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2013-05-22 19:52:17 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

A shockingly long list of actions the Canadian government has done to attack science.

It's almost as if I'm reading a list of anti-science governmental actions from the United States!

2013-05-22 14:52:14 (5 comments, 8 reshares, 17 +1s)

2013-05-22 00:13:25 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

'This is the perfect finger food. I usually eat a handful at a time. Though to be honest, when asked how they taste, I say, "It varies from person to person."'

2013-05-22 00:06:12 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 1 +1s)

The first major study of tiger moms is out. The kids have worse grades, and they are more depressed and more alienated from their parents.

When Amy Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother came out in 2011, it sparked  controversy among many people but especially psychologists and experts in  child development. The book, they felt, had lodged in the culture certain stereotypes about an Asian parenting style that was not well-studied or well-understood and certainly not ready to be held up as some kind of model.

Unsurprising, really.  Most "philosophies" advocating parenting styles, diet choices, wealth building seem to gain popularity before there is much, if any, science to support them.

2013-05-22 00:00:30 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

When asked what kind of coffee they like, most Americans will say: "a dark, rich, hearty roast". But actually, only 25-27% want that. Most prefer weak, milky coffee. Judgement is clouded by aspiration, peer pressure and marketing messages.

Interesting piece on the psychology of restaurant menu design.  

As an aside, I'm a decently smart guy who at a young age was singled out for advanced classes because of my great-for-my-age vocabulary...and yet I can never remember how to spell "restaurant"!

2013-05-21 23:55:26 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

"I've been in a crowded elevator with mirrors all around, and a woman will move and I'll go to get out the way and then realise: 'oh that woman is me'."

Heather Sellers has prosopagnosia, more commonly known as face blindness. "I can't remember any image of the human face. It's simply not special to me," she says. "I don't process them like I do a car or a dog. It's not a visual problem, it's a perception problem."

It's pretty fascinating to think about what it would be like to have conditions like these that cause people to see the world in a different way.

I'm sure that many (most?) people without face blindness have never even consciously realized that recognizing faces is a special thing that we humans do.

2013-05-21 23:48:31 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Thinking about a professor just before you take an intelligence test makes you perform better than if you think about football hooligans. Or does it? An influential theory that certain behaviour can be modified by unconscious cues is under serious attack.

A paper published in PLoS ONE last week1 reports that nine different experiments failed to replicate this example of ‘intelligence priming’, first described in 1998 (ref. 2) by Ap Dijksterhuis, a social psychologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and now included in textbooks.

And a bit later:

An acrimonious e-mail debate on the subject has been dividing psychologists, who are already jittery about other recent exposures of irreproducible results

Good!  They should be jittery, science of this sort has been shaky for years.  In psychology (and other fields) there are too manyposit... more »

2013-05-21 23:42:48 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I'm always wondering about how (or if) other people's inner dialog differs from my own.

I spend much of my idle thought time[1] thinking about philosophy and science, and when my thoughts take the specific form of "speaking" it's almost always along the lines of a hypothetical argument with some random person in my life wherein I'm trying to justify something I believe, or where I'm trying to teach (as I get a lot of enjoyment out of teaching others new things).

One striking similarity to the example in this article is the almost frantic gear switching.  I'll be having a mental dialog about evolutionary psychology, think about where/how/when I'm going to get gas tomorrow, think about how to explain modern web development to my Mom, and then pick up exactly where I left up with my evolutionary psychology dialog.

[1] By "idle thought... more »

2013-05-21 23:27:17 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

A larger hippocampus correlates to better math learning ability.  I find it interesting that with the study subjects it seems to be less about a natural ability to do math and more about a natural ability to learn.  I'd like to see follow-up studies with tutoring in other subject matters.

The day is coming where parents will be able to select for such things in pre-pregnancy consultations.

In a study of third-graders' responses to math tutoring, Stanford scientists found that the size and wiring of specific brain structures predicted how much an individual child would benefit from math tutoring. However, traditional intelligence measures, such as children's IQs and their scores on tests of mathematical ability, did not predict improvements from tutoring.

