1. Cory Doctorow on judging one's own writing:
One of the things I've noticed about writing every day is that there are days when writing that page feels like flying. Like the hand of God reached down and touched my keyboard, and every word is just pure gold. And then there are days that I feel I'm writing absolute, totally forgettable junk that shouldn't have been committed to phosphors, let alone saved to disc. The thing is, a month later, you can't tell the difference. The difference between a day when it feels like you're writing brilliantly and a day when it feels like you're writing terribly is entirely in your head, it's not in the prose.
(HT: kottke.org)
2. Sabotage manual from 1944 advises acting like an average 2008 manager
(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible -- never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
3. The 125 Healthiest Supermarket Foods in America (HT: Lifehacker)
4. James Q. Wilson on deterring crime:
Several readers have asked whether prison deters crime, some saying that correlation is not the same as causation. Social scientists have known that dictum for the better part of a century and have worked hard at finding out whether prison deters crime among would-be-offenders (it obviously prevents it among people already locked up). Steven Levitt, principal author of Freakonomics, discusses the issue in that book and summarizes the evidence, now very strong, in the chapter he wrote from a book I and Joan Petersilia edited entitled Crime. The econometric technique is simple: construct an equation that asks what can explain the crime rate using, as explanations, everything that we think causes crime (for example, urbanization, unemployment, and the like) and adds the chances of going to prison. When you do this, you find that the higher the chances of going to prison in a state, the lower the crime rate, other things being equal. (You also discover that the unemployment rate has very little effect on crime.
5. Schedule of US Economic Stimulus Check Payments
6. Quote of the Week: "Take all the words available in the human vocabulary and read them from the dictionary, and you have only a list of words. But with the creativity and imagination God has given human beings, let these words flow together in the right order and they give wings to the spirit. Every child ought to know the pleasure of words so well chosen that they awaken sensibility, great emotions, and understanding of truth." -- Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Child's Heart (HT: Zondervan)
First, whether it is a lottery winner, an athlete or a star entertainer, if they are not equipped with the knowledge on how to make and save money they are in trouble. When they didn't earn it through disciplined business practices and they don't have those skills they usually go through it quickly. Most lottery winners or athletes make a great deal of money in a short period of time. They start spending it on things that only go down in value (cars, jewelry, partying, entourage, etc) and start to evaporate the money they do have. They can carry this off until they stop earning big money. This is when the trouble starts. It is hard to believe that MC Hammer, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield and now Ed McMahon are broke. These are people who earned hundreds of millions over time and it disappeared. Lavish spending and entourages were probably the downfall for the first three for sure.
8. The Value of a Human Life: $129,000
In theory, a year of human life is priceless. In reality, it's worth $50,000. That's the international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure. More simply, insurance companies calculate that to make a treatment worth its cost, it must guarantee one year of "quality life" for $50,000 or less. New research, however, would argue that that figure is far too low. Stanford economists have demonstrated that the average value of a year of quality human life is actually closer to about $129,000.
9. Depressing Statistic of the Week: "A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income." -- David Brooks
10. Brendan O'Neill on the exploitation of Aids:
Finally we have a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals. After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease - with salacious, tombstone-illustrated government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or "die of ignorance" - the head of the World Health Organisation's HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret.
Kevin de Cock, who has headed the global battle against Aids, said at the weekend that, outside very poor African countries, Aids is confined to "high-risk groups", including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers. And even in these communities it remains quite rare. "It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in countries [outside sub-Saharan Africa]", he said. In other words? All that hysterical fearmongering about Aids spreading among sexed-up western youth was a pack of lies.
11. A handy page of Christian audio resources, from Darrell Bock to Ravi Zacharias
12. Chart of the Week
more graph humor and song chart memes
13. 8 Of The World's Most Unusual Postage Stamps
14. Why Don't Well-Educated Adults Understand Accumulation?
Yout might think that MBA students at MIT can easily deduce how much water is in a bathtub, based on the flow of water in and out. But you'd be wrong! Said bathtub is just one example of a "system" with "stocks" (e.g., water level) and "flows." Other examples are greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, customers in a store, or money in your bank account. Researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and George Mason University found that most of their students had trouble understanding even supposedly straightforward systems with one stock, one inflow, and one outflow. The researchers conclude that the poor performance reflects a fundamental flaw in how we think about accumulation.
