Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation - "We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability (“nature”) versus environment (“nurture”). Using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records, we first show that children’s chances of becoming inventors vary sharply with characteristics at birth, such as their race, gender, and parents’ socioeconomic class. For example, children from high-income (top 1%) families are 10 times as likely to become inventors as those from below-median income families. These gaps persist even among children with similar math test scores in early childhood—which are highly predictive of innovation rates—suggesting that the gaps may be driven by differences in environment rather than abilities to innovate. We directly establish the importance of environment by showing that exposure to innovation during childhood has significant causal effects on children’s propensities to invent. Children whose families move to a high-innovation area when they are young are more likely to become inventors. These exposure effects are technology class and gender specific. Children who grow up in a neighborhood or family with a high innovation rate in a specific technology class are more likely to patent in exactly the same class. Girls are more likely to invent in a particular class if they grow up in an area with more women (but not men) who invent in that class. These gender- and technology class–specific exposure effects are more likely to be driven by narrow mechanisms, such as role-model or network effects, than factors that only affect general human capital accumulation, such as the quality of schools. Consistent with the importance of exposure effects in career selection, women and disadvantaged youth are as underrepresented among high-impact inventors as they are among inventors as a whole. These findings suggest that there are many “lost Einsteins”—individuals who would have had highly impactful inventions had they been exposed to innovation in childhood—especially among women, minorities, and children from low-income families."
World’s Longest Running Scam: The Academy - "We generally decide to overlook evidence against our preferred narrative. Since the only people likely to be able to marshal that evidence are other academics, who share the same bias, we’re usually safe. Aside: Here’s something we like to do in philosophy: we cite statistics about the earnings of philosophy majors, post-graduation — which turn out to be pretty good, compared to most majors. We then either state, or leave it as implied, that philosophy improves your earnings potential. Ironically, philosophy should teach you to be critical of that sort of reasoning. (Ever hear about a little distinction between “treatment effects” and “selection effects”? I guess maybe that’s more of a sciencey topic, so philosophers wouldn’t get it.)... Here’s what we’re really doing.
a. Administering a really long, really expensive IQ and personality test.
b. Producing prestige.
c. Indoctrinating students.
d. Attacking rationality.
e. Playing intellectual games with each other...
When we lament the anti-intellectual trend in conservatism, we should look at the way intellectuals have been dismissing conservative ideas and shamelessly propagandizing for left-wing ideology. Of course conservatives would become anti-intellectual."
Arachnophobic Entomologists: When Two More Legs Make a Big Difference - "For some entomologists, an apparent paradox exists: Despite choosing a career working with insects, they exhibit negative feelings toward spiders which range from mild disgust to extreme arachnophobia. An article in American Entomologist features the results of a survey involving 41 arachnophobic entomologists who were asked questions about their fear of spiders. Although most entomologists had low scores (indicating mild disgust or mild fear), they still claimed to react differently to spiders than to insects. On the other end of the spectrum, some respondents scored in the clinically arachnophobic range and react to spiders in an almost debilitating manner."
Deleting the h from /watch? of any YouTube video takes you to hell : Weird - "It's making use of 2 channels, 1 with a username of 666 and another with a username of watc. When you remove h from the url, it can't parse the query string (the part after the ?) anymore, as it's a query string for the watch url. So instead, it tries to open the profile with the name watc."
Psychologists say a good life doesn’t have to be happy, or even meaningful - "According to Aristotlean theory, the first kind of life would be classified as “hedonic”—one based on pleasure, comfort, stability, and strong social relationships. The second is “eudaimonic,” primarily concerned with the sense of purpose and fulfillment one gets by contributing to the greater good. The ancient Greek philosopher outlined these ideas in his treatise Nicomachean Ethics, and the psychological sciences have pretty much stuck them ever since when discussing the possibilities of what people might want out of their time on Earth. But a new paper, published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Review, suggests there’s a another way to live a good life. It isn’t focused on happiness or purpose, but rather it’s a life that’s “psychologically rich.”... it’s one characterized by “interesting experiences in which novelty and/or complexity are accompanied by profound changes in perspective.”"
Cats' weekslong Vitamix standoff is entertaining thousands of people on Facebook - "Jessica Gerson-Neeves and her wife, Nikii, are really looking forward to using their new Vitamix blender to whip up smoothies and soups. In fact, the highly anticipated Black Friday purchase has recently become the focal point of their kitchen at home in British Columbia, Canada. There's just one problem: They can't actually unpack it. "It arrived in the mail on Dec. 16, and I brought it inside and set the box down on the kitchen floor for just a quick second," Gerson-Neeves says. "And that was a month ago." The cardboard box has become the site of a weekslong turf war between the couple and their three cats, in a saga that has garnered thousands of invested followers on social media."
