The tale of an economist's come from behind victory over a world-class poker player in a hotly contested game of rock-paper-scissors.

Genius comes from hard work and practice.

Bush's vision for space exploration points NASA in the right direction.

James Carroll is confused, as many people are, about the relationship of faith to reason:

The scientific method prizes experience (investigation and observation) over ideology. Reason over faith. The starting point of experience is not God's existence ("In the beginning, God"), but the person's ("I think, therefore I am"). How do I know I exist? Not because God tells me ("God said ..."), but because I can experience myself asking the question. The self- awareness of the thinking being is the start of sure knowledge, which is why close attention to such awareness (observation, investigation, experiment) is the absolute value of science.

He seems to think that if a president wants to veto a bill for moral reasons, she must first be like Descartes and reconstruct all of human knowledge from first principles. That, after all, is what scientists do, isn't it?

Some related thoughts from First Things.

Jack Shafer says the best writers at the New York Times are the movie capsule reviewers, and they're the best because they are limited to 20 words or less.

A cure for Alzheimers?

Daniel Gilbert writes what may be the rarest kind of Middle-East commentary: it is both insightful and fun to read. Excerpt:

If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd- numbered punch that preceded it.

My other Hummer is a Prius, and other strange political bumper stickers.

Among other bold claims, Shikha Dalmia says that a Prius is worse for the environment than a Hummer. But to me her most interesting point is this:

One of the most perverse things about U.S. consumers buying hybrids is that while this might reduce air pollution in their own cities, they increase pollution – and energy consumption -- in Japan and other Asian countries where these cars are predominantly manufactured. "In effect, they are exporting pollution and energy consumption," Spinella says.

Earlier I mentioned that people are donating their unused computer power to the wrong thing. Now you have the opportunity to use them for the right thing, namely, fighting malaria.

When you get a group of PhD scientists together, do they talk about science? No, they talk about money. And that can be a problem.

The BBC casts doubt on the six degrees of separation theory:

If 95 or 97 letters out of 100 never reached their target, would you say it was proof of six degrees of separation? So why do we want to believe this?

It is not a surprise that letter-passing experiments designed to test the six degrees of separation idea don't work. Since no one has a God's-eye view of the global social network, no one has any idea how to reach someone who is more than one degree away from them. That doesn't mean that the small-world network is a bad model; it may be a good model for the objective structure of the social network but not take into account an individual's limited knowledge of that network.

This, on the other hand, is definitely a good point:

What is more important is not the number of links, but the quality.

So we can enrich the theory by weighting the edges of the connectivity graph, which may very well reveal that social networks are more clique-ish and less well-connected than we thought.

Mark Noll writes about "the Magna Carta of the poor and the oppressed . . . the most democratic book in the world" in the Wall Street Journal:

Hundreds of phrases (clear as crystal, powers that be, root of the matter, a perfect Babel, two-edged sword) and thousands of words (arguments, city, conflict, humanity, legacy, network, voiceless, zeal) were in the common speech because they had first been in this translation.

Rules about how to use language aren't worth the effort:

If great writers break a rule frequently and naturally in writing, everyone else follows suit in speech, and doing so creates no confusion, that rule is a waste of everyone's time.

Jordan Ellenberg reviews two books about symmetry.

So you're a paleontologist struggling in obscurity. Your field is not dinosaurs, so no one cares. What do you do? Refer to your finds as a "demon duck of doom" and a "killer kangaroo". Then the BBC is sure to notice you.

Mexico can teach us how to run a fair election.

Want to save the world? Get rich.

If you have a good education, you shouldn't just consider getting rich. Creating and amassing wealth is an outright moral obligation.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an op-ed supporting "advanced market commitments" for the funding of vaccine research:

Under this proposal, wealthy nations would make markets for vaccines by committing to purchase a specific number of doses at a specific price. For example, they might commit to buy 200 million doses of a malaria vaccine at $15 per dose, with developing countries contributing a modest co-pay.

This is a terrific idea, and long overdue. It is a great way to use capitalism to spur those evil greedy pharmaceutical companies to help the poor. But when you're arguing for a campaign to help the needy, try to stay away from this kind of statement:

Economists and public-health experts have estimated that such a commitment would save lives at a mere $15 per life-year, an extraordinarily cost-effective way to improve the human condition.

Sounds just a little bit cold and heartless. $15 per life-year, huh? Obviously, if it was $150 per life-year it wouldn't be worth doing, but since it's a "cost-effective" way to save lives...

Michael Shermer discusses an interesting study about confirmation bias and its implications.