Sitting around, waiting for an event to start, two new units of measurement occurred to me.
Name50 - Size of the group required for the given Name to have a 50% chance of being first on an alphabetical listing.
Late50 - Size of the group required for an event having an equal chance of being postponed because [...]

Reasoning, when we do it, is mostly to find justification for what we already believe.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, in here.

The search for life in the universe is expanding. A National Academy of Sciences panel is recommending that NASA and the National Science Foundation support searching for forms of life that are different than those which we have experienced. So called weird life would be based on a fundamentally different chemistry than known life forms, [...]

From New York Times via Matt.
Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with [...]

The New Scientist reports new research on placebos. The results of the research that they report suggest that the placebo effect is mediated by opiods in the body. The New Scientist seems to be impressed with the wrong part of the research. Here is their opening paragraph.
It seems that placebos have a real physical, not [...]

Since I added geocodes to the blog I have been tracking a Blogdigger feed of blog postings near me. This is an interesting way to read. I come across many things that I wouldn’t otherwise.
For instance, Rick at News You Can Bruise has recently visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He posts his annoyance over the [...]

Much celebration of the Solstice on Tuesday. Summer is here.
Two problems:
For those of us on in the Pacific time zone and west to the date line, the Solstice was on Monday.
According to the U.S. Naval Observatory the solstice occurred on June 21 at 06:46 Universal. In Pacific Daylight Time that was 23:46 on June 20. [...]

This wasn’t something I knew about or was expecting when I started talking about two kinds of people, but tomorrow’s New York Times has an article on some political scientists’ recent discovery of genetics.
Using twin studies they have determined the heritability of various opinions. The graphic in the article reports on “Genetic Contribution to [...]