September 2, 2011
Published by admin at September 2, 2011
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Rational Rioting

A recent Scientific American article on the British riots claimed that “contrary to popular wisdom, mobs are not mindless. In fact, they act rationally—a characteristic that suggests ways to prevent riots.” If you go through the reasoning, what it amounts to is: we need to stop rioting, but rioting is […]
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August 16, 2011
Published by admin at August 16, 2011
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Suicides, iPhones and Numbers

A recent New Scientist article mentioned the problem the company that makes Apple’s iPhones etc had a while ago, where they got into trouble because of a “spate” of suicides among their workers, blamed, of course, on the company. It went on to say that the number of suicides in the year […]
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May 5, 2011
Published by admin at May 5, 2011
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Through a Glass, Half Empty

An interesting report from The Scientist: Chronic diseases world’s no. 1 killer Chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease are now the biggest killers around the world, a new report by the World Health Organization found. Accounting for more than 60 percent of the deaths worldwide in 2008, […]
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April 9, 2011
Published by admin at April 9, 2011
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Heroes

Ayn Rand identified the “package deal” as one of the deadly errors of thinking: combining opposites into the one concept, thus hopelessly confusing thinking. It is at its worst in ethical issues, where something good is conflated with something bad: something that can only damage the good and promote the […]
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March 19, 2011
Published by admin at March 19, 2011
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Fire, Ice and Precautions

Check out a very interesting post by David Lappi on trends in global temperature: not just the last 100 years, but the last 10,000 years, the last 5 million years and the last 65 million years. The two striking things about the trends shown are the huge shorter term natural variations […]
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