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POPSHow to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic (FAQ) More common questions and myths answered at the source, thoroughly cross-referenced and conveniently categorized and sub-categorized by type of argument: Stages of Denial Scientific Topics Types of Argument Levels of Sophistication A nice reference that's updated with fresh comments. Many "skeptics" often are unaware (by choice or by circumstance) that their common questions have already been addressed by scientists long ago.
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POPSFrench Atomic Bomb Test Photos from 1968 Never-before-seen 40-year-old pictures of French atomic bomb tests have surfaced on the internet and they are simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. The epitome of historical human achievement and wanton destruction combined in one split-second. These are four scanned pictures of hardcopies I possess of the French nuclear test codenamed Canopus, which was fired on 24th August 1968 in the Fangataufa Atoll. The French army had those pictures taken on site. Full-size links: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 .
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POPSRepetition Makes False Beliefs Permanent Politicians and other unscrupulous types have long exploited what psychological studies are now confirming: due to the neurophysiology of the learning process, simple repetitive association between two concepts is enough to make false propositions "feel" true and well-supported. Worse, after enough exposure to such associations, subsequent denials can strengthen the perception of the falsehood instead of weakening it. (This is a major reason why the stigma of a false accusation can persist even after innocence is proven.) Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.
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POPSThe Mathematical Lives of Plants The seeds of a sunflower, the spines of a cactus, and the bracts of a pine cone all grow in whirling spiral patterns. Remarkable for their complexity and beauty, they also show consistent mathematical patterns that scientists have been striving to understand. ... Scientists have puzzled over this pattern of plant growth for hundreds of years. Why would plants prefer the golden angle to any other? And how can plants possibly "know" anything about Fibonacci numbers? For the first time, scientists have found convincing biochemical mechanisms responsible for the interlocking spiral growth patterns seen in many plants. (The Romanesco broccoli plant is a striking example.) The video of the experiment with magnetized liquid iron droplets demonstrates how the geometry of such growth could occur in nature.
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POPSHow to Write Aphorisms Delacroix, Eugene (France, 1798-1863) To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty; to be a poet at forty is to be a poet. According to James Geary, editor of the compendium Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists , a truely memorable, quotable aphorism satisfies five laws: It must be brief. It must be definitive. It must be personal — that's the difference between an aphorism and a proverb. It must be philosophical — that's the difference between an aphorism and a platitude, which is not philosophical.... And the fifth law is it must have a twist. And that can be either a linguistic twist or a psychological twist or even a twist in logic that somehow flips the reader into a totally unexpected place. Now you know, so get to work! :)
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POPSAncient Blueprints of Calculus Uncovered in Archimedes Text Details have been released from the nine-year-long reconstruction project to recover the Greek mathematician's writings from this one-of-a-kind find and the results are fascinating. Buried beneath the surface of this gilded palimpsest, researchers discovered more extensive demonstrations of concepts such as infinite series, approximations, limits, and integral calculus than had been known to exist in ancient times. Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s. Reviel Netz, an historian of mathematics at Stanford University who transcribed the text, says that the examination of Archimedes' work has revealed "a new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics."
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POPSTen Ways to Make Sure That Peace Stays Dead Too many people on each side see the other as wholly culpable. Too many people on each side see themselves as wholly innocent, wholly victimized, ill-served by the well-meaning, abandoned by former allies, betrayed by the media, misunderstood by people who should know better, forgotten by the world. Too many people on each side see only the suffering that has been caused them. Too many people have learned to wall themselves off from the suffering that they have caused.
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POPSWhy The Loudest are Often the Most Wrong This classic paper by Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments , examines the psychological reasons for the unfortunately common correlation between ignorance and confidence. We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine. As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." ( PDF here .)
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POPSHow to Use First Names In the world of influence, names are money. Schoolteachers know it. Bartenders know it. Salesmen know it. Very polite children know it. These people have figured it out. A name well used makes any person feel seen. When someone uses my name, I know that he has at least considered me in some fashion, that my presence has registered. It conveys a substratum of intimacy, a level of connection, a sense that life does not have to be lived in a torpid fog of anonymous comings and goings.
