Thursday, August 30, 2007

Diversity transforms us all into turtles.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

An intentionally inflammatory post at Overcoming Bias:

In many situations it would be better to impose a punishment of torture than imprisonment. The fact that the U.S. justice system rejects torture as a punishment is the result of an anti-torture bias.

Overcoming Bias, though interesting, is firmly in the "we're super-rational and you're all superstitious morons", "most people are mindless lost sheep except the chosen rational atheist libertarian few" camp of blogs.

As a critique of this kind of thinking, this post gets it half right. But the problem is not really consequentialism, it's materialism.

Monday, August 27, 2007

An advice column from a theoretical physicist:

It will be impossible for you to determine precisely both the position and velocity of your dog, rendering him maddeningly difficult to catch.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Creepy sentence of the day:

The UN recommends a gender ratio of no more than 107.

It's from a BBC report on how China's one child policy is leading to more boys being born than girls.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Many thanks to Crawdad for designing a new header for this blog. It may be tweaked a bit in the future, but it's already such an improvement that I decided to go ahead and use it.

While I'm updating the header, I have a small problem that I was hoping my readers could help me with. The Solzhenitzyn quote above is attested several places on the always trustworthy and factually accurate internet, but this variant also appears:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

When sources are cited, both quotes are attributed to The Gulag Archipelago, which I unfortunately don't own. Did he write them both, or is one of them made up? Note that all the quote sites I've been to list one or the other, but not both. If they're both accurate, which should I use?

Friday, August 17, 2007

In China, you are forbidden to reincarnate without government permission.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Arthur Miller had something in common with Albus Dumbledore:

It would be easy to judge Arthur Miller harshly, and some do. For them, he was a hypocrite, a weak and narcissistic man who used the press and the power of his celebrity to perpetuate a cruel lie. But Miller's behavior also raises more complicated questions about the relationship between his life and his art. A writer, used to being in control of narratives, Miller excised a central character who didn't fit the plot of his life as he wanted it to be. Whether he was motivated by shame, selfishness, or fear—or, more likely, all three—Miller's failure to tackle the truth created a hole in the heart of his story.

This is the kind of article that suffers most from reading it on a glowing screen from a pithy link on a third-rate blog that compares the tragic but somehow redemptive subject to a wizard in a children's book. The article is touching, not funny, and long, and deserves to be read in dead tree form while sitting in an armchair. But it deserves to be read, so I'm linking.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

We're all living in a video game.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Today is a sad day for journalism. The Weekly World News is folding:

He founded Weekly World News as a sort of poor man's [National] Enquirer, running celebrity gossip and UFO sightings that didn't quite meet the Enquirer's high standards.

Friday, August 3, 2007

As a wannabe scientist, one of the sites I visit is PlosOne, a peer-reviewed, open access journal with the lofty and probably hopeless goal of becoming a Science or Nature without the subscription costs. Mostly they publish stuff about renal fibroblasts, but two of their recent articles caught my eye.

This one claims to show that sugar is more addictive than cocaine, at least for rats.

And this one explores how much word recognition relies on context, gestalt recognition of the whole word, or piecing together the letters.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Rolling Stone says ethanol is just a subsidy program for agribusiness, that it won't help global warming, and that it will make people starve.

I have, of course, talked about ethanol and other biofuels before.
Daughters or development, choose one:

Through their various mandates and mindsets, international institutions have put families and poor countries on the horns of a deadly dilemma: They can have social and political progress or they can have more than one or two children. Rights and development are pitted against faith and human life—increasingly, female life.