Asking the Tough Questions

ESPN, always digging deep, and figuring what people want to know... like what will the results of all 16 Saints' games be:

You know, as opposed to the other 31 teams in the NFL, for whom telling the future is either too difficult, or un-interesting.

Inattentional Deafness

Here's the lead:

One of the most famous experiments in cognitive psychology (pdf) involved a person in a gorilla suit walking through a basketball game between two teams of players, one dressed in white, the other in black. Told to count passes between the players in white, most people who watched a video of this scene completely failed to notice the gorilla.

more at: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2012/07/introducing-inattentional-deafness.html 

Politics and the Weather

another repost, paraphrasing here:

Political and cultural beliefs have more to do with perceptions of recent temperature than any other factor:

Individualists, who often object to environmental regulations as an infringement on their freedoms, tended to think the temperatures hadn’t gone up in their area, regardless of whether they had. Strong egalitarians, in contrast, tended to believe the temperatures had gone up.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/07/ideology-clouds-how-we-perceive-the-temperatures/

Why Italy (and Greece and Spain) are in debt, not to mention why other westerners have been calling them (us?) lazy for 200 years:

Today, Sicily’s regional government has 1,800 employees — more than the British Cabinet Office — and the island employs 26,000 auxiliary forest rangers; in the vast forestlands of British Columbia, there are fewer than 1,500. 

Out of a population of five million people in Sicily, the state directly or indirectly employs more than 100,000 of them and pays pensions to many more. It changed its pension system eight years after the rest of Italy. (One retired politician recently won a case to keep an annual pension of 480,000 euros, about $584,000.)

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/sicily-fact-of-the-day.html

Olympic Sailing NOT on TV

why have sports that won't be televised at all???  Learn from the America's cup here folks:

Team racing, match racing, catamarans, skiffs, windsurfing, and kiting would be a lot of fun to have on TV.  Everything else is boring to watch, so find a different way to celebrate the sport internationally. That said, good luck to all my friends over in England competing.

Is it just preference?

Krugman may wax nostalgic about a childhood spent in the suburbs where plumbers and middle managers lived side by side. But I doubt that many of his fervent fans would really want to live there. If so, they might try Texas.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-19/how-the-elites-built-america-s-economic-wall.html 

From the department of unintended consequences:

“They also receive free dental and medical services during their imprisonment. “Combined with the relative safety of their work in prison compared to the dangerous work at sea, Australian imprisonment is very desirable.”

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/marginalrevolution/hCQh/~3/XyRhDWuoJFE/immigration-to-australian-jail.html