2013-05-21 17:11:25 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Shrewd moves

The founder of Dow Chemical sold bromine in the US for 36 cents per pound.  Elsewhere in the world a German cartel sold it at 49 cents per pound, but there was an understanding that Dow would remain US-only while the cartel stayed out of the US.

Well, Dow was in financial trouble so he ended up taking his product overseas and easily beat the German cartels price.  Eventually, in retaliation, the Germans came to the US with a super low price of 15 cents per pound.

Dow's response?  He secretly bought the Germans product in the US, shipped it overseas, and sold it in the Germans backyard for 27 cents per pound...way less than what the Germans were selling it for.

The Germans couldn't figure out how come they weren't driving Dow out of business and why there was such a sudden demand for bromine in the US, so they lowered their price in theUS... more »

2013-05-21 00:56:03 (8 comments, 9 reshares, 26 +1s)

Cannonball.  Vat of mercury.

I mean, why wouldn't you drop the cannonball in?

2013-05-15 18:35:15 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I love people.  I even love people who don't agree with me about stuff.  

Despite that, I cannot understand how so many people go around being willfully ignorant.  The very idea of not having curiosity in your soul is frightening to me.

Now, when I say "I cannot understand", what I really mean is that I can't grasp the mindset on an empathetic level.  I understand the cognitive and sociological reasons behind it, it's just that the very mindset is alien to me, unlike the mindset of people who disagree with me on myriad other issues.

Sixty-two percent of Americans now say they believe that global warming is happening, but 46 percent say they are “very sure” or “extremely sure” that it is not. Only 49 percent know why it is occurring, and about as many say they’re not worried about it

2013-05-14 18:23:15 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

2013-05-14 00:27:58 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

A real-time world map showing where users are from who make edits to Wikipedia, as well as which article they're editing.

2013-05-13 14:48:51 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Apropos Of My Last Post About Signaling

In conclusion, a signal is a method of conveying information among not-necessarily-trustworthy parties by performing an action which is more likely or less costly if the information is true than if it is not true. Because signals are often costly, they can sometimes lead to a depressing waste of resources, but in other cases they may be the only way to believably convey important information.

2013-05-13 14:41:57 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 0 +1s)

You Didn't Do That For The Reasons You Think (Maybe)

According to some proponents of signaling theory (e.g. Robin Hanson), much (most?) behavior can be attributed to signaling.

"What's signaling mean?", you ask?  Here's my armchair explanation of my favored version of the theory.

When you chose the outfit you're wearing, when you pick a vehicle to own, when you vote for a candidate, when you voice an opinion, when you choose a career, or when you name your child, you did it largely because you "want" to signal to others that you're the type of person who would do those things, for various fitness and social (of course social reasons are fitness reasons) reasons.  In other words, you want to signal that you belong to Group X because you do the same things Group X does.

The common explanation for behaviors andch... more »

2013-05-09 23:15:54 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

These are some pretty amazing satellite timelapse images of different areas of the planet over the past 30 years.

2013-05-07 21:37:17 (43 comments, 43 reshares, 98 +1s)

Wow, I'm weak and lazy.

2013-05-07 02:32:47 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-05-06 20:46:20 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Not a photoshop: http://www.contriving.net/link/bp

2013-05-06 19:07:48 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 6 +1s)

Mathematical prediction models are better than doctors at predicting the outcomes and responses of lung cancer patients to treatment, according to new research presented today (Saturday) at the 2nd Forum of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO).

This is the sort of thing that's only going to be happening more and more often.

2013-05-06 18:53:21 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Nice brief overview of the five theses that give reason to be worried about advanced AI.

2013-05-06 18:53:13 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Alexander B Fry writes a nice overview of where we're at with regards to understanding dark matter.

