Quoted: Quality of sleep is not something to be taken lightly, and yet so many geeks have trouble sleeping at night. Aside from the obvious (going to a doctor), there are a number of things you can try to get a better night's sleep, ranging from sleep-tracking alarm clocks to software that lulls you into a slumber.

Quoted: A fun pattern has emerged among the Republican efforts to reach out to voters through the new social-networking online media: They're failing massively, with episodes that just make them look stupid and ham-fisted, and even sometimes force them to apologize for offending people.

Quoted: I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.

Quoted: But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.

Quoted: On the outside, both cars look vaguely similar to other souped-up rides, with scissor-doors, carbon fiber-trim, and other tuner-ish bling. On the inside, however, the Air Force influence becomes startlingly clear. The X-1 is tricked-out like a jet cockpit, with an ejection seat (non-functioning, we assume) and an instrumentation panel to make any gizmo junkie's heart race. The Vapor's interior is done in two-seat style, with a bonus steering wheel for the passenger and a special "stealth mode" for the exhaust system. If the Air Force was looking for "shock and awe", Galpin totally delivered.

Quoted: “Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States’ universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education (e.g., gross enrollment at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) and performance on mathematics and reading assessments from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) project. They also correlate with components of the Failed States Index and several other measures of economic and political development of nations. Conservatism scores have higher correlations with economic and political measures than estimated IQ scores.

Quoted: The participants went to a sleep clinic, where they followed their normal sleep schedule. At 1.5 hours after waking up and again at 10.5 hours, they had to perform a task that required sustained attention. The researchers found no difference in the attention levels of the two groups at 1.5 hours after waking, but the night owls were more focused than the early birds after 10.5 hours spent awake.

Quoted: Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

Quoted: There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

Quoted: In retrospect, we didn’t have the proper appreciation for risk, but who did? We were children of the bull market. Even at its top, my investment portfolio was never anything to write home about. Its saving grace was that it was mine. And I imagined that when we did cash out, at 60 or 65, I would pass my time buying my wife semisubstantial pieces of jewelry and going bass fishing like the men in Flomax commercials.

Quoted: Well, goodbye to all that. I took a random walk down Wall Street and got hit by a bus.

Quoted: Thrust enhancers, roll bars, microchips...the $20 billion running - shoe industry wants us to believe that the latest technologies will cushion every stride. Yet in this extract from his controversial new book, Christopher McDougall claims that injury rates for runners are actually on the rise, that everything we've been told about running shoes is wrong - and that it might even be better to go barefoot...