Winter’s Haven

Dartmouth researchers have discovered that “A dead salmon perceiving humans can tell their emotional state.“.
Well, actually no. Rather, this is an example of the sort of ridiculous result you can obtain if you’re not properly attentive to the possibility of false positives when separating noise from signal in fMRI scans. And it’s a nice example [...]

Five Percent of New Jerseyans Who Voted For Obama Think He’s The Anti-Christ.

Jose Flores, a Christian pastor from Bolivia, used a fake bomb to hijack an Aeromexico flight on September 9th, demanding to speak to president Felipe Calderon. Why was it so important for him to speak to the president?

Flores, 44, has said he was acting on a divine revelation and wanted to warn Calderon of an [...]

Stuff worth reading: Byran Caplan opposes “human weakness” as an excuse for adultery. Peter Suderman responds, looking at the issue from a broader social perspective.

This libertarian would like to take a moment to endorse Matt Yglesias’s complaints about land use regulations and the weird love affair many libertarians seem to have with cars and low-density cities.
But then, I do commute by bicycle, and my cultural sympathies lie with the left-wing environmentalist Europhiles, even if we often disagree on questions [...]

Suppose that your next-door neighbor beats and rapes his wife. What is the ethically appropriate response on your part? The commonly accepted answer to this question, with which I agree completely, is to forcibly subdue the husband and lock him in a cage, both to prevent him from committing further violence and as a punishment [...]

Once upon a time, the Steve Miller Band wrote a piece called “Fly Like An Eagle”…

[Video: Steve Miller Band plays "Fly Like An Eagle".]

…which became duly famous and was subsequently covered by a band in the Netherlands called Soylent Green….

[Video: Soylent Green covering "Fly Like An Eagle".]

…who sadly sang the original lyrics unchanged [...]

Julian Sanchez has an excellent post on symbolic beliefs. However, the question which the post nominally addresses (Are people in the South completely insane, or merely slightly batty?) is actually much less interesting than the generalized discussion of symbolic beliefs.

Here’s an important bulletin on “rescission” (the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies) from the it’s-much-much-worse-than-we-ever-imagined department.
the probability of having your [health insurance] policy torn up given a massively expensive condition is pushing 50%. One in two.
Assuming for the moment that that is correct, there’s really only one word to properly describe individual [...]

Paul Krugman has written a very clear, short overview of the Democratic health reform proposal. One observation: I can’t think of a single reason why anyone who supports the proposal should prefer it to an out-and-out single-payer system.
Instead of simply taxing people and paying their medical bills, the government will mandate that everyone buy “private” [...]