Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

Did you see any of the new stories about John Jost and teams’s forthcoming research paper? The one about how “behavioural residue” can be used to predict political leanings?
“Conservative rooms tended to be cleaner, more brightly lit, better organized, less cluttered, and also more conventional and ordinary in terms of decoration,” Jost said during a [...]

I am so jealous of all the people working at the LHC this week.
However, the best thing I’ve seen that’s LHC related this week was Hawking talking about his $100 bet against the project finding the Higgs boson.
Why do I think it’s the best thing?
Well, look at this part of his comments:
I think it will [...]

Shannon worked for Bell Labs (now owned by Alcatel-Lucent).
Guess who just shut down “fundamental research” in physics?
Not quite sic transit gloria mundi, but definitely a chunk of the glory of American research.

In some ways I’m a classic information theory junkie–Claude Shannon changed the way I think about the universe just as much as any golden book.
Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, is something that I keep thinking I’ve finally had my “kick from the knee” moment with, and then something comes along to make it clear [...]

So, like all the other serious geeks, I’ve been playing with Google Chrome for a the last couple of days.
In general, I like it–it’s fast, and there are lots of nice little UI bits that I quite like, plus the deep nerd in me likes the multi-process architecture and the built-in memory profiling, etc.
However there [...]

This pleases me. That is all.
Also, the Backup Dancers credit made me laugh out loud.

As I seem to be saying a lot this month, I’ve been using the Internet for a long time. I remember when Gopher was more useful than HTTP. I remember when with a little dedication you could surf a significant portion of the entire web. I mean, I’m not Berners-Lee or anything, but I started [...]

You know, I’ve always suspected that it wasn’t just that most “nice guys” are insecure, codependent cases. And science has vindicated my suspicion:
New Scientist: Bad guys really do get the most girls
NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty [...]

I knew it all along, but it’s nice to have some science to back it up
Spending on Happiness — HBS Working Knowledge
Can money buy you happiness? Yes—so long as you spend the money on someone else. According to new research, giving other people even as little as $5 can lead to increased well-being for the [...]

I know you’re already seen this, but it’s just too good to let go by.

My favourite bit references the hobo signs stuff we were looking at earlier this month:
And they devised a secret language of signs and scrawls used to alert their passing brethren to danger or opportunity. A crucifix chalked on the side of [...]

I’ve never been one to engage in a lot of “there are two kinds of people in the world…” divisions.
Oh, I think that humans are fundamentally inclined, probably at a biological level, to see things in terms of “us and them”, but like a certain brilliant Scotsman, I also tend to think that the direction [...]

Remember Nick Bostrom? And remember the Drake Equation?
Well, the two have met, as illustrated in MIT’s Technology Review this month, in Bostrom’s article, Where Are They.
Bostrom suggests, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, that the reason we haven’t met the aliens yet is that Drake’s equation is missing a Doom Constant that models [...]

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: (1) No sea-creature is less than two [...]

“Hooray for popularization!”

A while back I mentioned that I was really enjoying following the various TED Talks as they are being put online. (In fact, at this point, I’ve got an archive of over 230 of the talks as MP4 videos–around 12Gb–that I’m working my way through, either on the iPod during enforced waiting periods, [...]

Holy “ask and ye shall receive”, Batman!
From the CBC
The National Union of Public and General Employees, which represents more than 340,000 workers across the country, on Friday wrote to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to investigate the practice of “traffic shaping” and its impact on internet users.
“These internet service providers are, with little or [...]