Very interesting story of the peculiar kind of intelligence we’re still learning to perceive in octopi. For example:

One octopus Mather was watching had just returned home and was cleaning the front of the den with its arms. Then, suddenly, it left the den, crawled a meter away, picked up one particular rock and placed the rock in front of the den. Two minutes later, the octopus ventured forth to select a second rock. Then it chose a third. Attaching suckers to all the rocks, the octopus carried the load home, slid through the den opening, and carefully arranged the three objects in front. Then it went to sleep. What the octopus was thinking seemed obvious: “Three rocks are enough. Good night!”

(via Kottke)

John Terborgh’s piece about the moral question of “uncontacted tribes” and the history of that answer in Brazil is a great read. As someone who’d mused at the thought a little, but never done much else, I learned quite a lot.

David Cain hit the ball out of the park on this one. I literally finished it and said to myself (with a giggle), “That was both novel and enlivening.” If there’s a better standard to aspire to, I don’t know what it is. If you’re really too lazy to read it, the central thesis:

It’s an interesting quirk of Mother Nature — that she insists on taking us down to the ground like that, every day, no matter who we are. For all of us, the act of leaving consciousness is the same, it’s just our settings and situations — which bookend that unconsciousness — where we differ.

This piece got a reasonable amount of attention around the idea of its title that you don’t need to sleep for eight hours, but I found the far more interesting component of it to be the research into how people used to sleep in the past, and how it’s changed. This was all new to me:

A doctor’s manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day’s labour but “after the first sleep”, when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better”.

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

(via HN)

I really like Derek Guy’s beginner’s guide to the important factors to consider when buying clothes. Put This On is a great fashion blog for anyone who doesn’t much care about clothes, but this post is exceptional.

Eyal Press’s review of a new film that premiered at Sundance is very good, but also stands alone as a story of how Israel came to support the interests of overzealous ultra-Zionists instead of international law.

The Ottomans, who had controlled Palestine until World War I, had used the term to designate land far enough from any neighboring village that a crowing rooster perched on its edge could not be heard. Under Ottoman law, if such land was not cultivated for three years it was “mawat”—dead —and reverted to the empire. “With or without your rooster, be at my office at 8:00 in the morning,” Sharon told Ramati, who was soon crisscrossing the West Bank in the cockpit of a helicopter, identifying tens of thousands of uninhabited acres that could be labeled “state land” and made available to settlers, notwithstanding the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on moving civilians into occupied territory.

(The fact that the film premiered and Sundance and probably won’t be available for normal people for over a year makes yesterday’s point all over again.)

This is another one of those stories I saw a few times before I paid attention to. My excuse is that it’s poorly titled, it’s more about the broken American system of end of life care than it is about strictly “how doctors die.” (A problem whose most visible manifestations was all the hubbub about “death panels” some years ago.)

If you’re really interested in that topic, PBS’s Frontline’s Facing Death (from about a year ago) was another worthwhile treatment of the problem.

(via kottke)

I have, but it’s a thing that merits constant reiterating, as so few us spend any time being aware of it. David Cain turns in a great post on the topic:

What would [anyone in the Iron Age] pay to be able to:

• speak to someone across the sea
• have the knowledge of thousand encyclopedias in their pocket
• watch segments of the past (or someone else’s past) unfold in moving pictures, in real time
• see the face or hear the voice of a dead loved one
• heat the house without stoking a fire
• cook food in thirty seconds
• clean and dry their family’s clothing with ten minutes of actual work
• suck the dirt out of a rug
• get all their water from inside the house at whatever temperature they wish
• access instructions on how to do almost anything that can be done by humans

The old post this most reminded me of was this video of Stephen Fry (LB), and the point he makes about being richer than Louis XIV (which I’ve thought about regularly ever since I watched it).

There are many great parts of Adam Gopnik’s essay about Lord of the Rings, Eragon, and Twilight, but this is the one that struck me the most:

The tedious normalcy of the “Twilight” books is what gives them their shiver; this is not so much the life that a teen-age girl would wish to have but the one that she already has, rearranged with heightened symbols. Your life could be like this; seen properly, from inside, it is like this.

