This is an absolutely brilliant presentation given by Clay Shirky (author of the new smash hit on organizing Without organizations called “Here Comes Everybody“) on the topic of “Where do they find the time”. You hear this phrase, usually in response to some report of silly activity or massively time consuming hobby. We Clay knows [...]
Moon River alerted me to something by The Nonist on Flâneurs:
This is a map by de Lauwe of all the movements made during one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement of Paris. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of [...]
Ever since I read Timothy D. Wilson’s magnificent “Strangers to Ourselves“, I have been fascinated with the fact that we often know less about ourselves than our closest friends and family (thanks probably to our many cognitive biases) .
Enter MIT’s Reality Mining Project:
[O]ur ultimate goal is to create a predictive classifier that [...]
The central tenet of those who support unrestricted mass immigration has long been its putative economic benefits.
When the social costs of mass immigration were pointed out, the Homo Economicus argument would be deployed.
I have long seen through the sham of this argument and I am on record slamming it regularly.
See or example:
Immigration sophistry debunked…again
The [...]
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In March 2003, social psychologist Richard Nisbett published his groundbreaking book “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why“, which challenged the received wisdom that all human groups perceive and reason in the same way. He came to the conclusion, based mostly on observation and social psychology studies, that Asians and Westerners
“Have [...]
Friday, February 29, 2008
The Financial Times has great story about that profoundly strange and beautiful country, Japan:
In Japan, the trees are blue. So are the traffic lights, even though they look decidedly green to uninitiated outsiders. The Japanese do have a word for green, but when it comes to foliage and traffic signals, blue is the preferred term.
Blue [...]
Friday, February 22, 2008
Belgrade’s Holocaust Memorial - one of several in a city populated by a people famed for their resistance to the Nazis
I am used to reading lies and vitriol about Serbs and Serbia but an article emailed to me today is one of the most racist, hateful and biased articles I have read in a [...]
From Ancient Worlds News:
The Anglo-Saxons who conquered England in the 5th century set up a system of apartheid that enabled them to master and outbreed the native British majority, according to gene research.
In less than 15 generations, more than half of the population in England had the genes of the invaders, investigators say.
“The native Britons [...]
From Discover magazine comes the story of a superb piece of historical detective work, Megadeath in Mexico
“Epidemics followed the Spanish arrival in the New World, but the worst killer may have been a shadowy native‚Äîa killer that could still be out there.”
When Hernando Cortes and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men [...]
From The fraud of primitive authenticity
Two billion war deaths would have occurred in the 20th century if modern societies suffered the same casualty rate as primitive peoples, according to anthropologist Lawrence H Keeley, who calculates that two-thirds of them were at war continuously, typically losing half of a percent of its population to war each [...]