Kurt Kleiner writes in defense of naps:

A good nap is one of life's great pleasures, and the ability to nap is the sign of a well-balanced life. When we nap we snatch back control of our day from a mechanized, clock-driven society. We set aside the urgency imposed on us by the external world and get in touch with an internal rhythm that is millions of years old.

The genomes of breast and colon cancer have been sequenced.

For-profit charities could be a good idea.

Wired is running a piece by Gary Wolf about what he calls the New Atheism:

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil.

In interviews with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, the author is clearly sympathetic to their ideas but still manages to portray them as a little bit foolish, as embodying some of what they ridicule in others:

Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists.

I heard Sam Harris speak here in Boulder two weeks ago, and I tend to agree. He is intelligent, and his arguments are good, but they are not new and they aren't really his strength. What makes his books popular and his arguments gain traction is that he has the zeal of a true believer.

Lucy is coming to the United States. My distinction as one of few Americans to have seen the fossil in person is about to evaporate. Oh well.

The New Yorker takes a look at microfinance:

When people visit the worst kinds of slums—even worse than anyone can imagine—and they walk around and meet people in their little businesses and little homes, almost always, their first comment is ‘Why are they so happy?’ They are smiling, proud, with dignity, showing what they have achieved. And I say, ‘It’s because they have something today which they didn’t have a month ago, and they have a plan and dream of something they’re going to have in a month’s time that they don’t have today.’

Jorge Buendía reports on a comparison of American attitudes toward Mexican immigrants and Mexican attitudes toward Cental American immigrants [my rough translation from the Spanish]:

Generally, Mexicans reject immigrants as much or more than Americans. For example, only 5% of the population support increasing the immigration of Central Americans to our country (in the United States 17% support more immigration).

The majority of Mexicans, 51%, favor reducing immigration from Central America. In the United States the corresponding percentage is 39.

Mirror neurons and salience landscapes: the latest steps to understanding autism.

Think you hang out in an intellectually diverse group who have differing ideas and beliefs? Think again.

Gregg Easterbrook reports on a study that links autism to watching television. Steven Levitt is not convinced.

Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank have won the Nobel peace prize for their work in microfinance. I've heard only good things about microfinance; it seems to really work.

Geoff Pullum has a radical idea about government regulation of expression.

Josh Rosenau writes in defense of development:

The solution to deforestation cannot simply be to demand that people stop cutting down trees. Too often, that is the only way people can survive at all, and no calculus can justify allowing them to starve in order to preserve a few acres of forest.

An assessment of Harry Potter:

He's a glory hog who unfairly receives credit for the accomplishments of others and who skates through school by taking advantage of his inherited wealth and his establishment connections.

Elephants are causing traffic snarls in Mumbai. The solution, clearly, is to implant microchips in the elephants' ears.

Epidemic coming. Limited amount of vaccine:

Last year, scientists showed in a model that if you vaccinate about 60% of U.S. schoolchildren, flu deaths among the elderly would fall to 6,600 from the typical 34,000. "It's not necessarily true that the best way to protect someone is to vaccinate that person," says Ira Longini of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle. "In the case of the elderly, flu vaccine doesn't protect them very well, so breaking the chain of transmission provides greater protection."

There are lots of tricky ethical questions here, about who to vaccinate and why.

Richard Louv says our society is suffering from nature-deficit disorder:

ADHD may be a set of symptoms initiated or aggravated by lack of exposure to nature. By this line of thinking, many children may benefit from medications, but the real disorder lies in the society that has disengaged children from nature and imposed on them an artificial environment for which they have not evolved.

A kind commenter on this previous post prompted me to look around for something by Louv; the above is a bit old but definitely worth reading.

Changing military strategy in Iraq: "The more force used, the less effective it is," "Tactical success guarantees nothing," "The more you protect your force, the less secure you are." It sounds almost Zen.

If you have six extra hours to read a ridiculously long article, I highly recommend this one by Matthew B. Crawford:

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.

His argument throughout is that manual labor and skilled craft connect us intellectually and socially to the world and to our neighbors in a way that the so-called knowledge economy does not. I think he's on to something; the article made me want to quit graduate school and become a plumber.