I’m posting a link to this article primarily because the article agrees with me: “Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics”—I’ve believed for years that behavioral differences between genders (or between other sets of people, really) are due to cultural and social factors, not differences that are somehow “innate”. That article is a good summary of scientific findings that back up my belief.
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I’m not a fan of the Harry Potter series. I’ve only read the first one, didn’t particularly like it, and it’s not my kind of fantasy series.
I’m not a fan of fan fiction, despite technically having written some. I regard it as being of dubious quality, despite knowing perfectly well that it’s not more likely to be bad than anything else.
Nevertheless, I was, and remain, captivated by a particular piece of Harry Potter fan fiction: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Its twist is that its Harry is a hyper-rationalist genius. You should go read it now.
An exploration, using 134 attempts to get Mario to finish a level, of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. Using custom emulator software and a fan-produced ROM hack of Super Mario World, naturally.
This blog post, about how the Terra Nova Expedition struggled terribly with scurvy, is quite fascinating, particularly because the correct prevention for scurvy had been discovered long before it. It’s an illustrative example of how incomplete understanding, even when already armed with the right answer, can lead to awful mistakes.
Some evidence for that assertion:
There’s also this interactive Flash piece.
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Emily Yoffe has a Slate article about our compulsion to acquire new information—and how it means we’re extremely susceptible to addictive behaviors around Internet use. Critical points: we have drives for both pleasure and for “seeking”, and it is this latter drive that the modern always-online environment feeds. Or overfeeds.
I don’t know how accurate this journalistic take on neuroscientific discoveries is, but I do think that this would be a good article to have printed out, and highlighted, next to my computer.
I’ve never paid much attention to things like body mass index, and always had an idea that it might not be completely reliable as an indicator of individual health, but apparently it really shouldn’t be trusted at all.
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I’d heard of Zipf’s Law before, but was still astonished when a friend sent me this New York Times article about some of the things it applies to. The parts of it that really got me:
[T]he largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, and three times as big as the third largest, and so on. In other words, the population of a city is, to a good approximation, inversely proportional to its rank. Why this should be true, no one knows.
—“Guest Column: Math and the City”, Steven Strogatz, The New York Times, 19 May 2009
While I tend to be skeptical of scientific claims to understanding the workings of human brains and particularly human emotions, it’s clear that science is improving in this area, and that pharmaceutical behavior/mood modification is increasing in efficacy. So when scientists claim a chemical understanding of love (paywall-protected full version here), and the ability to induce it under some circumstances, it’s definitely interesting.
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I went to see a Long Now Foundation essay this evening with Lev, and it was really good. The talk was given by Frans Lanting, a photographer, and was called “Life’s Journey Through Time”.
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