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POPSEconomists On The Bailout I enjoyed this straightforward presentation of the arguments about the bailout. This pro-con display in the Charlotte Observer really boils down the issues and makes them understandable and palatable to the average reader.
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POPSThe 10 Most Worthless College Majors Philosophy Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: This isn’t ancient Greece: No one is going to pay you money, or allow you to sodomize their attractive son, in exchange for your knowledge of existence. Never has there been an employer who’s said “Man, we’re having all kinds of problems, I wish we had someone on our team who could reference and draw conclusions from the story of Siddhartha that would pull up our fourth quarter numbers.” I took many philosophy classes and it involved reading and smoking a shit pile of weed. You don’t need to pay 20,000 dollars a year to do that. All you need is twenty dollars and a library card. What Job You’ll End Up With: Thanks to your extensive knowledge of philosophy, you’re now self-aware enough to know that most jobs out there will make you totally miserable. So most likely you’ll wait tables part time and hope someone starts paying you for the bi-monthly entries on your blog.
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POPSHow Your Brain Controls Time
Warren Meck of Duke University argues that the brain measures long stretches of time by producing pulses. But the brain does not then count the pulses in the way a clock does. Instead, Meck suspects, it does something more elegant. It listens to the pulses as if they were music. At Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany, scientists have been building a model of how memory may store time. When neurons produce a regular cycle of signals, some signals come a little sooner and some come a little later. The researchers propose that as neurons pass these signals along, they can add tiny advances, some bigger than others. With these tiny wobbles, the brain can compress memories of time from several seconds down to hundredths of a second—a small enough package to store for later retrieval. As it stores time in memories, the brain may alter it in another way that is even more radical. It may record time so that our brains recall events in backward order. Scientists at MIT discovered re
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POPSNifong is wrong Nifong, you have nerve. You allowed the slut form NCCU, Crystal Mangum to follow through with her claims of being raped by members of the Duke Lacrosse Team, even though there was no evidence of it--and you want protection from being sued by those members of the lacrosse team? Nerve!
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POPSDuke University: Justifying affirmative action for rich white kids Duke University has been rather shameless in pandering to wealthy parents of potential students. In his book The Price of Admission , Daniel Golden estimates that between 3 to 5 percent of Duke's student body in the late 1990s were admitted under pressure from the development office--that is, kids of wealthy parents who were below Duke's standards. In this 2003 letter to the Wall Street Journal (where Golden is a reporter), Duke University president Nannerl Keohane argues that showing preference for kids of wealthy parents is just as justified as showing preference for minority kids. She cannot imagine how one can justify affirmative action for minorities but not for rich kids. Try harder, President Keohane.
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POPS Climbing as easy as walking for some. Nature Abhors a vacuum. When the treetops offered a niche, Some of the smaller primates made it their home and no doubt evolved specifically to it. The fact that larger primates and other predators had difficulty getting to the tree tops, would have made it much easier for a squirrel monkey, or a lemur to get away, they would have had difficulty defending them selves against anything, and they can't run very fast. A lot of squirrel monkeys who got too close to the ground, wouldn't have had any descendants. If everything could climb trees, there probably wouldn't have been any squirrel monkeys now.
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POPSAngioplasties Drop A USA Today analysis shows that in the wake of big studies like Courage that showed a benefit for angioplasties that was lower than many expected, fewer patients are opting for the treatment to alleve chest pain. That's bad news for makers of stents, including Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific, Abbott, and Medtronic.
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POPS Bad Times The declining credibility of the New York Times and of other tendentious media is, in one sense, a healthy thing. There has been too much public gullibility that has been cynically exploited by both the media and politicians. In another sense, however, it is a sad day for the country as a whole that there are shrinking sources of reliable news and informed and honest commentary. Hysteria has become the norm for too many once-serious publications, whether it has been hysteria for the purpose of hyping circulation or to advance some political agenda. The rise of alternative media -- notably talk radio -- has limited how much the mainstream media can get away with.
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