wordsleuth

The sympathetic image Rauch's article paints of the introverted personality is very seductive. I felt an odd sense of relief after reading it as I do tend to be withdrawn around groups. But the more I think about it, the more that I feel that there is a danger in identifying with manichaeistic labels like introvert and extrovert. Some people do have serious personality issues and may require help. Encouraging them in their delusion is harmful to society.

Michael Crichton cites reasons why "scientific consensus" is anything but science. His examples of how often the idea of consenus crops up in public policy debates on nuclear proliferation or second-hand smoking or global warming illustrate the serious consequences of bad science.

This is a fairly accurate characterization of how Chinese characters work. Also a very interesting thought experiment. Only a handful of Chinese characters are 'pictographs' in the strictest sense - i.e. pictures of physical things or entities. The vast majority of characters have phonetic/semantic components that make reading and understanding the language about as easy as it is for educated natives of any other tongue.

For those who find this fascinating, Donald Norman's book "The Design of Everyday Things" is a must-read.

Beautiful, but made me think of contrails, pollution and the wealthy.

Or just hit F5 before you save to insert the date and time.

The "broken windows theory" has been used by policymakers often enough that any attempt to substantiate it with experiments is a noble and practical endeavor. The findings reported here seem to indicate that the character of a neighborhood causes people to behave criminally or inconsiderately. Crime is more likely to occur in "bad" neighborhoods not only because they attract bad people to them, but also because they sway otherwise law-abiding people who pass through them to break the rules.However, this article provides percentages, but does not report how many people were observed in these field experiments. This is what is frustrating about articles like this; they just redact scientific studies without bothering to evaluate their credibility. But the fact that the original study was published in Science does give it some weight.

The forums here are among the best I've seen on the Internet. Forum members have always responded quickly to my questions (in my case, questions concerning French). Lots of native speakers of French, and probably Italian and Spanish too, frequent the forums.