Young Conservative Rap

Can a machine change your mind?

The mind is not the brain. Confusing the two, as much neuro-social-science does, leads to a dehumanised world and a controlling politics

Love me some Cheney

Precision hacking

the wisdom of crowds

story of stuff

story of stuff

more here

Omama speech at the WH Correspondence

Hurtling space junk

Sounds like we need to move towards a sustainable astronautics

MONTREAL - Man-made space particles as small as a cornflake could take out a spacecraft in the skies or anybody on the ground who strays into its path, cosmic experts from around the globe warned on Thursday.

Hurtling space junk has been deemed a growing extraterrestrial threat to humankind, prompting a group of space gurus to descend on Montreal this week to consider what to do about the potentially dangerous debris.

"They travel at the speed of about eight or nine kilometres per second - that's almost 10 times the speed of a bullet from a gun," said Ram Jakhu, a professor at McGill University, which is hosting the three-day congress on the high-flying hazards.

"So, they are naturally very dangerous."

A public service announcement

Socialism Gone Wild

Going Dutch

The Irony of Satire

Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.

My explanation is that strong conservatives are incapable of recognizing satire - just too subtle. I'm curious -- have there ever been a famous conservative satirist comedian?

The Database State

and database tyranny

Fear is all they know

If the swine flu doesn't get you

red meat will

Now a new study of more than 500,000 Americans has provided the best evidence yet that our affinity for red meat has exacted a hefty price on our health and limited our longevity.

The study found that, other things being equal, the men and women who consumed the most red and processed meat were likely to die sooner, especially from one of our two leading killers, heart disease and cancer, than people who consumed much smaller amounts of these foods.