Railing against Drone Warfare [article]

Rev. Dr. Paul F M Zahl argues against the US’s increased use of drones in warfare from a moral perspective:

Our use of drones are out of “proportion” because it uses the most advanced technology in the world to assassinate people who can basically only throw the equivalent of sticks and stones back at you. Moreover, it gives these people no chance to surrender. It is like capital punishment without an arrest, a charge, a trial, or a right of appeal.

Our use of drones is not humane, because it totally objectifies the enemy by making them into a picture on a screen. There is not the faintest possibility, in the conduct of drone warfare by means of remote control, that you can regard the enemy as a fellow human citizen of the planet.

The whistled language of Oaxaco, Mexico [Documentary]

Whistled language is a rare form of communication that can be mostly found in locations with isolating features such as scattered settlements or mountainous terrain.  Watch this documentary of Dr. Mark Sicoli conducting field studies among speakers of this language who live in northern Oaxaco in Mexico.

Posner on business ethics [Article]

Posner dissects the concept of free-market self regulation, & business ethics (to me, the term is an oxymoron) – and lays it bare for what it really is

Competition is doubtless essential to the efficient production and distribution of goods and services. But it is not an antidote to unethical practices by producers and distributors.

The question is whether his advocacy for more regulation is actually a solution at all?

The Monty Hall Problem and Schrodinger’s Cat [Article]

Scott Adams discusses the Monty Hall Problem & Schrodinger’s Cat, and our brains inability to understand reality at its most basic level.

Monty Hall is a game show host. You are given a choice of three doors. One has a car behind it, the other two have goats. If you pick the door with the car, you win it. Your odds are 1-in-3.

So you pick a door, but before it opens, Monty opens one of the other two doors to reveal a goat. He asks if you want to switch from the door you initially picked to the other closed door. Your brain says the odds are the same for any closed door, so you stay. But in fact, the odds are twice as good if you switch doors.

Sleep in your genes [Article]

How much sleep do you need? Depends on your genes, claim a group of geneticists from University of California.

In 2009, a team led by geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California San Francisco discovered a mother and daughter who went to bed very late, yet were up bright and early every morning. Even when they had the chance to have a lie-in at the weekend (a tell-tale sign that you are sleep-deprived) they didn’t take it. Tests revealed that both mother and daughter carried a mutation of a gene called hDEC2. When the researchers tweaked the same gene in mice and in flies, they found that they also began to sleep less 

Management exists to minimize the problems created by its own hiring mistakes [Article]

Thus says Scott Adams, referring to a video game company called Valve who have 400 employees, & no management structure, & his own start-up (about which he’s sharing very little, at least yet).  He reckons that the

need for management will shrink- at least for some type of businesses – because entrepreneurs have the tools to make fewer hiring mistakes in the first place 

Theodor Geisel’s book of art [Artivle]

Ted Geisel NYWTS 2 crop.jpgTheodor Seuss Geisel was well known as Dr. Seuss for his children’s picture books. He wasn’t as well known for his humorous story about n-u-d-i-s-t sisters, as Maria Popova helps us discover in the Atlantic. Take a look through “The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts concerning History’s barest family”.