Category: Uncategorized
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A New Look at Health Insurance and Gym Use
From Tyler Cowen’s Markets in self-constraint: A Danish gym chain is now offering membership free of charge, with the only caveat that you have to show up, in order for the membership to be free. If you fail to show up once per week you will be billed the normal monthly membership fee for that…
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Science Cribsheets
Since late 2005, Seed Magazine has been producing a series of cribsheets (or cheatsheets, as they are more commonly known in the UK) for “living in the 21st century”. These one-page introductions to contemporary scientific issues are really useful as reference sheets on a number of disparate topics. So far, subjects covered include stem cells,…
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A Presidential Debate on Science
Science Debate 2008 is a small group of people who, in 2007, began working to “restore science and innovation to America’s political dialogue”. Enlisting the help of over 38,000 people they gathered a total of 3,400 pressing science questions from nearly every major American science organization, dozens of Nobel laureates, elected officials and business leaders,…
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Collective Noun for Geeks
In expected atypical style, my colleagues and I had a discussion on ideas for the collective noun for (software) developers. The obvious candidates rolled in: A …geek …thread …hash …(dis)array … of developers. However, after dwelling on the issue for too long we decided the most appropriate was an embarrassment of developers, or the more…
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Science’s 10 Most Beautiful Experiments
Interested in finding “the most beautiful physics experiment of all time”, Robert P. Crease (a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory) asked physicist to nominate their favourites. The New York Times duly compiled the results, but rather than visiting their un-scannable list,…
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The Asexual Couple
As part of The Guardian’s First Person series, Paul Cox, 24, explains how he and his wife found love and happiness as an asexual couple, despite not being physically attracted to each other. In a fascinating post touching on many topics in her area of expertise, Dr Petra Boynton—a psychologist specialising in sex and relationships…
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Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics and Social Theory
The Flickr group Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics and Social Theory is fairly self-explanatory: I’m looking forward to seeing the group grow. via Neuroanthropology and Mind Hacks
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Randy Pausch Lectures
By now I’m sure everyone has watched, listened to, or at the very least heard of, Randy Pausch’s lecture Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams which he gave at Carnegie Mellon University a year ago today (the lecture is more commonly referred to as The Last Lecture). Since then I’ve watched two more speeches by Pausch…
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Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Earth
Bad Astronomy compiles a list of ten things you don’t know about the Earth. You probably (hopefully?) know a few of these already. The Earth is smoother than a billiard ball The Earth is an oblate spheroid The Earth isn’t an oblate spheroid The Earth is not exactly aligned with its geoid Jumping into a…
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Drugs for Optimising Morality
This month’s British Journal of Psychiatry has an interesting essay on ‘moral pharmacology’. Mind Hacks picks up the story: [Sean Spence] argues that while most attention has been focused on ‘smart drugs’ and cognitive enhancement, medication is already being subtly used to improve ethical behaviour and we should prepare for a revolution in ‘moral pharmacology’.…