I have become obsessed with the upcoming Canadian election. Despite the fact that I’ve already voted, I still can’t stop reading the editorials and projections. And I desperately want to write about the election…but I can’t. I feel like it’s impossible to write about politics without some sort of bias and my scientific career is [...]
No. This isn’t another post about Canadian politics. Although, given that this is the last week before the election, it took all my strength not to write about it. Instead, just a quick quote from the blog Punctuated Equilibrium about alcoholic monkeys: Researchers captured 1000 vervet monkeys from St. Kitts island, kept them in a [...]
This is a post about politics. While it’s obvious that I support a specific set of values, I don’t want to support one party or another in this post because I know that different people vote for different reasons (and honestly, I think this is a dark age of Canadian politics in terms of all [...]
Is it just me or have TED talks dipped in quality over the past few years? Seems like you need to go through a couple before finding the really good ones. I sincerely enjoyed this one about a teacher who designed a special game for nine year olds to help them understand how the world [...]
An interesting little bit of info from Catherine Rampell at the New York Times Economix blog. A recent poll in the U.S. found that people making over $250,000 a year appear to be a bit confused either about math or how well-off other people are relative to them. When they were asked whether their taxes [...]
“We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers.” – Jonathan Haidt Professor of psychology and the University of Virginia I love this quote. It refers to what happens to everyone when discussing contentious issues. If we have emotion invested in the issue we can get caught up trying to win the discussion [...]
I had two things I wanted to write about here today and I was trying to choose one when I realized that they had a common theme. Story 1: Greg Mortenson, the guy who wrote the smash best-seller Three Cups of Tea and who is apparently responsible for inspiring around $60 million dollars in donations, [...]
The whole problem with having political discussions is not just because every has different values but that everyone votes for different people for different reasons. There are so many criteria you can base your vote on. For example, if I wanted to vote for a party that represented my values most closely I’d vote for [...]
This is a great, short TED talk about why people aren’t actually as apathetic as we would think:
This is my life today:
