The Fiscal Toll of Treating ‘Lifestyle Diseases’ — NYTimes.com: Corny as it is to say so, if we can put a man on the moon we can create an environment in which an apple is a better and more accessible choice than a Pop-Tart. More can be said about the sea change my diet has undergone in […]
Okay, so I kept reading about language and thought and came across a fascinating article I had read a few years ago. Chew on this: A recent set of studies suggests that the grammatical genders assigned to objects by a language do indeed influence people’s mental representations of objects (Boroditsky et al., in press). […] Spanish […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
