• ‘Neuroplasticity is a dirty word’
• Mind Hacks review by Mark Changizi ‘Mind Hacks over stacks of facts’
• Jon Ronson on criminal profiling ‘It’s an ungainly, dull fact, but it is real. And that makes it lovely.’
• thejohnnycashproject.com
• Immensely pleasing Guardian portal from Phil Gyford
• YouTube: Amazing Octopus Camoflage
• Wikipedia: Twelve leverage points for intervening in complex systems
• The Trouble With Intuition (Simons & Chabris contra Gladwell’s Blink)
• David Harvey and the Crises of Capitalism (animated!)
• TED Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man
• Wikipedia’s intriguing List of countries by tax revenue as percentage of GDP
• “the least heralded migration in American history”: ‘At the height of the Depression….over 100,000 Americans had applied for jobs working in brand new factories in Soviet Russia’
• Beer: don’t automatically blame the brewer
• Newsweek ‘The Creativity Crisis’ (evidence creativity can be taught)
• Edge.org Dream-logic, the internet and artificial thought By David Gelernter (The ebb and flow of concentration is essential to human intelligence)
• Richard Hamming: You and Your Research ‘If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started’
• Vaughan lucid on cognitivism: ‘According to the Freudian model, the unconscious mind exists below the level of our awareness but still operates in terms of personal meaning. Contrast this with the cognitive model of the mind in which the conscious mind is interpretable in terms of personal meaning but the unconscious mind is ‘subpersonal’ or only interpretable in terms of computation or neurobiology.’
• Age-related IQ decline is reduced markedly after adjustment for the Flynn effect.

Viewed as a language, theory has no substantive content; it is a set of tautologies. Its function is to serve as a filing system for organizing empirical material and facilitating our understanding of it; and the criteria by which it is to be judged are appropriate to a filing system. Are the categories clearly and precisely defined? Are they exhaustive? Do we know where to file each individual item, or is there considerable ambiguity? Is the system of headings and subheadings so designed that we can quickly find an item we want, or must we hunt from place to place? Are the items we shall want to consider jointly filed? Does the filing system avoid elaborate cross-references?

Milton Friedman, in Essays in Positive Economics (1953). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (thanks Dan!)

Instead, he should have laughed at the MP and said gently something like “It is undoubtedly true that homeopathy does work, the only question is about why it works. All the evidence suggests that the effect is due to a combination of the power of individual’s beliefs about homoeopathy and the healing benefits of a meaningful relationship with a physician. For every 1 study that says, like David Tredinnick’s three, that homeopathy has benefits beyond those of placebo there are 50 which suggest that homeopathy medicines are inert and all the properties ascribed to them are properties of belief and relationships. Because of this, we need to ask if we want to allow a misguided homeopathy industry to charge us for medicines which we know to be snake oil, and whether there is not some less expensive and less deceitful way we can access the powerful healing effects that placebos such as homeopathy provide.”

On that last point, I’ve had an idea. Homeopathy is fake medicine, and obviously this has lots of benefits. All the power of placebos! Minimal risk and side-effects! Safe to use in combination with conventional medicine! The only downside I can see is that only patients you allow to remain misinformed can benefit and that the homeopathy industry has all this rigmarole involved in the preparation and delivery of the product that necessarily makes it expensive. So why not sell fake homopathic medicine? I don’t see how homeopaths could object if the medical establishment turns their strategy back on them. We could even use their experimental methods to replicate the successful results they’ve found with homeopathic treatment for our fake-homeopathic treatment. Instead of branded pharmaceuticals you can buy generic pharmaceuticals which have the same chemical composition at the fraction of the price, why can’t we buy homeopathy generics which are equally inert? Doctors could be free to prescribe them, saving the NHS money and simultaneously allowing patients access to all the wonderful benefits of placebo.

[1] Not that discussion of statistics and control groups is a bad thing, or a guaranteed way to lose your audience, I just think Singh lost his because of the way he discussed statistics and control groups, and because it wasn’t essential to the wider issues

• ‘the claim that Mind Hacks is a “popular high-quality psychology blog” is now SCIENTIFIC FACT!’
• Mindhacks.com: Towards an aesthetics of urban legends
• World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale
• Andrew Brown reviews Avatar
• Youtube.com: Jeweller in Saltaire fights off sword and axe wielding would-be-robbers
• How To Remove Broken Songs From iTunes Library
• campaignstrategy.org ‘Explore ideas for structure & strategy applicable to most campaigns’
• Blood, sweat and containerisation
• Mindhacks.com Paradise Learnt 74 year old man knows Paradise Lost by heart, but has otherwise normal memory
• Guardian datablog / Information is Beautiful: Military Spending
• My Father, The Spy by John H. Richardson
• Paul Broks on 150 years of Sigmund Freud
• The Data Driven Life
• LaTex: APA 5th Document Class
• LaTex: Obsolete packages and document classes

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken

I am now back in Sheffield, England

• Stephen Anderson on ‘When Data Gets Up Close and Personal’ making a game out of email using personal metrics
• Alec Patton on the RSA’s seminar on the Social Brain and education
• YouTube: Extreme Base Jumping With Wingsuits
• www.wikepage.org/ – free, easy, small, wiki package
• Sachzwang = ‘compelled action’
• YouTube: Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Symphony of Science)
• YouTube: Shockwave traffic jams recreated for first time
• ‘You have chosen to spend your life this way’
• lukesurl.com: Choose Your Own Philosophical Adventure
• Me, In the Exploratorium’s Distorted Room
• Kirsh, D., & Maglio, P.(1994) On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action. Cognitive Science, 18(4), 513-549. doi: 10.1016/0364-0213(94)90007-8.
• Guardian: Ten rules for writing fiction Will Self: ‘The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply.’
• Podcast: Robert Krulwich of Radiolab on why storytelling should be at the heart of science
• Hunting Grizzly Bear with bow and arrow
• Installing Latex in Ubuntu Linux
• Dan Robert’s article about brain training in the independent, quoting me very kindly

• TED: Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world
• TED: Robert Ballard on exploring the oceans
• TED: Paul Collier shares 4 ways to help the bottom billion – which are aid, trade, security and governance, in which he explains that democracy is more than elections and vital for overcoming the resource curse
• TED: Joshua Klein on the amazing intelligence of crows (but I can’t figure out why the lost change idea isn’t a go-er)
• TED Dave Eggers set up an alternative after-school-club to use the surplus time of his writer/editor buddies
• TED Benjamin Zander on how a passion for classical music can be for everyone
• TED Murray Gell-Mann on beauty and truth in physics
• TED Howard Rheingold on collaboration
• TED Neil Turok wishes for the next Einstein to be from Africa and he AIMS to make it happen
• TED Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration
• TED Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives
• TED Patrick Awuah on educating leaders

As important as it is to change the light bulbs, it is more important to change the laws

Thank you, Al Gore. In his 2008 TED talk calling for a ‘new hero generation’ to deal with climate change