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POPSAtheists Need to Chill Michael Shermer makes a point that needs to be made. Atheists need to remember what they stand for , not merely what they are against . Ridicule and contempt have no place in science, and haters should not tarnish its reputation by association. In the words of the greatest consciousness raiser of the 20th century, Martin Luther King, Jr., in his epic "I Have a Dream" speech: "In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline." If atheists do not want theists to prejudge them in a negative light, then they must not do unto theists the same.
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POPS25 Greatest Science Books of All Time The Origin of Species (1859) Darwin's masterwork is, undeniably, The Origin of Species , in which he introduced his theory of evolution by natural selection. Prior to its publication, the prevailing view was that each species had existed in its current form since the moment of divine creation and that humans were a privileged form of life, above and apart from nature. Darwin's theory knocked us from that pedestal. Wary of a religious backlash, he kept his ideas secret for almost two decades while bolstering them with additional observations and experiments. The result is an avalanche of detail—there seems to be no species he did not contemplate—thankfully delivered in accessible, conversational prose. A century and a half later, Darwin's paean to evolution still begs to be heard: "There is grandeur in this view of life," he wrote, that "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
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POPSWhy America Will Survive George W. Bush Otto von Bismarck saw how American blunders led to American power and allegedly said that God has a special providence for drunks, fools, and the United States of America. Walter Russell Mead (of the Council on Foreign Relations) puts Bush's 8-year stint in the White House into proper perspective. America's foreign policy has been short-sighted and often self-defeating from the get-go, alternately collaborative, passive, and interventionist. And, yet, miraculously, we always come out ahead. With the unstoppable rise of a global capitalist economy, Mead makes the case that America, for all its past and current faults, will continue to be the inevitable leader of this new international buoyancy. Not even our latest mistakes (unprecedented though they may be) can derail such a powerful incentive that is the modern American world trade system. Which means, more than ever, we're literally all in this together.
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POPSGiant Turkey Chases Boston Woman, Pecks Bottom Repeatedly When dispatched to the scene of a turkey, Verrier offers advice instead. He tells people not to feed them, not to be intimidated by them, and to keep their distance. Still, some people cannot help themselves. They need to be near the turkeys. Distance-shmistance, we want to be near the turkeys. I, for one, am against the city of Boston trying to regulate mutually consensual human-turkey behavior. A light ass-pecking never hurt anyone, am I right? Even though this incident happened right near my apartment, I have not been lucky enough to experience any super-sized turkeys on my errands, sadly. Look at the size of that sucker...he's gotta be like 12 feet tall! :)
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POPSIs the Search for Aliens a Good Idea? One thing is clear from our searches for ET - there is nobody transmitting strong interstellar beacons in our local vicinity. If "they" are out there, they are keeping quiet, prompting the question that they might know something we don't. Listening for transmissions from space is rational; intentionally announcing our presence to unknown civilizations borders on irresponsible. On Earth, radio technology and nuclear weapons were invented within only 50 years of each other. Any civilization with the capability to receive and understand our beacons will likely have figured out worse. Humans are bad enough at co-existing as it is without near constant war. Could you imagine being forced to enter foreign policy negotiations with another species like our own? It would be calamitous.
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POPSThe Biggest Threat to the West Lies Within Itself, Not with Islam Simon Jenkins on threats to peace and democracy. This defeatism led the American Congress to allow its president to authorise torture and detention without trial in what Senator Robert Byrd called “the slow unravelling of the people’s liberties”. It enabled a British Home Office to curb free speech and habeas corpus. It arms police, fortifies buildings and impedes the free movement of citizens. It makes every Christian suspicious of every Muslim.
