Food for the pleasure center of the brain

Two good ones from the Telegraph’s Week in Pictures:

A port worker carries a pirarucu, the largest freshwater fish in South America, after they confiscated 66 of the fish from poachers in Manaus, Brazil. Picture: REUTERS

A pig flies through through the air during the Pig Racing and Diving show at the 2008 Royal Melbourne Show Picture: GETTY

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It looks like todays blast(s) in Islamabad, Pakistan have completely destroyed the Marriot Hotel with the wreckage burning fiercely.

The people being interviewed are describing trully horrific scenes, with one local journalist saying it is the biggest bomb he has ever seen in Pakistan.

BBC News

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These are my links for September 19th 2008 from 08:51 to 17:48:

• Fitness - I Put In 5 Miles at the Office - NYTimes.com - Treadmill at work and other methods for fighting the fat and workplace stress.
• In country after country, democratic reforms are in retreat. The surprising culprit: the middle class - The Boston Globe -
• Abstruse Goose » 936 Little Blobs - 936 Little Blobs represents the 960 months of an average human lifetime.
• Tinker, tailor, soldier, defector — John le Carré: I nearly left the West - Times Online - JOHN LE CARRE, the espionage writer, has revealed that he was tempted to defect to the Soviet Union during the cold war.
• How to Work Better (10 Points) - 1. Do one thing at a time
  2. Know the problem
  3. Learn to listen
  4. Learn to ask questions
  5. Distinguish sense from nonsense
  6. Accept change as inevitable
  7. Admit mistakes
  8. Say it simple
  9. Be calm
  10. Smile
• Did Saakashvili Lie?: The West Begins to Doubt Georgian Leader - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International - It is looking increasingly like the Georgians were trying to fool not only the Russians and the separatists, but their allies too.
• Voices of Victims Heard at Belgrade Conference - Organisers hope event will encourage creation of regional commission to establish truth about war crimes in region.

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These are my links for September 17th 2008 through September 18th 2008:

• The Culture of Prosperity - Gregory Clark’s book - "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World" - shows how important attitudes are to economic growth, writes Wolfgang Kasper

  This book asks big questions: Why are some societies rich and others poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution occur in the seventeenth century, in England? Why do some societies—in Africa, for example—find sustained growth so elusive?

• Debate: ‘Behavioural economics: is it such a big deal?’ by Pete Lunn | Prospect Magazine September 2008 issue 150 - Behavioural economics is becoming increasingly fashionable. Does it represent a revolution in economic thinking? Or does it merely provide a few handy insights into the more irrational behaviours of individuals
• ‘Big bang machine’ is back on collision course after its glitches are fixed - Times Online - The Large Hadron Collider is ready to start smashing its first particles together early next week, after glitches with the £3.6 billion “big bang machine” were fixed by engineers.

  Although scientists had hoped that the successful creation of the particle accelerator’s first beams last Wednesday would clear the way for trial collisions this week, the timetable has had to be delayed because of power failures that affected its cooling system.

• Prodrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - In medicine, a prodrome is an early non-specific symptom (or set of symptoms) indicating the start of a disease before specific symptoms occur. For example fever, malaise, headache and anorexia (lack of desire to eat) are part of the prodrome for mumps or a variety of infective disorders. A prodrome can be the precursor to the onset of a chronic neurological disorder such as migraine or epilepsy, where prodrome symptoms include scotoma, disorientation, aphasia, or photosensitivity.

  It also refers to the initial in vivo round of viral replication.

  Prodromal labour, mistakenly called "false labour," is the early signs before labour starts.

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Some great Twitter epigrams and witticisms:

@sacca: You can’t really appreciate the vapidity of most people’s taste in music until you live directly above a traffic signal.

@tempo: Evolution is a sorting process that is the very antithesis of random. (in response to http://is.gd/1Do1 )

@davorg: Conference Driven Development - submitting talks to conferences so that it will galvanise you into doing the work you’re talking about.

@sourcegirl: procrastination is our brain’s way of saying that something is not as important as we may think it is…

@gstein: OH: isn’t a smoking area in a restaurant like a peeing area in a pool?

@amandachapel:@lisahoffmann “I’ve had conversations with people I never would have met otherwise.” Like hanging out at the bus terminal.

[From Twitter Epigrams and Repartee - O'Reilly Radar]

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[Originally posted in Combat Consulting]

Looks like we have a Tipping Point / Made to Stick / Fooled by Randomness type instant classic here:

This year has seen a glut of books on topics in that strange area occupied awkwardly by behavioural economics, cognitive psychology, and experimental philosophy. Some fail to distinguish themselves, merely rehashing the many ways in which we aren’t perfectly rational creatures. Others, however, find an original angle to tack the last 30 years of work since Daniel Kahneman first thought “but wait, real people don’t make rational choices”. Nudge (Thaler and Sunnstein, Yale University Press, 2008) is from two leading University of Chicago economists and takes a public policy angle that has been rewarded in the bestseller lists.

