Daniel J. Levitin, in WSJ:

Can science explain why the same song we enjoy singing with relatives or congregants drives us to visions of sugar-plum homicide when it blares across the public-address system Chez Target?

From the archive:

Frink: "Now that I have your attention, we have some exciting new research from young Lisa Simpson. Let's bring her out and pay attention."

Scientist #1: "She's just a little girl!"

Scientist #2: "Let's not listen!"

Do You Hear What I Hear?

James Surowiecki:

Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

Oh, but James!

What was the problem? And what should be done?

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

Also:

First of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.

We're having a debate in America on whether or not we ought to be listening to terrorists making phone calls in the United States. And the answer is darn right we ought to be.

News You Can Lose

The Economist:

Speed in spending is prized above all; but this is no way to build something that lasts as long as infrastructure.

Freeman Dyson:

It's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale.

Ethics are the art of doing that.

You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Back to The Economist:

Last year a bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, killing 13 people.

Recently, in the NYT:

Officials seem to think urgency to act absolves them from considering the longer-term implications.

Roads to nowhere

Tom Friedman:

What book will our kids write about us?

"The Greediest Generation?"

"The Complacent Generation?"

Or maybe: "The Subprime Generation: How My Parents Bailed Themselves Out for Their Excesses by Charging It All on My Visa Card."

Our kids should be so much more radical than they are today.

We should be talking about "bail," not "bailouts."

Peter Schiff:

We need a serious recession in this country, and the government needs to get out of the way, and let it happen.

Tom Friedman, in 2005:

Are Americans suffering from an undue sense of entitlement?

Somebody said to me the other day that the entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

Imagine an austerity rebellion.

Have you read Anathem?

The Real Generation X

Where are all the acorns?

At the Long Branch Nature Center, calls and e-mails have been pouring in from people who want to donate acorns they've gathered in areas where they are plentiful.

From earlier this year:

Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.

And last month, mystery solved:

Something is killing the little brown bats of the Northeast, and researchers may have fingered the culprit: a fungus.

I guess it was just a puzzle:

Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

This holiday season, remember the neediest: squirrels!

Scientists baffled by mysterious acorn shortage

Jim Rogers, one of the world's most prominent international investors, on Thursday called most of the largest U.S. banks "totally bankrupt," and said government efforts to fix the sector are wrongheaded.

"Without giving specific names, most of the significant American banks, the larger banks, are bankrupt, totally bankrupt," said Rogers, who is now a private investor.

"What is outrageous economically and is outrageous morally is that normally in times like this, people who are competent and who saw it coming and who kept their powder dry go and take over the assets from the incompetent," he said. "What's happening this time is that the government is taking the assets from the competent people and giving them to the incompetent people and saying, now you can compete with the competent people. It is horrible economics."

From the archive:

Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts in previous letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Also:

We need a serious recession in this country, and the government needs to get out of the way, and let it happen.

See Schiff:

The only thing that the U.S. government did right was to let Lehman Brothers fail. Everything else they did wrong.

Jim Rogers calls most big US banks bankrupt

Michal Zalewski, Googler:

This document is meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities.

Although all browsers implement roughly the same set of baseline features, there is relatively little standardization - or conformance to standards - when it comes to many of the less apparent implementation details. Furthermore, vendors routinely introduce proprietary tweaks or improvements that may interfere with existing features in non-obvious ways, and seldom provide a detailed discussion of potential problems.

From the archive:

“attacker can perform the aforementioned attack by deploying an uncooled microbolometer thermal imaging (far infrared) camera within up to approximately five to ten minutes after valid keycode entry”

Browser Security Handbook

The Cisco Annual Security Report provides a comprehensive overview of the combined security intelligence of the entire Cisco organization. Encompassing threat and trends information collected between January and October 2008, this document provides a snapshot of the state of security for that period. The report also provides recommendations from Cisco security experts and predictions of how identified trends will continue to unfold in 2009.

This year's report reveals that online and data security threats continue to increase in number and sophistication. They propagate faster and are more difficult to detect.

Key report findings include:

* Spam accounts for nearly 200 billion messages each day, which is approximately 90 percent of email sent worldwide
* The overall number of disclosed vulnerabilities grew by 11.5 percent over 2007
* Vulnerabilities in virtualization products tripled to 103 in 2008 from 35 in 2007, as more organizations embraced virtualization technologies to increase cost-efficiency and productivity
* Over the course of 2008, Cisco saw a 90 percent growth rate in threats originating from legitimate domains; nearly double what the company saw in 2007
* Spam due to email reputation hijacking from the top three webmail providers accounted for just under 1 percent of all spam worldwide, but constituted 7.6 percent of all these providers' mail

Fortunately, responses to these threats and trends are improving. Advances in attack response stem from the increased collaboration between vendors and security researchers to review, identify, and combat vulnerabilities.

Recently:

The potential value of total advertised goods observed by Symantec was more than $276 million for the reporting period. This value was determined using the advertised prices of the goods and services and measured how much advertisers would make if they liquidated their inventory.

Cisco 2008 Annual Security Report

Your parents might have worried when you chose Philosophy or International Relations as a major. But a year-long survey of 1.2 million people with only a bachelor's degree by PayScale Inc. shows that graduates in these subjects earned 103.5% and 97.8% more, respectively, about 10 years post-commencement. Majors that didn't show as much salary growth include Nursing and Information Technology.

From earlier this year:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

It's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees.

From last year:

The big law firms have to pay you $150,000, because a third of it is going to pay off your loans, and the rest of it is the minimum you'd really expect someone with that level of responsibility to be paid.

Salary Increase By Major | WSJ

Seth Stevenson:

Why is this anecdote-laden style so popular with business authors, and so successful (to the tune of best-selling books and huge speaking fees)?

I think it comes down to two things:

1) Fascinating anecdotes can, just by themselves, make you feel like you've really learned something. ("Hey, now I know what an Apgar score is, and where it came from! Who cares if this knowledge has zero application to my business?")
2) A skillful anecdote-wielder can trick us into thinking the anecdote is prescriptive. In fact, what's being sold is success by association.

Recently:

We enjoyed Late Bloomers tremendously because it concerned two of our favorite subjects—artistic and literary excellence—but we also wanted to throw things at it, because the sound core of truth it contained was coated with an obscuring layer of inaccuracy and inexpertise.

Mildly irritating though all of this may be, it is Gladwell’s forthcoming book, Outliers, that truly threatens to exasperate.

Demystifying greatness can be as dangerous as romanticizing it.

From the archive:

I would create, if not true bumper stickers, then the rumor of bumper stickers.

Does advertising actually work?