Posts from — December 2008

I’m stuck in Newark for at least 5 more hours, so it’s time to catch up on reading and writing.

My flight was SFO -> EWR -> BOS. My first flight was delayed over an hour, but I made my connection on time. The next flight made it to Boston, but all the runways were closed. We were in a holding pattern for a while, looking for other options, but ended up going back to Newark. During some of the turbulence, the captain said “I’ve asked the flight attendants to stay seated so that they don’t fly into the ceiling and… get hurt”, which was a slightly disturbing. I have another flight heading out at 9:30 tonight (~11 hrs later). Hopefully that flight won’t be canceled…

Catching up on the TED talks I’ve been meaning to watch for a while…

Taylor is a neuroanatomist who had a stroke and is able to describe it in fascinating detail, making for what was widely considered the best talk of the conference:

(video)

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And I realized, “Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!” And the next thing my brain says to me is, “Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?”

Via lifehacker, a method to improve your photography with classical art has a cool effect:

Topics: modern genocide, US & UN policy, Sergio Vieira de Mello

(video 23 minutes)

A six-part video in which Derren Brown and Richard Dawkins discuss psychics. The techniques used in cold reading are especially interesting:

(via Boing Boing)

A neat visualization of US immigration over the years:

Immigration to the US, 1820-2007 v2 from Ian Stevenson on Vimeo.

FlowingData has a large collection of immigration visualizations, too.

BBC had a good documentary in September with scientists’ recommendations for the next US President:

(50 min)

It’s covers a lot of topics, but I still managed to learn quite a bit (for example: I didn’t know why centrifuges were needed for nuclear weapons development, or what the JASON group was). It’s a good overview of the scientific issues of our time.
(via kotte)

From Burger King: “Flame Body Spray: The scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat”. I can’t think of anyone who shouldn’t get this for Christmas.

An interesting article from The American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. It’s a relatively long read, but covers a bunch of important topics.

Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.

I agree. In my experience, socio-economic diversity is much more valuable and interesting than racial diversity. Geographic diversity (i.e. bringing together people from all over the world) does have value, too, as it’s an easy way to learn about other cultures. I’ve learned so much from my coworkers at Google who come from other countries.

A couple more points that I found interesting:

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your
life?

And:

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time.

Some interesting perspective from The Register:

[...] for a well-trained military sniper at least, “collateral damage” — the accidental killing and injuring of bystanders and unintended targets — is almost nonexistent. Mistakes do occur, but compared to a platoon of regular soldiers armed with automatic weapons, rockets, grenades etc a sniper is delicacy itself. Compared to crew-served and vehicle weapons, artillery, tanks, air support or missile strikes, a sniper is not just surgically precise but almost magically so. Yet he (or sometimes she) is reviled as the next thing to a murderer, while the mainstream mass slaughter people are seen as relatively normal.

Full article
via Bruce Schneier