bodhi tree swaying

There’s a fascinating article on a site by Bob Sutton about the effects of “priming” people with ideas of money on subsequent acts of generosity. Here’s a snippet:

I ran into a fascinating set of nine studies packed into a 2006 Science magazine article called The Psychological Consequences of Money by Kathleen D. Vohs and her colleagues. They used a series of “primes” to turn research subjects’ attention to money (showing them lists of words about money, putting piles of monopoly money in front of them, showing them films that talked about money) and then created a host of little challenges, ranging from whether they would ask or gave help while struggling to solve an unsolvable to whether they helped an (apparently) blind person who accidentally dropped a bunch of pencils. Note there we no incentives manipulated in these studies, just a focus on money.

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Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by.
From Predictably Irrational, a really fascinating blog on the science of rationality.

He stops in mid swing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

Who do you think will find this joke more funny liberals or conservatives?

Common stereotypes link the word “liberal” with words such as open-mindedness, tolerance, and impartiality, while the word “conservative” is linked with tradition, caution, and conventional values. Given these associations we might expect that liberals will appreciate, and respond more to humor and jokes than

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I predict with, some confidence, that by the year 2000, or not long afterward, technology will have developed to the point where we can talk to — and even see — people in other parts of the world. The arts of cinematography and telegraphy will come together as never before and vast networks of cables will transport sounds and images around the globe.

From the comfort of one’s own drawing room one will be able to converse with friends and family in distant places, allowing us to keep in touch with each other as we travel the world. And if I may make an even more outrageous prediction, by that time there may even be heavier-than-air flying machines that allow us to cross the world’s oceans in a matter of hours rather than days!

Have I ever mentioned I love Star Trek? And that I’ve been thinking of writing a post about Vulcan philosophy and Buddhism?

There really may be a planet Vulcan.

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has detected two asteroid belts around Epsilon Eridani, the planetary system closest to ours and home to Star Trek’s fictitious First Officer Spock, the space agency reported yesterday.

A planet near the inner asteroid belt was identified eight years ago. The newly spotted planet is in the vicinity of the outer belt.

Epsilon Eridani is around 10 light-years, or 62 trillion miles (98 trillion kilometers), away from Earth’s solar system and, at a mere 850 million years old, is considered a younger, similar version of our own 4.5- billion-year-old system. Star Trek creators made it the home of Vulcan, and it’s possible that there are as-yet-unseen Earth-like planets between the star system and its inner

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In Something About Sarah, Kathleen Parker has some interesting things to say about men’s (and McCain’s) propensity to become distracted by pretty ladies:

…there can be no denying that McCain’s selection of [Palin] over others far more qualified — and his mind-boggling lack of attention to details that matter — suggests other factors at work. His judgment may have been clouded by . . . what?

Science provides clues.

At least her column seemed interesting to me, but maybe that’s just because she’s kinda hot.

Read the whole article

In December I used some money I got from my family as a gift to participate in the National Geographic “Genographic” project. I sent off a swab of my cheek cells to have my Y chromosome tested. I just got the results back the other day. No big surprises — I’m a mamber of Haplogroup R1b, which is the most common haplogroup in Scotland (where I’m from).

But what is more interesting is that my family’s journey begins, as does that of all human beings alive on the planet today, in or around Ethiopia, where last spring my wife and I adopted Maia. So over the last 60,000 years or so my family has migrated in a large loop from Ethiopia, up to Scotland, and in my case over to the US. And then we’ve headed back to Ethiopia to adopt. I guess that means …

If there is such a person as a “baby whisperer,” it is the pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp, whose uncanny ability to quiet crying babies became the best-selling book “The Happiest Baby on the Block.”

That seemed like the start of a very promising article in the New York Times today, but I was both reassured and a little disappointed by not really learning much new.

Dr. Karp’s method for dealing with an upset toddler is to hold them tight, do lots of rocking, and to use short, repetitive sentences while reflecting the child’s emotions in your voice and expressions. All of that has seemed intuitively obvious to me ever since we adopted Maia.

The other thing I’d add is to keep calm and not see crying as a sign of failure. Often when Maia needs to sleep she starts thrashing in my arms and crying, and it’s tempting …