Weight grade
According to this AP story, Malaysia are about to start grading students on their weight "to curb obesity that includes banning school cafeterias from selling junk food and sugar-laden soft drinks."
Your life in three-second intervals
According to this article in Science, Psychologist Emese Nagy has noticed that all hugs that occurred at the Olympics lasted about 3 seconds. Then he noticed many other things that took three seconds. It seems that our feeling of "nowness" lasts about three seconds:
Crosscultural studies dating back to 1911 have shown that people tend to operate in 3-second bursts. Goodbye waves, musical phrases, and infants' bouts of babbling and gesturing all last about 3 seconds. Many basic physiological events, such as relaxed breathing and certain nervous system functions do, too. And several other species of mammals and birds follow the general rule in their body-movement patterns. A 1994 study of giraffes, okapis, roe deer, raccoons, pandas, and kangaroos living in zoos, for example, found that although the duration of the animals' every move, from chewing to defecating, varied considerably, the average was, you guessed it, 3 seconds. "What we have is very broad research showing that we experience the world in about these 3-second time frames," says developmental psychologist Emese Nagy of the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom.
Matt Taibbi introduces Paul Ryan
What does Matt Taibbi think of Paul Ryan?
Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.What about Ryan's "bold" plan to balance the budget? Well, it's not entirely about cutting costs. It's also about drastically cutting income: It "includes dropping the top tax rate for rich people from 35 percent to 25 percent. All by itself, that one change means that the government would be collecting over $4 trillion less over the next ten years." Ryan's budget is thus a method of forcing middle class folks to give up valuable benefits so that rich folks can pay less tax. Bill Maher isn't pleased about Ryan's suggestion that he is offering a "cause" rather than a "budget."
No, it’s not a cause, it is a budget, that’s how we should look at it and it’s how we should solve these things. But the problem is that we don’t have one party that stands up to the other side, we have two parties who are agreeing that we should cut from the EPA and people who do the inspections of food and Pell grants and home heating oil for the poor, and nobody is standing up and saying, “No, we should take it from the defense department, from foreign subsidies, from tax cuts for the rich, for corporations like GE that paid no taxes last year.” That’s what’s wrong with our political system.And one more thing. This cartoon seems to capture another major aspect of the GOP mindset when it comes to balancing the federal budget.
Fallible stories
At Vital Concerns for the World, Anthropology Professor Robert Canfield points to the recent disclosures about Greg Mortensen's best seller, Three Cups of Tea, as further evidence that we need to be wary about the claims on which we base our social policy:
Once more we have learned that the stories we like to believe are not exactly true. Again it turns out that the stories we embrace have been shaped by the interests and agendas of fallible human beings like ourselves. Much of what we “know” about our world comes to us already misshapen by the interests of those who pass it on to us.The recent revelations about Mortensen remind us that we are easily suckered by claims that support our existing beliefs and desires. Cognitive scientists have long shown that human beings are constant prey to the confirmation bias. Vigilance about claims, then, especially fantastic claims, should [caption id="attachment_17551" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Image by Erich Vieth"]
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never go on vacation. Canfield's quote also reminds me of Carl Sagan's caveat: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." We need to be especially wary about tall claims from the far corners of the world where evidence gathering is sparse to non-existence.
Three Cups of Tea, like all too many stories these days, is a story about how to spin and embellish a story.
Cutting the debt and war-mongering
I figure I should just put up a banner ad urging all DI readers to go read Glenn Greenwald every day. He is that good at identifying important issues of the day and making sense of them. Today he pointed out the hypocrisy of the conservatives who are urging that we need to cut the debt, but who are wiling to run the economy into the ground with endless warmongering.
[I]t's vital that we continue to splurge for military spending that is almost equal to what the entire rest of the world spends combined, and that we continue to spend 6 times more than the second-largest military spender (China). Why is that? Because we may need to fight our fourth, fifth and sixth wars (not counting the covert ones) and must remain ready to start those wars at a moment's notice. There are many things one can say about someone plagued by that warmongering mentality; that they are serious opponents of borrowed spending and debt financing is most assuredly not one of them.