Rotundus.com

The Power of a Hot Body

"Idly mingling, a human body radiates about 100 watts of excess heat, which can add up fast in confined spaces. ... Geothermal warmth may abound in volcanic Iceland, but it’s not easy to come by in downtown Paris. So why waste it? Savvy architects from Paris Habitat decided to borrow the surplus energy from so many human bodies and use it to supply radiant under-floor heating for 17 apartments in a nearby public housing project, which happens to share an unused stairwell with the metro station. Otherwise the free heat would be lost by the end of the morning’s rush hour."

Another Side Effect Of Chemotherapy: 'Chemo Brain'

"about a quarter of patients undergoing chemotherapy have trouble processing numbers, using short-term memory and focusing their attention"

Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious 'fundamentalism'

"Higgs boson theorist says he agrees with those who find Dawkins' approach to dealing with believers 'embarrassing'"

African wildlife from the perspective of the ground [14 pictures]

An interesting view.

The lead in to an article by Nicholas Kristof in the NYT:

This is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.

Note also how things have changed:

About four decades ago, most of the children S.S.I. covered had severe physical handicaps or mental retardation that made it difficult for parents to hold jobs — about 1 percent of all poor children. But now 55 percent of the disabilities it covers are fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation, where the diagnosis is less clear-cut.

There's a need for support fo some kind but it's tough to structure such programs well.

Gorilla again outperforms Amsterdam blue chip index

The second sentence makes this crazier: "The bundle of stocks chosen by Jacko on the basis of bananas rose 12% in value over the year, while the AEX itself rose 10%. It is the 12th year in 13 that Jacko has outperformed the AEX."

Education, Intelligence, and Attitude Extremity

Interesting: "Completing high school strongly correlates to reduced extremity, particularly in the upper quantiles. College education increases attitude extremity in the lower tail of environmental beliefs."

Eyes wide shut

(RCT = randomized controlled trails - in vogue of late for studying poverty alleviation methods) "Most drug trials are "double blind", where participants do not know if they are in the "control" group or the "treatment" group. By contrast, most RCTs are not double blind. The paper illustrates the point by undertaking two different RCTs on cowpea seeds in Tanzania. ... The traditional RCT shows a significant over 20% increase in yields from the modern seed. But the double blind RCT shows that virtually all of that improvement comes from changed behavior, not from any inherent effectiveness of the modern seed."

Unfair Rates

"Canadian mailorder companies pay more to mail their products to Canadians than some of our international competitors do. Even from halfway around the world, our competitors can mail the same products to the same Canadian customers for less -- often for a lot less. Here are actual examples that show just how bad it is for Canadian companies." It's not just lower-income Asian countries to which this applies in my experience. Often mailing US-to-Canada seems cheaper than mailing Canada-to-Canada.

Walter L. Bradley:

When I was appointed head of the mechanical engineering department of sixty-five professors in 1989, I began to have the opportunity for much more personal interaction with faculty in our department who worked in divisions other than my own. A faculty member named Clay asked for an appointment with me to discuss his request for a one- to two-year leave of absence, and I suggested that we have lunch at the faculty club. He explained that Gail had finished her degree in veterinary medicine and had gotten a job at the zoo in Portland, Oregon, and he wanted to go with her. As we visited, I asked him about his and Gail's relationship, how long they had been married, and if they had any children. He responded with some discomfort that he and Gail were not married but had lived together for six years. While this was known to some people in the department, he had apparently not wanted to share it with me, anticipating my disapproval since he knew I was an evangelical Christian. How would you have responded to such an opportunity?

I though a response indicating my Christian disapproval not only would be not very helpful to Clay but would reinforce his stereotype about evangelical Christians and his desire to keep a safe distance from them. Instead, I responded by telling Clay that I could understand how a person who did not believe in a God of revelation who had given specific guidance about how we should live our lives would find such an arrangement to be perfectly sensible. I indicated that society today seemed to affirm such alternative lifestyles. I went on to share that if indeed the Bible was the Word of God, then such an arrangement would prove to be unsatisfactory in the long run, however satisfactory it seemed to be in the short run. He seemed relieved by my response and immediately asked me to tell him more about why I thought the Bible was the Word of God and therefore should be used as a moral compass to get through life. We spent the rest of our lunch hour discussing this fundamental question, which was much more fruitful than arguing about whether he should or should not live with Gail out of wedlock. Until our friends accept the authority of Scripture, the primary questions to be discussed have to be those of God's existence and transcendence.

- Excerpted from p. 308 of Telling the Truth

The doesn't just end here, but here seems a good spot to leave off from. Let's just say that the relationship in question here didn't wind up working up.