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I’ve received some messages from readers of Paradigms Lost asking what the future of the blog will be now that True/Slant has been sold to Forbes. Some of you may have noticed that I’ve stopped posting since news of the acquisition was announced. In a nutshell, I’ve decided to take a break from posting here until I hear from my friends in the management at True/Slant/Forbes regarding my own continued involvement with the company.

I remain grateful for the opportunities that Lewis Dvorkin and Coates Bateman have given me at both AOL and True/Slant, and I’ve enjoyed building up a community here of intelligent, funny, argumentative, and often irreverent readers. Will Paradigms Lost become just another paradise lost? I hope not. But committing to a blog requires the kind of attention and energy that, for this writer anyway, insists on a concrete sense of the possible future, too, if that makes sense.

When I learn this blog’s fate, I’ll be back to post an update.

Image by uscgd8 via Flickr

All we can do now is wait. After pouring 50,000 pounds of sludge on top of the gushing Deepwater Horizon well, still more patience will be required before we’ll know one way or the other whether BP will move on to shooting golf balls into the pipe.

“We will not be rushed,” BP’s Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said on Wednesday night. “It’s too early to know if it will be successful.”

So, when will we know, exactly?

“We’ve ridden a roller coaster and I think we just need to take the next 24 hours and see what the results are.”

With all due respect, a roller coaster has ups, downs, twists, and turns. This ride is more akin to a free fall of a very high cliff. We keep reaching for the parachute chord, but nothing ever seems to happen.

Earlier to day at Paradigms Lost, I had an interesting exchange with a reader who said he was standing on an oil rig 50 miles west of where Deepwater Horizon once stood. An engineer who seemed to know what he was talking about, “knut” (his screen name) claimed that U.S. Minerals Management Service officials told his crew today that before the accident that toppled Deepwater, BP was set to announce that it had discovered the largest oil deposit in U.S. history, that being the one that Deepwater had just managed to penetrate.

Well, here’s hoping the sludge solution works.

Image by Getty Images for FOX via @daylife

Search traffic can tell you a lot of things about human desire. But it’s not so hot at predicting the next American Idol. For the second year running, the hotter search term following the night of final performances of the top two contestants has lost.

Last year, Adam Lambert lost to Kris Allen.

This year, Crystal Bowersox lost to Lee DeWyze.

In both cases, Google searches for Bowersox and Lambert trounced those for DeWyze and Allen in the moments after the last judging round.

So, maybe what this says is that for all the attention we in the new media place on what people are searching on their computers, there’s a bigger cross-section of Americans out there who have something else in mind. On a musical level, that’s too bad, as Allen and DeWyze appear headed to utterly forgettable music careers.

Image by Getty Images North America via @daylife

A quick check of Google Trends reveals what is both obvious, and may not be true: Crystal Bowersox will be crowned the next American Idol.

In its “Hot Topics” section, Crystal ranked number one and two for much of the west coast airing of the show. In other words, people searched her name more than any other single word or name while the show aired. Lee DeWyze was nowhere to be found in the top ten “Hot Topics” searches.

Meanwhile, in the “Hot Searches” list on Google, the term “up to the mountain” and “black velvet” ranked number one and two, respectively, at the show’s conclusion in Pacific standard time.

“beautiful day lyrics” was the third most searched term, and “everybody hurts lyrics’” was number five. Those were two of the songs DeWyze delivered in rather uninspiring fashion.

The judges, for what it’s worth, clearly preferred Momma Sox. So did I. Overall thoughts on the disappointing season here.

After Congressional pressure, BP has switched course and will allow America to watch in real time as the company tries, yet again, to cap the gushing Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico.

This new attempt, called a top kill, has a 30 to 40 percent chance of failure, the company said Tuesday. But why should they be trusted when it comes to laying odds?

The plan calls for dumping 50,000 pounds of “viscous fluid” on top of the well. That may temporarily stop the oil, and give the company time to add concrete. If the initial attempts fail, BP says (and no, I’m not joking) that they will try to lodge a bunch of golf balls into the well. One wonders what the odds of success are for that plan.

Here’s your latest creative visualization for success.

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“More than 130 studies have linked BPA (bisphenol A) to breast cancer, obesity, and other disorders.” Thus concludes a report from President Obama’s 2010 Cancer Panel which was released in April.

