onemonkey.org

1. frightful young excrescence
2. piefaced litte excrescence
3. slab of gorgonzola
4. pig in human shape
5. sheepfaced, shambling refugee from hell
6. gastly sheepfaced fugitive from hell
7. fatheaded ass
8. popeyed bleater
9. dithering idiot
10. a dumb brick of the first water
11. halfwitted gargoyle
12. halfwitted Gadarene swine
13. herring-gutted young son of a what-not
14. foul blot
15. puff-faced poop
16. pestilential poop
17. potbellied perisher
18. newt-nuzzling blister
19. unbalanced young boll weevil
20. deleterious slab of damnation

via cosmic variance

The literal version of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart is even more brilliant than the original.

The 1980's provide a well stocked hunting ground for this genre.. i'm sure you've seen the literal version of A-ha's Take on me, and there are lots more out there

A friend just sent me this..

REMEMBER WHEN YOUR
MOTHER TOLD YOU
NEVER TO TAKE CANDY
FROM A STRANGER....

THIS IS THE ONE
SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT!!!!!

Now that does look a lot like me, but I honestly can't remember it.

Link: http://londonist.com

If you like to keep in touch with fun things Londonish then i can certainly recommend Londonist. Always well written and covering all kinds of London news and events that you might otherwise miss.

Here's their take on McCartney's (surely counter-productive) ungoogling

Sir Paul McCartney has successfully managed to get the image of his London pad scrubbed from Google Street View. Security staff for the ex-Beatle, who resides in Norwegian St Johns Wood, complained after discovering detailed photographs of the long and winding road where he resides on the service. Fearful of somebody discovering the address and coming in through the bathroom window, the team asked that they be removed as a personal safety issue: a fair point, really, given the domestic attacks that former bandmates John Lennon and George Harrison suffered, and in any case Macca probably doesn't want to be doorstepped every time he's leaving home. After all, everybody's got something to hide, even Paul and his drumkits.

link

Or their excellent series of reviews of the capital's independent bookshops.

Link: http://nickcohen.net/2009/05/22/the-courage-of-the-godly/

Speaking after the publication of the report of decades of almost unbelievable abuse in Catholic-run institutions in Ireland, Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society said the report “shone a spotlight on an attitude of systemic secrecy and callousness towards child abuse that has been endemic in the Catholic Church for centuries and remains even today ”.
Mr Porteous Wood said that “Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, wrote as recently as 2001 to bishops clearly stating that a 1962 instruction called Crimen Sollicitationis was still in force. This document instructs bishops who are dealing with accusations of sexual abuse to observe strict secrecy and threatens those who speak out with excommunication. It states that the instructions are to ‘be diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia [Vatican] as strictly confidential. Nor is it to be published nor added to with any commentaries.’ This may be why (now Cardinal) Murphy O’Connor failed to report abusive priest Michael Hill to the authorities.”
The document was in force for the twenty years after Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was uncovered only because the Texan lawyer Daniel Shea came across it during research on child abuse in Catholic institutions .
Keith Porteous Wood added: “The Holy See is making a mockery of its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. As the Vatican is the depository for this mass of incriminating information hoarded in obsessive secrecy, it certainly has a case to answer about its adherence to Article 34(b) (“take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent … The exploitative use of children in … unlawful sexual practices.”). It has also failed to produce three consecutive five yearly reports (1997, 2002 and 2007) required by the Article 44 of the Convention. They can hardly plead a nil return.
“As a direct result of the undeserved deference shown to the Holy See, no influential body, including the UN, has, as far as we are aware, had the courage to call the Holy See to account.
The National Secular Society calls on signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as well as national and international bodies charged with care for children to join in a demand for these apparent contraventions of the Convention by the Holy See to be highlighted, investigated and rectified.
Ireland

See rest on Nick Cohen's blog. Look out for cross talk on the comments.

Update:
Pope forgives molested children

Link: http://londonist.com/2009/05/sandwichist_-_national_sandwich_wee.php

Apparently it's National Sandwich Week. Sure, it's only a marketing ruse from the evil sandwich overlords of the British Sandwich Association but tasty nonetheless.

More from Londonist

Link: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/to_be_a_baby/

The great thing about being a philosopher is that you can write any old rubbish and speculate wildly without the need to support what you say with real data. The same can also be said for psychologists writing books for a general audience. (And of course I do the same if anyone ever made the mistake of asking me to write such a book.)

Thomas Nagel famously asked, "What is it like to be a bat" That question has become a staple of Philosophy 101 courses, but we might be better served asking a more basic one: What is it like to be a baby? Though all of us experience life as a baby firsthand, we've long held misconceptions about what babies are capable of thinking, feeling, and understanding. Only recently have we overturned dominant theories of development in which very young children were thought to be barely conscious at all.

In The Philosophical Baby developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik compiles the latest in her field's research to paint a new picture of our inner lives at inception - one in which we are, in some ways, more conscious than adults. Gopnik spoke with Seed's Evan Lerner about how babies and young children learn from us and what we can learn from them.

Lost in the Sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering
Michael A. Sayette, Erik D. Reichle, and Jonathan W. Schooler

Alcohol consumption alters consciousness in ways that make drinking both alluring and hazardous. Recent advances in the study of consciousness using a mind-wandering paradigm permit a rigorous examination of the effects of alcohol on experiential consciousness and metaconsciousness. Fifty-four male social drinkers consumed alcohol (0.82 g/kg) or a placebo beverage and then performed a mind-wandering reading task. This task indexed both self-caught and probe-caught zone-outs to distinguish between mind wandering inside and outside of awareness. Compared with participants who drank the placebo, those who drank alcohol were significantly more likely to report that they were zoning out when probed. After this increase in mind wandering was accounted for, alcohol also lowered the probability of catching oneself zoning out. The results suggest that alcohol increases mind wandering while simultaneously reducing the likelihood of noticing one's mind wandering. Findings are discussed with regard to theories of alcohol and theories of consciousness.

