“US, UK research: Thick kids more likely to become bigots“. Ouch. I’ve often thought that today’s conservatives weren’t the brightest bulbs on the whole, and wondered whether there was some causal link there, but to have it bluntly spelled out like that is pretty damning. Maybe these studies should be publicized a lot more. Nobody [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Thought and Learning category.
“If a Job Is Worth Doing…”
“…it’s worth doing badly first.” It’s a good idea to keep in mind, especially if (like me) you have a tendency toward perfectionism.
“Autism boom: an epidemic of disease or of discovery?”
The LA Times recently published a four-part investigation of autism. It’s pretty good, it has more information on it than I’ve been able to find in my own research elsewhere. I’m not a scientist, and I’m operating solely on my own experience and what I’ve read of others, but it seems to me that autism [...]
“It ‘Rewires Your Brain?’ Think Again.”
I never noticed, but that phrase really doesn’t mean anything at all. All learning rewires your brain — if it didn’t, you wouldn’t have learned anything. Maybe stories like this one aren’t as important as people think.
“Human beings unlikely to get cleverer”
A short quote to sum up the main idea behind the article: [...] according to researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Basel, we’ve pretty much hit the limits, and we’re never going to develop a science fiction-style ‘supermind’. Thomas Hills and Ralph Hertwig looked at a range of studies, including research [...]
“Ravens’ secret sign code probed”
More evidence — should any still be needed — that intelligence isn’t limited to humans, or even to primates.
“Swearing doesn’t help pain if you do it too much”
So keep it clean, boys and girls. (It’ll be interesting to find out the whys and wherefores of the brain mechanism responsible. I hope someone manages it in my lifetime.)
“Detecting Psychopaths by their Speech Patterns”
This is a little worrisome. As Schneier says at the bottom, “I worry about people being judged by these criteria. Psychopaths make up about 1% of the population, so even a small false-positive rate can be a significant problem.” On a complete tangent, the statistic that 1% of the population counts as psychopathic is disturbing. [...]
“Wooden Mars ark voyagers set to step out on Earth”
Remember that wooden “spaceship” I mentioned a few months ago? Well, it has almost completed its journey, and I’m happy to say that the astronauts survived without major conflict for the full trip. Of course, they knew in the back of their minds that it wasn’t the real thing, so the stress wasn’t as bad [...]
“We like zombies… because we *are* zombies”
I always wondered at the popularity of zombies in popular fiction. They have no skill and no intelligence, and they move very slowly, their only truly horrifying trait (other than their dire need of cosmetics) is that they won’t stop so long as they can move even a single digit in your direction. It requires [...]