March 2012
92 posts
2 tags
We Are All Born Believers
The vast majority of humans are “born believers”, naturally inclined to find religious claims and explanations attractive and easily acquired, and to attain fluency in using them. This attraction to religion is an evolutionary by-product of our ordinary cognitive equipment, and while it tells us nothing about the truth or otherwise of religious claims it does help us see religion in...
3 tags
Study: Exercise can lead to female orgasm, sexual...
Findings from a first-of-its-kind study by Indiana University researchers confirm anecdotal evidence that exercise — absent sex or fantasies — can lead to female orgasm.
While the findings are new, reports of this phenomenon, sometimes called “coregasm” because of its association with exercises for core abdominal muscles, have circulated in the media for years, said...
5 tags
Fun with Trends
by Richard Heinberg
Because projecting future magnitudes according to current trends requires relatively simple math, and because doing so sometimes enables analysts to make accurate short-term forecasts of things like population, sales volumes, and commodity prices, trend watching can confer a sense of mystical power. We can predict the future—and maybe even profit by doing so!
But, as...
3 tags
Murder Is Not an Anomaly in War
By Chris Hedges
The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy,...
5 tags
Automation of the Fourth Estate
The world of modern finance is increasingly dependent on automated trading, with sophisticated computer algorithms finding and exploiting pricing irregularities that are invisible to ordinary traders.
Meanwhile, Forbes—one of financial journalism’s most venerable institutions—now employs a company called Narrative Scienceto automatically generate online articles about what to expect from...
5 tags
Right Minds
By Samuel Goldman
The French Revolution was not the first revolution in human or even European history. Mobs had ruled the streets before; princes had often enough been deposed. Yet Burke insisted that that the Revolution was “the most astonishing thing that has hitherto happened in the world.” What was so astonishing about it?
Burke’s answer was that the French Revolution was the consequence of...
4 tags
Nanopills Release Drugs Directly from the Inside...
Researchers at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) have created nanoparticles which could release drugs directly from the cells’ interior. The technology, which has been named “nanopills,” was licensed to the firm Janus Developments of the Barcelona Scientific Park, which verified its tolerance by administering it in vivo.
UAB researchers developed a new vehicle to release...
4 tags
Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail
By Matt Taibbi
It’s been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes – some elaborate and brilliant in their conception, some so crude that they’d be...
5 tags
“If you took the greed out of Wall Street all you’d have left is pavement. The...”
– Robert Reich
5 tags
Return of the Commons
The commons is a key piece of building a sustainable, healthy and fair society. At the Story of Stuff Project, we’re concerned about the hyper-individualization and consumer-mania that has taken over our society. It’s a problem because we’re consuming more resources than the planet can produce each year and creating more waste than it can assimilate. The Global Footprint Network says we’re using...
4 tags
The President and the Pump
The average American motorist is now paying $3.80 a gallon, a record for the time of year. As prices have risen, all the Republican candidates have been selling the idea that the blame for this rise belongs primarily with Mr Obama—not with the market’s fear of a war with Iran, climbing demand in China or any other more plausible explanation. Unhappily for the president, many voters appear to be...
5 tags
Scary Oil
Nouriel Roubini
Gasoline prices in the US are approaching $4 a gallon, a damaging threshold for consumer confidence, and will increase further during the high-demand summer season.
The reason is fear. Not only are oil supplies plentiful, but demand in the US and Europe has been lower, owing to decreasing car use in the last few years and weak or negative GDP growth in the US and the eurozone....
3 tags
“Some depressing facts: Nearly half of people ages 16 to 29 do not have a job. A...”
– NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ
5 tags
The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy...
Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Colein Yemen, and...
3 tags
What Isn’t for Sale?
The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to have a public debate about where markets belong—and where they don’t…
When we decide...
4 tags
Taking stock of Big Business vs. Big Government.
BY DAVID ROTHKOPF
The sales revenues of the world’s largest company, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., are higher than the GDPs of all but 25 countries. At 2.1 million, its employees outnumber the populations of almost 100 nations. The world’s largest investment manager, a low-profile New York company named BlackRock, manages $3.5 trillion in assets — greater than the national reserves...
2 tags
Fiber laser points to woven 3-D displays - MIT... →
Most light emitters, from candles to light bulbs to computer screens, look the same from any angle. But in a paper published this week on the Nature Photonics website, MIT researchers report the development of a new light source — a fiber only a little thicker than a human hair — whose brightness can be controllably varied for different viewers. The fiber thus opens the possibility of 3-D...
Inside the Kurzweil SXSW Keynote: On Infinite Mind... →
South By Southwest Interactive is a bubble of optimism; a haven of ingenuity that seems liberated from all the constraints, or cynicism, of daily life. There are conceptual talks here that forgo all notions of funding or commerce, to instead bask in the glory of the Next Big Idea. There are demonstrations where you can […]
3 tags
Repetition: The Key to Spreading Lies by Ross...
Over time, studies have shown that repetition leads to familiarity, which is the key to fostering belief. Unfortunately, once familiar misinformation is embedded into our psyche, it can be incredibly difficult to dislodge. Prior research from Schwarz has found that attempting to debunk myths by presenting contradicting facts can easily backfire. The research indicated that any repetition of...
3 tags
Money Pol
Everything in Michael Kranish and Scott Helman’s biography “The Real Romney” (HarperCollins) confirms the view that until 2005 Mitt Romney was a liberal Republican cryogenically preserved from the pre-Reagan era. He was a liberal on social issues, such as abortion and gay rights; a champion of government programs, such as universal health care; an...
