November 2011
'You Are Not So Smart': Why We Can't Tell Good... →
So is the fancy world of wine tasting all pretentious bunk? Not exactly. The wine tasters in the experiments above were being influenced by the nasty beast of expectation. A wine expert’s objectivity and powers of taste under normal circumstance might be amazing, but Brochet’s manipulations of the environment mislead his subjects enough to dampen their acumen. An expert’s own...
October 2011
Trust Issues - Lapham’s Quarterly →
Hartwick College didn’t really mean to annihilate the U.S. economy. A small liberal-arts school in the Catskills, Hartwick is the kind of sleepy institution that local worthies were in the habit of founding back in the 1790s; it counts a former ambassador to Belize among its more prominent alumni, and placidly reclines in its berth as the number-174-ranked liberal-arts college in the country....
“Darkness is night, darkness is shadow; the one thing darkness is not is the...”
– The Ruricolist: Darkness
On not being OK | Geek Feminism Blog →
I get this idea that we, as geeks, are expected to rise above the common herd that are influenced by advertising and self-hate. We’re so much cleverer than that, so much more accepting! We were the fat kids in high school!
But we’re not. After all, geek boys lusts after the thin ones, every geek girl is bombarded with pictures of thin Leia, thin Xena, thin Sailor Scouts. Comics portray thin...
How OWS confuses and ignores Fox News and the... →
viciousneutral:
Fantastic article. This entire movement has really made me aware of just how willfully ignorant the american media is, and how biased so many alleged “journalists” are. What a joke. And yet, the myth of the “liberal media” will continue to be perpetuated, because it supports the otherwise inexcusable motives of the other side. Sickening.
A Song for only one gender
If your “hypocrisy!” reaction is too strong to override, stop reading now. I’m about to grump about the depiction of women in the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire books, a popular book and TV series heralded as the second-coming of Tolkien (it’s not). Why am I a hypocrite? I strongly recommend people NOT read the books, boycotting the corrosive, flat, misogynistic...
NEIL GAIMAN PRESENTS →
areasofmyexpertise:
NEIL GAIMAN has curated an amazing new collection for Audible of amazing books that have never been in audiobook format before, including:
THE MINOTAUR TAKES A CIGARETTE BREAK by Stephen Sherrill, which I very nearly represented back when I was a literary agent, but didn’t because I quit to write about cheese for a magazine. MY LOSS
and
DIMENSION OF MIRACLES by Robert...
Watchsciencecenter:
Hilarious segment on The Daily Show - “Science: What’s it up to?”
This is a great parody of the sort of criticism science gets from the anti-intellectual right in this country. Aasif Mandvi does a great job of getting his interviewees to agree to ridiculous incriminating statements. This one was my favorite:
Aasif: What’s the point of teaching children facts if it’s just going...
“The question I get asked most is ‘are they real?’ …Well, of...”
– Dolly Parton - Google+
“Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial...”
– David Frum : Krugman was right, I was wrong about the economy (via soupsoup)
Bravo, Mr. Frum. One of the few rational republicans out there.
(via viciousneutral)
“There is simply a limit beyond which economic inequality threatens democratic...”
– You Say You Want a Revolution - Print View - The Daily Beast
Surprisingly striking essay from Andrew Sullivan.
Thank you!
2105:
This little tumblr just crossed another notable number of readers. To all of you, thank you for following! I don’t know how many of those following accounts are inactive—I’d like to think maybe under 20% given the vibrancy of Tumblr’s community. So for the 80% who allow me to add stuff to their dashboard day-to-day (never more than 6 posts, I promise), I’m grateful for your...
Unexplained communication between brain... →
infoneer-pulse:
Could the brain be using electromagnetic fields to communicate between hemispheres — the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness proposed by Johnjoe McFadden (School of Biomedical and Life Sciences, University of Surrey)?
Neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have made a puzzling finding: people born without a corpus callosum (which links the...
Scientists finally agree: Sequim mastodon was... →
Well thank *god* that one’s finally cleared up. Neolithic Sequim can rest easy now.
Syrian Protesters Take Inspiration From Libya -... →
“Gadhafi is gone, your turn is coming, Bashar,” protesters shouted on Friday in the central city of Hama, long a hotbed of resistance to the regime.
The Syrian uprising has proved remarkably resilient over the past seven months, but has shown some signs of stalling in recent weeks as the government forges ahead with a bloody crackdown that the U.N. estimates has killed more than...
Bank of America Deathwatch: Moves Risky... →
Hoping Planet Money takes a crack at this one. There’s an amount of acronym festooning around banking moves that just never quite sink in.
Also, if Yves is right on this take…well, shit.
“The real value of a single-sex education isn’t in removing men entirely, but...”
– Margaret Hartmann ’06 in Jezebel. Read the story here. (via wellesleymag)
We Can All Become Job Creators - NYTimes.com →
hellbox:
I love this idea. I hate the need for this idea. It says that banks have systemically failed at their fundamental businesses with such magnitude that fast food needs to step in and fill their shoes.
The Ruricolist: Pythagoras →
Between the octave and the interval, the world almost seems made for us. This appearance is deceiving. The world is not just unfair, but rigged. Chances are you know what it is to pick up part A, and part B, never having doubted they went together, only to find that they don’t quite fit. The world is like that. Between the octave and the fifth there is a small but shattering discrepancy we...
Arab League stops short of suspending Syria -... →
Grumble, grumble.
Tweet Science →
…what it still is is a gold mine without, as yet, any sure way of getting the gold. And if too much dreck pours in, in the way of self-promoting tweets and obtrusive advertising, the gold may be lost forever. For Twitter, it’s a hazardous paradox. As Ashton Kutcher recently said, “There’s a danger of it becoming spammy, and that’s what really hurt MySpace … If Twitter doesn’t apply the...
Syrian forces target funeral, assassinate activist... →
Syrian security forces trying to suppress the resilient anti-government uprising killed five people Saturday, including one person who was attending a funeral procession for a teenager shot dead in protests a day earlier, activists said.
Another of the dead was an activist for the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights who was assassinated while in hiding in a besieged eastern city,...
“In this summer’s debate over raising the debt ceiling, the game of chicken...”
– Playing Chicken To Cut The Deficit : Planet Money : NPR
Accurate metaphor.
Occupy Wall Street's 'Political Disobedience' -... →
WRONG PEOPLE ARRESTED ON WALL STREET →
arewepayingattention:
October 14, 2011
THE BOROWITZ REPORT
Wrong People Arrested on Wall Street
Goldman Boss: ‘Thought They Were Finally Coming for Us’
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) - Millions of Americans cheered the news on Friday that arrests had finally been made on Wall Street, but were soon disappointed to learn that the wrong people had been taken into custody. “I was like, finally...
Online harassment as a daily hazard: when trolls... →
It’s not so clear there that en masse silence is a useful strategy, it varies by case, and the off-hand use of the “everyone knows that you don’t feed the trolls!” wisdom that was (arguably) effective in the case of lone trolls is in effect a message to people being targeted for harassment by a coordinated group, or who have a number of individual harassers, that no one gives a shit. Don’t talk...
W. W. Norton: Turbulence by Adrienne Rich →
wwnorton:
There’ll be turbulence. You’ll drop your book to hold your water bottle steady. Your mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall may who ne’er hung there let him watch the movie. The plane’s supposed to shudder, shoulder on like this. It’s built to do that. You’re designed to tremble too. Else break
