn’t considered as influential as the other two. Almost all children interested in horses find out these facts with just a little bit of reading since these foundation stallions are repeated in nearly every equine reference book. Add the fact that every purebred horse’s bloodlines are carefully recorded at birth, and you understand why I consider this research a waste of time and money.

Fortunately, it was funded by a private foundation and not public grant money. Still, it was an awful lot of effort to tell the world something that was already quite well known. Next up: a study to discover why horses like grain.

gender-based education

Scientists are constantly studying the human brain. They’ve long been fascinated with the differences between the sexes, even more so when they are able to actually prove a behavioral theory with biology. Some recent studies have been about the developmental and learning differences between boys and girls.

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a creative malcontent

If you want to see how blogs can be used for more than chronicling someone’s sex life, hop on over and view the President’s blog. 😉 Someone pointed me to this otherwise I would’ve never thought to look for it.

As a longtime fan of The Onion, I really like this blog. Political differences aside, this sort of facetiouness is a time-honored American tradition in a new format. Benjamin Franklin would probably get a kick out of it.

further invasion of privacy

I meant to write this a couple weeks ago, but better late than never.

Announcing an all-new, all-invasive method of displaying your personal information on the Internet! Zabasearch! Not only do they list your previous addresses and any other information they can find, each and every person in their database now has their own blog! And anyone can post anything they want on said blog!

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