This post from Shanghai makes me wonder how widespread is the notion of counting sheep.
There’s a Dell one and a Sun one
And a Blue one and a Compaq one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all run just the same.
One patient’s account of depression lifted by electrodes. (Cited by SciTech Daily.)
Greg Cochran, whom I once knew slightly, is mentioned in The Economist for his theory that the high rate of neural disorders among Ashkenazi Jews is a result of natural selection for intelligence. (Also cited by SciTech Daily.)
Tyler Cowen (cited by Travis) quotes a NYT article:
. . . participants [at a retreat for autistics] . . . can wear color-coded badges that indicate whether they are willing to be approached for conversation.
and remarks:
I will be very happy if this ever becomes socially acceptable practice for non-autistics . . .
When I had a cubicle to call my own, I would sometimes put up a little sign:
CAUTION
TEMPORARY ACUTE SURLINESS ZONE
No one ever gave me grief about it, and I can’t recall that anyone even asked what it meant; I guess they assumed I was busy.
Robin Hanson: Is Fairness About Clear Fitness Signals?
Ryan Sager: The Killing of Peter McWilliams
Linda Schrock Taylor: Great Ideas of Homeschooling
. . By the way, I recently tried to post a comment on an old entry, and ran into a bug. If you yearn to express yourself and are similarly frustrated, there’s always mail.
Ron Paul, last of the small-government conservatives (in public office), warns of a scheme for mandatory mental “health” screening of children. Astraea hosts a longer similar piece.
quoth Paul Graham:
But VCs are mistaken to look for the next Microsoft, because no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM.
Tehee. In the same essay:
Because you can’t tell a great hacker except by working with him, hackers themselves can’t tell how good they are. This is true to a degree in most fields. I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. The people I’ve met who do great work rarely think that they’re doing great work. They generally feel that they’re stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it’s only a matter of time until they’re found out.
Why, that’s just how I feel! Do you suppose . . . ?
(Perry Metzger pointed me to Graham’s essays.)
One David Mortensen observes:
. . . language is a code employed only by code-breakers: that none of us knows the language we speak as a fully explicit system. Instead, we bluff our way through, filling in the gaps in our knowledge of the code with an inference here and a leap of logic there. This capacity to extrapolate from the known to the unknown is, in essense, grammar. . . .
(Cited by languagehat)