December 2011
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“God damn it, Bill, just stop! Stop writing, about the internet, in particular,...”
– Hamilton Nolan’s advice to Bill Keller, from Ten People Who Should Quit the Media in 2012
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Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - Guy... →
When I first got involved in studying linguistics, I read the work of Benjamin Whorf, whose theory — The Whorfian Hypothesis — was that language shapes thought, and as a result, people can only think thoughts that are expressible in the languages they know. This theory fell out of favor in later decades, but new evidence has emerged that suggests that our perception of the world is...
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ilovecharts:
Branches
via drueisms
This is one of the best examples of how Prezi could be useful in education: zooming into segments of a tree of life to kingdom, phylum, etc., down to individual species, with annotations.
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Cities’ Cost Cuttings Leave Residents in the Dark... →
Newest sign of austerity: cutting back on street lights.
Monica Davey via NYTimes.com
Cities around the nation, grappling with what is expected to be a fifth consecutive year of declining revenues and having exhausted the predictable budget trims, are increasingly considering something that would once have been untouchable: the lights.
Highland Park’s circumstances are extreme; with...
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Futurity.org – Aging musicians have sharp brains →
via Emory
Older musicians perform better on cognitive tests than individuals who did not play an instrument, according to a new study published in the April issue of Neuropsychology.
While much research has been done to determine the cognitive benefits of musical activity by children, this is the first study to examine whether those benefits can extend across a lifetime.
“Musical activity...
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About Those Gift Cards - NYTimes.com →
NYTimes Editorial Staff
A study by the economist Joel Waldfogel, now at the University of Minnesota, found that university students value a present about 15 percent less, per dollar spent, than something they bought for themselves.
Just give cash. Not to mention how easy gift cards are to lose, or the huge amounts that go unspent.
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“@stoweboyd: ~$41 billion has been lost or is likely to go unspent in gift cards...”
– December 29, 2011 at 03:21PM — http://bit.ly/sgHZox
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“If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past few years, it is that the very...”
– - Frederik Pohl via The Way The Future Blogs
(via azspot)
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“@stoweboyd: Men 16-24 gained 178K jobs but women lost 255K in past 2.5 years...”
– December 29, 2011 at 01:22PM — http://bit.ly/uCEKCV
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In Indian Slum, Misery, Work, Politics and Hope -... →
A great long read about Dharavi, a slum of Mumbai, and one that may hold the secret to the future of cities:
Jim Yardley via NYTimes.com
In the labyrinthine slum known as Dharavi are 60,000 structures, many of them shanties, and as many as one million people living and working on a triangle of land barely two-thirds the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Dharavi is one of the world’s most...
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DC: The Anti-Berlin - Matt Yglesias via Slate →
I lived in the DC suburbs — Reston VA — for 20 years, always trying to move away to a more urban and cool place (it’s a long story). But I never considered moving into DC, and here’s why:
Matt Yglesias via Slate
Carol Morello and Timothy Wilson write about the DC population growth surge, in which we’ve grown about 2.7 percent since April of 2010. They note that...
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“Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely...”
– - Matt Taibbi, Flat N All That
I missed this review of Tom Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded when it was published. Man, Taibbi can eviscerate with the best of ‘em.
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Hack Thirty #30: David Brooks - Alex Pareene via... →
David Brooks has been the “conservative” that highbrow liberal publications love for so long that it’s no longer fair to call him a conservative columnist. He rarely touts the superiority of conservative policy ideas, beyond getting briefly caught up in the glorious rush to war with Iraq. He admires Barack Obama and finds Sarah Palin distasteful. But politics has very little to do with...
“I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to...”
– Voltairine de Cleyre
(via mutualaddiction)
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“What I could not foresee was the flame that would be locked inside me, whose...”
– Irene Nemirovsky, Fire in the Blood
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Always Unsuitable - Marge Piercy
She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck. They were grinning politely and evenly at me. Unsuitable they smirked. It is true I look a stuffed turkey in a suit. Breasts too big for the silhouette. She knew at once that we had sex, lots of it as if I had strolled into her diningroom in a dirty negligee smelling gamy smelling fishy and sporting a strawberry on my neck. I could never charm the...
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Why Do We Cheat?
Cheating may be good for the genetic make-up of your offspring, if you are a woman.
Monogamous Animals Often Have Unattractive Partners - Jennifer Viegas via Discovery News
In socially monogamous species, from birds to humans, most individuals find partners.
A large proportion of females, however, wind up with unattractive males of below-average quality, according to a new study that also...
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Could Re-Wilding Avert the 6th Great Extinction? -... →
Can we let the wild things roam, and save our earth?
Carolyn Fraser via Scientific American
Biodiversity loss is now lining up to be the greatest man-made crisis the world has ever known. Biologists call it the Sixth Great Extinction, or the Holocene extinction event, after our current geologic time period. (The five previous extinction events all came before the evolution of Homo sapiens, ...
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The Coming Water Wars: The Summer Of 2012
Looking back on one of the under-reported stories of 2011 (via Josh Sternberg) — the rising food prices underlying the Arab Spring unrest — I came across a piece by Marion Diamond, which fails to connect the dots.
Marion Diamond via The Australian
Food prices are rising. Everyone is feeling the pinch, but for most of us in Australia it’s not a matter of life and death. And...
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Infinite Stupidity - Mark Pagel via Edge →
Mark Pagel is Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind.
I want this book.
Mark Pagel via Edge
One of the first things to be...
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North Of Everywhere - Helen Mort
i. Hermaness
Last night, my body was a compass needle drawing me past every place I’d once called North: past Sheffield’s border lands, the sleeping giant of Manchester, grey towns en route to Aberdeen then silently across the waterway to Lerwick where my bearings ferried me past Baltasound, the sloughed down moors, past Norwick bay where waves worry at rock all day. By nightfall, I’d...
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Off A Side Road Near Staunton - Stanley Plumly
Some nothing afternoon, no one anywhere, an early autumn stillness in the air, the kind of empty day you fill by taking in the full size of the valley and its layers leading slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of country, if you stand here long enough, you could stay for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall, pulls you in, one field at a time, pasture and fall meadow, high...
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“Infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things. How do they know an edge...”
– – Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
(via a la recherche du temps perdu)
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