Alexander Kruel

"As I noted the biggest problem for biological group selection is that groups are clumsy & lumbering organisms in an evolutionary sense. They don't reproduce fast, and may not exhibit enough distinctiveness to become a coherent unit of selection. Multicellular organisms face the problem of being slow to respond to evolutionary pressures in relation to their pathogens, ergo, sex. The nature of sexual process is also essential in mediating intragenomic competition and conflicts, the details of which serve as the core of Mark Ridley's book The Cooperative Gene." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"The post I got this from doesn't contain any details, nor does it contain useful links to the making of this particular video, but looking around the top level of the blog it's fairly clear that this was put together from a large number of individual videos of people singing just one part of the song. He's got another piece underway, and you can see some of the individual parts. This is one of those really cool and impossible-to-predict things you get with the modern Internet. And I think this stuff is ultimately a lot cooler than anything coming out of the blogging-as-journalism model." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

Great! - Alexander Kruel

"A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a miniature prototype of a machine that could one day climb from Earth to outer space. The idea of a space elevator — passengers and cargo traveling up and down a 60,000-mile cable — has long been a fixture of science fiction, notably in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “The Fountains of Paradise.”" - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"Dave blows up some tantalum and electrolytic capacitors in front of his new 300fps Sanyo Xacti high speed camcorder!" - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"Kessler fearlessly accuses major restaurant chains of a crime they brag about, relying on unnamed “insiders” to reveal that comestible pushers such as Cinnabon and The Cheesecake Factory deliberately make their food delicious—or, as he breathlessly puts it, “design food specifically to be highly hedonic.” Kessler certainly has the goods on the corporate conspiracy to serve people food they like. “We come up with craveable flavors, and the consumers come back, even days later,” a “research chef at Chili’s” confesses to him. Kessler also reveals that Nabisco lures Oreo eaters through a dastardly combination of sweet white filling and crunchy, bittersweet chocolate wafers, achieving “what’s called dynamic contrast.” Or maybe it’s “what the industry calls ‘dynamic novelty,’ ” as Kessler claims in another Oreo discussion elsewhere in the book. Either way, it’s so good it must be bad." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"First, let me say it has been a pleasure to read Denialism, a book I've wanted to dig into ever since you came to speak about it to our Knight Science Journalism Fellows seminar at MIT. It's heartening to see another author beating the drum about America's dysfunctional relationship with science, and making the point so vividly and memorably. Your narrative about vaccine skeptics' attacks on an unassuming and rigorous scientist like Harvard's Marie McCormick—whom I have also interviewed—made me so angry I wanted to hurl the book across the room (and that's a good thing!)." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

Who wants to try it? Some scientist maybe? I don't know... - Alexander Kruel

Still online? - Alexander Kruel

"We think the single most important idea about climate change is the optimistic one, that, given global will and a lot of effort to develop the truly sustainable technologies we need, we could emerge from some difficult years to a much more positive future, in which a stable global population lives prosperously and sustainably, supported by the ample energy resources of the sun." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"Beautiful candidates are indeed more likely to be elected, with a one standard deviation increase in beauty associated with a 1 ½– 2 percentage point increase in voteshare. Our results are robust to several specification checks: adding party fixed effects, dropping well-known politicians, using non-Australian beauty raters, omitting candidates of non-Anglo appearance, controlling for age, and analyzing the ‘beauty gap’ between candidates running in the same electorate. The marginal effect of beauty is larger for male candidates than for female candidates. … Consistent with the theory that returns to beauty reflect discrimination, we find suggestive evidence that beauty matters more in electorates with a higher share of apathetic voters." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

""Toward a Civilization of Collective Intelligence" identifies the most important changes that have happened in our society. The slides introduce the necessity of a new language that can set a link between the machine process of cyberspace and the human collective intelligence, which is dynamic, in constant change and made in different languages, from different approaches. We need a language that represent the essence of Collective Intelligence as a Virtual World, understanding this term not only as a space where we can interact as avatars but as a global space that is formed by the human actions, their objects and interaction." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”" - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion." - Alexander Kruel

"Trying to draw a line between what could and couldn’t have been any other way under the circumstances is of course misguided. There is not even a gradient of degree of choice on which to draw a line for practical purposes. Everything was determined. But there is another important gradient. The key factor is how different reality would have needed to be for the person to make a different ‘choice’." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

Uh just noticed people can't even subscribe to your stream via RSS. You have to register to even see it :-( - Alexander Kruel

Facebook is so confusing... - Alexander Kruel

"This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"Ted Chiang has never written a novel, but he’s one of the top writers in science fiction today. He writes short stories and novellas, and he isn’t very prolific with those. He just comes out with a story every year or so that does everything right. You know how some people are ideas writers, and their ideas are so amazingly brilliant that you don’t care they can’t really write character and plot? Ted Chiang is like that, except that his characters and plots are that good as well." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

You can download his latest here: http://www.nightshadebooks.com/downloa... -- I haven't read anything by him yet... - Alexander Kruel

"The story is about a scientist from a race of air-driven mechanical beings who constructs a device to dissect his own brain, and in the process discovers something alarming about his world which will lead to his race's doom." - Alexander Kruel

"Americans should not be surprised at democratization shifting a political culture toward more religiosity. In the American republic expansion of suffrage to all white males resulted in a more evangelical religious political class. It is likely that the first five American presidents, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe would not be considered Christians by the American public today because of their personal beliefs (or lack thereof).* In many nations the anti-clerical and laicist faction tends draw strength from a segment of the elite which perceives itself as progressive or liberal in thought, at least before more widespread secularization percolates across the society." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"Let’s all take a walk with Terence McKenna in the rainforest and talk about psychedelics, shall we?" - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet