December 2009
38 posts
8 tags
Rediscovering Weekly Sex Worth Abundant Loneliness
Is Food The New Sex? by Mary Eberstadt (Hoover Review): A thoughtful meditation on how the way we think about food in 2009 is much like how people thought about sex in the 1950s. And vice versa. [via]
Ten Psychology Studies From 2009 Worth Knowing About by David Disalvo (True/Slant): “1. If you have to choose between buying something or spending the money on a memorable experience, go with...
6 tags
Fart Job Shadows Blame Blue Victoria
Anatomy Of A Brain Fart by Leeaundra Keahy (Discover): We all sometimes have inexplicable brain farts - Keahy explains why.
Blame It On The Brain by Jonah Lehrer (Washington Post): Making a whole list of new years resolutions is the worst thing you could possibly do if you actually want to make changes to your life.
Something In The Sky On New Year’s Eve Happens Once In A Blue Moon by...
7 tags
Mental Terror Search Sprouts Inflammatory Pain
In Search Of Eva Tanguay, The First Rock Star by Jody Rosen (Slate): The 1922 recording of her song “I Don’t Care” sort of sounds like Bjork doing “It’s Oh So Quiet”, except more unhinged. Tanguay influenced Mae West and Billie Holiday, and also may have been the model for Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
Taking Mental Snapshots To Plumb Our Inner Selves by...
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Easy Magical Twelve Brewing Toast Tongue
Tongue Twisters: In Search Of The World’s Hardest Language (The Economist): There are languages so hard to learn that linguistic experts develop lumps on their larynx trying to learn them. I love that the language Tuyuca, described in this article, requires every utterance to be accompanied by a statement of evidence for the utterance “diga ape-hiyi” means “the boy played soccer...
7 tags
American Tree Inside Unintended Salami Deluge
Inside The Mind Of A Savant by Donald A. Treffert and Daniel D. Christensen (Scientific American): Article about Kim Peek, the idiot savant who inspired Rain Man, and who died recently. [via Mind Hacks, with further links to more about Peek]
The Real American Pie by Cliff Doerksen (Chicago Reader): Here in Australia, what we call ‘meat pies’ never went away - they’re usually the...
11 tags
Boxing Day Grandpa Science Edition Links
Let’s Face It, Science Is Boring by Stephen Battersby (New Scientist): Speaking as someone who has a doctorate as a result of experiments, Battersby’s right. Science is boring. Well, you know, boring to do. [via]
Kinkiness Beyond Kinky by Carl Zimmer (The Loom/Discover): To quote from the article: “there comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write...
6 tags
Family Fun Teaching Hypnotised Sex Paper
The Psychology Behind Wrapping Paper by GrrlScientist (Living The Scientific Life): Psychologists have discovered that having to unwrap a gift means that we like it more (someone in the comments of the blog suggests that this might also explain lingerie).
The Family Jewels by David Farley (The Smart Set): In terms of Christian relics, you probably know about the Shroud of Turin, the Holy Grail,...
7 tags
Vegan Sin Foolery Screwing Pink Chickens
Sorry, Vegans: Brussel Sprouts Like To Live, Too by Natalie Angier (New York Times): The more we learn about plants, the more it becomes clear that they are responsive to the environment, they communicate, and they fight animals that want to eat them. They just do so more slowly. [via]
Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience Of Screwing Up by Jonah Lehrer (Wired): Success is usually built on the back of...
7 tags
20 Groovy Imagination Review Books Falling
Santa’s A Health Menace? Media Everywhere Are Falling For It by Ashley Merryman (NurtureShock/Newsweek): If science journalists read more than the press release, they wouldn’t have been punked so effectively. [via]
Steal These Books by Margo Rabb (New York Times): What books in America get stolen the most? (Clue: the most popular stolen book contains (some variant of) the words...
3 tags
Elliott Smith - Cecilia/Amanda (Jackpot Sessions,...
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Small Time Wildlife Studying Ponzi World
Asia’s Wildlife Trade by Bryan Christy (National Geographic): Anson Wong is the Malaysian-based kingpin of the international illegal endangered wildlife trade, and it’s all legal where he’s from. A really fantastic piece of writing. [via]
A Ponzi Scheme That Works (The Economist): A Ponzi scheme is a fraud where previous investors are paid with returns with money from subsequent...
6 tags
Ignored Addicted Majority Superpowers Will Riot
Can You Really Be “Addicted” To Shopping Or The Internet? by Vaughn Bell (Slate): Just because you behave to excess does not mean you have an addiction, and diagnoses like “internet addiction” are problematic in several ways.
Free Will And Ethics by Jonah Lehrer (The Frontal Cortex): Students told that there is no free will, that they’re just a bag of meat, are more...
