October 2009
RealClimate: An open letter to Steve Levitt →
Whole Brain Catalog™ →
Cutting-edge experimental technologies and new microscopy methods are now able to reveal new aspects of organization within these scales, yet the development of software tools to synthesize these data into more coherent models of brain structure and function has lagged behind. The Whole Brain Catalog™ is a client-server platform that provides rich 3-D views for researchers to zoom in, out, and...
“Wordsworth and Coleridge are watching the Lakers game. They can’t get...”
– McSweeney’s Lists: Terrible Poetry Jokes. …So there’s someone else on the planet who reads poetry while constantly wondering what it conversationally stuck with said poet at a party. Nice to know.
The Fanciful Notion of ‘Minerality’ in Wine →
“The idea is romantic and highly useful commercially, but it is scientifically untenable,” wrote Alex Maltman, a professor at the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University.
Tough gig.
The Return of Hobbes →
givemesomethingtoread:
In the film Fight Club, the real name of the protagonist (Ed Norton’s character) is never revealed. Many believe the reason behind this anonymity is to give “Jack” more of an everyman quality. Do not be deceived. “Jack” is really Calvin from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. It’s true. Norton portrays the grown-up version of Calvin, while Brad Pitt plays his imaginary...
“Writing in Wired, Daniel Roth explains that Demand Media uses a three-part...”
– Made to Order News: Demand Media’s Content Factory - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com (via brooksjordan) My former parent company’s gambit is finally getting serious consideration. The scrutiny is good because it has been long anticipated.
Major Lazer ft. Ninjasonik - Pon De Floor (Diplo...
"The Pity of War", Christopher Hitchens in The... →
Peter Hart is one of the chief historians at what the British still call the Imperial War Museum, in London, and he is a member of that tremendously tenacious group of scholars—the late (somehow magically named) John Terraine being the veteran of the group—who cannot rest until honor and credit have been restored to those who made up the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders. Hart...
Experimental Philosophy: Are People Actually Moral... →
…When ordinary individuals claim, for example, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were wrong or immoral, they mean that it is wrong or immoral *full stop*. If someone were to disagree with such a claim, then at least one of the persons would have to be wrong.
The claim of folk objectivism is a datum that most metaethical theories try to vindicate or accommodate. But is it true? Are...
“The problem with becoming bigger is it takes you longer to do it. You have to...”
– Largest Web-Spinning Spider Discovered …Continuing today’s web-reading that seems to work for both real life and the “Alien” series.
“Every part of RATS is tailored for use on a battlefield. A soldier could make an...”
– Raytheon Sends Android To Battlefield [Forbes.com]
It’s Google Latitude one-over. Add to that the “Aliens”-eque helmet-cam/biometrics reporting systems and I expect they’ll soon add the beeping, green radar motion sensor (with Bill-Paxton-provided audio cues).
“They don’t have a government in Somalia, so ‘ticket’...”
– Road safety campaigns take multicultural approach via How We Drive
WNYC Radiolab - New Normal?
How do you tell the...
“Hey, Moulson*, let the robot do its job.”
– Me to my anxious dog concerning him cornering the Roomba which should otherwise be cleaning the basement. Suddenly I had a flash of my great-grandparents, with me trying to explain the context of that increasingly commonplace sentence
* He came with the name and he’s smarter than you so...
“The reduced number of active diocesan clergy has forced us to take unprecedented...”
– Priest Shortage Forces Vatican To Hire Temps To Deliver Sacred Rites | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source via ascendingcoherence who notes the irony in the last sentence given the number of women friends we have with Capital-D divinity chops.
“[Y]our chances of hitting one of these jackpots is about the same as being eaten...”
– “That’s from Tax.com’s David Brunori, on a potential deal to allow states run both Powerball lotteries and Mega Millions lotteries. “, Putting Your Lottery Odds in Context [Economix]
We've Seen the Future, and It's Unmanned →
givemesomethingtoread:
Every so often in history, something profound happens that changes warfare forever. Next year, for the first time ever, the Pentagon will buy more unmanned aircraft than manned, line-item proof that we are in a new age of fighting machines, in which war will be ever more abstract, ever more distant, and ruthlessly efficient.
MSM Reporting as Propaganda (No One Minds Our New... →
Nobel in Foresight [Economix] →
McSweeney's Lists: What to Expect: The Third... →
Pitch-perfect.
Keep in mind that all adults reach their developmental milestones at their own pace. It is important not to compare your adult’s rate of development to that of his peers. The following list is meant only as a guideline and not as a cause for alarm.
Financial-Services Regulation Fuels Tiff - WSJ.com →
Via Greg, who’s greatly entertained by the headline enough to send it to me.
“A career in User Experience Design at [redacted] is an effective choreography of...”
– E-mail.
“$6.5 trillion: Value of assets in stock mutual funds at end of 2007.
$3.7...”
– The Great Recession: The numbers tell the story [Seattle Times]
Insider Trading Alert System →
This project is an entry for Yahoo’s OpenHack in New York. Yahoo Finance (and every other finance service) provides insider trading data days after the information becomes public. InsiderTrades.org scans the SEC’s filing system every thirty seconds and then alerts subscribers if their stock has been traded by an insider.
Cool.
Study Shows That It Is Our Brains, Not Eyes, That... →
To study how the brain represents the color of objects, the researchers used a technique called binocular rivalry. The technique presents a different image to each eye and thus pits signals from the right eye against signals from the left.
“The brain has difficulty integrating the two eyes’ incompatible signals. When the signals from the two eyes are different enough, the brain resolves the...
McSweeney's Lists: George W. Bush's Retirement... →
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect →
givemesomethingtoread:
In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.
An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard...
Science Writing Smackdown: Henig vs. Shenk! Part I →
Cool blog conversation format. I may have my grammar-geek side but I appreciate this discussion since it stays with meaning rather than academic one-upsmanship.
The Mythical Teeming Hordes of “Pent-Up Buyers”... →
I like the phrase “borrowed from the future”.
ascendingcoherence:
The Kylie concert on...