thinkness - June 2004 Archives

June 2004

Intuition? Feh. - I was looking at the IMDB entry for The Fog of War and came across this snippet from a user review: My first encounter with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was in the late spring of 1966 when, as... Posted in monkey vs robot , psychology & consciousness | 6 Trackbacks | 317 Comments
Zed was wrong? - Ah, here's a fascinating TNR article about this book I was thinking of reading called The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. (First of all,... Posted in emergence | 0 Trackbacks | 287 Comments

Bushcorp vs reality - If you read both thinkness and The New Republic, you might think I sort of cribbed my previous post from their recent article, Closing of the Presidential Mind, but I assure you it's not the case. I think the article... Posted in monkey vs robot , political currents | 0 Trackbacks | 136 Comments

Neo is the one. Which one? - The other day thinkness came across a good review of a whole bunch of books attacking Bush, his administration, the war in Iraq, etc. (I almost always find it more useful and interesting to read commentary about multiple sources, because... Posted in political currents | 1 Trackbacks | 132 Comments

Cleavers a-plenty - Thanks be to Axel, for he hath shown me the folly of my ways. It turns out that there are many 'cleavers,' or words that are there own opposites. There's a whole other name for them: autoantonyms. (Pretty dreary, no?... Posted in language | 0 Trackbacks | 301 Comments

Cleavers - I woke up today thinking about words that can be their own opposites, depending on their degree and the connotation of the word. 'Righteous,' 'sentimental,' and 'decadent' can all be either good or bad, depending on how they're used. Consulting... Posted in language | 0 Trackbacks | 129 Comments

Triple mixer strikes back - Tom Hanks, discussing why it's better to be an actor than a politician: "I'd much rather be able to carve that out of popular culture as opposed to becoming yet another cog in the polarized 24-hour wheel of news." This... Posted in language | 0 Trackbacks | 138 Comments
The truth about the untruth - Prominent newspapers, such as the NYTimes and the WaPost, have been going about as close as they ever will to claiming that the president and his boss, the veepee, are flat-out lying about connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Dubya... Posted in | 3 Trackbacks | 45 Comments

Might as well face it - New studies give further credence to the theory that being in love, as Robert Palmer said, is like an addiction. Researchers used gene therapy to change one gene in a male meadow vole -- which is usually promiscuous -- to... Posted in psychology & consciousness | 6 Trackbacks | 4 Comments