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POPSWho's Minding the Mind? New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it. In describing my own research or cognitive science in general to people, the most difficult obstacle I would eventually encounter was the stubborn human belief that there was a independent entity — a free will — in charge of everything important that goes on in their brain. While science has been steadily dismantling this understandable misconception for decades, recent studies on subconscious social priming like these would have helped me demonstrate my point. To be fair, it's more than a little disconcerting to realize what a messy mix of competing, semi-independent, multi-layered neural modules are responsible for producing our daily behavior.
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POPSWhy Are We So Bad at Spotting Lies? By nature, we are a rather trustful species and (unless you lie or detect lies for a living) chances are good that you harbor false assumptions of what deceitful behavior looks like. So says famous psychologist Richard Wiseman in this summary of his research into the universal, cross-cultural trait of human deception. Among other things, Wiseman shows that by the time they are five, even our own kids can fool us with ease and abandon! The simple fact is that the real clues to deceit are in the words that people use, not the body language.
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POPSThe Fallacy Files I clipped this before, but pop restrictions burried the clip. In a very naive hope to keep discussions fallacy-free, better the debate and stimulate some self-criticism, I'm re-sharing this with you all. Anyway, the resource is huge, examples abundant, explications very clear and even etymological grounded.
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POPSA Tragic Legacy And the president who vowed to lead the war for freedom and democracy has made torture, rendition, abductions, lawless detentions of even our own citizens, secret "black site" prisons, Abu Ghraib dog leashes, and orange Guantánamo jumpsuits the strange, new symbols of America around the world. New essay by Glenn Greenwald on the future legacy of America's reaction to 9/11.
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POPSHow to Become President with Clipmarks You heard it here first. In 2008, you just won't get elected without reaching out to the coveted Clipmarks community. And you can bet we'll be checking candidates' sign-up dates. :) The publicity for Clipmarks 2.0 rolls on....
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POPSNew Math Theory Explains Toddler's "Word Spurt" A bell-shaped word distribution and a steady child learning rate turn out to be enough to bring about the extraordinary explosion seen in children's vocabularies around this age. McMurray notes that languages have only a small number of very easy-to-learn words and many more intermediate words. So when a baby has been exposed to enough language to learn the easy words, she will acquire just a few words. As she is exposed to more language, she begins to learn the medium words. And because there are a lot of medium words, she is likely to pick up a lot of words at this stage. This, McMurray says, is the vocabulary explosion.
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POPSOn Architecture and Elegance bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance—holding, spanning, sheltering—with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. From philosophical historian Alain de Botton's inimitable The Architecture of Happiness , itself a paradigmatic illustration of the aesthetic elegance of well-engineered minimalism (be it architectural or textual). The NYRB's synopsis of de Botton's work makes note of this: The simplicity of his writing is not the product of a simple mind.... In The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) he remarked that "there are...no legitimate reasons why books in the humanities should be difficult or boring; wisdom does not require a specialized vocabulary or syntax."
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POPSMath Behind Ancient Islamic Tile Patterns Decoded When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. See the full research article as published in Science . It's a wonderful example of original, multidisciplinary academic research bridging history and mathematics that happens to force us to re-think the sophistication of ancient geometrical knowledge. When Lu looked at photographs of Islamic buildings, he found that he could break the patterns on their surfaces up into the same shapes, even though the shapes often weren't immediately visible. "I couldn't sleep for days," he said. "I skipped Christmas break to work on it."
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POPS80-Year-Old Indian Math Mystery Solved A few months into 2007 and already another long-standing mathematical mystery has been more-or-less put to rest. It will be hard to top Perelman's stunning proof of the legendary Poincaré Conjecture from last year, but in math and science, you never know when the next breakthrough will come. (If you haven't already, read up on some of the incredible anecdotes about the life of the Indian genius, Ramanujan. He was truly one of a kind.)