Dara Khosrowshahi: Uber CEO works on app for a day and reveals how much drivers can make - "Twitter users asked him to share a detailed breakdown of his trips on the food delivery app, and the log of deliveries he posted showed that he earned $106.71 during a half-day period, meaning his hourly rate was roughly $30 an hour, well above the local, state and federal minimum wages... According to April 2021 data from the company, an Uber driver in San Francisco on the app for 20 hours a week earns a median wage of $25.28 per hour before tips or expenses."
Grains vs. tubers and the fate of civilizations - "The most advanced civilizations all tended to cultivate grain crops, like wheat and barley and corn. Less advanced societies tended to rely on root crops like potatoes, taro, and manioc. It's not that grains crops were much easier to grow than tubers, or that they provided more food, the economists say. Instead, the economists believe that grains crops transformed the politics of the societies that grew them, while tubers held them back. Call it the curse of the potato... Crops like wheat are harvested once or twice a year, yielding piles of small, dry grains. These can be stored for long periods of time, and are easily transported - or stolen. Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. Yuca, for instance, grows year-round and in ancient times, people only dug it up right before it was eaten. This provided some protection against theft in ancient times. It's hard for bandits to make off with your harvest when most of it is in the ground, instead of stockpiled in a granary somewhere. But the fact that grains posed a security risk may have been a blessing in disguise. The economists believe that societies cultivating crops like wheat and barley may have experienced extra pressure to protect their harvests, galvanizing the creation of warrior classes and the development of complex hierarchies and taxation schemes. "Since the grain has to be harvested within a short period and then stored for use until the next harvest, a visiting tax collector could readily confiscate part of the stored produce"... In many places, grains do not feed more people, acre for acre, than tubers. Potatoes, in particular, are an amazingly nutritious plant. The choice between cultivating cereals and tubers, where it existed, depended on local growing conditions. Societies tend to grow crops that yield the most calories. In some places, that meant potatoes. In other places, that meant wheat. When the economists examined that agricultural data, they found that more fertile regions did not necessarily yield more complex societies. The crucial factor wasn't the amount of food that a society could produce; it was the type of food they chose as their main crop - grain or tuber... Increasingly, anthropologists say that the key to understanding the rise of civilization is to study political and religious institutions. Many now believe that societies took up farming not out of necessity, but for cultural reasons - to please a king or to satisfy their religion... Historians once believed that people were forced into farming because of overpopulation, but evidence shows that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was more than enough to satisfy people's needs. Moreover, agriculture seems to have begun in places where there was already plenty of wild food, and stable populations of people. There must have been some other motivation, besides desire for food. Bone records show the earliest farmers were shorter and sicker than their hunter-gathering peers. It appears that early farming was much more miserable than foraging... A famous paper by Qian, an economist at Yale and Nathan Nunn, an economist at Harvard, argues that the white potato revolutionized agriculture in Europe after being brought over from the Americas. It dramatically increased the amount of food that people could grow, particularly in places unsuitable for grain agriculture. Between 1700 and 1900, the world population nearly tripled; Qian and Nunn give the potato a large chunk of the credit."
Meme - "Hey David. Recognize this? IT'S YOUR WIFE's sock. SHE LIVES WITH ME NOW. SHE SAID THAT SHE WANTS TO BE WITH A MAN WHO DOESN'T PLAY CALL OF DUTY ALL DAY, WHO IS BETTER SOCIALLY
SORRY DAVID, BUT SOMETIMES LIFE THROWS A WAKE UP CALL - YOU CAN EITHER STAY DOWN OR DUST YOURSELF OFF AND SAY, "THIS ISN'T WHERE I WANT TO BE, BUT THIS IS WHERE I AM, AND I MUST MAKE MY WAY HOME"
Here are some words from your incredible wife: "Dont contact my parents xxx""
Man jailed over upskirt videos, including those of another man dressed in women’s clothes
Man caught peeing on ex-wife's grave by her kids - "A man with an apparent 48-year grudge has been going each morning to urinate on the grave of his ex, much to the horror of her furious kids, who realized something was wrong when they discovered bags of poop left at their mom’s final resting place... Murphy said the video and pictures he and his sister got indicated that the man drove to the cemetery almost every morning between 6:14 a.m. and 6:18 a.m. with his current wife, got out of the car, walked to Torello’s grave and peed on it. “I can’t get my wife to go out to dinner but this guy gets his wife to go along with him to desecrate my mom’s remains every morning!”"
