Category: interesting
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What Will Change Everything?
The Edge annual question, 2009: What will change everything? Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet,…
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Celebrating Neutrality
On wondering why there are a lot fewer prediction markets than the topic’s popularity might suggest, Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias looks at neutral arbitrators and asks, Who Cheers the Referee? Similarly who cheers the officials who keep elections fair, or the teachers who grade fairly? Inspiring stories are told of folks who win legal…
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Iran’s Sexual Revolution
Taking the lead from Pardis Mahdavi’s latest book, Passionate Uprisings, The Nation looks at Iran’s ‘sexual revolution’ in these days of political dissent and upheaval. Somehow, one suspects that the grassroots push to change sexual mores cannot be totally divorced from the effort, on the part of feminist activists but also some reformist parliamentarians and…
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Debating Cryonics
Cryonics: the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. When one discusses cryonics, topics as diverse as futurology, medicine, technology and philosophy are debated. A few weeks ago a number of high–profile bloggers, headed by the excellent Overcoming Bias, have been…
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World’s Center of Population
The world’s center of population is located at “the crossroads between China, India, Pakistan and Tajikistan”. At this point, the mean distance to all humans on Earth is 3,200 miles (5,200 km). The opposite is a point in the South Pacific near Easter Island. From here, the mean distance to all humans on Earth is…
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Intelligence’s Effect on Sperm Quality
The Economist presents a short article on how intelligence predicts—among other health benefits—sperm quality. Something I pointed to a couple of months ago when research results were first coming through. Recently, it has been discovered that an individual’s [intelligence] is correlated with many aspects of his health, up to and including his lifespan. One possible…
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Interview With a Somali Pirate
A pirate boss speaks to The Guardian We give priority to ships from Europe because we get bigger ransoms. To get their attention we shoot near the ship. If it does not stop we use a rope ladder to get on board. We count the crew and find out their nationalities. After checking the cargo…
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Snipers: Cowardly Assassins, or Surgical Soldiers?
An eye-opening look at military snipers. It might be because there’s another side to snipers and sniping after all. In particular, even though a sniper will often be personally responsible for huge numbers of deaths – body counts in the hundreds for an individual shooter are far from unheard of – as a class snipers…
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Counterfactual Thinking and the First Instinct Fallacy
Counterfactual Thinking and the First Instinct Fallacy (pdf); a research paper on whether or not it’s better to change your answer when taking multiple-choice tests. The abstract: Most people believe that they should avoid changing their answer when taking multiple-choice tests. Virtually all research on this topic, however, suggests that this strategy is ill-founded: most…
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If a HDD’s Read/Write Head Were a Boeing 747
From an article discussing Seagate’s plant in Ireland (where 80% of the company’s read/write heads are produced): an impressive analogy of a HDD’s read/write head. The dimensions of the head are impressive. With a width of less than a hundred nanometers and a thickness of about ten, it flies above the platter at a speed of…