Benedict Carey, who covers mental health issues for the New York Times, has written a revealing article about magical thinking, or why some people believe that their thoughts can affect events outside of their control. It turns out that there are some solid psychological and neurological explanations for superstition.
Category Archives: ShortLinks
Webb rocked the casbah last night.
Newsweek: “For the first time ever, the response to the State of the Union Message overshadowed the president’s big speech. Virginia Sen. James Webb, in office only three weeks, managed to convey a muscular liberalism–with personal touches–that left President Bush’s ordinary address in the dust.” Sen. Webb made Virginia proud last night.
Pi is exactly 3!
Tim has demonstrated that the Bible proves the existence of unicorns. Also, he’s demonstrated that the Bible proves that they don’t exist.
How to filter out image-based spam.
Macintouch has a clever tip on reducing image-based spam for Mail.app users. Users of any modern e-mail client (such as Thunderbird) should be able to adapt this suggestion to their own program.
Corn-based ethanol is bad for America.
Joe explains why corn-based ethanol is a dumb source of energy. I’ve been meaning to write about this for months, but Joe’s done it better than I could.
Track GA budget amendments.
The General Assembly’s Legislative Information Service has a state budget section where you can find out what budget amendments have been proposed by whom, what agency they’ll affect, how much they’ll cost, etc. This system is parallel to the traditional legislative process, so you won’t find this information by looking at bills or at Richmond …
My dentist only has People.
Gawker: “The best magazine writing of the year of firecrotch came from The Virginia Quarterly Review…” Um. Thanks?
Biplane dinosaur.
A pair of biologists have figured out that an early winged dinosaur, Microraptor gui, had two pairs of wings arranged like a biplane, thus beating the Wright brothers to the punch by some 125M years. That was a lousy way to fly, though, and natural selection soon discarded them for wings more like we know …
Bush hits 28%.
President Bush’s popularity rating is down to 28%, a new all-time low, according to a CBS poll. The next landmark: 24%, which will tie him with Nixon’s approval rating at the time of his resignation. It’s time to commission a new poll, targeted at that 24%, with just one question: what’s your deal?
Fox News caught lying about Sen. Obama.
CNN catches Fox News totally making stuff up about Sen. Barack Obama. Josh Marshall asks who Fox will fire over this. I’ll take “nobody” for $500, Alex.