Apparently it’s more of a selection bias sort of thing.

This week’s New York Times Magazine cover story is an in-depth and pretty devastating critique of three decades of breast cancer awareness campaigns, especially focused on the Susan Komen foundation. The one sentence summary: Komen’s campaigns aren’t helping to cure or prevent cancer, they aren’t dispensing good medical advice, but they are causing women to live in unnecessary fear.

I’m proud of how the people and politicians of Boston reacted to the bombing of the 2013 Marathon and resulting manhunt. But I share a lot of this columnist’s anger at the choices we as a country have made about how we confront terror, and what those choices have cost us.

This guy is my hero. Down with common sense!

NPR’s Planet Money investigates the 14 million Americans on a “hidden” form of welfare — disability. Eye opening.

This analysis makes me feel relatively better about Google’s Chrome Sync and relatively worse about Apple’s iCloud sync. Of course these and any of the other sync security options could change instantly if the vendor releases a browser update (in the case of Chrome a silent one) that modifies the behavior.

Cory Doctorow’s moving tribute to Swartz, 26, who was recently found to have committed suicide. I never knew Aaron, but I’d occasionally see him around Harvard. I recognized him because I followed his blog, digital activism, and standards-making work since I was in high school. He was a brilliant and driven thinker and doer in the digital law and public policy space. He also helped create (or at least rewrite) the early Reddit, crafted the Creative Commons license framework, and helped build the RSS specification. That’s a lot to accomplish in a lifetime, and he did it all in his teenage years and early 20s. He is a few years younger than me, and at times I found him inspiring, at other times inscrutable, but always I kept an eye out for his latest work. Sometimes I wondered — if I had done things differently, been more passionate, just a bit smarter — if I could have been like Aaron. Now, learning about his demons, I’m just sad for him, and for us, who no longer have him around.

The best and most enlightening thing I’ve read so far on why people own and carry concealed weapons.

Bruce Springsteen spills all to America’s Finest News Source

America’s Finest News Source once again offers the best, most spot-on reporting. Isn’t that just a little bit sad?

I am so 100% in favor of this. I really like Monopoly, but no one else does. I like playing it by the rules, but everyone is always surprised and confused by property auctions, and people insist on stupid rules like money for free parking. When played properly, using the actual rules, the game is much more interesting. I didn’t know about the two house rules often used at tournaments, but now that I do I am going to insist on them.

It’s a head-scratcher all right!

Suddenly our new 1,800 sq. ft. home feels positively decadent. I’ve been spending a lot of time perusing Sarah Susanka’s books and drawing up plans. Her initial work seemed generally targeted at highly affluent people who could afford extravagant new McMansions. She tries to convince them to downsize by 1/3 or so on raw square footage and instead put the money into building rich detailing into their new homes by spending more per square foot. Her later books talk about remodeling existing smaller or older houses to make them more livable, which is more relevant to Meghan and I. Not So Big Remodeling is fast becoming my home renovation bible. If this is going to work, I’m going to need to become much more handy around the house!

Author Terry Pratchett speaks out about his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and what it means to his life. He says that dementia research is chronically underfunded and the spectrum of dementia diseases, including Alzheimer’s, is greatly misunderstood by the public. It is a disease with no hope, because there is no cure, and it affects millions of Americans directly (and many more indirectly) as our population ages.

See also, this recent NYTimes op-ed by, among others, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

We need so much more of this sort of thing.

Depending on style of driving, the more correct interval is between 5,000 and 10,000 miles, depending on car model.

The Onion is right on target, as usual.