5 tags
Hobby Lab Debunked Waiter Party Conversation
Foot-in-mouth Syndrome: Pitfalls Of The Party Season by Michael Bond (NewScientist): People trying not to think about something often think about it. This + alcohol = you saying things at the work Christmas party you’ve been trying to avoid saying all year. [via]
30 Secrets Your Waiter Will Never Tell You by Michelle Crouch (Reader’s Digest): Basically, as servers of your food, they...
7 tags
Evil Speed Of Oil Change Fallacy
What Is The Speed Of Thought? by Carl Zimmer (Discover): Answer: depends on the thought and which bits of the brain are conducting it.
Vanessa George And The Evil That Women Do by Stefanie March (TimesOnline): What makes a woman sexually abuse a child? [thanks Suse]
A Fish Oil Story by Paul Greenberg (New York Times): Because people are obsessed with Omega-3 supplements, the sea on the Atlantic...
7 tags
Bhutan Ministers Saved 4.5 Billion Gaga Photos
How Shellfish Saved The Human Race by Maggie Koerth-Baker (Boing Boing): That humanity now dominates the world was not pre-ordained. Circa 160,000 years ago, natural climate change pushed humanity to the brink - deserts expanded, species died out, etc. There were only 1000 breeding individuals left. If they hadn’t figured out how to eat shellfish, the world would not now be our oyster.
2009...
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Other Favourite Albums From 2009, pt 2.
And some more albums that grabbed me in 2009:
The Flaming Lips - Embryonic
Music fans who subscribe to progressive ideas within music - including most professional reviewers, I suspect - want their favourite artists to innovate, to not rest on their laurels but to respond to a new time, new fashions, with new sounds. At the same time, I suspect most of us want the band to stay the same, too, to...
6 tags
Politicsy Link Dump
My O-Song bookmarks folder is so full right now - so many good articles. I’ve gone up to 6 links a day as opposed to 5, but it just gets bigger and bigger. I often bookmark politics related things but end up not posting them here for some reason. So here’s a dump of my bookmarks on subjects to do with politics.
Figures Confirm Noughties As Warmest Decade In History by John Vidal (The...
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Global Psychiatry's Deadliest Older Child Saved
Top 10 Astronomy Pictures of 2009 by Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy): [insert Carl Sagan quote about the wondrousness of nature here]. [via]
Psychiatry’s Civil War by Peter Aldhous (New Scientist): The DSM-IVR, the currently used diagnostic manual in the US (and Australia) - and the reason why you know phrases like “bipolar disorder” or “major depressive disorder” -...
6 tags
Coconut Menu Missed Lego Tiger
On Tiger Woods, the Media, and Sex Addiction by Petra Boynton (drpetra.co.uk): The idea of ‘sex addiction’ is not especially backed up by evidence, and is largely promoted by right-wing faith-based groups; be wary of it, and the way the media latches onto it.
The Top 10 Stories You Missed In 2009 by Joshua E. Keating (Foreign Policy): All the things happening in geopolitics that you...
8 tags
Other Favourite Albums From 2009, pt 1.
The other day I posted a write-up of my top 3 albums of the year. Of course, I listened to more than 3 albums this year. Often there’s plenty of albums in a year that don’t grab me, but which I can hear quality in - Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, for example. I can hear why it’s going to top a lot of top 10s, but for whatever reason it didn’t grab me,...
5 tags
Failed Queen Loses Christmas Octopus
Failed State: New South Wales by John Birmingham (The Monthly): Birmingham, who once wrote a book, Leviathan, about the seedier side of Sydney’s history, is unsparing in his description of the failure of recent NSW politics.
Lake Baikal, Where The Ice Queen Cast Her Spell by Mike Carter (The Guardian): A portrait of a remote Siberian lake, featuring frozen waves, microscopic shrimp, vodka,...
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Favourite Albums of 2009
In a way, my favourite albums of 2009 – the ones I most listened to, the ones that inhabited my head the most – were an album from 1999 (XTC’s Apple Venus Vol. 1) and an album I played on (Lazy Susan) that will come out in 2010. I couldn’t get enough of Apple Venus and the cleverness and snark of its songwriting, of songs as perfectly crafted as “River Of Orchids”, “I’d Like...
8 tags
Cat Sellout Status Ideas? Meep!
The 9th Annual Year In Ideas by various authors (New York Times): A couple of dozen “new ideas” from 2009; I could have written today’s link dump based entirely on this. Read it, at least, for the study showing that cows with names give more milk, and for the discussion of gourmet dirt. [via]
Obama’s Big Sellout by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone): Taibbi writes impassioned,...
4 tags
Shearwater - “Castaways” (The Golden...
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Mental Devil Calls Internet Simple
My Day With The Mental Health Professionals by Deborah Orr (The Guardian): A nuanced portrait of the delicate art of “sectioning” in the UK, the practice of involuntarily committing someone to a mental hospital.
