The Anarchy by William Dalrymple. The full review http://eh.net/book_reviews/the-anarchy-the-relentless-rise-of-the-east-india-company/ Recommended.
Saturday, November 16, 2019
Thursday, November 14, 2019
An overview of some of the work of George Price
The mathematics of kindness Several other links have been posted before.
Two women
And the current ‘acting’ president of Bolivia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanine_%C3%81%C3%B1ez “In a deleted Twitter post from 2013, Áñez called an indigenous ritual of the Aymara people "satanic" and said that no belief system is better than the Christian God.[22]”
Saturday, November 09, 2019
Individual vs group
When the Strong Outbreed the Weak: An Interview with William Muir
“Muir’s experiments reveal a tremendous naiveté in the idea that creating a good society is merely a matter of selecting the “best” individuals. A good society requires members working together to create what cannot be produced alone, or at least to refrain from exploiting each other. Human societies approach this ideal to varying degrees, but there is always an element of unfairness that results in some profiting at the expense of others. If these individuals are allowed to breed, and if their profiteering ways are heritable, then selecting the “best” individuals will cause a cooperative society to collapse. It’s a good thing that the early eugenicists did not have their way!
“Muir’s experiments reveal a tremendous naiveté in the idea that creating a good society is merely a matter of selecting the “best” individuals. A good society requires members working together to create what cannot be produced alone, or at least to refrain from exploiting each other. Human societies approach this ideal to varying degrees, but there is always an element of unfairness that results in some profiting at the expense of others. If these individuals are allowed to breed, and if their profiteering ways are heritable, then selecting the “best” individuals will cause a cooperative society to collapse. It’s a good thing that the early eugenicists did not have their way!
Muir’s experiments also challenge what it means for a trait to be regarded as an individual trait. If by “individual trait” we mean a trait that can be measured in an individual, then egg productivity in hens qualifies. You just count the number of eggs that emerge from the hind end of a hen. If by “individual trait” we mean the process that resulted in the trait, then egg productivity in hens does not qualify. Instead, it is a social trait that depends not only on the properties of the individual hen but also on the properties of the hen’s social environment.”
Tuesday, November 05, 2019
On sad Bollywood songs
Sunday, November 03, 2019
AlisonGopnik interview
The mind at work: Alison Gopnik on learning like children Right combination of nurture and autonomy “Parents, it turns out, have an important role in fostering curiosity and exploration. Gopnik describes a recent study from Columbia University psychologist Nim Tottenham’s lab that updates classical theories of avoidance learning. If you put an adult rat in a maze and it goes down one end and gets a shock, it never goes down that end of the maze again. But young rats actually prefer the arm of the maze that leads to the shock—when their mother is present. And Tottenham replicated this result with three- and four-year-old children as well. If the child feels safe, they are more motivated by exploration than by a predictable outcome.”
Free downlads from California uni. Press
About 90 books, I downloaded this and a few more https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.72/
Saturday, November 02, 2019
Cellular life
Cellular Life, Death and Everything in Between “We now know that cells can flirt dangerously with the boundary of death — and perhaps even cross it entirely — yet regain their lost function.”
Indian brains smaller
'Indian brain is smaller': IIIT-Hyderabad researchers create Indian Brain Atlas “The average Indian brain is smaller in height, width, and volume as compared to the western and eastern population like the Chinese and Korean according to the first-ever ‘Indian Brain Atlas’ created by researchers of the International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad (IIITH).” Research for medical purposes.
Check also The Human Brain Has been Getting Smaller Since the Stone Age and Neanderthals Had Bigger Brains Than Modern Humans — Why Are We Smarter?
Check also The Human Brain Has been Getting Smaller Since the Stone Age and Neanderthals Had Bigger Brains Than Modern Humans — Why Are We Smarter?
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