November 2011

Boys’ brains, girls’ brains: How to think about sex differences in psychology. – Slate Magazine

“Fear of sexism has produced a bias against conceding sex differences, which gets in the way of frank discussion and investigation.” “Beware any explanation that relies on a single factor. Hormones matter, but so does socialization.” “The fishy part of neuroscience isn’t the data. It’s the spin we put on the data in the guise of explanation.”
(tags: gender neuroscience psychology feminism)

How Much Religion Should You Expose Your Children To? | Friendly Atheist

Tycho and Gabe talking about what they should teach their kids about religion. Interesting that Gabe (who’s son is also called Gabe) is a vague theist but didn’t want to pass on much formal religion to his son, but Tycho (an atheist) thought the kid should know about the Bible.
(tags: atheism religion bible penny-arcade children)

Strange Horizons Fiction: Tomorrow is Waiting, by Holli Mintzer

A short science fiction story about the Muppets. Heartwarming stuff. Via Sumana.
(tags: sci-fi science-fiction muppets ai)

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

The guy who single handedly runs Pinboard writing about Facebook and social stuff.
(tags: socialgraph social facebook graph pinboard relationships)

The Marvels And The Flaws Of Intuitive Thinking Edge Master Class 2011 | Conversation | Edge

The Edge also did a feature on Kahneman a while back. Here it is, with more examples of ways in which our thinking fails, but also things we can do which we’re finding difficult to program computers to do.
(tags: psychology intuition daniel-kahneman cognition cognitive-bias rationality)

Michael Lewis on the King of Human Error | Business | Vanity Fair

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky did ground breaking work on cognitive biases: the ways in which human thinking systematically fails. Fascinating article. Via andrewducker.
(tags: psychology rationality bias cognition cognitive-bias daniel-kahneman amos-tversky)

Requests: HTTP for Humans — Requests 0.8.0 documentation

An HTTP library for Python that’s less awful than urllib2. Hopefully someone will add it to the standard library at some point. Via Leonard Richardson.
(tags: python http library requests programming)

I kveld med YLVIS – «Stonehenge» – YouTube

This is epic.
(tags: video funny stonehenge)

Index of /nelhage/Public/condition-echo-blueshift/case-nightmare-green

Someone’s LARP rules for a game based on Charles Stross’s Laundry books.
(tags: laundry roleplaying charles-stross horror cthulhu larp)

Arthur Recreates Scenes from Classic Movies

So cute! I like the Close Encounters one.
(tags: funny baby movies cinema pictures)

Stöwer TitanicSo, I’ve been looking into ways of running a “proper” blog, and I’ve come down to PyBlosxom or WordPress. In either case, I’ll get my own hosting for it.

Advantages of PyBlosxom over WordPress:

  • Keeps entries in text files. I fear databases.
  • Seems to have a better security record than WordPress.
  • In Python, so hackable and I’d feel I’d have some hope of understanding what it’s doing (WordPress is in PHP).

Advantages of WordPress over PyBlosxom:

  • Very active developer community, so lots of nice plugins. (PyBlosxom isn’t abandoned but doesn’t have so many people working on it).
  • More themes, some of which are pretty (PyBlosxom has a few themes in their repository, none of which are that pretty).

Anyone who’s used either of those care to comment?

A Much More Exotic – The bad kind of murder

“A call to restrict porn is, in effect, a call for more women to be murdered. It’s a good thing we have a government that’s not afraid to take tough decisions.

Starting next week, this LJ account will be syndicated on Comment is Free and Feministing.”
(tags: porn rape murder jo-yeates media guardian satire)

Testing psychics « Derren Brown Blog

Derren Brown carefully avoids libelling Sally Morgan while pointing out that, well, all the other psychics were frauds…
(tags: derren-brown psychics woo woo-woo simon-singh sally-morgan sally morgan)

A suggestion for Dr. Dawkins | Alethian Worldview

‘Dr. Dawkins should challenge God to a debate. There should be an empty chair on a stage somewhere, and Dawkins should stand up beside it and say, “Well then, I believe that according to William Lane Craig’s rules of engagement, I am now entitled to declare that God is afraid to face me because He knows He’s wrong.”’
(tags: funny religion richard-dawkins william-lane-craig debate god)