Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations
Joseph talks about how to build self-confidence. The key: to make things not novel. He gives some tips and suggestions on how to accomplish that.
Hasan was first introduced to the FBI when he topped a local watch list and was detained mid-travel for questioning. After extensive questioning and talks with various agents, he decided to compile his life in such a way that they could check on him wherever he was (which he made public here: elahi.umd.edu). While this may cause panic for most of us, he commented that the data he was posting was so specific and exacting that is was practically useless.
I have always thought the brain was cool but in sort of a nebulous, general way. Eagleman writes about many of the most recent findings about the brain and how cool neuroscience is. Most interesting is how much we still do not know or cannot tease out from other things. For example, we know that people use different sides of their brain to do different things, however if half a brain is removed from a child younger than eight, we find no developmental differentiation between the half brained child and a full brained child throughout the rest of their life. We still have yet to understand where all those brain functions went and what they displaced. (As a side note, there are very good medical reasons for removing half a brain–cascading seizures that could lead to death are one–and such operations are not performed arbitrarily “for the sake of science”.)
Interesting tidbit: At this point in our research, environment is a better predictor of psychosis than genes.
Fact: most life on earth can produce light. Widder present her research of these creatures with a captivating, and often humorous, collection of videos.
Edith Widder: The weird and wonderful world of bioluminescence
Bonus: You can purchase your own collection of bagged dinos (like the ones in her bottle) to poke for you own blue-light special amusement from Sunnyside Sea Farms. I highly recommend these and love to poke mine dinos each night before I go to bed. If you watched Life of Pi then you may remember these scenes:
