Two people are sitting in a room together: an experimenter and a subject. The experimenter gets up and closes the door, and the room becomes quieter. The subject is likely to believe that the experimenter's purpose in closing the door was to make the room quieter.

The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail

The internet is revolutionising space exploration, bringing new sights and discoveries to anyone who cares to look just as quickly as to the scientists involved.

To boldly surf: the new destinations for armchair astronauts - Independent Online Edition -- Sci_Tech

Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona told a congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

U.S. Surgeon General sees 4-year term as compromised - International Herald Tribune

In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the "pen register" devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves.

We lose yet another privacy right... they're falling like flies...

SAN FRANCISCO / Judges OK warrantless monitoring of Web use / Privacy rules don't apply to Internet messages, court says

Linux fans (myself included) love to argue to Windows users how much better the Linuxes are than Microsoft Windows. Now don't get me wrong, I am not posting this to disprove that Linuxes, BSD's, or any of the *nixes are better than Windows, they really are. However (and there's always a however) we tend to be very selective on what we tell you when it comes to the minor details. Take this as a confession, as an admission of those details you might not necessarily like about Linux.

absolutely so true

Think Thick: Confessions of a Linux Fan: 10 Things You Might Want To Know Before Switching Over To Linux

Glenn Gould Playing the Goldberg Variations. It's 47 minutes long, but you may find it difficult to stop.

Goldberg Variations

As the 17th Congress of China's Communist Party approaches this autumn, party organizations in Beijing are abuzz with talk of democracy. Expect lots of "democracy" initiatives at the Congress. Some of these were signaled in an important speech by the party general secretary, Hu Jintao, to Politburo members and others at the Central Party School on June 25th.

While these initiatives do not constitute democratic institutions and procedures as recognized in real democracies, they nonetheless represent serious efforts to broaden what the Chinese describe as "inner-party democracy," "electoral democracy," and extra-party "consultative democracy." All of these forms go under the broad rubric of "socialist democracy" or "democracy with Chinese characteristics," as described in Hu's speech.

Let a thousand democracies bloom - International Herald Tribune

The common notion that women are the more talkative sex has been dispelled by scientists in the US.

BBC NEWS | Health | Men 'no less chatty than women'

Following the recent wave of arrests in England and even Australia, everyone seemed surprised that most of the terrorist suspects were highly educated, some apparently from middle-class or privileged backgrounds. At least two of them had completed their medical training, with one about to become a neurosurgeon.
...
With Islamist militants, however, the sociological dynamics seem to be different. No researcher has yet been able to construct a single profile based on simple socioeconomic indicators that would accurately describe the "typical" jihadist. A senior British intelligence officer summed it up as follows: "The pattern is that there is no pattern."
...
What they share, however, is that they have all experienced tensions in their personal lives, or were faced with deep and sustained crises of identity that they resolved by embracing jihadism.

A crisis of identity and the appeal of jihad - International Herald Tribune

one afternoon on my parents’ front porch, I stood up in front of my father and briefly passed out. My parents arranged for me to see an endocrinologist named Robert Modlinger, who got hold of my ample test records, phoned me, and started to talk in a strangely unmodulated voice. His wife April was also on the line, repeating my answers to his questions so he could read her lips. I learned later that he’d gone deaf a decade earlier, in his mid-twenties, when he was a student in medical school. Finally, he said, “I want you to come into my office. I think you have Addison’s Disease.” It sounded more like, “I THINK you have AHHHH-dison’s Disease.”

The idea of a deaf man diagnosing my problem by phone, when a seeing, hearing physician had repeatedly failed to do so in person, has stuck in my head ever since as the Miracle of St. Modlinger.

Basic Instincts - Times Select - New York Times Blog