On a recent visit home, my mother and I got into it over the value of government services, and whether it was worthwhile to go into deficit to support social programs. I don't know if I was able to communicate my idea that government has economic value, even though it doesn't directly produce wealth (her phrase, arguably put, but I hope my meaning ( Read more... )

Obviously everything in space is three dimensional, but you get pretty used to 2-d images of the sky. If we saw the big dipper from a different angle they would look totally different (lesson plan pdf for teaching this to kids). Even though I knew this academically, and I even had an image in my head of the spatial arrangment of things, I always ( Read more... )

There's this idea that sexism (in the traditional direction of the term: men are superior to women) largely hurts women, but it causes issues for men too. There's a TED talk about the "Man box": acceptable activities for men are limited by what is manly. Here's an example about
how sexism hurt laptop adoption.
Though Hawkins doesn't quite say it ( Read more... )

There's a pretty good article up on Skepchick today about Franz Boas (who revolutionized anthropology).

It's a good article, and makes him sound like a pretty interesting person, but the passage I got focussed on was about Historical Particularism.
Historical particularism is the idea that societies have particular or unique histories that inform ( Read more... )

I never understood what hash salting was until I read this. A really good article which explores all the angles on making a basically secure web-app, with a lot of examples.
So the lessons for developers:

1. Password storage should always be done using a strong hashing algorithm. IT should be one designed for password storage and also use a ( Read more... )

ETA 15h01: Fixed the main link.

Lovely little takedown of flawed pschology up on Salon: PZ Myers, a blogger I read, deconstructing another bad article out of Jesse Bering (Scientific American's "Bering In Mind", and also Discover, I think). He's ripped into a few of Bering's articles before.

Bering's Situation:Take, for example, a situation I ( Read more... )

Even though I'm not going to buy it, I love this shirt.

This has been an ongoing question for a while: why are some genomes huge (hundreds of billions), and others small (hundreds of thousands)? (Humans are toward the upper range at ~3 billion.)

According to Dr. Gregory's theory, having extra DNA generates a certain level of metabolic baggage. Weight scales as base pairs, and organisms with larger ( Read more... )

Wow, just wow. It blows my mind that someone thought this would be an effective ad:

via Skepchick

Here's a very interesting story about a varsity football player who made it to university without basic literacy skills ( Read more... )