Why We Like What We Like

By Alva Noë

Can you tell the difference between gourmet liver paté and dog food?

I mean, can you tell the difference by taste?

Many of you are probably pretty sure that you could, and also that you could tell the difference between a $100 bottle of a splendid vintage and some $5 schlock, right? But can you really? In a blind taste test?

Scientists have…

This is a great article by Malcom Gladwell about how we sometimes fail under intense pressure to perform well, because we either choke or panic. He briefly describes the difference between implicit and explicit learning, and how these relate to choking and panicking under pressure. Well worth the long read. From the…

This is a decent article. He starts out with a pretty good assessment of what a fanatic is and wants, but then he suddenly changes gears to talk about literature and humor. Kind of caught me off guard, but if you read the tagline he tells you he's gonna do that. Worth the long read. 



He has some good observations:

"Conformity and uniformity, the urge to belong and the desire to make everyone else belong, may be the most widespread if not the…

Is myth more comforting than reality?

by Quinn O'Neill

For parents wishing to introduce their children to a scientific worldview, two new books may make the job a bit easier. Daniel Loxton’s book “Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be” recently won the 2010…

This is worth reading about. There are not links provided to many of those publications, but I suspect you can find some of them if you Google the titles.   - Dallas

Belief in a Just World



I was home sick when the news of the Japan earthquake came in. I could only hear the television from the other apartment talking about something huge, because the local reporters started referring to CNN, when normally the news would be comfortably confined to local political bickering and showbiz…

Running to catch the sun

We are all heading for the grave in an indifferent universe. How do we cope with such existential concerns?





So you run and you run to catch up

with the sun but it's sinking,

Racing around to come up behind you

again.

The sun is the same in a relative way,

but you're older,

Shorter of breath, and one day closer

to…

…

I am posting this not so much because of his opinions on progressive and conservative politics, but because of what he has to say on intrinsic and extrinsic values, especially these quotes:…

Having sat through two dozen or so graduation speeches, I have naturally wondered why they are so often so bad. One reason, of course, is that the speakers are chosen for their eminence in some field, and not because they are either competent speakers or gifted writers. Another reason is that the audience is eager to be done with all ceremony so that it can proceed to some serious reveling. Thus any speech longer than, say, fifteen minutes will seem tedious, if not entirely…

Is Civility Dead?

by Natalie Pompilio



I live in a city known for its brotherly love, but I didn’t see a lot of that one recent day while reading an on-line edition of the newspaper where I work. The public comment section contained some of the coldest, most vicious writing I’d ever seen.



Under an article about a woman’s murder and her boyfriend’s arrest, some one wrote, “So 2 pieces of trash are off the street…