Reading about bullying is at once reassuring and liberating, and bloody horrible, as all the old nausea and dread comes rushing out. I've parked so much information about the subject here there's probably not a whole lot of value in my adding much more, but I may take some notes and add further info and/or insights at some point. In the meantime, ( Read more... )

Behold the Dunning-Kruger Effect: a psychological phenomenon in which folks overestimate their own competence at something, precisely because they lack the competence to correctly judge their own ability.

This plugs right in to the natural but hazardous tendency to trust people who seem confident, regardless of their actual knowledge or skill. ( ( Read more... )

Australian judge: it's OK to rape an unconscious woman. SMH columnist defends him against mean old feminists. Peachy.

Let's have some cheering crap:

Advice on finding a lost cat

Via fritters, here's a baby deer washing a very happy cat.

The exact link between obesity and diabetes may have been found - a protein secreted by fat cells ( Read more... )

From Something Awful, useful phrases translated into Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, such as "There are crocodiles in my pants". (I can still read bits of this. Hee hee hee hee hee.)

From TV Tropes, Never Live It Down explains so much about fandom (Owen, Gwen, Spike, etc etc etc).

Christian beliefs still strong, says survey: "More than four in 10 ( Read more... )

Happy or not, Russians rarely smile in public

Why girls are killing themselves. "[Teenage girls] lack the privacy needed to work through the emotional struggles of adolescence because of cell phones, instant messaging, and social networking sites. 'Let's say things aren't going well in middle or high school and you email someone about it,' Hinshaw ( Read more... )

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article5326758.ece (DT's understudy ( Read more... )

http://xkcd.com/23/Read more... )

The skeptics have posters up around uni which bear a quote from Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Huxley: "The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence."

With respect, I reckon ol' Hux is wrong there. There are two far worse sins against the human mind. The first is believing things despite the evidence. The second is trying ( Read more... )

Tetris has become a way for me to check the level of my cognitive deficit. After last night's rough sleep, not only can I not react quickly enough, I just get more and more bewildered - it all becomes a sort of blur.

Now this is interesting. I have the Death Note anime theme stuck in my head. It's a terrific little rock song. The thing is, my Japanese is practically non-existent (I have pretty much the same handful of words as any gaijin otaku, desu). So what the heck is my grey matter actually playing? As I "listen" to the earworm, I can pick out a few ( Read more... )