- In 1938 Frank Sinatra was arrested by the Bergen County, New Jersey sheriff and charged with carrying on with a married woman
- Amy Mount’s Copenhagen climate talks blog
- Couzin et al (2005). Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move. Nature, 433(7025), 513-516 ‘We
also demonstrate how groups can make consensus decisions, even though informed individuals do not know whether they are in a majority or minority, how the quality of their information compares with that of others, or even whether there are any other informed individuals. Our model provides new insights into the mechanisms of effective leadership and decision-making in biological systems’ - Wired from 1994: Tetris as pharmatronic – Tetris inventor: ‘For me, Tetris is some song which you sing and sing inside yourself and can’t stop.’ Why? ‘His clinical psychologist business-partner: “The main part is visual insight. You make your visual decision and it happens almost immediately. Insight means emotion: small, but many of them, every two, three seconds. The second mechanism is unfinished action. Tetris has many unfinished actions (that) force you to continue and make it very addictive. The third is automatization: In a couple of hours, the activity becomes automatic, a habit, a motivation to repeat.”
- Writing Tips for Non-writers
- What Philosophers Believe: David Chalmers and David Bourget recently canvassed several thousand professional philosophers for their views on a range of central philosophical issues.
- Two references on feedback helping consumers cut energy consumption here and here (thanks Julie Dirksen)
- ‘To a psychologist, climate change looks as if it was designed to be ignored.’
- ‘Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries.’ (thanks Dan)
- ‘Properties of the nervous system that are key to its function and that many of us naively regard as unique to neurons are actually expanded, elaborated, specialized versions of properties that are also present in organisms that lack brains, nervous systems, or even neurons…and that aren’t even multicellular. This is precisely what we’d expect from evolutionary origins, that everything would have its source in simpler precursors.’
- The Beck Record Club covers Songs of Leonard Cohen
- Mark Changizi on what we can deduce about Alien vision
- Break the Inverted Pyramid to put science news in context
- YouTube: Lambchop cover ‘This Corrosion’
- Guardian interview with one of my heroes, Peter Tatchell
- Guardian: Tom James’ article about ten years of regeneration in Sheffield and across the UK
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