Dispatches is a quality CBC Radio show. It covers global issues that aren’t covered by the mainstream press while maintaining a rather high level of rigour in the stories it covers. Which is why I was disappointed with a recent segment on traditional medicine in Brazil. A story on traditional medicine in Brazil would be [...]
While riding the bus for no reason recently, I found this on my ipod: a debate between well-known atheist Christopher Hitchens and well-know British ex-prime minister Tony Blair (although it’s less well known that he converted to Catholicism after his term as PM) on whether religion is a force for good in the world. It’s [...]
Busy day. Check out this awesome video from Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich about why people can’t walk in a straight line. It seems easy enough, but when people are blindfolded and asked to go in a straight line, they seem more adept at walking in perfect circles which, I guess, is interesting in itself: A Mystery: [...]
This blog may as well be named the Dan Ariely and a few other things blog. I just love the way this guy thinks about the world. He and other behavioural economists have been making the hopefully obviously contradictory points that classical economics relies on people always making rational decisions and that, in many aspects [...]
This is way cool. Every album reviewed by Pitchfork in 2010 on what the statistics-inclined would call a histogram showing the distribution of reviews over a year. I could talk about this distribution statistically but that would be boring (to some–ok many). Click on it instead! It’ll bring you to the site which is interactive!
How presumptuous of me. I’m sure with a day to think about some people got yesterday’s riddle. According to the studies about 10% of people get the right answer. I was part of that 90% the first time I came across the Wason Selection Task as this is known. Here it is again for anyone [...]
This is a famous card “trick”. It’s actually not really a trick at all but when I learned about this “trick”, it was the first time that I realized that the human brain isn’t all it’s made out to be. Here’s the “trick”: If I tell you that these four cards belong to a deck [...]
I read a lot of blogs. Well, I don’t actually read that many, I scan the post titles or the first couple paragraphs looking for something interesting. Something I’ve learned that’s saved me a lot of time is to avoid articles that are about something that sounds like an interesting idea because, too often, they [...]
