I was going to rant about something but didn't have the energy to write it all out. Maybe some other time. When I'm feeling rant-ish.
I came back home one day checking my usual items: E-mail, Facebook, Twitter etc and one thing led to another and before I knew it I've watched 5 hours of talks on TED (Technology Entertainment Design). Given that most of the talks on TED are about 20 minutes long, you can imagine how many I've actually watched. Topics vary from predictions of the future based on current technological advances in science and medicine to answering some of the most fundamental questions about the most fundamental elements of the universe to human behaviour on why we do the things we do. Very very highly interesting and I encourage all to watch some of these talks.
I'll skip introducing the physics-y side of talks because seriously it is pretty hardcore stuff even though the talks were meant for the general (not academic) audience but if you do know some physics then it is a very beautiful thing. But I'll just present to you stuff on human behaviour and psychology and I will let the talks to do talking and for you to let the information percolate in that brain of yours.
Behavioural economist Dan Ariely on why we cheat sometimes
Dan again on do we really have control over our decisions.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice.
Barry again on why we stopped being wise and suggestions on how to fix that.
How we sometimes get statistics wrong even for some academics which result in dire consequences.
Think the financial crisis was bad? There are bigger problems to come.
A response to Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life. Don't be too quick to write this guy off. There are some things that needs some thinking.
Interesting views from a comedian.
More news:
I smell a conspiracy theory...
Some surprising findings on casual sex and removing a band-aid.
Interesting discussion on colour to sexism.
We are getting more hungry for information that it's starting to get quite scary.
Painful truth on degrees these days.
Paper batteries. We have come so far since they days of AA batteries.
Given a really really really small space to live, it's amazing how people can adapt to it. And we live where we take space for granted.
Interesting idea for those who want to jump off the Facebook cruiseliner.
This. Is. Awesomesauce.
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ok. no troublemaking posts =p
our reading material is very similar. there's a wealth of potential for dicussion on them - i'll just pick two tonight
casual sex: sounds similar to a "study" which showed that people who downloaded more pirated mp3s also spent more money per year on music CDs, thus trying to justify piracy (just like this one is trying to justify casual sex.. to rile people up with bad statistics). i mean yeah, we know that people who like music both download and purchase more music. so? it's certainly an interesting question though. proper studies need controls - isn't ethical especially for this case - then you need longitudinal studies - a good (and perhaps only) example would be the Grant study - while it isn't about sex, it does deal with what makes us happier, and is a great read in any case.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness
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information: i would say humans receive information at a constant rate. if before we read newspapers now we read blogs and newsfeeds. on that note, it should be fairly trivial to calculate roughly the bit-stream that humans receive. i did this once for fun, no longer remember the answer - of how my gigabytes / terabytes of information our brain receives per second. the human eye can detect a flashed image as brief as 1/400th of a second, resolve millions of colors and resolution of something like a tens of millions of pixels? run the same thing for other senses.
consciousness, then, is the ability to discard 99.99% of the data that we receive, so we can actually get in a thought edgewise.