About Josh Clark
Josh Clark is a senior writer at HowStuffWorks.com and, along with Chuck Bryant, serves as co-host of the “Stuff You Should Know” podcast. Josh attended the University of Georgia, where he studied anthropology and history and took off to start an alternative newspaper with six core classes left until graduation. He regrets nothing. When he gets the chance, Josh likes to while away his weekends watching "Magnum P.I." on DVD in his pajamas with his three sneaky dogs. According to the Death Clock, Josh has until 2041 to live, which he finds suspect.
Most Recent: Josh Clark Postings
How Booze Gave Rise to Civilization
by Josh Clark | February 2, 2010
Somewhere around 10,000 or so years ago something big happened to humanity. We stopped wandering around, pulling berries from shrubs and jumping out of trees onto gazelles to feed ourselves. We settled down. We chose the most desirable plants from our surroundings and cultivated them into crops that could reliably produce sustenance for us. We chose the tastiest, least dangerous animals we could find and taught them to stay in pens until we got around to slaughtering them. This moment in human history (a moment that developed over thousands of years) is called the Neolithic Revolution, and not for nothing.
The True Story behind “The Men Who Stare at Goats”
by Josh Clark | February 1, 2010
If you haven’t seen The Men Who Stare at Goats, I can’t hate you for it. It was largely panned by word of mouth and critics, and its producers opted (I think wisely) to not give anything away in the trailers. It was a good movie, though and I wish so badly that you’d go see it. Please, just go see it. Why won’t you go see it?
So, the premise of the movie (and the book it’s based on) is a military battalion assembled and trained to engage in deadly combat using telekinesis, spy using remote viewing and other types of generally scientifically unfounded techniques of the mind as soldiers. The goats in the title are test subjects used to demonstrate the mental power of the soldiers to kill another being just by concentrating on it. What’s awesome is that not only is it based largely on fact, one of the main characters has come out to correct the author. There was indeed, at least one goat.
The Difference Between a Sociopath and a Psychopath
by Josh Clark | January 26, 2010
Chemical Ali was hanged yesterday in Iraq. He was the cousin of Saddam Hussein. Under his cousin’s regime, Ali Hassan al-Majid ordered and orchestrated, among other things, the 1988 chemical weapons drops that killed 5,000 of his own Kurdish countrymen. A year before that, he was the official in charge of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Kurds in Iraq with poison gas. He ordered the survivors be killed. Ali liked the chemical weapons, which is how he got his nickname, and, not coincidentally, why he was hanged.
On PRI’s The World today, Barim Hasali, the Prime Minister of Kurdistan, is introduced as a person who opposes the death penalty. He made a special exception for Ali. “I am against the death penalty,” Hasali said. “But I have to admit: In the case of people like Ali Hassan al-Majid, I cannot be true to my feelings about the death penalty.”
So you may have heard about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to reverse longstanding limitations that banned corporations from directly contributing financially in elections. It’s kind of a big deal.
As reported in the Washington Post, for a few decades now, corporations have been limited to contributing to political action committees, which have set limits of $5,000 per calendar year, and kept corporations away from contributing to a candidate directly. Of course, there are always loopholes: Corporations have a way of strongly suggesting to its rising stars that contributing to a certain campaign would probably be good for the old career. Maybe even those employees’ bonuses later in the year will reflect an additional amount of the same sum they contributed. So you’ve got a few execs writing $5,000 checks to a Political Action Committee. It’s disingenuous, but tolerable. The limits for individual campaigns are even narrower: $2,400 per candidate, per election.
The outpouring of aid to Haiti following the earthquake that left the country even worse off than it is normally is heartening. Thanks to our lightning-fast telecom infrastructure, we can send $10 to Red Cross relief efforts on the ground just by texting “Haiti” to 90999. We can also hop onto any number of sites, including Whitehouse.gov which is serving as a kind of clearing house for relief organization’s contact info, and send money via credit card.
And just as 21st century as being able to help someone you’ve never met using your iPhone is major corporations skimming off the top for their own profit. The Consumerist published a post about AT&T and Sprint maintaining their standard fees for the texts, while T-Mobile and Verizon opted to waive them for Haiti donations.
