As seen at Marginal Revolution, a study of turning the hearts of the children to their fathers:

An initial study involved 80 undergrads spending five minutes thinking about either their fifteenth century ancestors, their great-grandparents or a recent shopping trip. Afterwards, those students in the two ancestor conditions were more confident about their likely performance in future exams, an effect that seemed to be mediated by their feeling more in control of their lives.

Three further studies showed that thinking or writing about their recent or distant ancestors led students to actually perform better on a range of intelligence tests, including verbal and spatial tasks (in one test, students who thought about their distant ancestors scored an average of 14 out of 16, compared with an average of 10 out of 16 among controls). The ancestor benefit was mediated partly by students attempting more answers – what the researchers called having a ‘promotion orientation’.

“Kids who leave high school either take up post-secondary education, and enter the most politically engaged space they’re likely to occupy in their entire lives, or they start earning paycheques—a moment at which government policy becomes frighteningly real, as if a monster in a children’s book had suddenly leapt off the page and started devouring the furniture.” (link)

“The dear leader likes to look at things.
updated every other day and sometimes on the weekends too.” (link)

The Liberace museum closed its doors last week, so shouldn’t there be space in the world now for a Wayne Newton museum, if not indeed a pressing need to maintain the cosmic balance? (more…)

From The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham, p. 35:

But given the weight of tax, and the endemic injustice that marked the Roman system, it is not surprising that corruption should focus on it. Social critics, more numerous as the empire went Christian and and a radical fringe of moralists gained a voice, very frequently stress fiscal oppression in their invective; only judicial corruption and sexual behaviour were as prominent. This would last as long as the empire.

Something to think about if you were wondering how long certain current conservative concerns, mixed with Christian religion, have been and will be with us.

[The following are the closing paragraphs from John Lumley’s lecture that he gave after being awarded the 1990 APS Fluid Dynamics Prize.]

“Some comments on turbulence,” Phys. Fluids A 4 (2), Feb. 1992, pp. 203-211. (link)

I would like to close with a few words about being a theoretician in the United States toward the close of the 20th century. The United States is a curiously unsympathetic environment for a theoretician, or any scientist interested in fundamental work. We have a sociocultural/historical myth with which those of us who were children here grew up, of egalitarianism, practicality, inventiveness. An American, in this myth, is a man who rolls up his sleeves and pitches in, solving the problem at hand in a clever, simple, practical way (often involving bailing wire and-a wad of chewing gum), usually saying over his shoulder that he does not hold with book learning. (more…)

There is a peculiar character that haunts Mormonish circles who sometimes is a Mormon and usually not. (more…)

The New York Times has an update on construction of Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie (link):

“The spotlight so far has been on the Elbphilharmonie, a 350-million-euro (and counting) project, or more than $433 million, with a tentative completion date of 2013. Designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to look like a glass wave cresting atop a brick warehouse, it is at the end of the Am Sandtorkai peninsula, and will eventually house the NDR Symphony Orchestra’s concert hall, a five-star hotel and about 60 luxury apartments. (more…)

[From A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad]

When I presented my self to be examined for master the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a round, soft face in gray, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious lips.

He commenced operations with an easy going “Let’s see. H’m. Suppose you tell me all you know of charter-parties.” He kept it up in that style all through, wandering off in the shape of comment into bits out of his own life, then pulling himself up short and returning to the business in hand. It was very interesting. “What’s your idea of a jury-rudder now?” he queried, suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon a point of stowage.

I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea, and gave him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-book. In exchange he described to me a jury-rudder he had invented himself years before, when in command of a three-thousand-ton steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest contrivance imaginable. “May be of use to you some day,” he concluded. “You will go into steam presently. Everybody goes into steam.”

There he was wrong. I never went into steam—not really. (more…)

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of reading Conrad’s Nostromo. Recent events have caused me to wonder if perhaps our President also did so. (more…)

There was a Star Trek episode where a planet-ruling computer had all the citizens under mind control and everyone behaved in plodding, sedate manner. The human temperment couldn’t endure a full duty cycle of dullness however, so the computer programmed a periodic Red Hour during which people smashed windows and raped women. As a child, Red Hour seemed a bit too fantastic. Now, I see that that it was too realistic. (link)

“Jews of European descent living on opposite sides of the globe are more closely related to one another than they are to their fellow countrymen, according to the largest study ever conducted of what it means genetically to be Jewish. Ashkenazis, the primary group descended from European Jews, are all as closely related as fourth or fifth cousins would be, the study found.”

—Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times

“In exploring the data more fully, Jones finds that the gains are not the result of people living longer, but generally of a decline in ‘great achievement’ in scientists’ 20s and 30s. ‘Peak productivity has increased by about 8 years, with the effect coming entirely from a collapse in productivity at young ages.'”

(link)