Category: interesting

This site introduces you to many of the issues and ideas that are of interest in the field of development economics. You can take a series of virtual field trips throughout Zambia visiting a number of places and people, gaining access to key data and economic theory. Field trips including aid, wildlife and agriculture.

Charlie Brooker in the Guardian says,

There’s no point debating anything online. You might as well hurl shoes in the air to knock clouds from the sky. The internet’s perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain’t one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering.

via Frank Paynter’s Listics

Americans are more socially isolated than they were 20 years ago, separated by work, commuting and the single life, Duke University Professor Lynn Smith-Lovin reported on Friday.

Nearly a quarter of people surveyed said they had “zero” close friends with which to share or talk over issues.

What is happening? What are humans for?

More than 50 percent named two or fewer confidants, most often immediate family members.

[story at Reuters]

“A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain shared values…”
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada;
active from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s.

Each pixel of this face has been calculated by scientists using a specialized software program.

It has been altered in a special way in order to make people think this is an attractive face.

Find out why some faces are more beautiful than others.

Learn how scientists help unravel the mystery of beauty and the dangerous relationship between a beautiful body and social power.

“We are trapped by the simple false conclusion: what is beautiful is also good”.

“All this shows that we judge people and ourselves on a totally unrealistic basis. We compare ourselves with the most beautiful faces of the world which seem to be omnipresent in the media. They are integral parts in movies, in music video-clips, in commercials, they are on the title pages of magazines, on posters and so on. But the most absurd thing is that these “natural” faces the way they are depicted do not exist in reality either. Most of them are at least partially “artificial”. Their digital images are increasingly optimized by modern image processing software. By doing so faces are generated with attributes that are unreachable for even the most famous super models.”

SymFace lets you see how your face would look if it was perfectly symmetrical

Nearly a quarter of people surveyed said they had “zero” close friends.

Americans are more socially isolated than they were 20 years ago, separated by work, commuting and the single life, Duke University Professor Lynn Smith-Lovin reported on Friday.

More than 50 percent named two or fewer confidants, most often immediate family members.

[story at Reuters]

In over a fifth of cases, people wrongly remembered whether they actually witnessed an event or just imagined it…

“In our tests volunteers either thought they had imagined words which they had actually been shown or said they had seen words which in fact they had just imagined – in over 20 per cent of cases. That is quite a lot of mistakes to be making, and shows how fallible our memory is – or perhaps, how slim our grip on reality is!

“Our work has implications for the validity of witness statements and agrees with other studies that show that our mind sometimes fills in memory gaps for us, and we confuse what we imagined occurred in a situation – which is related to what we expect to happen or what usually happens – with what actually happened.

“Most of us, though, have a critical reality monitoring function so that we are able to distinguish well enough between what is real and what is imagined and our imagination does not have too great an impact on our lives – unless the reality check system breaks down such as after stroke or in cases of schizophrenia.”

The study found that the areas that were activated while remembering whether an event really happened or was imagined in healthy subjects are the very same areas that are dysfunctional in people who experience hallucinations.

Dr Jon Simons and Dr Paul Burgess led the study at the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience via Science Blog

Bill Moyers is back.

“…what is it about religion that’s got America hooked?

It’s an old debate between absolutes, the contrasting viewpoints of belief and disbelief that stirs the passions.

From the popular to the public square—79% of self-identified evangelical Christians cast ballots for President Bush in 2004—the tug of war between reason and faith is the undercurrent of our society in what some see as a fundamentalist era.

On one end of the spectrum people say, “Only religion counts.” On the other end, “Only reason counts.

‘How do we keep the public space between reason and faith, where most of us spend our lives, from becoming a no-man’s land of constant warfare?’
— Bill Moyers (Read the full essay.)

Resources for further investigation of the topics:

“I’d rather have a smaller following of really cool people who get it,” says Dixie Chick Martie Maguire, “who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith. We don’t want those kinds of fans. They limit what you can do.”