Sympathy For The Devil Worshipers by Andrew O’Hehir (Salon): Members of Darkthrone and Satyricon “seem semi-reconciled to their fate as professional entertainers,...
5 tags
Samaritans Estate Created Undercover Missile
Mediterranean Was Created In Earth’s Biggest Deluge by Ian Sample (The Guardian): Around 5.3 million years ago the Mediterranean was land rather than sea. Less than two years later, it held 4 million cubic kilometres worth of sea. Simply incredible. [via]
The Doctors Were Real, The Patients Undercover by Douglas Heingartner (New York Times): The Dutch mental health system has started to use...
2 tags
Langhorne Slim - “Say Yes” (Be Set...
6 tags
False Thinking Facebook Mate Mystery
Can Anyone Stop Facebook? by Farhad Manjoo (Slate): There are more people on Facebook who play Farmville than there are people on Twitter. [via]
The Mystery Of Zomia by Drake Bennett (Boston Globe): Zomia is the mountainous central Asia, largely lawless and anti-civilisation; the study of Zomia peoples can tell us a lot about our civilisation, and people in general.
The Psychology And Power Of...
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“All of us exist in a swarming, pulsating world, driven mostly by an unconscious...”
– Robyn Hitchcock, liner notes to Globe Of Frogs, 1988.
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Testosterone Competition Discarded Worm Victims
Prejudice vs. Biology: Testosterone Makes People More Selfish, But Only If They Think It Does by Ed Yong (Not Exactly Rocket Science): Because people think that testosterone makes you act like a cockhead, women act more belligerently after scientists say they have injected them with testosterone (but actually just with a placebo). For the same reason, people act like they are drunk if they think...
2 tags
Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - Even Heroes Have...
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Dessert Monkeys Getting Circular Encyclopaedia
Rudiments Of Language Discovered In Monkeys by Brandon Keim (Wired Science): An influential paper from 2002 by Noam Chomsky, Marc Hauser, and Tecumseh Fitch argued that the main thing that made humanity different from other mammals was the possession of recursion in language, that we can make completely new meanings by adding words, changing word order, etc. Seems like they were wrong:...
5 tags
Faux Homosexuals All Warmer Psychopaths
Faux Friendship by William Deresiewicz (Chronicle Review): A long discourse on the changing nature of friendship in the Facebook age - we have come to have more friendships, but more fragile and distant friendships.
All That by David Foster Wallace (New Yorker): An excerpt from his unfinished/unrealised last novel, The Pale King. [via]
Homosexual Selection: The Power Of Same-Sex Liaisons by Kate...
Women Insects Praise Africa Tomorrow
Men Are From Earth, Women Are From Earth by Vaughn Bell (Mind Hacks): Despite the hype, men and women do not measurably differ in how they use language.
Tomatoes Can Eat Insects by Richard Alleyne (telegraph.co.uk): They trap insects on sticky stems, and then absorb their nutrients. The movie Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes had a grain of truth! [via]
Let Us Now Praise…Jingles by James...
5 tags
Best Hill Job Begins Change
What East Anglia’s E-mails Really Reveal About Climate Change by Peter Kelemen (Popular Mechanics): An excellent and sober analysis of the controversy and what it says about the way science goes, and about climate change. [via]
Best Songs of 2009 by Sean Michaels (Said The Gramophone): Michaels’ poetic prose so often seems to catch the heart of the songs he writes about.
Dissection...
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Immortal Brain Reopening Monarch Ears
Reopening The Case Of The Female Orgasm by Jesse Bering (Bering In Mind/SciAm): Why have women evolved to have orgasms, considering that they’re not necessary to conception (in contrast to men)? (I was amused by this line: “As a gay man, it’s always seemed rather exotic and foreign to me, sort of like decorative basket-weaving in a small African village.”)
The Monarch Of...
7 tags
Born Albinos Focus On Behavioural Illusion
How The Brain Filters Out Distracting Thoughts To Focus On A Single Bit Of Information (ScienceDaily): Different parts of the brain are like different radio stations - they transmit gamma waves. The hippocampus (part of the brain) plays a role in filtering, because at any one time it simply focuses on gamma waves at one frequency (e.g., the equivalent of 100.6FM). Then again, the study that this...
November 2009
40 posts
8 tags
Meat Contrarian Smuggled Crash Mammon
Seven Answers To Climate Contrarian Nonsense by John Rennie (Scientific American): Heard about how it hasn’t gotten hotter since 1998? Or how the ‘hockey stick’ graph was wrong? Or that there’s a great big conspiracy? Rennie debunks it all. [via]
Did Christianity Cause The Crash? by Hanna Rosin (The Atlantic): Americans who believe in prosperity theology (the idea that...