Hey, you remember how people were talking about a series of photos about a soldier? And you remember how you didn’t look at them? Here’s your chance to correct that mistake.
(via kottke)
Lloyd does a great job explaining the way psychics and mediums seem to know you so well. The video that he mentions of Derron Brown running a Forer experiment is on YouTube, and he’s got a copy of the reading Brown used.
This shocked me:
A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report.
The rest of the piece is a worthy analysis of what that fact means.
It’s pieces like this that make me love David Brooks. Telling us what we don’t want to hear, but need to. The jumping off point:
Despite the Democratic triumph that month, [Galston and Kamarck] noted, public distrust of government remains intensely high. Historically, it has been nearly impossible to pass major domestic reforms in the face of that kind of distrust. Therefore, they counseled, the new administration should move cautiously to rebuild trust before beginning a transformational agenda.
I’d recently noticed that I’d almost completely stopped watching sports, so an article on the topic caught my eye. This was a large part of it for me:
You pretty much have to watch [sports] live. Sure, you can record a Sunday afternoon football game and watch it the next day, but the final score is harder to avoid than the twist in last night’s episode of Mad Men. Glimpse the back page of the local tabloid, and the game is spoiled. Even if your self-imposed media blackout does succeed, watching a day-old ballgame is like doing yesterday’s crossword. It just doesn’t have the same crackle. At the same time, other entertainment options are becoming easier to fit into my schedule. If I’m not in the mood for the TV shows I’ve DVR’d, I can always stream a movie on Netflix.
For every kid who ever asked, “But when will I ever use this?” when learning about an esoteric math or science concept.
The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day!
(via jimray)
The Economist makes (or made in November) an interesting point: it’s the middle of the road stuff, not the blockbusters, that are suffering a technology marches forward.
A study of the Australian market by Nielsen, a research firm, found that the number of titles bought each year (measured by ISBNs) has risen dramatically, from about 275,000 in 2004 to almost 450,000 in 2007. Niche titles selling fewer than 1,000 copies each accounted for nearly all the growth in variety. Yet their market share fell. In Britain, sales of the ten bestselling books increased from 3.4m to 6m between 1998 and 2008.
(via Marco, who pulled the quote that most likely explains the phenomona)
Though I think that title doesn’t quite properly belong to Crash — this was the decade of Gigli, From Justin to Kelly, and many other terrible and unloved movies — this is exactly right:
Bad movies get made all the time. But what infuriated me about “Crash” was that so many people mistook it for something profound when it was truly the opposite. It shouts at the top of its lungs: “I’M SUBTLE! I’M NUANCED!” and [too] many people somehow agreed.
(Found like this: Jeff Goldberg linked to TNC, who linked to Postbougie who cited the title link. All of those links are probably worth perusing as well.)
Though there’s nothing obviously new in this piece by Bruce Schneier on CNN, it’s nice to see the argument against the recent hype so clearly articulated. I thought this was a point too seldom made:
Our current response to terrorism is a form of “magical thinking.” It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.
(via DF)
I thought seriously about linking to David Brooks’s column about the story behind Hannakah. But then The Awl juxtaposed his words with those of Sarah Palin and I decided I’d go with that.
This is unquestionably the best blog I’ve run across this month, and it’s certainly in the running for best new-to-me blog of 2009. A sampling of the near-daily statistics you can learn:
(via @fakelvis)
This video offers an interesting experiment. But (after you watch the video) I thought these comments were worthwhile:
This is ridiculous! First of all these two people look like they could be brothers. Also, the blatant misdirection is never addressed. Every time somebody interacts with one of the two, their attention is always drawn away from the face of the person.
That is kind of the point of the experiment. Unless average humans make a point in looking at the other they work on assumptions. And one assumption is that things usually stay where they are.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Working in retail, I can tell you that people just don’t pay attention to the people who serve them. Customer will come in asking for an employee who told them something last time, when you ask who it was or if they can describe the person, they often have no idea. … People pay attention to whatever they came in for, but they don’t pay attention to their surroundings.
Anyone notice that the Professor’s shirt color changes from the first shot of him to the next?
(via DF)
I’d argue it’s required that both Dr. Seuss fans and aspiring artists like these Letters of Note.
(via @austinkleon)
Excused by nostalgia for the decade’s passing, but really here because of Jeff Atwood and my not seeing it the first time. His unquestionable best:
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
While there’s a lot in Drake Bennet’s piece about the Berlin Wall that would have a high school history student slapping their head — really, Mr. Bennett, no historical event has a single cause? — this bit caught my eye:
According to Suri, there are three major factors that determine how a government, especially an authoritarian government, responds to this sort of popular protest. The first is how effective the traditional organs of state power and repression are - everything from the police and military to the state-run media. The second is the sort of international obligations the government has: In 1989 the Soviet Union was deeply indebted to the United States and Western European countries, and Gorbachev, he argues, had much to lose by alienating them, while China’s government had more faith in its economy’s ability to survive as an international pariah. And the third is simply how comfortable, all things being equal, the country’s leadership is with violence.
In a delightful and wide-ranging essay John McWhorter makes some good points about the underappreciated upside of the dwindling number of spoken languages.
Can we say that the benefits of linguistic diversity are more important, in a way that a representative number of humans could agree upon, than the impediment to communication that they entail? Especially when their differentiation from one another is, ultimately, a product of the same kind of accretionary accidents that distinguish a woodchuck from a groundhog?
(via IotD)
Up’s Carl Fredricksen is probably America’s most famous nail house resident, but he’s certainly not the only one.
(idea via FYE)
Obviously not, but this is the most interesting “Really?” article I’ve seen in months:
…when healthy subjects consumed about 4 teaspoons (20 milliliters) of white vinegar as a salad dressing with a meal that included white bread with a little less than 2 ounces (50 grams) of carbohydrates, there was a 30 percent reduction in their glycemic response, or rise in blood sugar, compared with subjects who had salad with a dressing made from neutralized vinegar.
Cameron Booth set out to make a map of America’s Interstate highway system in the style of H.C. Beck’s famous map of the London Underground. Unlike other versions — I linked one here — he strived for the ideal compromise of geographic accuracy and simplicity of presentation, and it’s fair to see he’s made the best one the internet’s seen. The big version; and some details on the forthcoming hardcopy.
(via kottke)
Three historical facts relating to Sesame Street you may be interested in: