more empirical evidence on making sense
Brain effects are communicative goods. A recent study found common effects among reading and seeing actions: Participants observed actions and read phrases relating to foot, hand, or mouth actions. In the premotor cortex of the left hemisphere, a clear congruence was found between effector-specific activations of visually presented actions and of actions described by literal [...]
Tagged: biology
a first-person shooter game
Recently I ate a cantalope and threw the rind into the trash bin, which remained unemptied longer than it should have been. I also had on the counter some peaches ripening past ripened. Attracted by this resource-rich environment, fruit flies invaded my kitchen. Generally speaking, I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy. As a kid I [...]
Tagged: games
a Shakespearean portrait of bad public reason
Purported portraits of Shakespeare have attracted considerable public interest. A scholar recently explained: If Shakespeare study today is a lively mix of wishfulness, mythology and scholarship, this may simply be because we don’t know what he looked like, and what we do know about him is unsatisfactory. … How did this money-worried little capitalist, who [...]
Tagged: images, Shakespeare
incentive-compatible, just-in-time dishwashing
Mr friend Dr. S. (B.A., Princeton; M.S., MIT; M.D., Yale) shared with me a long time ago a stunningly innovative solution to a difficult group-living problem. I will now share that solution with you, my highly esteemed blog co-participants. The group-living problem: No one does the dishes. They pile up, festering in the sink. The [...]
communicative punishment
Ohio is establishing a registry of sex offenders who weren’t criminally convicted of sex offenses. The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, reported: A recently enacted law allows county prosecutors, the state attorney general, or, as a last resort, alleged victims to ask judges to civilly declare someone to be a sex offender even when there has [...]
Tagged: law
carnival of the bureaucrats #2
Featured this month as Bureaucrat-of-the-Month is Funtwo. That’s not Fun2.0, but Funtwo. Bureaucrats have no need of superfluous precision. You can see Mr. Funtwo working intensely in front of his desk in the video below (or here). With characteristic bureaucratic modesty, he appears faceless. Mr. Fun continues in the tradition of bureaucrats that have made [...]