There are many like it But this one is mine.

“ In the 1820s, a man named Josiah Holbrook developed the idea of a lecture series called Lyceum, named after the Greek theater where Aristotle lectured his students (for free). It was amazingly popular, the American Idol of its day. People everywhere wanted it to come to their town. By 1835, there were 3,000 of these events spread across the United States, primarily in New England.

— Why Speakers Earn $30,000 an Hour - Scott Berkun

Sounds more like TED than American Idol to me.

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“ Enrichment is again seen as unlikely to drastically alter cognitive ability. An 1150 SAT kid is not going to become a 1460 or 1600 kid as a result of their college education. Yes, those funny little tests are measuring something real and relatively stable.

— Do advanced education and a challenging career make you smarter? - Steve Hsu

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“ A market where everything is rising is not an efficient market: it’s a market which is failing to do its job of allocating capital efficiently to where it can be put to best use, and away from areas where it can cause big problems.

— The roots of the coming crash | Blogs - Felix Salmon

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Still Life With 1st Mariner Bank

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Pass the Salt:

I’m not even sure there *is* a road.

Also, experimenting with a border on this image. Any opinions?

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“ The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked.

— Secret copyright treaty leaks. It’s bad. Very bad. - Cory Doctorow

Go on, read the whole thing. It’s as bad as his title suggests - and keep in mind all it’s doing is codifying and extending what we already have.

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Untitled

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“ A long story in short: Adobe sucks at programming, then apple told them they sucked at programming. If they want to release that shit under the name adobe so be it, but it sure isn’t going to be endorsed by Apple.

— anon

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Numbers in Concert:

I probably like this one more than you.

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“ It is easy to see how the modern academic discipline reproduces all the salient features of the professionalized occupation. It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields.

— Professionalization in the academy - Louis Menand

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“ Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers.

— Joseph Henrich et al.

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“ This is interestingly at odds with of our general tendency to avoid regimentation and structure, though we accept more at work than at home. It seems that at some level we miss and/or admire folks whose lives are tightly structured and defined by a particular strong standard identity… How much have we lost by not having the better-defined social roles of our ancestors?

— Costumes And Identity - Robin Hanson

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“ I’ve been saying that a public option with negotiated rates probably won’t post much of a price advantage against private insurers. But according to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf), that’s an overoptimistic take. The public option’s premiums, they say, will actually be more expensive than private insurance

— Will the public plan have higher premiums than private insurance? - Ezra Klein

The Public Option: it’s fannnnntastic

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Not For Mail:

Don’t you even think about it

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