Full story at TIME,
via Huffington Post

Wasn’t it Einstein who said there was more empty space in an atom than in the solar system?

Proportionately, there is more empty space between an atom’s nucleus and its first electron than between the Sun and Pluto!

When you figure out how to scroll this page at Phrenopolis, you’ll see an atom from the inside.

You’ll get an elementary sense of the space inside an atom.

The author says,

“I used to think that things like rocks and buildings and my own skeleton were fairly solid.

But they’re made up of atoms, and atoms, as you can see here, contain so little actual material that they can barely be said to exist.

We are all phantoms.“

Most cosmic particles as well as radiation from the earth travel right through us. But some can strike molecules in our body. In the early 70s I spent much of a year crafting trim and furnishings at the home of Dr. John Gofman, a pioneer at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, a pioneer on the health effects of radiation, a co-discoverer of uranium-233, and an articulate and effective critic of the safety aspects of the U.S. atomic energy programs. Dr. Gofman traveled the world with this warning,

“Most particles go right through our body. But we truly need to worry about the occasional ‘bowling ball’ that can wreak havoc as it collides with one of the molecules in our body.”

See this post on how easy it is for the sun’s rays to damage our DNA.

Update:
Dr. Gofman passed away in August 2007 at the age of 88. The LATimes reports,

Often called the father of the antinuclear movement, Gofman and his colleague at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Arthur R. Tamplin, developed data in 1969 showing that the risk from low doses of radiation was 20 times higher than stated by the government.

A new post is here.

A professor at Princeton University and a MacArthur Foundation fellow, Bonnie Bassler, is credited with discovering the ability bacteria have to communicate across species using a small molecule called autoinducer-2 (AI-2).

This simple sugar, produced by scores of microbes including Escherichia coli, Salmonella, Vibrio cholera, and several species of bioluminescent marine bacteria, allows bugs to assess the density of the local population and to adjust their behavior accordingly: throwing off light, spewing out toxins, or forming slimy biofilms.

The idea that bacteria use chemical signals to convey information about population density – a phenomenon called quorum sensing – has been around for decades. In the early 1970s, microbiologist Woody Hastings noticed that V. fischeri, an organism that resides inside the light organs of squid and other marine life, glows only when its ranks swell.

But few scientists appreciated how widespread quorum sensing would turn out to be.

I instantly thought of human quorum and wondered if humans utilized similar stimuli. Frankly, it’s likely.

When we flock to fads, wear certain brands to bicycle or other brands at the hotel, are we cueing signals?

Is Web 2.0 merely a biofilm in the internet?

Gee whiz. It’s late. I should be asleep.

Quorum sensing? Multiple stuff going on here methinks.

Lyme disease is caused by a bacterial organism that is transmitted to humans via the bite of an infected tick. Some people bitten by an infected tick develop a characteristic skin rash around the area of the bite. The rash may feel hot to the touch, and vary in size, shape, and color, but it will often have a “bull’s eye” appearance (a red ring with a clear center). However, many will not develop the rash, which makes Lyme disease hard to diagnose because its symptoms and signs mimic those of many other diseases.

Seven to 10 days following an infected tick’s bite, the first stage of Lyme disease begins with flu-like symptoms such as fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes, headaches, fatigue, muscle aches, and joint pain.

Neurological complications most often occur in the second stage of Lyme disease, with numbness, pain, weakness, Bell’s palsy (paralysis of the facial muscles), visual disturbances, and meningitis symptoms such as fever, stiff neck, and severe headache. Other problems, which may not appear until weeks, months, or years after a tick bite, include decreased concentration, irritability, memory and sleep disorders, and nerve damage in the arms and legs.

N.I.H. link site
Lyme Disease Foundation
LymeBusters

Superb .gif animation! Superb! Excellent! Wow! Learn the evolution of the alphabet in a few short minutes. Gain new insight. Ponder.

