I’m critical of your critical thinking.

Psychologists have longed talked about ‘goal gradient’ which describes how we work harder to achieve a goal as we get closer to it. I just came across a fantastic study published in the Journal of Marketing Research which shows that we can be convinced to shift into a higher gear of work and spending, even when the perception of progress is a complete illusion.

Follow the link for the full story. The experiment is quite simple/ingenious

Phenomenal. Some key points:
“Trade is ten times as old as farming.”
Animals can have culture, but they do not have cultural exchange.
The chain of exchange for a single good in our society is nearly incomprehensibly vast.

The researchers did 4 miniature experiments. In the first, they took 28 students, over 80% of whom said they believed in good luck, and randomly assigned them to either a superstition-activated or a control condition. Then they put put them on a putting green. To activate a superstition, for half of them, when handing over the ball the experimenter said: “here is your ball. So far it has turned out to be a lucky ball”. For the other half, the experimenter just said “this is the ball everyone has used so far”. Each participant had 10 goes at putting on the green, trying to get a hole-in-one from a distance of 100 cm: and lo, the students playing with a “lucky ball” did significantly better than the others, with a mean score of 6.42, against 4.75 for the others.

Alberta scientists discover largest bed of dinosaur bones

Find also contains evidence of ‘catastrophic’ tropical storms that routinely wiped out creatures in the area

Well how cool is that?!

Plantwire is a fun, easy way to find and learn about plants.

We provide information on many of the world’s most beautiful, interesting, and important plants. You can search by plant name, flower color, or by tags. Our database now includes over 300 plants and is growing quickly. We provide general descriptive information, flower colors, and basic instructions on how to grow and propagate each plant. More than 6000 images are included.

Great tool! Asked them about introducing tags that are especially effective oxygenators and air-purifiers. We’ll see what happens

GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs.

Extremely excited about this project.

Two potential signatures of life on Saturn’s moon Titan have been found by the Cassini spacecraft. But scientists are quick to point out that non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations.

Titan is much too cold to support liquid water on its surface, but some scientists have suggested that exotic life-forms could live in the lakes of liquid methane or ethane that dot the moon’s surface.

Evidence keeps stacking up for microbial life in our solar system.