Manic Nation: Dr. Peter Whybrow Says We’re Addicted to Stress – >>“In the past, you either fought and won or you died, but either way the stress disappeared,” explains Whybrow. “Now the alarm bells go off much of the time as we encounter one prolonged threat.”

The Curse of Political Purity by Garry Wills | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books “But the man being voted for, no matter what he says, dances with the party that brought him, dependent on its support, resources, and clientele. That is why one should always vote on the party, instead of the […]

Multitaskers are incompetent “We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.”

Holy levitating Slinky! “In this series of slow motion clips, you can see that if you hold a Slinky by one end and drop it, the bottom end doesn’t actually move until the top end catches up with it.”

isaach well played, internet. http://t.co/eebUJmG9

Reinforcement sensitivity theory – Wikipedia

Quick study: Satoshi Kanazawa on intelligence: The disadvantage of smarts | The Economist “Most of the problems that we have to solve today—how to excel in school, how to find jobs, how to do virtually everything on a computer—are evolutionarily novel. So intelligent people do well in almost every sphere of modern life, except for […]

Team Spirit: The New Yorker Adam Gopnik writes about Olympic nationalistic pride. “Sports are about human character inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as they show that you can master anything with enough effort. Seen in this light, our urge to give the full measure of our national devotion to the synchronized swimmers—and the shot-putters and even […]

baseballcrank Our laws in as many areas as possible should be simple, easily understood & vigorously enforced.

NBA TV documentary on the Dream Team Jason Kottke, kottke.org