King Skeptics Watch Southpaws Killing Mind
Southpaws: The Evolution Of Handedness by Nora Schultz (New Scientist): Turns out that we generally have to be handed - otherwise the brain gets confused trying to figure out which side should do stuff. Why humans are mostly right handed is probably an accident of history. [via]
King Coal by Guy Pearse (The Monthly): The extent to which the Australian economy has been run on coal in recent times is such that we may soon be the largest exporter of energy in the world. Pearse discusses the history and implications of this in that typically Monthly style.
A Mind In The Water by D. Graham Burnett (Orion): In 1814, fishermen who trapped a dolphin in Devon, UK, had no idea what it was. How did we get from that point to the current point where dolphins are beloved by hippies, Sea Worlds and comparative psychologists? [via]
The Lazy Medium: How People Really Watch Television (The Economist): How people actually watch television and how they say they watch television on forms are two rather different things - the reason television has not gone the way of the dodo is because television is a regular social activity, and checking things on YouTube or watching downloaded torrents is not. [via]
Your Office Chair Is Killing You by Arianne Cohen (BusinessWeek): Sitting down all day is probably most of the reason why you have a back ache.
Skeptics Of The World, Unite! by Christian Caryl (Foreign Policy): We live in a world where conspiracy theories are given more and more prominence; Caryl examines why this might be - we want things to have happened for a reason. At the same time, quite a large proportion of the populace has never been to university (or done more than a semester or two). So they are unlikely to know or understand the intellectual theories behind things like economics, group psychology, climate change, political theory, etc etc. In contrast, their leaders almost certainly base their policies on these things to some extent. So there is a conspiracy going on that they’re not a part of - the conspiracy of the intellectual world.