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POPSHow to Brood Tom Chiarella might be my favorite author to clip, not only because of the originality of his topics but because of his pithy, honest terseness and his wry approach to modern life. Now pardon me while I mull over what all this implies about me, Clipmarks, and the entire history of humanity alone in a corner somewhere.... Some people are smart. They stay away. You might call this respect. Others are pathological in their worry. "Why so glum?" they ask. Or "How you doing, big guy?" And just because they won't honor my need to be alone in public, to stretch around inside the muscle of my worry, or respect the fact that a smile is sometimes just a tiresome, mawkish mask, I flat-out lie. I tell them I'm doing fine. Jim Dandy. Then I smile and wait for a good moment to turn back to my troubles -- which now include the fact that some jackass thinks it's okay to call me "big guy."
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POPSStunning Photo of Saturn Backlit By the Sun With our sun behind it, Saturn carves out a majestic silhouette against the vastness of space. And the tiny speck peeking through the rings? That's us! Click on images for full-size. (Transmitted by the Cassini probe looking back at the Earth from a billion-mile-out vantage point. Background behind the image's creation.)
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POPSQUIZ: What American Accent Do You Have? If you think you don't have an accent, think again. This short quiz is a way to find out which dialect of American English you speak. Different regional accents become more prevalent in countries at different times throughout the years for various socio-economic and geographical reasons. These accents come to be perceived as "neutral" or "accent-less" by the majority during these times. For a while, the American dialect sometimes called "Standard Midwestern" has dominated but, like accents themselves, this "standard" constantly evolves. Recently, the spoken aspects of American English have trended westward along with the population center of America. Many features distinct to Northeastern accents (think NYC, Boston) are being replaced in popularity with those from Western accents (think LA) across America. This shift tends to be more prominent the younger the speaker is.
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POPSWhy Eye Contact Matters And for the one who's being looked at, eye contact sends a message, signaling acknowledgment, connection, and attention, signaling something, I suppose, like empathy. Being seen is, on some level, being felt. It's nice to be acknowledged.
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POPSHow To Be Funny Very nice tips with funny examples. Surprise is often worked into a joke through the 'pull-back/reveal' technique. The joke focuses your attention on a particular angle or detail of the scene, then suddenly pans out to show you the whole, surprising picture. Very often the success of these jokes hinges on the joke-teller's subtle control of rhythm: a beat here, a breath there.
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POPSPolitical Junkies: Why it Feels Good to Be an Extremist In The Political Brain , psychologist Drew Western summarizes fMRI experiments exploring the neuro-psychology of systematic bias and rationalization in the brains of political extremists. Finding ways to dismiss contradictory evidence triggers pleasant emotional releases in partisans' brains, eventually becoming a pleasurable, learned behavior. Once partisans had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on. The partisan brain didn't seem satisfied in just feeling better. It worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased "reasoning." These reward circuits overlap substantially with those activated when drug addicts get their "fix," giving new meaning to the term political junkie.
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POPSThe Stick Figure Guide to Winning in Iraq As described in the article, the creator of this humorous, optimistic cartoon, a young Captain Travis Patriquin, was killed by an improvised explosive device in Iraq just last Wednesday. His creation has been circulating among the troops and, lately, across the internet. PDF version of the presentation .
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POPSGeorge Washington's Rules of Civility
Insightful precepts of civil social behavior; as applicable now as ever. As a young schoolboy in Virginia, George Washington took his first steps toward greatness by copying out by hand a list of 110 ' Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation .' Based on a 16th-century set of precepts compiled for young gentlemen by Jesuit instructors, the Rules of Civility were one of the earliest and most powerful forces to shape America's first president.... Most of the rules are concerned with details of etiquette, offering pointers on such issues as how to dress, walk, eat in public and address one's superiors. But in the introduction to the newly published Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace , Brookhiser warns against dismissing the maxims as "mere" etiquette. "The rules address moral issues, but they address them indirectly," writes. "They seek to form the inner man (or boy) by shaping the outer."
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POPSWhatever Happened to Online Etiquette? Maybe as the Internet becomes as predominant as air, somebody will realize that online behavior isn’t just an afterthought. Maybe, along with HTML and how to gauge a Web site’s credibility, schools and colleges will one day realize that there’s something else to teach about the Internet: Civility 101. Also see: Why are we so nasty (online)?
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