Recent Articles

Cluttered = Smart

Cluttered = Smart

| May 24, 2013 | Reply

For some people, “Attention Deficit Disorder” (ADD) can be a real problem. I’ve got it and I don’t view it as a “disorder”, even though as I’ve written, my particular flavor of ADD can sometimes throw up a speed bump. Anyway, now I can point to some science on scatter-brains.

I recently finished Steven Johnson’s Where Good Things Come From: The Natural History of Innovation – a recommended read, by the way. In his chapter on Serendipity, Johnson talks about Robert Thatcher’s 2007 study in which he looked at phase-lock (when neurons are firing at the same frequency) and noise (when they are not synchronized) in brains of children by performing EEGs and then giving them IQ tests. The study has the inspiring title of “Intelligence and EEG Phase Reset: A Two Compartmental Model of Phase Shift and Lock” if you are really adventurous, masochistic, or really like reading academic papers. I guess I’ll go with the first descriptor – I read it and I’m really glad I’m not into research.

For those who want to cut to the chase, Thatcher found that:

Phase shift duration (40 – 90 msec) was positively related to intelligence and the phase lock duration (100 – 800 msec) was negatively related to intelligence.

In layman’s terms, the more disorganized the brain, the smarter someone is. The noise appears to be necessary to help the brain find new connections between neurons.

Celebrate disorder!

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The horrendous cost of health care

| May 23, 2013 | Reply

These numbers from the Miliman Research Report are stunning. This situation cannot possibly be sustainable for most Americans, and I have little faith that the Affordable Care Act will reduce these costs. I want to believe that the ACA will address costs, but I simply can’t believe this. It’s also amazing that in light of these numbers, and in light of the recent blockbuster Time Magazine article, “Bitter Pill,” America seems incapable of having a rational conversation about what it really needs to do to reduce these horrendous costs.

Last year, when healthcare costs for the typical American family of four exceeded $20,000 for the first time, the Milliman Medical Index (MMI) compared the cost of a family’s healthcare to the cost of an average midsize sedan. This year, with costs exceeding $22,000 ($22,030), we note that healthcare costs for our family of four are almost as much as the cost of attending an in-state public college ($22,261) for the current academic year. The total share of this cost borne directly by the family—$9,144 in payroll deductions and out-of-pocket costs—now exceeds the cost of groceries for the MMI’s typical family of four. The out-of-pocket cost alone—$3,600 for co-pays, coinsurance, and other cost sharing—is more than the average U.S. household spends on gas in a year.

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Helen Keller speaks

| May 23, 2013 | 2 Replies

What a cool video — I had never before seen a video of Helen Keller, much less one where she speaks.

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Recreated childhood photos

| May 23, 2013 | Reply

These recreated childhood photos do intrigue me . . . Maybe it’s the stark undeniable passage of time made so vivid.

Here’s a set of them.

And here are hundreds more on Google.

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Taxing social welfare groups

| May 23, 2013 | Reply

Propublica gives important background for understanding the alleged improper actions of the IRS:

In the furious fallout from the revelation that the IRS flagged applications from conservative nonprofits for extra review because of their political activity, some points about the big picture — and big donors — have fallen through the cracks.

Consider this our Top 6 list of need-to-know facts on social welfare nonprofits, also known as dark money groups because they don’t have to disclose their donors. The groups poured more than $256 million into the 2012 federal elections.

A century ago, Congress created a tax exemption for social welfare nonprofits. The statute defining the groups says they are supposed to be “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” But in 1959, the regulators interpreted the “exclusively” part of the statute to mean groups had to be “primarily” engaged in enhancing social welfare. This later opened the door to political spending.

Here are the six points elaborated by Propublica:

1. Social welfare nonprofits are supposed to have social welfare, and not politics, as their “primary” purpose.

2. Donors to social welfare nonprofits are anonymous for a reason.

3. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision meant that corporations could pay for political ads, anonymously, using social welfare nonprofits.

4. Social welfare nonprofits do not actually have to apply to the IRS for recognition as tax-exempt organizations.

5. Most of the money spent on elections by social welfare nonprofits supports Republicans.

6. Some social welfare groups promised in their applications, under penalty of perjury, that they wouldn’t get involved in elections. Then they did just that.

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Omnipotence bounded

| May 22, 2013 | Reply

Quote from Facebook (“AtheistWorld AW“):

Funny [how] god always sends his hurricane punishments in hurricane season and his earthquake punishments in earthquake risk areas.

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New Pope jumps over a very low bar

| May 22, 2013 | 1 Reply

Non-believers have been villainized for so long by religious leaders that it leaves us flummoxed when a religious leader fails to take an unfair swipe at us. The religious leader I’m referring to is Pope Francis, and what he said was resoundingly refreshingly ordinary, though it sounded so good coming from the leader of the Catholic Church:

“Atheists should be seen as good people if they do good, Pope Francis has said in his latest urging that people of all religions, and none, work together.

“Just do good, and we’ll find a meeting point,” the pope said in a hypothetical reply to the hypothetical comment: “But I don’t believe. I’m an atheist.”

The new Pope has thus jumped over a very low bar. One small step for a man–one giant leap for a religious leader.

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The stunning numbers of YouTube

| May 21, 2013 | Reply

These numbers stagger the mind:

Users of the world’s most popular video sharing service upload 100 hours of video to the site every minute. That’s 6,000 hours of video every hour and a whopping 144,000 hours of video every day.

And here’s how Youtube does it.

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Obama Administration officially criminalizes investigative journalism

| May 20, 2013 | Reply

Stunning new development regarding the Obama administration’s war on journalism, and this is not hyperbole. What follows is an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald’s analysis:

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ – that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information – is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same “solicitation” theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can “charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.”

[T]he point of the unprecedented Obama war on whistleblowers and press freedoms: to ensure that the only information the public can get is information that the Obama administration wants it to have. That’s why Obama’s one-side games with secrecy – we’ll prolifically leak when it glorifies the president and severely punish all other kinds – is designed to construct the classic propaganda model. And it’s good to see journalists finally speaking out in genuine outrage and concern about all of this.

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