Either dark matter exists or it doesn’t. If it exists, then either we can detect it or we can’t. If it doesn’t exist, either we can show that it doesn’t exist or we can’t. The observations that led astronomers to posit dark matter in the first place seem too robust to dismiss, so the most common argument for non-existence is to say there must be something wrong with our understanding of gravity – that it must not behave as Einstein predicted. That would be a drastic change in our understanding of physics, so not many people want to go there. On the other hand, if dark matter exists and we can’t detect it, that would put us in a very inconvenient position indeed.

2013-05-03 22:16:46 (1 comments, 6 reshares, 12 +1s)

This is the asteroid Ida.  It's around 50km long.  The asteroid has a moon called Dactyl that you can to the right that's about 1.5km in diameter and orbits it at around 90km. 

Pictures taken in 1993 by the Galileo spacecraft en route to Jupiter.  This is when Dactyl was discovered.  Ida itself was discovered in 1884.

2013-05-01 02:45:59 (5 comments, 16 reshares, 16 +1s)

I laughed when I got to the end.

2013-04-30 19:21:49 (14 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

According to Darren Naish in his book All Yesterdays, this is what a modern baboon looks like when reconstructed from it's skeleton using the same techniques artists use to reconstruct dinosaurs from their skeletons.

(H/T to Quora for this:  http://www.contriving.net/link/bm)

2013-04-30 00:05:37 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Snake robots are cool

2013-04-29 23:56:37 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 0 +1s)

Does anyone have any ideas why embedded youtube videos won't play in ttrss?  I just get the spinning youtube circle, but if I open the article on the original posting site, the youtube video plays just fine.

This is reproducible 100% of the time on my machine.

2013-04-28 18:24:40 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 11 +1s)

Neat. Via +Pyry Pakkanen.

2013-04-28 17:44:58 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Am I going to screw stuff up if I copy ttrss from git over my current 1.7.8 installation?  What's a good way to perform this kind of upgrade?

2013-04-26 17:36:11 (3 comments, 4 reshares, 6 +1s)

Time Travel in Movies

2013-04-22 20:46:31 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

It's not uncommon for me to get stuck on a programming problem and go start composing a forum post explaining my problems and asking for some help.

In the process of explaining my problem in enough detail and in a structured-enough manner to explain it to other people I realize the solution to my issue.

This also happens when I write docstrings.

2013-04-22 03:33:18 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

I remember reading this so many years ago and was just reminded about it again.

A great little scifi story about the changes in store for humanity.

2013-04-18 23:27:58 (10 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I just installed tt-rss via apt-get on Ubuntu 12.10 and I can't seem to find any mention of plugins in the preferences like it mentions on the plugins wiki page, where it says "User plugins are enabled in Preferences -> Plugins."

Is the Ubuntu-packaged version of tiny just broken?

2013-04-17 21:49:08 (10 comments, 3 reshares, 2 +1s)

I posted this earlier today with just one photo, but I added a closer photo and no one knew what it was earlier...

So, one last try:  Can anyone tell me what kind of tree this is?  I'm located in Missouri, USA.

2013-04-17 16:19:36 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

What kind of tree is this?

2013-04-13 22:49:29 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2013-04-13 20:11:43 (5 comments, 8 reshares, 13 +1s)

The Derweze area is rich in natural gas. While drilling in 1971, Soviet geologists tapped into a cavern filled with natural gas.The ground beneath the drilling rig collapsed, leaving a large hole with a diameter of 70 metres (230 ft) at 40°15′10″N 58°26′22″E. To avoid poisonous gas discharge, it was decided the best solution was to burn it off. Geologists had hoped the fire would use all the fuel in a matter of days, but the gas is still burning today. Locals have dubbed the cavern "The Door to Hell".

Full resolution picture here - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Darvasa_gas_crater_panorama.jpg

2013-04-12 16:39:57 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

My wife has a phone (Atrix 4G) she bought at Best Buy.  She also pays 9.99/month for phone insurance through them.  Not a good deal, but if it makes her feel better, I don't care.

