rigorousintuition.ca

• Hanna Rosin | New data on the rise of women
  — TED dot com | December 2010; Washington DC
  
  
  
  [TED NOTES.] Hanna Rosin is the sort of journalist who dares to articulate what people are thinking—only they hadn’t realized it yet. Born in Israel and raised in Queens, the co-founder of women’s site DoubleX (an offshoot of Slate) and contributing editor at the Atlantic Monthly is probably best known for the furor raised by her article titled (not by her) “The End of Men”—which asserts that the era of male dominance has come to an end as women gain power in the postindustrial economy. A similar furor greeted her well-researched piece “The Case Against Breastfeeding,” which questioned the degree to which scientific evidence supports breast-feeding’s touted benefits.
  
  Rosin has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post and contributes to such publications as the New Yorker and the New Republic. Her book God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America peers into the inner workings of Patrick Henry College, a seven-year school for evangelical Christians aspiring to political and cultural influence.
  
  • Rosin makes her most powerful argument when she looks, not at the current workforce, but at what is happening on America’s college and university campuses. There, she explains, “we can see with absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by women.”
    — AlbertMohler.com

• See sunspots form
  
  
  [EXCERPT FROM BAD ASTRONOMY] ...Obviously, having two more days advance warning on sunspot formation would be a Very Good Thing.
  
  The scientists doing this work have done it successfully for four forming sunspots so far. The method appears to work pretty well, and I hope it can be refined and sped up to give us more warning. Last week I was visiting the Big Bear solar observatory to film an interview, and noticed that the spot that blew off several flares was moving off to the far side of the Sun, but there were several spots still marring the surface. One of them, Active Region 1263, blew its lid just days later. How cool would it be to know that was coming, days before the spot itself was even visible?
  
  Image and video credit
  SOHO/MDI, SOHO/HMI, the SOHO MDI and HMI teams, NASA/SOHO

Howard Stern wrote:"I thank God that I didn't lose my mind the night I took four hits of blotter acid. And I know this OCD kicked in after the blotter acid, I know I was sick as a dog, and I know a chunk of my brain went out the window when I did this.
...
I overdosed, and my brain was on fire. I didn't sleep for days. I couldn't stop hallucinating. When I closed my eyes it got worse. I would go to read something - the letters would close up and dance away. It was scary. I was scared out of my mind. Thank god my roommate, he was there and held onto me for the night.
...
And I took that acid, and after that I was so fucking crazy - that stupid movie came out, 2001: Space Odyssey. I took acid again. After that acid experience, and then the 2001 experience, it dawned on me that this wasn't going to be my life anymore. The 2001 was actually a good experience, because I only took the proper amount. I had overdosed [before]. Four is insane. I wanna see anyone take four and survive. They were going to take me to the hospital because I couldn't get my brain together. Couldn't see, couldn't do anything. I was on another planet."

• Tim Harford | Trial, Error and the God Complex
  — TED dot com | July 2011; Edinburgh, Scotland
  
  
  
  [TED DOT COM NOTES.] In the Undercover Economist column he writes for the Financial Times, Tim Harford looks at familiar situations in unfamiliar ways and explains the fundamental principles of the modern economy. He illuminates them with clear writing and a variety of examples borrowed from daily life.
  
  His new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure, argues that the world has become far too unpredictable and complex for today’s challenges to be tackled with ready-made solutions and expert opinions. Instead, Harford suggests, we need to learn to embrace failure and to constantly adapt, to improvise rather than plan, to work from the bottom up rather than the top down. He also presents the BBC radio series More or Less, a rare broadcast program devoted, as he says, to “the powerful, sometimes beautiful, often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers.”
  
  He says: “I’d like to see many more complex problems approached with a willingness to experiment.”

eyeno wrote:I don't know if CNN really wants this banned but it is blatant shaping of the news.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hx_4mBZ ... r_embedded

• Snow on Cuba Mall in central Wellington | August 15th 2011
  — filmed & edited by Ro Tierney
  
  — music | Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy