Psychology
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On the historical interpretations deathmatch: Sid Meier’s ‘Civilization 2’ versus Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens.’
How do you pick the all-time list of video games? And what does the list tell us about humanity?
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On humor (and bad medical advice).
In which I write a bodybuilding-mag-style paean to eating cat feces.
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On the attacks in Paris.
Military drone strikes may have increased the risk that innocent civilians die elsewhere.
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On stuttering.
During his first year of graduate school at Harvard, a friend of mine was trying to pick a research advisor. This is a pretty big deal — barring disaster, whoever you choose will have a great deal of control over your life for the next five to eight years. My friend found someone who seemed…
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On Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”
James created a striking depiction of some of the brutal homophobic lives eddying near Bob Marley.
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On reading Playboy from the 1970s.
Take away the rampant chauvinism and Playboys from the sixties and seventies are actually pretty good magazines.
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On Gerry Alanguilan’s “ELMER,” his author bio, and animal cognition.
In ELMER by Gary Alanguilan, chickens suddenly gain intelligence and have to fight against murder, oppression, and prejudice.
abortion rights, Andy Hartzell, animal cognition, chicken, David Duchovny, ELMER, empathy, ethics, evolution, Fox Bunny Funny, Frans de Waal, Gerry Alanguilan, graphic novel, Holy Cow, Homo naledi, live your ethics, Peter Singer, speciest, suffering, teleological misconception, teleology, vegan, vegetarian
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On military drones.
Sleep Dealer is a lovely film. Flawed, sure — the romantic bits are corny, the characters’ sudden shifts of heart are abrupt — but the ideas behind the film and they way they’re depicted are great. If you like mildly-speculative science fiction that conveys powerful social commentary, you should definitely look for it. But you should…
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On attempts to see the world through other eyes.
Recoloring an image is cool … but is it enough to imagine how other animals view a certain scene?
A Different Form of Color Vision in Mantis Shrimp, animal cognition, animal vision, animal vision tool, attention, brain plasticity, color vision, colorblind glasses, cone cells, crotalomorphism, dichromat, distinguishing between similar colors, eyes, facial recognition, frequency shifting, fusiform gyrus, gene therapy, glasses to let colorblind people see color, human facial recognition, image processing, mantis shrimp, mantis shrimp research, mantis shrimp vision, neurological processing, New York Times, peacock vision, perception, photoreceptors, retrovirus, species, starling vision, summer of science, tetrachromat, Thoen study, trichromat, vision, visual spectrum, what do bees see, what do dogs see, what does the world look like to other animals, what does the world look like to other creatures
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On free-market economics & the actual meaning of words.
Despite being rather politically liberal, I consider myself a free market economist. (Maybe it’s unfair to self-describe as an economist, though? I did the coursework for a master’s degree in economics… but couldn’t get a degree because I didn’t complete the residency requirement. I was enrolled as an undergraduate at the time, and apparently would’ve…
basic research, beekeeping, CAFOs, cap and trade versus carbon tax, capital gains tax, carbon tax, Collapse, definition of fortuitous, definition of peruse, do taxes make people work less, Easter Island, economics, education spending, fortuitous, free market, free market distortions, free market economist, free-market fundamentalist, government subsidies, health spending, infrastructure, infrastructure spending, James Surowiecki, Jared Diamond, Joseph Stiglitz, market solutions, market solutions versus government solutions, mis-used words, misused words, New York Review of Books, patent protections, peruse, politicians misusing words, politics, pollution, positive externalities, pro-life, progressive taxation, right-wing economist, Stiglitz, subsidies, tax on high earners, taxation, taxing negative externalities, Thomas Friedman, tragedy of the commons, why does Easter Island have no trees, Why I Am Pro-Life, Why the Rich Are So Much Richer
Frank Brown Cloud 