Category Archives: News
A Language of Smiles — Olivia Judson Blog — NYTimes.com
A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud [...]
2009 UN World Drug report — The Big Picture — Boston.com
WNYC — Radiolab: New Normal? (October 02, 2009)
John Horgan examines how Americans seem to have a completely different attitude toward war than we did thirty years ago. He takes us on a stroll through Hoboken, asking strangers one of the great unanswerable questions: “Will humans ever stop fighting wars?” Strangely, everyone seems to know the answer. Robert Sapolsky [...]
2009 Sumatra earthquakes — The Big Picture — Boston.com
Essay — The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate — NYTimes.com
A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time [...]
Why We Need Government-Run Universal Socialized Health Insurance
I’m a sucker for these animated explanations. And the parallels about fire-fighting insurance are pretty striking.
Esquire: Nate Silver to Republicans: Raise Taxes
For Republicans, raising a few taxes may be good policy and good politics. We are now on the verge of the longest period since the creation of the income tax without an increase in what the wealthiest taxpayers pay — fifteen years, matching the no-new-taxes interval from 1952 to 1966. Meanwhile, [...]
Debunking Health Care Lies (by Reading the Bill) — Blog — OpenCongress
At OpenCongress, we’ve had the official text of the House health care bill available online for a month for people to read and get the facts: H.R. 3200 – America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. Anyone can easily permalink and comment on any individual section of the full [...]
Mexico’s drug war — The Big Picture — Boston.com
In December of 2006, Mexico’s new President Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug cartels, reversing earlier government passiveness. Since then, the government has made some gains, but at a heavy price — gun battles, assassinations, kidnappings, fights between rival cartels, and reprisals have resulted in over 9,500 deaths since December 2006 — over 5,300 [...]
der/die/das and el/la make you think differently ...