Is Disgust a "Conservative" Emotion? - PubMed - "Extant political-psychological research has identified stable, context-independent differences between conservatives and liberals in a wide range of preferences and psychological processes. One consistent finding is that conservatives show higher disgust sensitivity than liberals. This finding, however, is predominantly based on assessments of disgust to specific elicitors, which confound individuals' sensitivity and propensity to the experience of disgust with the extent to which they find specific elicitors disgusting. Across five studies, we vary specific elicitors of disgust, showing that the relations between political orientation and disgust sensitivity depend on the specific set of elicitors used. We also show that disgust sensitivity is not associated with political orientation when measured with an elicitor-unspecific scale. Taken together, our findings suggest that the differences between conservatives and liberals in disgust sensitivity are context dependent rather than a stable personality difference. Broader theoretical implications are discussed."
No, Conservatives Don’t Experience Feelings Of Disgust Any More Than Liberals – Research Digest - "liberals were more affected by the liberal-disgust scenarios, while conservatives were more disgusted by the conservative-disgust selection"
Meme - "SURPRISINGLY RECENTLY INVENTED FOODS
foods invented since World War II that feel older than they are
nachos 1940
apple crumble 1940s
spaghetti carbonara 1944
currywurst 1949
butter chicken 1950s
Mongolian barbecue 1951
Shopska salad 1955
fartons 1960
Hawaiian pizza 1962
carpaccio 1963
Doner kebab sandwich 1960s
tiramisu 1960s
sticky toffee pudding 1960s
uramaki 1960s
banoffee pie 1971
chicken tikka masala 1970s
General Tso's chicken 1970s
pasta primavera 1975
tartiflette 1980s
chocolate fondant 1981
ciabatta 1982
bubble tea 1980s
salmon sushi 1980s
blended iced coffee 1980s"
‘Without borders, democracy ceases to exist’ - "We live in a world where it has become fashionable to be against borders – not only national borders but also boundaries of any kind. The distinctions between citizen and non-citizen, adult and child, man and woman, public and private have all been eroded in the name of openness. But what impact does this have on political and social life?...
They were motivated by the belief that any form of distinction is seen as potentially harmful. People say borders are not only bad because they keep people out, but they are also immoral and discriminatory... Any kind of moral imagination that goes beyond individual identity is immediately seen as a kind of sickness... what borders do is bound people to a specific space. That has an important moral significance because people exist in communities within fairly clearly defined spaces. People are not just members of an abstract global entity – they see themselves as coming from a particular town or county. And that influences who they are and the meaning they attach to life... Laws exist for people within a given territory. The idea of democracy only makes sense in relation to a bounded people, a bounded demos, where citizens are able to take responsibility for other people who inhabit the same space. Without borders, democracy simply ceases to exist, and public life turns into a reality TV show... I was really surprised to discover in the course of my research that, increasingly, citizenship is criticised and framed in a negative light. I never imagined people would question citizenship because it is such a foundation of our modern political life. But it is criticised, on the same grounds as all other borders are criticised. People say it is fundamentally wrong to make a distinction between a citizen and non-citizen, because if you do, you are discriminating against the non-citizen. Of course you are, because that is the whole point of being a citizen – you are basically saying your citizenship means something to you, because you are not like those people who are not citizens. As a citizen, you have certain responsibilities and privileges that other people do not have. If you erode the distinction, then what you also destroy is the responsibility that citizens have for the democratic future of their own society... The more open you are, the better person you are. The more unrestrained you are in your openness, the more value you have. Ultimately, that kind of fetishisation of openness leads to a situation where our culture becomes one big reality television show, where increasingly, pornography is seen as being valued because we are so open about our bodies. We are so open about talking about sex, we are so open about talking about intimacy, that literally anything to do with your own private self, anything to do with your own inner thoughts, needs to be played out and performed within a public space. The invitation to this kind of openness not only undermines the persona of an autonomous human being who has their own thoughts. It also destroys the private sphere. Increasingly, we are told that anybody who wants to maintain a distinction between what they do at home and what they do in public is somehow suspect... In many respects, the people who claim to be very cosmopolitan, who have no attachment and go from conference to conference or fly from one city to the other, are not open – they are simply confusing escapism with openness. They are escaping commitment and responsibility, and they are flattering themselves by calling that openness."
