Considering that the gut releases more of some neurochemicals than the brain does, this isn’t as surprising as it might be. But still fairly surprising.
Originally shared by Melissa Walsh
This is a huge step towards finding a cure to Parkinson’s disease.
TIL that Jack London’s last book was spec-fic.
Originally shared by The Public Domain Review
New Essay — “Astral Travels with Jack London” — http://buff.ly/2f36caZ
On the centenary of Jack London’s death, Benjamin Breen looks at the writer’s last book to be published in his lifetime, The Star Rover — a strange tale about solitary confinement and interstellar reincarnation, which speaks to us of the dreams and struggles of the man himself.
Via Kimberly Chapman. Methane from cattle is about 20% of global greenhouse gases, and this isn’t the first (but may, it sounds like, be the best) piece of research to help reduce or even eliminate it.
If the cattle are releasing less methane, they’re probably also experiencing better digestion, I suspect, so there could be incentives for farmers who don’t care about or believe in global warming to participate.
Originally shared by Casey McKinnon
Nice discovery, Canada!
Thinking of Leonard Cohen always makes me think of his best-known song, “Hallelujah”. And thinking of “Hallelujah” always makes me think of the one performance of it that didn’t raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
It was on the TV singing competition The X Factor a few years ago, and the performer was a young girl, 13 years old, with a beautiful clear voice. I loved her voice, and I love the song – but I didn’t love them together.
“Hallelujah” is not a song for the beautiful, clear voice of a young girl. It needs to rasp and burr and crack, to be a cold and, above all, a broken hallelujah. Its beauty is in its imperfection and its difficulty.
There are moments for perfect, clear, lyrical beauty, and there are moments to rasp and burr and crack.
This is what Leonard Cohen and that young woman taught me.
Originally shared by Writers Write
Songwriter and singer, Leonard Cohen
Via Walter Roberson. Today’s web has perverse economic incentives to reduce the quality of “news”.
Originally shared by Kee Hinckley
I’m encouraged to hear that there might have been some effect from all those Snopes and Politifact articles I liked on FB, mainly to get them into my stream where members of my wife’s family would see them.
Even though, for a significant proportion of Trump voters, seeing a factual correction only causes them to evaluate the source as having a “liberal bias” rather than believe the correction.
Rationality is important, weakly correlated with intelligence – and trainable.
Originally shared by Tom Nugent
” As the psychologist Keith Stanovich and others observed, even the Kahneman and Tversky data show that some people are highly rational. In other words, there are individual differences in rationality, even if we all face cognitive challenges in being rational. So who are these more rational people? Presumably, the more intelligent people, right?
Wrong.”
Development of a Rationality Quotient (RQ) would be extremely useful, just as Emotional Quotient (EQ) has helped broaden our perspective on intelligence.
One of the reasons I look with suspicion at anyone with a rigid ideology is that ideological rigidity tends to exclude some pragmatic solutions which may help to achieve the things you actually value.
Decide what you want to achieve, and then use any ethical means to achieve that, regardless of its source.
Originally shared by David Brin
Interesting article on how food banks, with their somewhat socialist mind-set, incorporated “market” forces to help them allocate food donations not only where they were needed but where they are wanted-most. Apparently, so long as equity and generosity are factors in the general outline, market forces and even competition help to get resources to the right place, efficiently.
You might expect the stories in a boxed set formed around the idea of being explicitly the opposite of grimdark to all be kind of the same.
Not remotely.
Originally shared by C. J. Brightley
Kyra Halland summarized our Light in the Darkness boxed set as “There truly is something for everyone in this set: sword and sorcery, sword and no sorcery, sorcery and no sword, sixguns and sorcery, steampunk, magical realism, settings from modern day to alternate history to fantasy worlds based on Asian myths, from no romance to romance in a variety of flavors. Light in the Darkness explores a full range of fantasy, featuring good (if flawed) characters doing their best to do the right things in difficult circumstances, with an undercurrent of hope.”
You can find the set at:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01K3534QI
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/light-in-the-darkness-cj-brightley/1124360518?ean=2940153673578
Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/light-in-the-darkness-a-noblebright-fantasy-boxed-set iTunes/iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/light-in-darkness-noblebright/id1143589450?mt=11
http://www.kyrahalland.com/blog/light-in-the-darkness-roundup-1
Originally shared by David Brin
An amazing survey of cause-of-death of members of a wide variety of mammal species finds that a likely baseline murder rate among humans would be around 2 percent. The authors used the fact that closely related species usually show similar rates of interpersonal violence to predict a 2 percent rate of lethal violence among humans. That means that 2 out of every 100 human deaths would be a murder taking into account only our place on the evolutionary tree, and nothing about political pressures, technology or social norms.
In comparison, among mammals in general just 0.3 percent of deaths are murders. For the common ancestor of primates, the rate is 2.3 percent.
With 2 percent as a human baseline, we come across as both uncommonly peaceful for primates and uncommonly violent for mammals.
“Rates of homicide in modern societies that have police forces, legal systems, prisons and strong cultural attitudes that reject violence are, at less than 1 in 10,000 deaths (or 0.01%), about 200 times lower than the authors’ predictions for our state of nature.”
The champion killers of their own kind? Meerkats. Hakuna Matata, man.