Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
There are plenty of ways to celebrate victory at the Olympics: You can do the Lightning Bolt like Usain Bolt. You can do various things with your fingers like Michael Phelps. You can brag on Twitter. But rarely has anyone danced like David Katoatau did this week in Rio. And what’s remarkable about his dancing…
John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930 that “if economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.” Almost a century later, he’s getting his wish. Economists tend to be a grandiose bunch. They advise presidents and billionaires. They are generally unashamed about offering…
Insurance giant Aetna will stop selling health insurance through most of the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act in 2017 because the company said it is losing money in many of those markets. On Monday, Aetna said it will sell individual insurance policies in only 242 counties in four states, down almost 70 percent…
The trailer for new film Hidden Figures debuted this weekend and, I kid you not, watching it gives me chills. The film, which is landing in theaters in January 2017, is based on the true story of African American women who worked as mathematicians and engineers for NASA in the 1960s. They were the original…
PSY 607: Everything is Fucked Prof. Sanjay Srivastava Class meetings: Mondays 9:00 – 10:50 in 257 Straub Office hours: Held on Twitter at your convenience (@hardsci) In a much-discussed article at Slate, social psychologist Michael Inzlicht told a reporter, “Meta-analyses are fucked” (Engber, 2016). What does it mean, in science, for something to be fucked?…
Some serious academics, according to Google Image Search. Last week, a Serious Academic™exhausted hundreds of words denouncing the use of social media by his colleagues while insinuating that selfie culture poses an existential threat to academic life. The social media backlash from other serious academics was swift and on point, reminding us that many scientists…
Photo credit: AP My smart colleague George Dvorsky over at Gizmodo published a defense of “radical life extension” this morning. This is a largely pseudo- or quasi-scientific pursuit favored by billionaire parasite Peter Thiel (among others), based upon the idea that, essentially, death is a pathology rather than a natural fact of existence, and thus…
Photo: Heisenberg Media/Flickr Billionaire douchebag Peter Thiel has plenty of crazy ideas, but his commitment to radical life extension isn’t one of them. Without question, Thiel clings to some rather obnoxious ideas. An ardent libertopian and admirer of the pseudo-intellectual Ayn Rand, the tech mogul believes that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and he questions…
Image: Pixabay The US Drug Enforcement Agency has announced that marijuana will remain a Schedule 1 drug, saying it has “no medical use or purpose.” The decision keeps weed on the same naughty list alongside drugs like LSD and heroin. The Obama Administration has turned down a request by two Democratic governors to change the…
There remains a pervasive notion that happiness can only truly come from finding a spouse, lest one rot of loneliness in some dusty attic. But a new study out of the University of California at Santa Barbara provides a very different view of singledom, one that this single woman finds enormously encouraging. In work presented…