Does It Matter When You Eat? Timing of Meals Affects Body Fat, Study Shows - "The team asked ten individuals to delay breakfast by 90 minutes and eat dinner 90 minutes earlier than usual. Results revealed that all those who were able to stick to the schedule reduced their overall body fat by the end of the ten weeks by an average of 1.9 percent. “This was corroborated by questionnaire responses with 57% of participants noting a reduction in food intake either due to reduced appetite, reduced duration of eating opportunities and/or reduced snacking (particularly in the evening)”... it could just be a matter of eating less — the authors describe a “shortened TRF window” — so people had roughly four fewer hours of the day available for snacking when they adhered to the protocol. An alternative explanation, based on Johnston’s previous research, published in Advances in Nutrition, suggests that the body burns through food at a faster metabolic rate earlier in the day."
Meme - "My oil painting of Taco Bell"
It's not stupid, if it works - why percussive maintenance is a legit repair method? - "hitting something until it starts working properly. Might sound like a bad idea, but in many cases is juts works. But why? It actually makes quite a lot of sense. Percussive maintenance is a very common solution to many malfunctions. In fact, NASA says it’s been used during Apollo 12 mission when one of the cameras stopped working – astronauts just hit it with a hammer. Your dad probably did it too – a few gentle taps on the side of the screen would improve the image quality tremendously and sometimes it was all it took to change from static noise to a perfectly watchable movie. While many consider it to be a barbaric expression of angry on inanimate objects, percussive maintenance is actually a legit way of fixing stuff. First you have to ask yourself, why something doesn’t work. More often than not it is something coming out of alignment. For example, gears may be jamming, because one of the shafts is wearing down. How do you force the teeth of these gears to mash together without disassembling the entire gearbox? Hit it with a hammer. Vibrations will knock these gears into place and the device will work as intended. It obviously works for electronic devices as well, especially old ones. Older electronic devices still have some mechanical components, mostly switches. Things heat up, cool down, sometimes shake and various components become misaligned. This results in malfunction, which is not something you want in your daily life. More modern electronics don’t have as many analogue components, which means that there are less mechanical switches. Instead switching is done electronically. However, even today’s appliances and gadgets still have various connections that may work themselves loose. A quick jab could help these components finding their appropriate location and allowing the device to function normally again. And of course by “jab” we mean a light tap. You should also remember that it is a bit of a lottery. While a hit may push components back into alignment, it could also jam them even more. Or disconnect other connections. Also, the smaller the device, the less effective percussive maintenance is. You phone pretty much doesn’t even have anything that could be aligned with a swift tap of a hand. In fact, most modern devices are immune to percussive maintenance and it’s a shame"
Mother Shares Poetry Of Her Fourth Grader Son In Wholesome Twitter Thread - "Poetry is the best way to express emotions. A mother took to Twitter to share poems that her fourth-grade son wrote for her. The mother, by the username Grubreport, shared three different poetries along with a caption, "4th grader wrote this during distance learning two years ago." She posted pictures of her son's poem on a Twitter thread. In one of the poems, the child wrote, "I think I had an idea for a poem, but now it is out of my mind and wandering around the house." In the second poem, he wrote a poem for his mom on Mother's day. "You are beautiful like a rose on a stem with thorns. Because sometimes you get angry.""
We Are What We Watch: Movie Plots Predict the Personalities of Their Fans - "How do features of movie content relate to the psychological makeup of the audiences they attract? We study this question by employing advanced analytical tools to a new rich dataset that combines detailed characterizations of movies and their plots with personality measures of social-media users who “liked” them. We identify novel associations between movie features such as quality, revenue and genre, and the personality dimensions of their fans. We then use machine-learning to show that movie plots—captured via text—predict the personalities of fans beyond all other variables studied. We further use text analytical methods to quantify how different psychological themes (e.g., leisure) and unique concepts that organically emerge from the data (e.g., adultery) relate to fans’ personalities, and show that movie plots align with the characteristic ways in which their fans think, feel, and behave. For example, films with anxiety have neurotic fans, where social films attract extraverted fans. Our findings provide fine-grained mappings between dimensions of personality and movie preferences, facilitate scalable automated assessment of audience psychographics, and showcase a text-analytic framework for studying how features of multidimensional cultural products relate to psychological characteristics of their consumers."
Iranian governor SLAPPED at inauguaration because man is 'furious wife got her Covid jab off a man' - "The inauguration of an Iranian governor was interrupted by a man walking on stage and slapping him in the face - allegedly because he was furious his wife had to get her Covid jab delivered by a male doctor. Abedin Khorram was appointed as Governor of East Azerbaijan Province in northwestern Iran was slapped by 'a member of the armed forces' during the ceremony, according to the regime-linked Fars news agency."
michelin: Living the Arctic dream: This is what dining at the world's northernmost Michelin restaurant feels like - "You can only get there by boat or helicopter, but Michelin-starred chef Poul Andrias Ziska hopes his restaurant in remote Greenland, far above the Arctic Circle, is worth the journey. The 30-year-old chef relocated his restaurant KOKS from the Faroe Islands in mid-June, leaving behind his relatively accessible address for Ilimanaq, a hamlet of 50 inhabitants hidden behind icebergs on the 69th parallel north. Housed in a narrow black wooden house, one of the oldest in Greenland, the restaurant can only accommodate about 20 people per service, and experiments with local produce, including whale and seaweed, with fresh produce almost impossible to find in the harsh climate."
