DI traffic

I founded Dangerous Intersection back in March, 2006.  That was 4,500 posts and 21,000 comments ago.  Now that we've reached the end of another year, I decided to check DI's traffic.  We're not a huge site but we're not small either.  I thought readers might find it interesting to see the same stats that I periodically check. Here they are (this is a clickable image): As you can see, we receive almost 6,000 daily visitors these days, which is gratifying and a great honor to each of us who write at this site.  [Note: We changed servers in mid-August, so you will not see the full year's stats in this image]. Thanks to all of you have visited DI or commented at DI over the past year.  Our plan is to keep improving and keep growing.  For those who have not commented before, please do consider leaving a comment, especially if you disagree with us. And happy new year to everyone.

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The secret powers of time (animated)

I've previously posted on Philip Zimbardo's excellent discussion regarding the "Secret Powers of Time." He has convinced me that one's perception of time (or even a nation's overall perception of time) affects one's character (or the nation's character) in profound ways. It certainly affects the pace of life. Tonight, I stumbled upon a ten-minute cleverly animated version of Zimbardo's presentation. Citing the work of Robert Levine, Zimbardo indicates that you can identify countries and cities by their pace of life. In those places with the highest pace of life, "men have the most coronary problems." He proposes that the basic purpose of schools is to take present-oriented children (which he defines as our natural state - see 5:30 of the talk) and attempt to turn them into future-oriented children. In American, a child drops out of school every 9 seconds, and it's often a boy and a minority student. Here's the context. By the time a boy is 21 years old, he has spent 10,000 hours playing video games, and many more hours watching shows, including pornography, which they tend to do alone. This means that many hours are not being spent developing social skills. These children thus live in a world they create. Bottom line is that they will never fit into a traditional classroom, which is analogue--it is incredibly boring to them. The commonly-heard cure for our educational ills--that we need more classroom time reading, writing and arithmetic is thus a recipe for disaster for these present-oriented students. Traditional classrooms offer the lack of control and delay of gratification; this is not at all interesting compared to life in front of a video screen. Zimbardo argues that we are "under-estimating the power of technology in re-wiring young people's brains." They get upset even waiting an extra minute or two booting up their computers or downloading files. We bark at our kids to avoid hedonistic addictive activities, but they are already aware of the consequences, but they are not future-oriented kids, so there is no feedback loop to alter their behavior. Bottom line: Many of the disputes we have with other people are due to our differences in the perception of time.

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The power of sunshine

In this video, you can see the power of two square meters of sunshine. As a child I used to set fire to a piece of paper outside with a small hand held magnifying glass. This sophisticated mirror is several magnitudes more impressive. You might be wondering whether sort of device could be used for cooking. The answer is yes, and these cheap devices can help slow deforestation and desertification. Here is a video demonstration of the cooking power of the sun:

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Neanderthals as living breathing people

What follows below is an audio version (with slides) of a presentation given at the Yale Medical School by science writer Carl Zimmer. His lecture starts with the discovery of the first recognized Neanderthal bones, and brings us up to modern times. The general theme of the talk is that those beings who have been recognized to be different have traditionally been characterized as barbaric and inferior. This theme holds true regarding Neanderthals, who have been traditionally characterized as brutish and uncivilized. Zimmer's talk includes numerous vivid reconstructed images, and the evidence on which they are based, suggesting that Neanderthals looked and acted quite human, indeed. The emerging truth is that Neanderthals were big-brained hominids who lived across great expanses of Europe from 200,000 to 20,000 years ago. They were prolific tool-users: For example, they made stone tools such as spear tips and bows and arrows; they cleaned hides and fashioned clothing. they lived in communities where they would have specialized areas for storing and preparing food. It appears that they left flowers at their burials sites. They made jewelry out of painted shells, suggesting that they were self aware.

The Red Headed Neanderthal from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.

Starting at the 20 minute mark, Zimmer discusses the work of Svante Paabo of the Max Plank institute, which recently completed its analysis of DNA found in the bones of Neanderthals. Neanderthal skeletons that appeared to be hybrids provoked researchers to obtain an entire Neanderthal genome. Researchers then found that the Neanderthals have the same FoxP2 gene that we do, suggesting that they might have had language. The elephant in the room is that Neanderthals are no longer here and we are. But they are still living on in one sense, as Zimmer explains at the 41 minute mark. The Planke institute determined that between 1-4% of non-African DNA is Neanderthal. How's that for humanizing Neanderthals?

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William K. Black notes the lack of prosecutions regarding financial fraud, and offers a solution

William K. Black previously worked as an investigator of financial institutions during the S&L crisis. In a detailed article at Huffpo, Black laments the almost total lack of criminal prosecutions related to our recent financial meltdown. Here's the problem in a nutshell: "What has gone so catastrophically wrong with DOJ, and why has it continued so long? The fundamental flaw is that DOJ's senior leadership cannot conceive of elite bankers as criminals." Here's what we need to do about it:

Our best bet is to continue to win the scholarly disputes and to continue to push media representatives to take fraud seriously. If the media demands for prosecution of the elite banking frauds expand there is a chance to create a bipartisan coalition in Congress and the administration supporting prosecutions. In the S&L debacle, Representative Annunzio was one of the leading opponents of reregulation and leading supporters of Charles Keating. After we brought several hundred successful prosecutions he began wearing a huge button: "Jail the S&L Crooks!" Bringing many hundreds of enforcement actions, civil suits, and prosecutions causes huge changes in the way a crisis is perceived. It makes tens of thousands of documents detailing the frauds public. It generates thousands of national and local news stories discussing the nature of the frauds and how wealthy the senior officers became through the frauds. All of this increases the saliency of fraud and increases demands for serious reforms, adequate resources for the regulators and criminal justice bodies, and makes clear that elite fraud poses a severe danger. Collectively, this creates the political space for real reform, vigorous regulators, and real prosecutors.

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