Quoted: By her own words, Sarah Palin is dumb. Here's the excerpt of pages 255-257 of "Going Rogue: An American Life":

Quoted: I wish Daniel Defoe had had occasion to debate with Nick Griffin.

Quoted: While putting together this post, I had a hard time with the title. I was going to include the words retro or vintage but then I thought - Are most of these retro or are some of these modern? Here was my conclusion: While some of these illustrations have that retro-feel, most are a modern take on a movie classic. What these artists have done so well is take a particular scene or character and create a visual representation of the movie. Most of the time, rather than bombard us with visuals, they ask us to draw on our experiences. From Olly Moss's incredibly simplistic black and red movie posters to Tom Whalen and Brandon Schaefer's more colorful, retro-inspired art, I hope you enjoy this collection of some of the most cleverest and coolest retro-modern movie illustrations around! Rain Man Olly Moss American History X Olly Moss Big Spacesick Back to the Future Spacesick The Shining R Black Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back Tom Whalen The Wizard of Oz Tom Whalen Transformers Tom Whalen Dawn of the Dead Tom Whalen Ghost Busters Brandon Schaefer The Dark Knight Brandon Schaefer Big Trouble in Little China Tyler Scout Inglorious Bastards Tyler Scout Watchmen Ian Vanderhoff Up Eric Tan The Incredibles Eric Tan Ratatouille Eric Tan Spiderman ~ninjaink The Harry Potter Series M.S. Corley (Not all movies yet, but soon to be!) Other Awesome Movie Art: My Modern Movies, Reimagined (8 Pics) Film the Blanks: Test Your Movie Poster Knowledge (10 Examples) Smurf Wars! - 3 Awesome Illustrations

This is sweet.

Quoted: In 2002, two psychologists found a business opportunity selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

Quoted: Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient’s room? Considering the importance of a patient’s frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient’s care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations?
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I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.

Quoted: This isn't the post for another summary of computational models of dopamine activity - see here and here, if you're interested - but suffice to say that our brain cells are finely tuned to want more information about stuff which they already know. In essence, these cells work by constantly striving to reduce their "prediction-error signal," which is the gap between what these cells expect to happen and what actually occurs. If a monkey has been trained to get a squirt of juice everytime a bell is rung, then these dopaminergic cells quickly learn that the bell predicts the sweet reward. As a result, they want more information about that specific rewarding stimulus. What, for instance, predicts the bell? Maybe the scientist flicks a switch before ringing the bell? Or maybe he scratches his nose? Or maybe he simply enters the room? What numerous experiments have found is that our dopamine neurons aren't interested in responding to the reward itself - instead, they want to find the first reliable bit of information that predicts the reward. This is why we crave new facts: they are means of updating our old facts, of extending our cognitive models forward in time

Quoted: Over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong has a great summary of a new paper trying to figure out why information (at least in ...