16. What college majors lead to the greatest earnings?
If your son or daughter is not sure what to study in college, here's some research that just might help them in the long term, at least financially. An analysis of a large data set on college graduates confirms prior research (and common sense) that engineering degrees garner the highest income and arts/social science degrees the least, with business and science/math degrees somewhere in the middle. The analysis, however, also indicated when a second major can pay off. Two engineering majors or science/math majors are not worth more than one. Yet it always pays to add an engineering major to another kind of major. A business and science/math double major is worth more than either one by itself. It doesn't pay to add an arts/social science or education major to a business, science/math, or engineering major. And, finally, women get more out of engineering or science/math degrees, whether as single or double majors.
Or they could go to college to get something more rewarding but less materially useful, like a liberal arts education.
17. Theodore Dalrymple on Envy:
We are enjoined, when we suffer or feel unhappy (which are not necessarily quite the same thing, of course), to consider those who are yet worse off than ourselves. This is supposed to relieve and console us, but it rarely does. The most that it achieves is to make us feel guilty that we are so miserable over comparative trifles when others have so many worse travails than ours; and this in turn makes us feel more wretched than ever. Moreover, there is a curious moral asymmetry at work: while the thought that there are always people worse off than ourselves is supposed to be edifying, the thought that there are always people better off than ourselves is not. Indeed, it is the very reverse, a powerful stimulus to resentment, the longest-lived, most gratifying and most harmful of all emotions.
(HT: One Eternal Day)
18. Scalia Decries Drift of Court On Religion
Justice Antonin Scalia, in a speech Sunday night, declared that the US Constitution should not be read to "banish the Almighty from the public forum." He decried what he sees as the Supreme Court's prevailing, if recent, jurisprudence that holds that government "cannot favor religion over nonreligion." He lauded a 1952 opinion by Justice Douglas declaring: "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."
19. Quiz: How many sequels were there? (HT: Waxy)
20. The iPhone lesson in boosting margins
3: Third, work to increase the reference price. By comparing the new $199 iPhone to the $599 original phone, Steve Jobs is in essence competing with his prior self - and winning. The $400 in savings is fiction, but it feels like a good deal.
(HT: Nudge)
21. Hypnosis - myths and facts (HT: The Presurfer)
22. Survey: Dramatic Gains in Dads' Involvement
Fathers have increased their involvement in their children's lives over the past decade, according to a new survey by the National Center for Fathering.
The survey, released in anticipation of Father's Day, compares fathers' involvement in their children's education with a similar survey we conducted in 1999. Overwhelmingly, the survey shows a positive trend among fathers. Dads are more involved in every area examined by the survey. The greatest increases in father involvement came in "walking or taking your child to school," "attending class events," and "helping your child with extracurricular activities." Significant gains were also seen in "helping your child with homework" and "visiting your child's classroom."
23. How to Live With Just 100 Things
24. Miracle baby "born" twice:
When Chad and Keri McCartney say their infant daughter, Macie Hope, is born again, they aren't referring to religion -- the month-old miracle baby really was born twice.
The first "birth" was about six months into Keri McCartney's pregnancy, when surgeons at Texas Children's Hospital took the tiny fetus from Keri's womb to remove a tumor that would have killed Macie before she was born.
The second time was on May 3, when the McCartneys welcomed their surgically repaired -- and perfectly healthy -- baby girl into the world.
(HT: Neatorama)
25. LOLCat of the Week
more cat pictures
26. Are soap operas a form of birth control?
In 1960, the average Brazilian woman had 6.3 children. By 2000, the fertility rate was down to 2.3. The decline was comparable to China's, but Brazil didn't have a one-child policy. In fact, for a while it was even illegal to advertise contraceptives.
Many factors account for the drop in Brazilian fertility, but one recent study identified a factor most people probably wouldn't consider: soap operas (novellas). Novelas are huge in Brazil, and the network Rede Globo effectively has a monopoly on their production...Using census data from 1970 to 1991 and data on the entry of Rede Globo into different markets, the researchers found that women living in areas that received Globo's broadcast signal had significantly lower fertility. (And yes, the study did control for all sorts of factors and addressed the concern that the entry of Globo might have been driven by trends that also contribute to fertility decline. I'll spare you the gory econometric details.) Additionally, people in areas with Globo's signal were more likely to name their children after novella characters, suggesting that it was the novellas specifically, and not TV in general, that influenced childbearing.
(HT: kottke.org)
27. Why it hurts to sell your stuff
If the reason for the endowment effect came from the products being overvalued by their owners, (professor Brian) Knutson's team expected to see a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbus change during the test. It didn't, "whether buying or selling, the activation in the nucleus accumbus looked the same", says (co-author professor Scott) Rick.