Linkadelic Magazine points out, “Good examples are Y that turned into V and then made a comeback. and an entire set of characters that switched direction and turned into E, F and K in a short 150 year period.”

Of 12,000 people supplying wine in Bordeaux, 4,000 lost their jobs in merely 4 years.

While critics acclaim the 2005 vintage as one of the best for a century, only an elite few in Bordeaux are rejoicing. Pushed to the wall by mounting costs, global over-production of wine and crushing loans, hundreds of winegrowers are selling.

deconsumption sez, “I’d encourage you to read Jacob Needleman’s The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders, which argues in very much the same vein, and with immanent grace, (psst: imminent means happening really soon; immanent means top level.) about the possibility of our reuniting in a new way with that essentially spiritual idealism which drove and guided America’s great founders. And don’t just take my word for it, read the Amazon.com reader reviews…”

Do we jail behavior or condition?

Fewer than 55,000 Americans receive treatment in psychiatric hospitals.

Meanwhile, almost 10 times that number — nearly 500,000 — mentally ill men and women are serving time in U.S. jails and prisons.

Link to PBS show The New Asylums.
via ‘Mind Hacks‘, the blog of the O’Reilly book.

With no Congressional action on raising the minimum wage since 1997, inflation has eroded wages. The minimum wage in the 21st century is $2 lower in real dollars than it was four decades ago and now stands at its lowest level since 1955…

…the national minimum wage of $5.15 is not enough for a family to live above the poverty line. The annual salary for workers earning the national minimum wage still leaves a family of three about $6,000 short of the poverty threshold.

…the House of Representatives last week voted to give members of Congress yet another pay raise, as it has done almost every year for nearly a decade.

CNN’s Lou Dobbs continues,
“For some reason, our elected officials decided against holding a news conference. Maybe that’s because they didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that they raise their own salaries almost every year while refusing to raise the pay of our lowest-paid workers.

“This administration, our Republican-led Congress and the dominant corporate interests in this country want cheap labor. And to achieve that goal they’re outsourcing middle-class jobs, importing illegal labor and cutting retirement and health-care benefits.

If I should die before we have a chance
To say goodbye…
Remember me
Remember me.

I followed my heart instead of the pack
Set out on this trail and never looked back
When my final sunset fades to black…
Remember me
Remember me.

For I didn’t really die; just changed;
One more adventure though it seems strange.
It wasn’t my choice but the will of The Creator
All beings be blessed and I’ll catch you all later

In the cold tingle of the fresh fallen snow;
On the hot summer nights where the South winds blow
In the will towards the light of the seeds as they grow
If you’re ever wondering about where the birds go…
Remember me
Remember me.

I didn’t last long but don’t mourn for me;
Be sad for the ones who never live free.

Better a season in freedom than a lifetime in chains
So when that last ripple is all that remains…
Remember me
Remember me.

VanDweller – still here on May 25, 2004, hopefully for as long as my skin holds out, I can still hear the music in the song of the birds, and I finish all my book & recording projects!

The 100 most reliable cars of the last decade.

Warranty Direct, though operating in Britain, collects lots of data about warranty issues – something you’ll never find out from the only other people who have access to the information (the manufacturers). In a very clever move, it has taken this secondary data and produced a reliability index – an independent comparison of frequency of failure across the 55,000 vehicles it insures.

Article at Gizmag

“If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”

Some clever answers:

“If I’m not doing anything wrong,
then you have no cause to watch me.”

“Because the government gets to define what’s wrong,
and they keep changing the definition.”

“Because you might do something wrong with my information.”

At the Crypto-Gram Newsletter, Bruce Schneier continues, “My problem with quips like these — as right as they are — is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not.

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

…we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.”

An article on wholesale surveillance measures originally appeared on Wired.com.

The Number One Rule of Niche Marketing:
“The more people who think you’re crazy, the more likely you’re on the right track.”