“We ended up at one point lying on the snow, looking up at the sky and talking about the food chain and how the sun indirectly supplies energy for our bodies. It was pretty idyllic all around.” I love it. That’s the mix of blissful goofing off + learning that I loved when I was a kid. Playing, learning, creating, it’s all the same. I hope I’ll get to share that one day with kids of my own. Sledding, photosynthesis, snowball fight, maybe a little praxeology with the afternoon snack…
Category: life
The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids:
Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and studentsÄô Äúshorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.Äù DweckÄôs research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concernÄîthey are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrates this…
A paraglider got sucked into a thunderstorm, lifted 32,000 feet above sea level amidst lightning and “hailstones the size of oranges,” and survived. This is one of those unfortunate capers I kind of wish had happened to me.
Ah, vindication. When I’m at work, I make a point to take a nap every day. Sometimes I’ll even squeeze in a second one. A recent long-term study has shown that “among working men who took midday naps, there was a 64% reduced risk of death” from heart disease. I knew I was on to something! [via kottke]
Jonathan Ley hiked across Iceland last year, and as usual has shared some awesome photos. I am a big fan of his narrative of his Continental Divide Trail thru-hike; I love how he placed thumbnails of annotated photos in the relevant location within the text (for example).
I like Cameron Marlow’s idea for city guides, identifying socio-cultural twins in different cities across the nation: “IÄôm an Atlantan in Chicago. WhereÄôs Little Five Points?” Sounds like a good crowd-sourcing project.
Awwww. Joshua Blankenship got engaged.
Speaking of empathetic apes, here’s the Wikipedia entry for Binti Jua, the ape who rescued the little boy who fell 20 feet into the ape cage.
Michael Pollan has an extensive article on what to eat and why. [via justin blanton]
Steven Pinker writes about the mystery of consciousnessÄîthe biology of the soul and the moral implications of when we finally find it. The two big challenges: the Easy Problem, distinguishing the brain’s participation in conscious and unconscious thoughts and how they evolved, and the Hard Problem, explaining first-person subjective experience as neural activity.
Here’s an old interview with L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. about his escape from Scientology. The Stephen Colbert also offers a balanced perspective on the Daily Show.
Lisa Carver on the current batch of chick lit: I’d like to take all these books, pile them up and throw gasoline and a lit match onto them. [via bookslut]
There’s a Flickr group for headcrushing photos.
Emory University Water Tower 1933-2007
They’ve decided to take it down this year, after decades of faithful service. It’s just getting too old to be safe. What a downer.
Christian outreach for adult film stars begins with these Bibles featuring custom marketing covers. [via daniel simmons]
After receiving 21 text messages from the victim, a thief was persuaded to return the cellphone and other stolen goods.
“Over the past thirty years, a new breed of ‘anthropometric historians’ has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, theyÄôve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a societyÄôs well-being.” [via justin blanton]
Mark Larson 