There’s something deeply satisfying about the field of neuroscience taking a roundhouse to the face from a professor of geriatric medicine who hails from the same town as Morrissey.
The aforementioned Raymond Tallis has been on a rampage lately. Most recently he’s pointed out in an article in New Scientist the fallacious nature of applying something as calculating as science to explain something as subjective as human consciousness. Tallis sides with a small and much bullied group that don’t believe that consciousness is necessarily generated within the brain. As such, neuroscience isn’t equipped to investigate what it is that accounts for the human sense of self.
The Story of Mike the Headless Chicken
by Josh Clark | January 11, 2010
When you drive a hatchet through the neck of a chicken, rendering it decapitated, it tends to thrash about here or there for a little while. Generally one won’t live eighteen more months, only to asphyxiate on some corn lodged in his exposed esophagus in a motel room in Arizona. Such is why the story of Mike the Headless Chicken is arguably the most recounted chicken decapitation story in America.
There’s really no wrong way to tell this story: Mike was an unnamed, anonymous 2.5-lb. bird living in Fruita, Colorado when he was chosen to die by farmer Lloyd Olsen who planned on eating him one evening in September 1948. After the hatchet was dropped and the rooster’s head severed from his body, Mike went through the usual indignant rigmarole of protesting such abuse, flopping about and flapping his wings and the like.
Visa and Google’s Unreasonable Power: Why 2012 is 1984
by Josh Clark | January 5, 2010
Even while Mayan protests that their calendar is cyclical, another signal that the world will sink into catastrophe in 2012 has emerged. As pointed out in a recent New York Times article about Visa’s transaction fees, plastic payment for transactions is expected to overtake cash that year. That seems like enough evidence to imagine the earth splitting in two and swallowing us into its molten heart hippie and Republican alike. No one will be spared.
Just wanted to be sure everyone had heard about this.
On December 31, a U.S. Federal District Court judge threw out manslaughter and weapons charges against five Blackwater Worldwide (now Xe Services) contractors who opened fire on a busy traffic circle in Baghdad in September 2007. The contractors (Blackwater/Xe tends to recruit former Delta Force heavies) were were found to have fired indiscriminately, unprovoked and unjustified on Iraqi civilians in the crowded square with automatic weapons and rocket launchers.
On Halloween back in 2001, somebody set fire to St. John’s Anglican Church in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia. This wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy in itself, as people do set fire to churches from time to time, and especially on Halloween, a tradition that traces its roots back to our beloved Detroit. But this particular act of arson uncovered a mystery that was recounted on the CBC recently.
Recent Postings by Category
BrainStuff
- Interesting Reading #414 – The tiniest computer, hearts really can break, family pays $5,000 per year for connections, New font saves ink and much more…
- Public Service Announcement – Soft drinks nearly double your chances of pancreatic cancer
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FanStuff
- What’s art — and what’s groundbreaking — in video games?
- Ursula K. Le Guin vs. Google Books: Round Two
- “Lost,” “Fringe” and That Whole Alternate Universe Thing
How-to Stuff
- How to Take a Road Trip, Abraham Lincoln-Style
- How to Explain Love in the Least Romantic Way Possible
- How to Quiet a Barking Dog
ScienceStuff
- Space Music Vol. 8: Sun Ra and Afrofuturism
- Stuff from the Science Lab Roundup: Space Eats and Grow Houses
- Why does time fly as you get older?
Stuff You Should Know
The Coolest Stuff on the Planet
High Speed Stuff
- The Toyota Recall: Where can you get the latest information?
- What is Toyota doing to fix its gas pedal problem?
- High Speed Stuff Wrap-up: Automotive Pet Peeves and Polar Vehicles
Keep Asking
- How does an airbrush work?
- Is the Internet free? If you want to make a website, will it cost you to put it online?
- If you look at a piece of glass from an angle, why does it have a bluish or green tint?
Stuff You Missed in History Class
- Last Week in History Podcasts: Battle Horses and Black Moses
- The Wonderful Adventures of the Nurse We Forgot
- Black History Month on HowStuffWorks