Psychological Science (2009)

The minds of drunks are prone to wander and they don't often notice. This merits publication in a top journal? Someone's been drinking!

Mind you, I do like the idea of theories of alcohol. I think I might start researching in that field... Cheers!

Cosmic Variance does neuroimaging of times past and imagined futures:

Because of the growth of entropy, we have a very different epistemic access to the past than to the future. In retrodicting the past, we have recourse to "memories" and "records," which we can take as mostly-reliable indicators of events that actually happened. But when it comes to the future, the best we can do is extrapolate, without nearly the reliability that we have in reconstructing the past.

[link]

Abtruse Goose strings together some poetry (but without apology to ST Colridge, it seems)

Link: http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/evil-robot-monkey/

This Hugo nominated short story is so short that you can read the whole thing in 4 minutes flat. And I encourage you to do so

Evil Robot Monkey

by Mary Robinette Kowal

Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter's wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

[read the rest]

Readers of David Brin's work will already be familiar with the idea of 'uplift' but if not then this elegant short story summarizes it succinctly.

a utterly bleak story that allows no straight-forward narrative escape from the indifferent callousness of the universe. very bad things happen for no good reason and some people have to live through that..

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html

The BPS blog has a good summary of a study that found that what political candidates looks like could have a strong influence on whether they are elected.

John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas presented photos of pairs of competing candidates in the 2002 French parliamentary elections to hundreds of Swiss undergrads, who had no idea who the politicians were. The students were asked to indicate which candidate in each pair was the most competent, and for about 70 per cent of the pairs, the candidate rated as looking most competent was the candidate who had actually won the election. The startling implication is that the real-life voters must also have based their choice of candidate on looks, at least in part.

Moreover, a second experiment asked children aged 5 to 13 years to make the same choice, but in the context of a game in which they needed to select who they would like to captain their ship sailing from Troy to Ithaca. They tended to select for captain those candidates rated earlier as most competent by the udergrads, and again the children's choices tended to retrospectively predict which candidates went on to be victorious in the real election.

For the pair of candidates shown above, 77 per cent children who rated this pair, and 67 per cent of adults, chose Laurent Henart, on the right (the real-life winning candidate), rather than Jean-Jacques Denis on the left.

J. Antonakis, O. Dalgas (2009). Predicting Elections: Child's Play. Science, 323. In Press.

Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-9280.2009.02305.x

Michael Inzlicht, Ian McGregor, Jacob B. Hirsh, Kyle Nash (2009) Neural Markers of Religious Conviction Psychological Science

Many people derive peace of mind and purpose in life from their belief in God. For others, however, religion provides unsatisfying answers. Are there brain differences between believers and nonbelievers? Here we show that religious conviction is marked by reduced reactivity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a cortical system that is involved in the experience of anxiety and is important for self-regulation. In two studies, we recorded electroencephalographic neural reactivity in the ACC as participants completed a Stroop task. Results showed that stronger religious zeal and greater belief in God were associated with less firing of the ACC in response to error and with commission of fewer errors. These correlations remained strong even after we controlled for personality and cognitive ability. These results suggest that religious conviction provides a framework for understanding and acting within one's environment, thereby acting as a buffer against anxiety and minimizing the experience of error.

paper/a>

Link: http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=harder-than-a-diamond-survey-says-2009-02-19

In addition to being the traditional token of marital intent, the diamond has long provided the—ahem—gold standard for super-hard materials. But physicists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, say that two lesser-known materials, wurtzite boron nitride and lonsdaleite, are even harder.

scientific american

I rather like the fact that this research was done in Las Vegas.

Yes, it's a bit late, but i've always been a bit slow with mathematics.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

A great article by Michael "Liar's Poker" Lewis about Houston Rockets forward, Shane Battier. Battier is a complete and utter basketballing anomaly, his stats are dreadful but every team he plays for seems to do miles better with him on the court. Needless to say, it is not by accident, but the Rocket's general manager Daryl More seems to have been the only person to realise this.

In the very first days of my PhD, I tried to explain the difference between how philosophers study concepts (mainly by looking things up in dictionaries) and how psychologists might go about it by running experiments, such as taking a toddler to the zoo. Here's the original post.

It seems like I wasn't the first psychologist to have this idea.

It is well known how intensely older children suffer from vague and undefined fears, as from the dark, or in passing an obscure corner in a large hall, &c. I may give as an instance that I took the child in question, when 2 1/4 years old, to the Zoological Gardens, and he enjoyed looking at all the animals which were like those that he knew, such as deer, antelopes &c., and all the birds, even the ostriches, but was much alarmed at the various larger animals in cages. He often said afterwards that he wished to go again, but not to see "beasts in houses"; and we could in no manner account for this fear.

Darwin, Charles (1877) A Biographical Sketch of an Infant, Mind, 2, 285-294 [here]

Happy birthday, Chuck.

Link: http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus

People living in London will have seen the atheist buses roaming the streets, courtesy of my good friends at the New Humanist and the generous donations from the public. Now thanks to the generous generator of rule the web, you too can make your own statement:

Or how about one for Darwin's 200th Birthday..

Update: I've just noticed that you can find the same joke at Londonist together with a list of what's on in London for Darwin Day.

Having to install XCode for some geekery-pokery at work and sitting through the install of many, many gigs of files I had time to notice the icon. I'm not sure that a great big hammer is imagery I'd want to associate with my coding environment.

Mind you the number times I have wanted to take a hammer to this goddamn stupid box of silicon.