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• Icesave but you pay: the (im)potence of people power | Heinrich Böll Stiftung - "Since the advent of the phenomenon of globalisation, one of the pet topics of political scientists has been the double-bind that governments have found themselves in. On the one hand, the integrated financial markets make it paramount to play according to set rules of fiscal prudence and to heed warnings issued by international credit institutions and credit-rating agencies. This is a prerequisite in order to be able to borrow, and borrowing is in turn prerequisite for running a government. This international finance dictate however puts governments at odds with their citizens, who typically care most about their living standards and job prospects, and who want to see public spending for the tax money they put in. The bond markets v. citizens dilemma is less apparent in times of economic growth, but in times of economic recession it becomes acute."
• Your Computer Really Is a Part of You | Wired Science | Wired.com - "Computer malfunction made test subjects aware of it — what Heidegger called “unreadiness-at-hand” — and the computer was no longer part of their cognition. [...] “The thing that does the thinking is bigger than your biological body,” he said. “You’re so tightly coupled to the tools you use that they’re literally part of you as a thinking, behaving thing.”
• http://ix.io/ - A nerdy pastebin.
• Fitts's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a model of human movement in human-computer interaction and ergonomics which predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to and the size of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer display using a pointing device. It was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954. [...] Fitts's law is an unusually successful and well-studied model. Experiments that reproduce Fitts's results and/or that demonstrate the applicability of Fitts's law in somewhat different situations are not difficult to perform. The measured data in such experiments often fit a straight line with a correlation coefficient of 0.95 or higher, a sign that the model is very accurate."
• Amazon.com: Light and Color in the Outdoors (Light & Color in the Outdoors) (9780387979359): Marcel Minnaert, L. Seymour: Books - "All of science springs from the observations of nature. In this classic book, the late Marcel Minnaert accompanies the reader on a tour of nature's light and color and reveals the myriad phenomena that may be observed outdoors with no more than a pair of sharp eyes and an enquiring mind. From the intriguing shape of the dapples beneath a tree on a sunny day, to rainbows, mirages, and haloes, to the colors of liquid, ice, and the sky, to the appearance of the sun, moon, planets, and stars - Minnaert describes and explains them all in a clear language accessible to the general reader."
• Scott and Scurvy (via http://ff.im/heJV0) - "This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems. But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived."
• Curved Spaces (via http://ff.im/h1Shl) - "Curved Spaces is a flight simulator for multiconnected universes. Such toy universes are the 3D analog of the torus and Klein bottle on which the simpler 2D Torus Games are played. Because light itself wraps around such a space, inhabitants see their universe’s contents repeating in a crystaline pattern, like a hall of mirrors but with no reflection. Curved Spaces is intended for undergraduates and graduate students studying 3-manifolds, and has also found use as a research tool in topology and cosmology."
• St Stallman: A Hero of the Highest Order | things twice - "There are different ways of being wrong, and RMS is wrong in the right way. It’s quite simple: if “we” are the people who fight the influence of corporate power and who acknowledge and resist the drive towards that power: the power over people and people’s minds that comes from controlling the economy, then “we” can never win as long as software has any importance in and influence over people’s lives. [...] We can’t, because when moral obligation, the quest for redemption, or just an overwhelming empathy enters the prisoners’ dilemma, there is a chance that insanity lies just around the corner."
• YouTube - Glottal Opera - Vocal cords singing, filmed with a fiber optic camera inserted through the nose.
• UMNTU NGUMNTU NGABANTU: ‘A PERSON IS A PERSON BECAUSE OF OTHER PERSONS’: THE ETHOS OF THE PRE-COLONIAL XHOSA-SPEAKING PEOPLE AS PRESENTED IN FACT AND YOUNG ADULT FICTION | Tanya Barben - "Essential to the Xhosa-speaking people’s belief system and way of life is ubuntu expressed in the saying umntu ngumntu ngabantu translated as a person is a person because of other persons. Ubuntu is a word existing in all black languages of South Africa, without an equivalent in any European language. It can best be summarized as a philosophy of life that encompasses brotherliness, togetherness, hospitality, solidarity and mutual support of each other and the community within which one exists. It is a kind of insurance, with a man giving as much as he can on one day in case he is in need on another. It also means having sound moral values. The individual is a harmonious part of society, but the society is nothing without the individual."
• Quining Qualia (Daniel Dennett) - "My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special. [...] Rigorous arguments only work on well-defined materials, and since my goal is to destroy our faith in the pretheoretical or "intuitive" concept, the right tools for my task are intuition pumps, not formal arguments. What follows is a series of fifteen intuition pumps, posed in a sequence designed to flush out--and then flush away--the offending intuitions."
• THE ECONOMISTS' NEW CLOTHES | Adam Curtis Blog | BBC (via http://ff.im/gFtaI) - "And when you examine the roots of the neoliberal idea of the market it gets odder still. The ideas that rose up in the post-war years that captured the imagination of people like Mrs Thatcher are actually a very strange mutation of capitalism. If you listen to interviews with Friedrich Hayek he talks far more like a cold war systems engineer discussing information signals and feedback than Adam Smith with his theories of Moral Sentiment. While the roots of the technical systems that the banks created to manage risk also lie back in the cybernetic dreams of the 1950s and 60s. Dreams not of progress through the dynamism of markets - but of using computers to create a balanced, almost frozen world. - just like in the Cold War. Which raises the question - have we misunderstood what we have lived through since 1979?"
• Are you ready for some free fall? | The National Newspaper - "Eventually we pile into a luxury bus and head out to the highway, where traffic is stopped so that truly important citizens can follow state and city police escorts through the traffic while the rest of us wait for them to pass. In America, you don’t have to be the President’s brother or cousin to merit special treatment. Anyone with money can buy the local cops, along with the obeisance of fellow motorists; for a brief moment it must feel amazing. As we sit in traffic, bets are taken on who will get the high score on a new iPhone app called Urinal Test. I like these men. They behave like pigs because that is what the orderly functioning of the markets demands."
• Ask HN: Lightweight Programmer's CMS? | Hacker News - Lots of them.
• Reply to Himma: Personal Identity and Cartesian Intuitions | Thomas Metzinger [PDF] - "It is not clear to me how it could come as a surprise that neurophysiological states turn out to be nothing over and above neurophysiological states. [...] Here is what the theory really says: the self-model performs certain functional operations for the system itself and represents their outputs to the system itself. The PSM is neither the subject nor the object of conscious self-representation. The whole point of the theory is to avoid the typical classical fallacies in German idealism that claim an identity of subject and object for the special case of self-knowledge and are then not able to give an account of the epistemicity of the underlying relation anymore. The PSM is not a little man in the head, an agent that performs functional operations. Rather, it is an instrument developed by the system as a whole to satisfy its needs. It also is not an epistemic agent representing information to itself—instead, it is a vital part of the system as a whole that achieves this."