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Every year, around this time, I’m always amazed by the number of people I meet who are coughing and sneezing and hacking away. I say to them, "You didn’t get a flu shot–you can get one in the drug store for around $20 now," and they reply something like, "There are dangerous nanotubes inside vaccines," or "Flu shots GIVE you the flu." When I ask them where they heard that, they always reply, "I read it on the internet." And they believed it implicitly.

There used to be a song that said, "How do I know? The Bible tells me so!" That seems to have been replaced by "How do I know? The internet tells me so."
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Certainly very strange, but I have to ask: he says that he was going up on his roof to get footage. But why? Does he do it every day? He doesn’t explain. While this sound is indeed very weird, it’s also true that faking something like this would be very easy.
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Computers can do more than identify psychopaths–they can also give us a clue about who wrote the Bible.

The books of the Bible–both the Old Testament (or Torah) and the New Testament–were written by unknown authors. They are "named," but scholars doubt that these are their actual names so, except for the letters in the New Testament that were penned by Paul, the Bible was written by Anonymous. But a new computer program may be able to identify them.
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Are there are more people alive today than have ever lived? Earth’s population reached seven billion in October. We need to figure out how that compares with the number of people who have lived before us. The problem is, how do you figure out how many people have ever lived, and where do you start?

The normal starting point is when Homo sapiens first walked the earth, about 50,000 years ago, so you have a starting point and an end figure, but it’s the time in between that’s the problem. In BBC News, Wesley Stephenson quotes demographer Wendy Baldwin as saying, "For 99% of that time there is no data.
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