Why should this worry you? Because BPA is a chemical compound that is practically inescapable in modern American life. It is used in plastic bottles, where it is known to break down and contaminate the liquid contents. It is sprayed inside of the vast majority of our country’s canned goods, and has routinely been detected in staggering levels in the food it is supposed to be protecting. Cash register and credit card receipts are covered in BPA. In fact, 92% of the food and drinks in the U.S. that come in plastic or metal packaging contain BPA.

Even small amounts of BPA can act as “endocrine disruptors,” altering your body chemistry in alarming ways.

“Hundreds of independent peer-reviewed scientific studies have found harm from low doses of BPA,” Laura Vandenberg, a BPA researcher at Tufts University said in a recent statement.

The stuff is everywhere. But it can be removed from our society. Japan quietly stopped using BPA in the 90’s. Canada has banned it from infant toys and bottles, as have a handful of U.S. states. Senator Diane Feinstein has now proposed a much heftier ban of BPA that extends to all food and drink containers used in America.

“I think the outlook is that its going to be a struggle,” Feinstein said of the prospects for passage of the ban. “There’s no question about it. There are powerful interests that don’t want us to pass this bill.”

What to do until a ban will someday be enacted? Well, avoid canned foods, for one thing. The levels found in canned vegetables have proven the real eye-poppers. The Environmental Working Group also has a handy list of how to steer clear of BPA in your daily life.

Here’s an interview with Dr. Frederick Vom Saal a researcher at the University of Missouri who I spoke with for an AOL article on the topic.

Image by Joel Bedford via Flickr

On Monday, the US Supreme Court sided with 6,000 African-Americans in the city of Chicago who say that the city’s hiring test to become a firefighter summarily discriminated against them. The court action clears the way for the would-be firefighters to sue.

While the court heard a reverse discrimination case last year in which white firefighters in New Haven, Ct. contested the removal another hiring test that African Americans on the force claimed had kept them from being promoted, the two incidents have a decidedly common thread:  for blacks in America, rising in the ranks of the fire department has proven disproportionately elusive to most every other profession in the country (and certainly more than any blue collar ones).

Leaving aside the two most recent Supreme Court cases on firefighter tests for a moment, the larger picture of racism at the American firehouse is hard to ignore. Recent episodes in Houston, New York, DC, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Columbus, Jacksonville, LA, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, Akron, San Jose, etc., keep this pattern alive and well, like an echo from a former time that just refuses to die.

Sure, progress has been made in lots of cities, including Miami which, in 2009, elected its first black fire chief. The numbers of minority firefighters is on the rise nationwide, but it has taken an extraordinary amount of legal action and social pressure to make that happen.

So, what gives firefighters? Why does your noble profession, in particular, continue to be sullied by this ugly historical trend? Just to be clear, I’m not trying to say that if you’re a white firefighter, then you’re automatically a racist. Nor am I saying their aren’t racist firefighters of color. But why this ongoing battle at the firehouse?

No, you don’t have to watch the whole thing. But what’s fascinating to me is that this guy “deepwater909″ likens the death of Gray to that of Michael Jackson, another great mask wearer of our times.

Gray, 38, was found dead in an Iowa hotel room Monday. Foul play is not suspected. Here’s Gray in happier days, setting fire to a Christmas tree.

And the man behind the mask turns out to be a pretty handsome guy.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Say it with me: There is no scientific evidence that shows ANY link whatsoever between childhood vaccines and an increased risk of developing autism.

None. Zero. It’s a myth.

Today, the person most responsible for having spread that falsehood (save, perhaps, for Jenny McCarthy) can no longer practice medicine in the United Kingdom.

The U.K.’s General Medical Council today stripped Dr. Andrew Wakefield of his title. In February, The Lancet, the journal where Wakefield had published his bogus study, retracted the research, saying it was utterly false.

Yes, the internet took Wakefield’s claim and ran with it. As a result, vaccination rates have plummeted. So, spread the word, hysteria won round one. Perhaps reason will now mount a comeback.

The verdict on the get-up, with its flesh-toned underwear, has been decidedly mixed. Williams, whose own EleVen label designed the outfit, said the concept was to create “illusion.” Certainly, she succeeded on that task.

So what is your take? Is this budding designer’s new out fit a smash or a swing and a miss?

For more pics of the outfit, click here.