.me
March 2010
10 posts
“
In the UK, it is a well know fact that power demand surges at the end of every episode of Eastenders, Britain’s best-loved TV show. The reason that happens — for those unfamiliar with British custom — is because millions of people simultaneously rush to switch on their kettles to make a cup of tea. All of that water boiling demands a lot of energy (2.2kW in our example).
The tea-rush habit is so dependable, meanwhile, that TV ratings are compiled using National Grid data.
” —FT Alphaville » A UK power desurge
“
People living in communities that lack market integration display relatively little concern with fairness or with punishing unfairness in transactions. Notions of fairness increase steadily as societies achieve greater market integration. People from better-integrated societies are also more likely to punish those who do not play fair, even when this is costly to themselves.
For progressives, this finding brings great comfort. It suggests that people are, if not perfectible, at least morally malleable in positive ways.
” —The origins of selflessness: Fair play | The Economist
“Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world’s attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike. […] The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past.”
—Edge: TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY By David Gelernter
“True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.”
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (via dinkenesh)
“So when people find out that we are anthropologists — assuming that they don’t think we study dinosaur bones — they want savagery from us: titillating bits of excessive and unexpected difference. […] I think an important part of being an anthropologist is that you are not deeply attracted to savagery, but rather something I’d call ’subtlety’: an appreciation for the little things in life. It comes from an awareness of them, all of them, which helps you put things in context: why that flat bread that way? How does metalworking in this place mean the dough gets put on top of one sort of thing rather than another?”
—The Savage and the Subtle | Savage Minds
“People seem to favour products and careers that share initials with them, so that, perhaps, Peter prefers Pepsi (Hodson & Olson, 2005), and Harold tends to own a hardware store, while Roger is a roofer (Pelham et al., 2002) […] Moving to whole names, it appears that Louis will tend to live in St. Louis, and Mary in Marysville, and that this effect, applying also to surnames, is not likely to be due entirely to parents naming children after their location, but to implicit preferences for one’s own name, and variants of it (Pelham et al., 2003).”
—The Psychologist - The name game