The problem with it, is that the insurance and the phone suck.  They've repaired/replaced it 4 or 5 times.  So while it's good that they take care of fixing it, the problem is that she uses this phone for business (several thousand minutes a month of talk time). It's a huge hassle to use another phone without all her apps and stuff on top of having to drive an hour to the nearest Best Buy to drop the phone off and then drive another hour to pick it up when it's "fixed".  I use quotes because the last time she dropped it off, they replaced it with a phone on which the backlights behind the front buttons stopped working within a week so she had to take it back and wait for a replacementagai... more »

2013-04-11 19:47:08 (11 comments, 7 reshares, 9 +1s)

So, in this study of 330 women over 15 years, they found that the nipples of women who did not wear a bra raised an average of 7mm/year towards the shoulders and their breasts became more firm.

Apparently, wearing a bra weakened the supportive tissue...

2013-04-09 22:38:13 (4 comments, 3 reshares, 10 +1s)

To test their hypothesis about the packing tape, the shoemakers decided to send two packages to each of 89 people in the United States. For each recipient, one package featured the Atheist-branded packing tape and one used generic packing tape. All packages were shipped the same day. Yet the Atheist-branded packages took an average of three days longer to reach their destinations. And while only one package from the generic-tape set went missing, nine of the Atheist-branded packages went missing. These (statistically significant) results were recently released on their website.

2013-04-04 16:38:35 (7 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

I'm vindicated!  Actually, I just always hated stretching before exercising.  I didn't really have any thoughts about whether it was efficacious[1] or not.

One, a study being published this month in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, concluded that if you stretch before you lift weights, you may find yourself feeling weaker and wobblier than you expect during your workout. Those findings join those of another new study from Croatia, a bogglingly comprehensive re-analysis of data from earlier experiments that was published in The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports. Together, the studies augment a growing scientific consensus that pre-exercise stretching is generally unnecessary and likely counterproductive.

[1] I love saying efficacious.

2013-04-03 15:48:05 (10 comments, 15 reshares, 23 +1s)

This is the best explanation of how a piece of technology works that I've ever had the privilege of watching.

2013-04-01 21:55:08 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.


― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

2013-03-28 23:04:24 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

How exactly did one big rock from space kill dinosaurs on the other side of the planet?  Here's an idea:

A paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research reviews the evidence for what its authors consider the most plausible model for global mayhem caused by the impact: its debris lit all the world's forests on fire at once.

Fire, fire, fire!

2013-03-28 22:54:35 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

The Knobe Effect

Named after the experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe, the Knobe Effect describes the fact that people's moral sense lead to some counter-intuitive judgments.

Knobe asked nearly 100 random people in a Manhattan park a question about the following story.

The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, "We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment."

The chairman of the board answered, "I don’t care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program."

They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed.

Knobe asked them if the chairman intentionally harmed the environment.

88% of people said yes.
Knobe th... more »

2013-03-27 17:07:41 (5 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

Quora is always a great site for learning about stuff you never thought about before.

This particular question was asked:

What are the most convincing bits of evidence which prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the Holocaust occurred?

I've never really encountered a Holocaust denier, but I'm, of course, aware they exist.  But the best answer to this question and the currently most up-voted one if you click through to the site goes in to a lot of detail that boils down to this:

No Nazi put on trial ever denied that it happened even though their life was at stake.

2013-03-26 17:12:19 (0 comments, 6 reshares, 6 +1s)

In normal optical fibers (silica glass), light travels a full 31% slower. Light actually travels faster through air than glass — which leads us neatly onto the creation of Francesco Poletti and the other members of his University of Southampton team: A hollow optical fiber that is mostly made of air.

2013-03-26 16:35:26 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

An anti-senescence parable.

2013-03-26 16:31:58 (2 comments, 5 reshares, 9 +1s)

Graphene aerogel is pretty light.

read more: http://www.contriving.net/link/bd