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POPS26% of Americans don't know that earth revolves around sun (my understanding is that the 71.2% who correctly said that it takes the earth 1 year to revolve around the sun is actually 71.2% of the 73.6% of respondents who correctly said the earth revolves around the sun. That means that only 52.4% of all Americans know it takes the earth one year to revolve around the sun. That noise you just heard is my jaw hitting the floor. Via Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber
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POPSMind Reading Is Now Possible "The more detailed the thought is, the more different these patterns get, because different people have different associations for an object or idea," says Haynes. "We're much closer to this than we were two years ago, but still far from a universal mind-reading machine." How far? The CMU group is determining the brain patterns that encode abstract ideas (honesty, democracy), words and sentences, a big step toward a mind-reading dictionary.
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POPS7 Writing Habits of Amazing Writers This extremely prolific writer has won numerous awards, including the National Book Award. She writes in longhand, and while she doesn’t have a formal schedule, she says she prefers to write in the morning, before breakfast . She’s a creative writing professor, and on the days she teaches, she says she writes for an hour or 45 minutes before leaving for her first class. On other days, when the writing is going well, she can work for hours without a break — and has breakfast at 2 or 3 in the afternoon!
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POPSGeorge Bush Doesn't Know Why People Don't Like Him George Bush has been asking around the white house about why people seem to dislike America, or is it just him they dislike. My guess is that the world will once again warm up to America and appreciate us for the great country we are, once the Bush boy is gonzo. I just wish he were heading to the Hague where he could be tired, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld for war crimes.
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POPSClip Title Deleted It's for "National Security." :) Screw our own rights and liberties and security and privacy, as long as the tyrannical, paranoid, fear-driven Empire is happy. Right? America's behaviour is alarming, annoying, paranoid and ridiculous, to say the least, and very unbecoming of a so-called "free and brave" nation. "It's one thing to say it's reasonable for government agents to open your luggage. It's another thing to say it's reasonable for them to read your mind and everything you have thought over the last year. What a laptop records is as personal as a diary, but much more extensive. It records every Web site you have searched. Every e-mail you have sent. It's as if you're crossing the border with your home in your suitcase." ----- One law firm has instructed its lawyers to travel to the United States with "blank laptops" whose hard drives contain no data ----- Lawyers cannot fully advise people how they may exercise their rights during a border search.
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POPSPolygamy is the key to a long life Men, by contrast, can reproduce well into their 60s and even 70s and 80s, and most researchers assumed this explained their longevity. But Lummaa and colleague Andy Russell wondered whether other factors explained the long lifespan of men, such as a grandfather effect. If female survival is the main explanation for male longevity, then monogamous and polygamous men would live for about the same length of time. Instead, it seems that fathering more kids with more wives leads to increased male longevity. Men, then, live long because they're fertile well into their grey years. The explanation could be both social and genetic. Men who continue fathering kids into their 60s and 70s could take better care for their bodies because they have mouths to feed. But evolutionary forces acting over thousands of years could also select for longer-lived men in polygamous cultures.
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POPSHearing Voices (of advertisers) Serious ethical issues are raised by some of the potential uses of hypersonic sound, because the projected messages are imposed upon people against their will, and could perhaps be used to subtly manipulate behaviour.
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POPSSex Ed Teacher Answers Student Questions on Masturbation, Parents Seek Criminal Charges This type of fear based mentality on the side of parents and school administrators is a large part of the reason teens struggle with sexual issues. Parents don't want to talk about it...prosecute teachers who try to answer the students questions...and yet we ask "Oh my! What has happened to our youth? Where have we gone wrong?" These parents need to be sued for utter stupidity. Don't attack a Sex-Ed teacher for trying to answer legitimate questions! If they want to control the minds of their children...HOME SCHOOL them in a church basement somewhere and mind the shackles please, they tend to come loose with time and age.
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POPSOral sex "Well," Grandpa said, "She goes to bed in her bedroom, and I go to bed in my bedroom ... And she yells, 'Fuck You!!!!!' and I holler back, 'Fuck You too.' "
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POPSLiteral Answers to Rhetorical Questions
>>People commonly ask empty rhetorical questions that rarely receive any sort of sensible answer. When you have had your surfeit of poetical whimsy and are ready for some good, hard facts, come here to be set straight.The world would be much improved if those engaging in windy musings were more often brought up short by a nice, sharp definition or a pointed rebuke. Even the fantastical William Shakespeare, asking himself "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?" goes on (admittedly at excessive length) to list a number of reasons for answering in the negative.Of course, some questions are so ill-framed as to admit of no sensible answer. Example: Where have you been all my life? It so happens that this question has never been addressed to me; but if it were I should be at a loss to detail the many addresses at which I have resided and worked during the span of existence of some other person, even if I knew that person's precise date of birth. Such idle musings are best ignored.<<
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POPSThe Meaning Of America I've watched it happen over the years since hate radio and its multimillionaire mavens first gave voice and increasing political clout to resentment, intolerance, bitterness, anger, frustration over broken dreams, and unfulfilled entitlement. We've turned mean. We've been encouraged to go onto knee-jerk, scorched-earth attack mode by politicians, activists, and media brokers who gained influence and financial reaffirmation. The loudest and most dominant voices don't urge us to find root causes of problems and their solutions, or to reach for true understanding. All we are told, and all we know anymore, is hitting, and hitting harder, and hurting deeper, killing, demonizing, punishing, mocking, name-calling, eviscerating, marginalizing, threatening, intimidating, bullying, bombing, and war-making.
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POPSWhy We're All Moral Hypocrites The researchers then "constrained cognition" by asking subjects to memorize long strings of numbers. In this greatly distracted state, subjects became impartial. They thought their own transgressions were just as terrible as those of others. This suggests that we are intuitively moral beings, but "when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn’t that bad,"
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