First some humor ( Read more... )

Well kinda. I came across this series yesterday and promptly spent 6 hours last night watching the lectures. Does that make me weird ( Read more... )

Time for another grab bag of interesting things I have come across in the hive mind ( Read more... )

A double standard of morality also emerged when other people were arbitrarily divided in two groups and given differently colored wristbands. They watched as one person, either from their group or from the other group, went through the exercise and assigned himself the easy job ( Read more... )

Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive ( Read more... )

http://xkcd.com/374/Read more... )

I haven't posted in a while (like that's a surprise). It's always good to visit with my family, especially my sisters. One thing that is unusual about all my siblings is how different we all are from each other, but how well we get along. We always end up having interesting conversations, and its always good to hear opposing points of view on ( Read more... )

iambic_cub has been reading Quebec news in order to practice his French. He heard about this one a while ago. It took a little longer to make it into the English news, but here it is:

http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/11/arche_de_zoe.php

( more reading behind the cut )

It is an unnerving tale, one that raises profound questions about the fragility of our modern outlook. Even the most stable and successful democracies, with the most high-minded and civilized believers, have proved vulnerable to political messianism and its theological justification. If we can understand how that was possible in the advanced West, ( Read more... )

This sea change in economic thinking doesn’t cut easily along the left-right political axis, and its implications could be profound. “Root-causes” liberals can find a great deal of satisfaction in the emphasis “Where is the Wealth of Nations?” places on education. According to Hamilton, education explains about 36 percent of a country’s intangible ( Read more... )