The authors (who refer to each other by their last names, even in the blog that accompanies the book, an awkward affectation that makes me picture two 1950s men in suits at a work cocktail party) have coined a new term: libertarian paternalism. By this they mean that policy makers can use your brain’s decision-making shortcuts to steer you towards good behaviour while still leaving you free to choose bad. It’s opt-out public policy.

Libertarian Paternalism is a brilliant phrase because it has something for everything: libertarianism for the Small Government suit, paternalism for the Smug Liberal. Nudge has been required reading in the halls of English and US power, because it promises that you can have your cake and eat it. You can make decisions for other people, but not be hated by the people who don’t like you making decisions for other people! What’s not to love?

The book has a simple structure: first the authors walk us through our cognitive biases, the flaws in our decision-making apparatus; then they take us through different real-world scenarios such as social security, healthcare, and education; and finally they deal with objections and suggest future avenues of exploration. In each subject area, the authors suggest “nudges” (the authors endow the word with the same near-religious air that accompanies “social graph” and “RoR” in Web 2.0 circles) that will gently encourage people to do the right thing. For example, we tend to fear losing things more than we anticipate gaining things, so the authors suggest we not immediately deduct money from salaries to increase retirement savings (which would be perceived as a loss) but instead reduce future raises and put the reduction towards retirement. Then backing out would require losing the retirement saving you were doing (a loss, felt more keenly than the gain of the spending money).

[From Book Review: Nudge - O'Reilly Radar]

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Gorgeous Asian-American actress Kristin Kreuk has cut off her long hair, which was all the excuse I needed to remind the world of how beautiful she is.

Via Ummm… I cut off all my hair!

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These are my links for September 16th from 16:47 to 22:50:

• Dutch block EU accord on Serbia trade benefits - The Irish Times - Mon, Sep 15, 2008 - Nasty move by the Dutch. They are trying to wash away the guilt of Srebrenica by punishing Serbs in Serbia for the acts of unrepresentative militias in Bosnia (another country). The politics of conditionality must stop.
• BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Oceans are ‘too noisy’ for whales - Levels of noise in the world’s oceans are causing serious problems for whales, dolphins and other marine mammals, a report warns.

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From Bosnian Army General Jailed at The Hague:

Former Bosniak general Rasim Delic, accused of commanding a unit of “mujahedeen” who allegedly committed atrocities in the Bosnian war, has been jailed by The Hague…

Retired General Rasim Delic, 59, was found guilty by a first instance verdict for command responsibility.

He was sentenced for cruel treatment as a violation of the laws of the customs of war in relation to events in Livade and Kamenica Camp, where Mujahadeen forces held captured Bosnian Serb troops in July and August 1995.

Delic was found guilty on one of the four-part indictment. He was indicted for murder, inhuman treatment and rape, by his command responsibility.

He was commander of the main staff of the Bosniak (also known as Bosnian Muslim)-dominated Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1993.

Prosecutors allege he was in charge of a unit of foreign fighters known as the mujahadeen who poured into Bosnia to fight Serb and Croat forces during the 1992-1995 war.

Prosecutors say Delic failed to prevent mujahadeen fighters gunning down prisoners and beheading others.

[From BalkanInsight.com - Bosnian Army General Jailed at The Hague]

What sentence did Mr Delic get for for these crimes? Since Serbian civilian leaders have received up to 40 years for lesser offenses, I am sure one would exct a pretty massive term in prison.

He got three years. That is T H R E E (3). Not Thirty Three (33).

Yet another example of the joke that is the Hague Show trials essentially letting off non-Serbs despite being their being guilty of gross war-crimes.

I completely agree with Milorad Dodik, the Prime Minister of Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity of Republika Srpska when he said:

The Hague Tribunal has showed again “that justice for Serbian victims in the front of the Tribunal is unreachable.”

Talking to Republika Srpska’s official news agency, Dodik said this verdict “ruined the slightest bit of confidence in the Tribunal, which has practically lost its credibility in the front of the Serb people.”

He said that the Tribunal, instead of giving just verdicts and decisions in order to help reconciliation in the region, “obviously is throwing new seeds of hate between people in Bosnia.”

“We all saw the pictures of decapitated people. I call upon the world to ask judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia if three years are enough punishment as Rasim Delic got, for the horrible crimes of the mujahadeen who were subordinate to the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, that he was in command of,” asked Dodik.

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