Tyler Cohen:

The most dangerous people are those that have been taught some financial literacy. They're the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It's the people that realize, "I don't know anything at all," that end up doing pretty well.

Richard Thaler:

Many people love lotteries.

In using lotteries to motivate it is important to get the details right.

The idea is to play on people's feelings of regret.

Alison Gopnik:

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards.

An Afghan human smuggler:

They will know you are lying, but as long as you say the same thing whatever they ask you, you will be fine.

John Horgan on the theories of Robert Trivers:

Fooling others yields obvious benefits, but why do we so often fool ourselves? First, believing that we're smarter, sexier and more righteous than we really are -- or than others consider us to be -- can help us seduce and persuade others and even improve our health, via the placebo effect, for example. And the more we believe our own lies, the more sincerely, and hence effectively, we can lie to others.

Philip J. Buckenmeyer, et al:

CONCLUSION: The 5-Hour Energy Shot(R) did not significantly improve short- or long-term cognitive function for selected computer-based tasks despite a high level of perception that it was working effectively compared to a placebo with college-aged participants.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Freeman Dyson:

Grab every opportunity to take responsibility and do things for which you are unqualified.

Francis Fukuyama:

It is extremely easy to build a drone now that can do not just surveillance but can carry rather large payloads. If you want to see how large some of these planes get, check out this video of a model Airbus A380. I don't have to spell out the implications of this. I want to have my drone before the government makes them illegal.

Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Mark Hanis:

If human rights organizations can spy on evil, they should.

Tom Junod:

It's amazing whom we're arresting as terrorists these days.

Pico Iyer:

It's only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

NASA, via Decius:

Behold one of the more detailed images of the Earth yet created.

The Theory:

A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can - using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours' drive and still feel as if we're close to home.

Address Is Approximate

Sophie Windsor Clive:

A chance encounter and shared moment with one of nature's greatest and most fleeting phenomena.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

From the archive:

Three-dimensional mapping of starling flocks could shed light not only on the birds' collective behavior but also on a broad range of other aggregate systems.

Freeman Dyson:

I happen to be a frog, but many of my best friends are birds.

Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker:

Masafuera, in the South Pacific, five hundred miles off the coast of central Chile, is a forbiddingly vertical volcanic island, seven miles long and four miles wide, that is populated by millions of seabirds and thousands of fur seals but is devoid of people, except in the warmer months, when a handful of fishermen come out to catch lobsters.

Murmuration

Andy Maser:

On October 26th, a hole was blasted in the base of 125' tall Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in Washington. In less than 2 hours, the reservoir behind the dam drained completely and the White Salmon flowed unimpeded by a dam for the first time in 100 years.

Lucas Foglia:

Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.

Dan Kildee:

Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow.

Explosive Breach of Condit Dam

Phil Plait:

Mt. Rainier is a volcano, climbing to a height of over 14,000 feet (4300 meters). There are no other mountains anywhere near that height nearby, so it's really prominent in the landscape. The rising Sun catches the peak, and the shadow is cast on the underside of the cloud layer. The dramatic sunrise colors really make this an incredibly beautiful shot.

The long shadow of Mt. Rainier | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

David A. Ensminger:

Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation is a vibrant, in-depth, and visually appealing history of punk, which reveals punk concert flyers as urban folk art. David A. Ensminger exposes the movement's deeply participatory street art, including flyers, stencils, and graffiti. This discovery leads him to an examination of the often-overlooked presence of African Americans, Latinos, women, and gays and lesbians who have widely impacted the worldviews and music of this subculture. Then Ensminger, the former editor of fanzine Left of the Dial, looks at how mainstream and punk media shape the public's outlook on the music's history and significance.

Often derided as litter or a nuisance, punk posters have been called instant art, Xerox art, or DIY street art. For marginalized communities, they carve out spaces for resistance. Made by hand in a vernacular tradition, this art highlights deep-seated tendencies among musicians and fans. Instead of presenting punk as a predominately middle-class, white-male phenomenon, the book describes a convergence culture that mixes people, gender, and sexualities.

This detailed account reveals how members conceptualize their attitudes, express their aesthetics, and talk to each other about complicated issues. Ensminger incorporates an array of scholarship, ranging from sociology and feminism to musicology and folklore, in an accessible style. Grounded in fieldwork, Visual Vitriol includes over a dozen interviews completed over the last several years with some of the most recognized and important members of groups such as Minor Threat, Minutemen, the Dils, Chelsea, Membranes, 999, Youth Brigade, Black Flag, Pere Ubu, the Descendents, the Buzzcocks, and others.

You can preview the book at Google Books.

From the archive, John Boehner:

Don't let those little punk staffers take advantage of you.

Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation

Decius:

No one wants to try to catch a falling knife.

Brady Dennis:

Four years into the housing crisis, the ongoing expense of upkeep and taxes, along with costly code violations and the price of marketing the properties, has saddled banks with a heavy burden. It often has become cheaper to knock down decaying homes no one wants.

[This] grew out of a 2009 state law ... Similar legislation is in the works in Georgia ...

Gus Frangos, president of Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp:

It is the root canal of community development that we're doing, and it's not a quick fix.

Decius:

Holy shit -- an intelligent, actionable idea!

Sterling Hayden:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

Mr. Frangos, Mr. Frangos, Tear Down This House

Martin S. Feldstein:

Without a program to stop mortgage defaults, there is no way to know how much further house prices might fall.

John Bird and John Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

The Economist's Washington correspondent:

I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Judith Warner:

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

How to Stop the Drop in Home Values

David Hockney:

Don't we need people who can see things from different points of view?

From the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition:

Dr. Witold Kilarski of the EPFL-Laboratory of Lymphatic and Cancer Bioengineering in Lausanne, Switzerland shot Litomosoides sigmodontis (filaria worms) inside lymphatic vessels of the mouse ear at 150x magnification using aFluorescent confocal microscopy.

From the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition:

Charles Krebs from Issaquah, Washington brings us this portrait of a water boatman (Corixidae sp.), viewed in reflected light.

The double compound eyes of a male St. Mark's fly (Bibio marci), submitted by Dr. David Maitland from Feltwell, UK.

The tip of a butterfly tongue viewed in polarized light by Stephen S. Nagy, M.D. from Helena, Montana. (Stephen S. Nagy, M.D.)

Via Bruce Sterling:

CrowdOptic, a maker of crowd-driven mobile solutions for the enterprise, today announced the release of CrowdOptic Analytics, an advanced, behind-the-scenes tool used by live event producers for monitoring their spectators' event viewing and photo-taking activities during live events. The CrowdOptic platform features a one-of-a-kind technology which senses where crowds are focusing from moment to moment, by tracking the precise paths of spectators' phones as they view and take photos and video of the live action. CrowdOptic monitors, in real time, the GPS location and compass headings on each of the hundreds, or often thousands, of mobile phones in a crowd (using GPS to locate the phones and compass headings to determine the direction the phones are pointing) and finds the point where two bearings, taken from two different locations, intersect.