Interesting Links for 07-05-2012

[andrewducker]

• The real reasons Boris won and Ken lost
  
  (tags: politics london )
  


• Timeline of the far future
  
  (tags: viaJWZ universe earth physics science )
  


• Analytic thinking can decrease religious belief
  
  (tags: thinking science religion )
  


• Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Teachers (and frankly, anyone with a brain)
  
  (tags: BertrandRussell education philosophy teaching )
  


• A majority of voters still in favour of Proportional Representation
  
  (tags: uk voting pr )
  


• The Scale of the Universe (it's very big, and made of very small things)
  
  (tags: physics scale space astronomy science universe visualization )
  


• You've just been made minister for Awesome Fun Times. What do you do?
  
  (tags: life hedonism politics )
  


• The caramelized onions are a lie!
  
  (tags: food cooking onions )
  


• If the CIA has confirmed they tortured someone why does the BBC keep putting the word "alleged" before the word "torture"?
  
  (tags: torture bbc )
  


• I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets
  
  (tags: lottery gambling money statistics )
  


• lessons learned from an iPhone mugging
  
  (tags: iphone apple theft )
  


• The frequent fliers who flew too much.
  
  (tags: flight airplanes business usa )
  

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

"Timeline of the far future"

Wow, I never before felt that the age of the universe so far was small.

[andrewducker]

Like standing at the top of a hill and then noticing the Himalayas behind you :->

[andrewducker]

Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

"Analytic thinking can decrease religious belief."

Wow! How could that happen? One would never have thunk it.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

And shockingly, the headline is apparently relevant to the content of the article; I can't remember the last time I saw a "causes" headline that didn't mean "correlation"... :)

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Is this supposed to be so spaced out? It looks really screwy on my LJ.

[andrewducker]

How's that?

Not sure if something got messed up, but I just turned off the LJ autoformat. It looks the same on mine, but might look better on yours.

[zz]

fixed on mine now.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

That fixed it completely, yes.

[fub.livejournal.com]

Also: no tags?

[darkoshi]

It's still spaced apart more than usual on Dreamwidth, for me. No big deal, either way.

I was surprised by the indication in the mugging article that IPhones cost 700 pounds in the UK. That seems awfully much (says a person who's never even touched one)... But perhaps that corresponds to the most expensive one on the Apple site, which is $850 (64 GB, unlocked, contract-free).

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

I know a few people who voted No to AV, who were definitely against FPTP, but didn't think AV was good enough. Of course, the politicians interpreted it as being pro-AV. It would have been nice to have a "do you think FPTP needs to be taken out and shot?" referendum, followed by a "can this this country really be too stupid to understand ranking, like the politicians are claiming? yes/no" poll.

As for the lottery article, I'll need to take a longer look at it, but I'm not convinced that it would work with the UK lottery. Since half of the UK money goes straight into lottery related charities, it means that regular players have at most a 50% expected return, and it's probably much less than that. Perhaps that return is elevated when there are a few rollovers in a row, but that doesn't happen very often. On the other hand, half of all the money goes to making the country better, so it's not all bad.

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

where's the source on "Analytic thinking can decrease religious belief"?

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure. I get them from all over the place. Sometimes I remember (and then you get a via tag) and sometimes I don't (and you don't). Why?

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

I think skreidle mentioned that one too. I don't know, it looked like another "if people just thought a bit more, they wouldn't believe in God" study, but they don't say if they're looking at the average believer vs the average atheist, or did they do something to put someone temporarily in an analytical frame of mind, or is it during a lifelong change, if a person becomes more analytical they are less likely to believe in God?

[andrewducker]

It says in the article

"Researchers used problem-solving tasks and subtle experimental priming...to successfully produce “analytic” thinking. The researchers, who assessed participants’ belief levels using a variety of self-reported measures, found that religious belief decreased when participants engaged in analytic tasks, compared to participants who engaged in tasks that did not involve analytic thinking."

Was that not what you wanted?

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

oh! missed it

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

now I'm curious about the self-reported measures

[andrewducker]

If you find anything useful out then please let me know!

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

his article mentioned it'll be in tomorrow's issue of Science.