Archive for the ‘Link Banana’ category
The View from Nowhere
Jay Rosen asked himself some questions (over a year ago) about an idea he’s trying to spread about the American journalistic style:
In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.”
The initial idea is good, but the fleshing-out is worth sticking around for.
(via Chairman Gruber)
On Language Pedantry
Oliver Burkeman’s column is always worth paying attention to, but this line in the latest one was too good not to share:
Anger [about grammatical mistakes] delivers ego-enhancing pleasure; so does strengthening the boundaries of group membership – and carping about language is far more socially acceptable than explicit class snobbery or nationalism (not to mention less bother than confronting actual atrocities).
The Upper Peninsula War
Someone created a thoroughly documented Wikipedia article about a 19th century war between the American state of Michigan and Canada. A war that never happened.
(via r/TIL)
What Reddit’s Taught Me
Well, not ME, but a reddit user called Brokim. Among lists of hive-mind generated life tips — this unholy amalgam of real advice and inside jokes — ranks up there pretty high. Don’t get me wrong, it no Colin Marshall’s Meta-MetaFiltered Wisdom (on Link Banana) but it is worth a few minutes.
The Impractical Cheeseburger
I link to this disproportionately popular article mostly because I linked to “I, Pencil” recently and it’s essentially the same thing, only food based. (And in this case, rather than having an irrelevant plea for privatized mail service tacked on at the end, we get one about home-grown turkey.) But it remakes a point I think absolutely vital:
Anyone who tells you that life was better in the past is a dummy. Anyone who dreams of self-sufficiency a fool. We live in a magical time filled with uncountable objects no person would ever dream of making on their own. Everything about our lives is a minor miracle; we’re far more deeply connected than we even realize.
That felt good. Thanks for listening, internet.
The Nature of Fantasy
There are many great parts of Adam Gopnik’s essay about Lord of the Rings, Eragon, and Twilight, but this is the one that struck me the most:
The tedious normalcy of the “Twilight” books is what gives them their shiver; this is not so much the life that a teen-age girl would wish to have but the one that she already has, rearranged with heightened symbols. Your life could be like this; seen properly, from inside, it is like this.
(via The Browser)
Why Most Published Research is False
Why Most Published Research is False
I’m a bit of connoisseur of this type of thing, and so I’m embarrassed that I just today found an utterly fantastic plain-English argument from Alex Tabarrok about why you should discount almost all news story about a really interesting new finding by scientists. (I’m a connoisseur of this kind of thing because of the number of intelligent people who seem to treat every new study about a wonder-substance or agent-of-death as meaningful.) These guidelines are a good summary:
1) In evaluating any study try to take into account the amount of background noise. That is, remember that the more hypotheses which are tested and the less selection which goes into choosing hypotheses the more likely it is that you are looking at noise.
2) Bigger samples are better. (But note that even big samples won’t help to solve the problems of observational studies which is a whole other problem).
3) Small effects are to be distrusted.
4) Multiple sources and types of evidence are desirable.
5) Evaluate literatures not individual papers.
6) Trust empirical papers which test other people’s theories more than empirical papers which test the author’s theory.
(via Tabarrok himself, in a shorter but good post about a specific study’s failure)
The Meaning of Reaction Videos
The Meaning of Reaction Videos
I’m increasingly aware of how much I like random bits of non-conclusive pondering. It’s not that it’s better than a conclusion, it’s that it’s more interactive. In that spirit, I enjoyed Sam Anderson’s essay about reaction videos:
It’s no accident that all of this started on YouTube in 2007 — at a moment when, and in a place where, human experience was beginning very visibly to splinter. Watching thousands of people react identically to “2 Girls 1 Cup” (“Come on!” they invariably shout, and “Why!?”) feels like a comforting restoration of order and unity. Which means that the most disgusting and offensive video ever to go viral was ultimately, oddly, a force of togetherness.
Why We Laugh
An interesting theory about the evolutionary value of humor:
The initial emotional response to any discovery of error in your understanding of the world has got to be “uh oh.” But in humor, the brain doesn’t just discover a false inference, it almost simultaneously recovers and corrects itself. It gets the joke. The pleasure of the punch line is enhanced by that split second of negativity just before the resolution.
I’m not sure I completely buy this theory, but I did think about it a lot while watching a two-and-half year old cousin laugh on Thanksgiving. Though in that context the theory that came to my mind is its value as a primitive form of communication and in-group bonding.
(via The Browser)
Why We Laugh
An interesting theory about the evolutionary value of humor:
The initial emotional response to any discovery of error in your understanding of the world has got to be “uh oh.” But in humor, the brain doesn’t just discover a false inference, it almost simultaneously recovers and corrects itself. It gets the joke. The pleasure of the punch line is enhanced by that split second of negativity just before the resolution.
I’m not sure I completely buy this theory, but I did think about it a lot while watching a two-and-half year old cousin laugh on Thanksgiving. Though in that context the theory that came to my mind is its value as a primitive form of communication and in-group bonding.
(via The Browser)