But others part of the brain, the insula, which has a role in the experience of pain, and the greater mesial prefrontal cortex became activated when the subjects contemplated selling one of their items. If they had ranked that item as one they particularly liked, the change in the insula was greater.
According to this research, this is because of loss aversion, says Rick. "It is not because people are overplaying the positive [aspects of a possession]." Rather, we just become attached to objects we own -- so much so that it takes a lot to convince us to part with them.
(HT: BoingBoing)
28. One In Ten Adults In England Has A Non-earlobe Piercing -- One in ten adults in England have had a piercing somewhere other than their ear lobe, with a quarter experiencing complications, and one in 100 piercings resulting in a hospital admission, according to a study on the British Medical Journal website.
29. Tell me by the way I walk -- Biometrics is commonly associated retinal scans, iris recognition and DNA databases, but researchers in India are working on another form of biometrics that could allow law enforcement agencies and airport security to recognize suspects based on the way they were, their characteristic gait. The team reveals details of a comprehensive framework for gait recognition by computer in the inaugural issue of the Inderscience publication, the International Journal of Biometrics.
30. Teenagers attending college less likely to engage in risky sexual behavior -- Adolescents attending college six months after completing high school are significantly less likely to engage in risky sexual behavior than those who do not go to college, according to the first study to directly compare the two groups. The University of Washington study, published in this month's issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, also compared risky sexual behavior of teens living at home and those who established their own residences and found no significant differences between the groups, said Jennifer Bailey, a research scientist with the UW's Social Development Research Group and lead author of the paper.
31. Building on pyramids of trash-- A Dutch engineer has devised a simple solution to the growing amounts of waste society generates. Writing in the current issue of the International Journal of Global Environmental Issues, Roelof Schuiling of Geochem Research BV, suggests solidifying waste in a concrete-type material and using the resulting slabs to build pyramids that not only deal with waste disposal but could become tourist traps and major landmarks for our cities.
32. Mobile phones expose human habits
The whereabouts of more than 100,000 mobile phone users have been tracked in an attempt to build a comprehensive picture of human movements. The study concludes that humans are creatures of habit, mostly visiting the same few spots time and time again. Most people also move less than 10km on a regular basis, according to thestudy published in the journal Nature. The results could be used to help prevent outbreaks of disease or forecast traffic, the scientists said.
33. Zürich Chamber Orchestra | Roller Coaster
(HT: Very Short List)
Of course prison is a deterrent, just as capital punishment is. When people try to twist data to indicate otherwise, I ask if they think driving behavior would change if the cost of traffic tickets were reduced to a nickel or increased to 5 yrs. in jail. The cost of a behavior influences how much of that behavior you'll get (sort of like that supply/demand thing).
Just because prison doesn't stop crime completely doesn't mean it isn't a deterrent.
"The Almighty" ain't very "almighty" if mere mortals can banish s/he/it.
He decried what he sees as the Supreme Court's prevailing, if recent, jurisprudence that holds that government "cannot favor religion over nonreligion."
Scalia's kind of ...well...wrong is the most polite way I can put it. After all, the question to be begged is "Whose religion?"
Scalia is an intellectual embarassment and the apotheosis of the dishonest conservative. Quite simply his job is to render "opinions" and push the scales of justice in the US away from justice. Conservatism is, after all, all about maintaining injustice.
Don't believe me? Look at the history and philosphy of conservatism. If you objective is maintenance of the status quo (or worse, pushing the status quo back to a horrible, "Gilded Age" mentality) then by it is manifestly obvious that, you are letting injustice be done to meet your objective.
He lauded a 1952 opinion by Justice Douglas declaring: "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."
Perfect example of what I was just saying...
#12 *: )
Texas will always be the only relative state this side of Canada!
He decried what he sees as the Supreme Court's prevailing, if recent, jurisprudence that holds that government "cannot favor religion over nonreligion."
Ayyee but Joe and others here have told us previously that atheism is itself a religion. If that's the case then gov't neutrality isn't about being neutral betweeen religion.v.non-religion but neutral between competiting religions.
Ayyee but Joe and others here have told us previously that atheism is itself a religion.
You have this annoying habit of responding to people in the 3rd person. If you are responding to Joe, address Joe; if you are responding to someone else, address that person. Your usually, meandering posts are already tough enough to follow without this unusual tic you've developed.
Depressing Statistic of the Week: "A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income." -- David Brooks
I wish I could find the exact figure, but income surveys of the lowest quintile always find that their spending is about 50% higher than their income. Be it savings or drug money. So that would really only be 6% of their spending on the lottery. Which isn't that much anyway.