Here’s an interesting one: a face in a testicular tumor. The image of the man’s face, seemingly in some distress, was sent to Urology, the International Society of Urology’s official journal, and was published in the journal’s September volume. G. Gregory Roberts and Naji J. Touma, from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, had conducted the ultrasound … Read more
Radley Balko got quite a lot of hate mail in response to an article he wrote for HuffPo on Occupy Wall Street. One letter hilariously complains I am appalled by your lack of integrity. You quoted someone from the Cato Institute but didn’t reveal that you also worked for them. You also didn’t reveal that … Read more
Is it a bit hasty to write about a movie you’ve not yet seen? Perhaps, but this one I’m eager to see, and it will be televised again on November 12th so perhaps there will be an opportunity. Miss Representation is a documentary made by Jennifer Siebel Newsom on the subject of how women are … Read more
If you really aren’t interested in video games at all, you….probably won’t bother reading this post. But if you’re somewhat interested in them but don’t know much about them, you might not know that this weekend has been BlizzCon, the annual convention held in Anaheim, California by Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard’s most famous and far-reaching games are … Read more
Let me say this, right from the start: I love biases. No, I don’t love that they exist, but I think they’re endlessly fascinating. I love thinking about them, identifying them, figuring out where they come from. Studying biases is how I came to the realization that the way we generally think about human reasoning is … Read more
Not allowed to be right aboutanything. After posting a clip from Bill Maher’s show in which the comedian mocks the Republican presidential candidates, Ed Brayton got some flack from readers complaining that they wouldn’t watch it because Maher has established himself as having some pseudoscientific views, specifically being anti-vaccination. When Ed expressed confusion about why … Read more
Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business decided to examine the relationship between status and power in how people treat each other. So they organized a study that involved telling participants they would be working on a business exercise with another student, and randomly assigning each participant a role in the project with a … Read more
“We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.” — Andrew, The Breakfast Club The Pervocracy has a great post on the end of “normal” relationships in general, but I particularly liked the part about gender norms: you don’t have to be non-heterosexual to question what gender means to … Read more
Apparently October 9th is National Pro Life Cupcake Day. Did you know? It’s a day when pastries become political…poor pastries. Pressed into service on behalf of highly controversial issue which doesn’t have, so far as I can tell, any direct connection to wax paper wrappers and frosting. But, one might ask, how is this joyous … Read more
David Brooks has an interesting essay in the New York Times called The Limits of Empathy. In it he discusses the wealth of research published lately on how empathy works as a psychological response, and makes a case that it can’t and shouldn’t be considered the true foundation for morality. This is because the reaction … Read more