Extra Credit: Weekend Reading List
Here are some good reads from the last week or so that you may have missed. I tweet these through the week and collect them in a post every Friday. Follow The Syllabi on Twitter if you prefer the trickle feed. Open this in your browser to see Read Later buttons.
- The fractal dimension of zip codes
- Bilingualism has some interesting cognitive benefits
- Scientists are finding out that “forbidden colors” — composed of pairs of hues that cancel each other out in your eye — can be seen if you know how to look for them
- Cooking is shifting from being an artistic pursuit, leading to increasing scientific rigor in the kitchen
- What happens to the brain under anesthesia is one of medicine’s biggest mysteries and scientists hope to map neural circuits to solve some its mystery, and use it to answer questions about consciousness
- The distinction between anxiety and fear is important for the task of treating and defining anxiety disorders
- As the demand for gold skyrockets, miners are destroying invaluable rainforest to get at it
- We have more people in correctional facilities in the U.S. now that there were in Stalin’s gulags—more than six million—why do we lock so many people up?
- The terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were invented by a journalist in protest of making same-sex erotic behavior illegal, but deeply unscientific psychiatrists are responsible for the value judgments attached to the terms
- How did the Glock become America’s weapon of choice?
- Games like Zynga’s abuse Skinner-like “dark patterns” to lull users into easy stimulation and spending excessive amounts of money
- How the broken economics of academic publishing let JSTOR get away with charging universities thousands of dollars to access their own research
- Was Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man a collaborative effort?
