-
Quote:"Laughing is primal, our first way of communicating. Apes laugh. So do dogs and rats. Babies laugh long before they speak. No one teaches you how to laugh. You just do. And often you laugh involuntarily, in a specific rhythm and in certain spots in conversation.
You may laugh at a prank on April Fools' Day. But surprisingly, only 10 to 15 percent of laughter is the result of someone making a joke, said Baltimore neuroscientist Robert Provine, who has studied laughter for decades. Laughter is mostly about social responses rather than reaction to a joke.
// Rats laugh. Youtube it.
-
// Great interview with the South Park guys.
-
Quote:"The data is fun to peruse, but it has practical implications as well. Ad buyers should focus on sports programming, according to the analysis. That's because sports fans are most likely to view events live instead of on a DVR machine, meaning they don't skip the ads.
Dems tend to watch more TV than GOPers, and they dominate most kinds of programming. That means GOP ad buyers have fewer choices, and sports offer the best opportunity to reach their voters.
// Been saying it for years. If you're running for office and are a Republican, you have to find a way to put sports into your strategy. Either in advertising, or in other events. An easy one is to put your campaign lit on one side of a small card, and something sports related (like official's hand signals in football) on the other; then get your volunteers to pass them out at football games. Then lit drop the parking lots.
-
Quote:"The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which Prime Minister Harper has cited as an authority, recently surveyed fiscal stimulus initiatives in advanced and emerging economies and concluded that the average effect of discretionary fiscal policy “does not provide strong evidence of countercyclical effects.” Simply put, the IMF concluded that fiscal stimulus is generally not an effective way to combat recessions.
// Nelson Muntz, the patron saint of Austrian economists.
-
Quote:"At the age of 90, Prof Lovelock is resigned to his own fate and the fate of the planet. Whether the planet saves itself or not, he argues, all we can do is to "enjoy life while you can".
// What an adorable little fuzzball.
-
// I like the fact movie food is incredibly expensive. It limits the number of people eating in the theatre, making it possible to enjoy a movie without loud open mouth popcorn chewing and pop slurping.
-
Quote:"Around 5,000 youngsters have gathered on the Costa Dorada for a five-day festival of late night-drinking and debauchery.
'Saloufest' promotes itself as a sporting event, but locals have been shocked by the alcohol-fueled antics of many of the 18 to 23-year-olds.
Just 24 hours after the partying started in the town of Salou, nine people had been treated by paramedics for drunkenness, with five of those requiring hospital treatment for alcohol poisoning.// A lot of us curmudgeons see this sort of behavior as a form of nihilism fueled by modern atheism and media culture. If existence has no meaning, then Party On.
-
From the masthead:"If the conscious self is an illusion – who is it that's being fooled?"
// This is one of those great blogs you never hear about.
-
Quote:"There were two interesting results. One was that the same kind of RP appeared whether the subject pressed a key or not. Trevena and Miller say this shows that the RP was not, after all, an indication of a decision to move, and was presumably instead associated with some more general kind of sustained attention or preparing for a decision. Second, they found that a different kind of RP, the Lateralised Readiness Potential or LRP, which provides an indication of readiness to move a particular hand, did provide an indication of a decision, appearing only where a movement followed; but the LRP did not appear until just after the tone. This suggests, in contradiction to Libet, that the early stages of action followed the conscious experience of deciding, rather than preceding it.
// Libet found Readiness Potentials (RP) could be repressed, preserving some sort of free-won't. However, this experiment calls into question Libet's entire hypothesis. Awesome stuff.
Filed under: Uncategorized |
Marty Andrade 