The magic of starling flocks
Incredible starling flocking visuals in this video taken in Ot Moor, a few miles to the east of Oxford, in the U.K.
Incredible starling flocking visuals in this video taken in Ot Moor, a few miles to the east of Oxford, in the U.K.
I know that this is an article featuring freaks, but this family with seven pet tigers has earned the spotlight. I hope we don't read about a tragedy regarding this family someday, but I'm not optimistic.
Here is one method of getting really good photos of snowflakes using DIY equipment. Amazing clarity.
How should one interpret scientific claims? Here are the headings to an excellent article featured in Nature: Differences and chance cause variation. No measurement is exact. Bias is rife. Bigger is usually better for sample size. Correlation does not imply causation. Regression to the mean can mislead. Extrapolating beyond the data is risky. Beware the base-rate fallacy. Controls are important. Randomization avoids bias. Seek replication, not pseudoreplication. Scientists are human. Significance is significant. Separate no effect from non-significance. Effect size matters. Study relevance limits generalizations. Feelings influence risk perception. Dependencies change the risks. Data can be dredged or cherry picked. Extreme measurements may mislead.
Henry Giroux was featured on Bill Moyers' most recent show, and he regret that we are headed toward "zombie politics."
In his book, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, author and scholar Henry Giroux connects the dots to prove his theory that our current system is informed by a “machinery of social and civil death” that chills “any vestige of a robust democracy.” This week on Moyers & Company, Giroux explains that such a machine turns “people who are basically so caught up with surviving that they become like the walking dead – they lose their sense of agency, they lose their homes, they lose their jobs.” What’s more, Giroux points out, the system that creates this vacuum has little to do with expanding the meaning and the substance of democracy itself. Under “casino capitalism,” the goal is to get a quick return, taking advantage of a kind of logic in which the only thing that drives us is to put as much money as we can into a slot machine and hope we walk out with our wallets overflowing.