(via The Browser)

I’m a bit of connoisseur of this type of thing, and so I’m embarrassed that I just today found an utterly fantastic plain-English argument from Alex Tabarrok about why you should discount almost all news story about a really interesting new finding by scientists. (I’m a connoisseur of this kind of thing because of the number of intelligent people who seem to treat every new study about a wonder-substance or agent-of-death as meaningful.) These guidelines are a good summary:

1)  In evaluating any study try to take into account the amount of background noise.  That is, remember that the more hypotheses which are tested and the less selection which goes into choosing hypotheses the more likely it is that you are looking at noise.

2) Bigger samples are better.  (But note that even big samples won’t help to solve the problems of observational studies which is a whole other problem).

3) Small effects are to be distrusted.

4) Multiple sources and types of evidence are desirable.

5) Evaluate literatures not individual papers.

6)  Trust empirical papers which test other people’s theories more than empirical papers which test the author’s theory.

(via Tabarrok himself, in a shorter but good post about a specific study’s failure)

The basis of “I, Pencil” is one of the most important ideas you’re likely to ever encounter. Anyone who, encountering its premise for the first time, is not at least a little awed is probably dead inside.

I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, as a wise man observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”

[I refer in my generous praise to the first two-thirds of the piece. While the bit about the mail isn’t obviously wrong, it’s much less obviously right than the part about the pencil. While I won’t here mount a strong defense of the US Postal Service, I believe one can adequately be mounted. I favor wonder and awe, not militant libertarianism in all matters.]

(via Google, The Rational Optimist, and an email I was drafting)

Jonah Lehrer highlights some interesting studies about inequality. This is the most interesting result:

It’s not that the primates demanded equality — some capuchins collected many more pebbles than others, and that never created a problem — it’s that they couldn’t stand when the inequality was a result of injustice.

Glenn Loury makes a similar point in this great dialog about Occupy Wall Street, saying that people begrudge Wall Street and not widget-makers like Steve Jobs because they see what Jobs did to earn his wealth.

This is a list post — a style I regard with contempt — but it’s also by David Cain, the writer I currently most wish I could be. (It’s a similar feeling to what I said about Colin Marshall when he wrote that DFW post.) The guy does what I’ve been trying to do for five years better than I do. It’s stuff like this I’m talking about:

Imagine if nobody regarded anybody as a stranger, but instead just a person they didn’t know. You can’t have wars without strangers. For that and other atrocities, we need a group of people so alien and blank to us that we don’t care what happens to them.

This story is first and foremost a good yarn. It’s entertaining and unknown enough to keep you interested, while it teached you some valuable things about the seldom regarded infrastructure that keeps human civilization pushing foreword, and the risks of nuclear terrorism within that system.

(via Hacker News)

This is great little story of the universe. I love reading (and watching and listening to) material about the universe because it allow me to spend time with these two seemingly-conflicting realities:

• The entire past and future of the universe exists so that I can be alive right here and right now.
• I am utterly irrelevant to the processes and scales that make up the past and future of the universe.

(via Lone Gunman)

I’ve seen multiple stories about this valuable idea in the last few months, but I just noticed I never actually posted any of them here. So here’s Oliver Burkeman writing around this book:

It’s that the whole notion is little more than a piece of rhetoric, unrelated to any real psychological process. It certainly helps people: it helps relationship gurus sell books; it helps death-penalty advocates argue their case, since executions purportedly provide closure; it helps politicians construct satisfying narratives. What it doesn’t seem to do is help people who are suffering, whom it instead pressurises.

A great unreligious primer on the value of egolessness. One of those things I didn’t know I was looking for until I found it. Also one of those things I’d like to have written first, but that’s a different matter.

(Oddly, via Hacker News)

Justin Wehr writes a piece I feel like I’ve meant to for years — an ode to Americans’ absurd obsession with grass:

Grass farms – otherwise known as lawns – have been a part of our heritage as a suburb-dwelling species for thousands of centuries, or at least since 1897, when a USDA report was published and read by several people. The report specified that lawns should be grown from a single grass species and plucked of any intruding invader. [Fact.] This was a sensible request seeing as how, in the suburbs, a man’s home was his castle, and so the arbiters of fashion rightly urged that our castles ought to be miniature cutesy versions of Monticello and Mount Vernon.