A very useful holiday shopping advisory from Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias. Bottom line: you get more credit from buying the top item in cheapie categories than by buying low to moderate priced items in more exclusive types of goods. But the reaction also depends on whether the recipient is able to evaluate what they […]
Read more...Completely deranged. Wonder what he’s on. I think I want some. Hat tip aci.net:
Read more...Never mind global warming. Human observation of the universe may have accelerated its demise. An article in New Scientist discusses the theory developed by cosmologists Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and James Dent of Vanderbilt University. They believe that the observation of dark energy made in 1998 may have caused the universe to […]
Read more...No, the headline is not a variant on the now tired joke, “What does a guru order at a McDonalds? ‘Make me one with everything.’” It instead refers to a different sort of messianic endeavor, the quest in physics to come up with a unified theory that integrates all known types of matter and forces. […]
Read more...Time for comic relief. Hat tip Credit Slips:
Read more...From the BBC: An Indian man has married a female dog, believing the union will help him atone for stoning two other dogs to death.P Selvakumar, 33, said he had been cursed since the killings, suffering paralysis and a loss of hearing. The wedding took place at a Hindu temple in Tamil Nadu state. The […]
Read more...Cultural myths die hard. Even though a study in Science earlier this year found that men and women uttered nearly the same number of words in a day, yet women are widely perceived to be more chatty. My pet theory is that men see themselves as talking about things that are necessary and important, like […]
Read more...Folks, it’s a slow day in the media and blogland, not even a sighting of Ben Stein to liven things up. So I will pass along this story (warning: gross at points) from the Times of London, which recaps an article from Science Magazine on the ten “wackiest” experiments of all time. Unfortunately, this falls […]
Read more...The article below, from the 12 Angry Men Blog, mourns the dumbing down of home chemistry kits. One has to wonder at these heavy-handed efforts to contain threats, particularly in a society that lacks gun controls. Are we next going to make styrofoam a controlled substance, since mixed with gas, it produces a decent napalm […]
Read more...I must be losing perspective to think this has anything to do with the MLEC rescue proposal. From the BBC: Chimpanzees under attack exaggerate their screams to get help from higher ranking group members, researchers from Fife have discovered.The study found primates produce high-pitched and prolonged screams when they were the victims of severe aggression […]
Read more...Time for some lighter weekend fare…
Read more...The Ig Nobel Prize is given annually by the Journal of Improbable Research to “celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology”. From the BBC, whose favorite award was for the “gay bomb”: 2007 Ig Nobel Winners Medicine – Brain Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, […]
Read more...According to Bloomberg (hat tip 2Blowhards), well-groomed men do better financially than their rumpled peers. And contrary to popular perception, the impact is greater for men than women. Note that the study measured time spent on primping, and made no effort to assess the efficacy of those efforts. Perhaps the seemingly lower economic impact of […]
Read more...Oh, you are such a good reader! You either care about this site enough to look at notices and/or you found “consulting porn” worthy of attention (probably because you found the expression to be an oxymoron). Like it or not, if you are in a large, or even a medium sized organization, you may have […]
Read more...If this story hadn’t come from the Associated Press, via the Toronto Star, I’d have some doubts as to its veracity: A man in southern China appears to have died of exhaustion after a three-day Internet gaming binge, state media said Monday. The 30-year-old man fainted at a cybercafe in the city of Guangzhou on […]
Read more...