Detroit man who moved to Canada splits from girlfriend after 13 days - "A besotted man who got his new girlfriend's name tattooed on his neck and moved countries to be with her two weeks after they met has revealed that they have already split up - after living together for 13 days. Terrance Green, 23, from Detroit, and Alisa Thomas, 27, from Toronto, first matched on Hinge on April 17 and she flew 230 miles to spend the weekend with him. The 23-year-old had boasted that he and Alisa were trying for a baby one month after they matched on the dating app and two weeks after they met."
Woman who won €1m literary prize turns out to be three men | Financial Times - "the €1m Planeta prize — the world’s highest paying literary trophy — was awarded to Carmen Mola, an author who until now has been presented as a female university professor who writes under a pen name because of her desire for anonymity. Although Mola’s books are decidedly gory, the writer has been publicised as the “Spanish Elena Ferrante” — a reference to the reclusive, and also pseudonymous, Italian literary novelist. But when the main prize at the Planeta awards ceremony was announced in the presence of King Felipe VI in Barcelona, three people stepped up to the podium — and none of them was a woman. Neither Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez nor Antonio Mercero are academics, but in fact television scriptwriters in their 40s and 50s who have worked on Spanish shows such as On Duty Pharmacy, Central Hospital and No Heaven Without Breasts... Martínez suggested in an interview with Spain’s EFE news agency that the authors chose to write under one name because “collective work is not as valued in literature [as in] other arts such as painting or music”... there was a “pseudonym behind a pseudonym”, since The Beast was submitted under the pen-name Sergio López, which was then revealed to be Carmen Mola, and subsequently unveiled as Díaz, Martínez and Mercero."
You Sexy Devil – The Story of the Genie du Maal - "Picture this: the scene is the 1840’s in Liege Belgium. Here the Cathedral of Saint Paul lavishes its parishioners with a gorgeous sinuous double staircase adorned with only the most luscious Gothic flair. Still as decadent as the staircases were there seemed to be something missing, perhaps something could be placed at their base to sew the whole thing together. This is when the church decided that a statue was in order so they hired Joseph Geefs an accomplished marble sculptor. His commission was to create a statue of Lucifer the fallen angel which he did in his masterpiece L’Ange du Maal [The Angel of Evil.] According to some Lucifer was the most beautiful of all the angels... L’Ange du Maal was breathtakingly beautiful... the church commissioned another statue but in a strange and perhaps terribly questionable decision they chose Geef’s brother Guillaume to remake the masterpiece… You know similar but less distracting. That’s when Guillaume stepped up to the plate and created his own masterpiece Le Genie du Maal [The Genius of Evil.] Now I don’t know what Geefs was thinking or where his standing was in the church but I think it’s fair to say he wasn’t content with the decision to sack his brother’s hard work. Maybe that’s why he appears to have used the same delectably gorgeous model for his sculpture. Far from making it less distracting Geefs took his brother’s inspiration and ran with it making his version even hotter.
On L'Ange du Mal and Le Génie du Mal
The True Story of Yasuke, the Black Samurai in Japan | Time
Apparently he was just a servant
Bye-bye blacklist: Harvard ends attack on single-sex groups - "Harvard University announced a stunning attack on freedom of association when it blacklisted members of independent, single-sex, off-campus organizations from certain scholarships and campus leadership opportunities. Now, after legal setbacks and years of intense public criticism, the blacklist is no more. Yesterday, Harvard President Lawrence Bacow announced to the Harvard community that the university will abandon the policy due to the “prevailing interpretation of federal law.” Last year, a federal judge ruled that a lawsuit brought against Harvard by fraternities and sororities could proceed with claims that the blacklist policy discriminated based on sex... Harvard’s blacklist policy, ostensibly enacted to foster “inclusion” and “address deeply rooted gender issues,” in reality gutted students’ right to free association. Students found to have joined a single-sex social organization were forbidden from receiving Harvard Fellowships as well as Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, and banned from attaining leadership positions in recognized campus organizations or on athletic teams. The policy ignored the fact that sororities, fraternities, and Harvard-specific “final clubs” are completely independent and receive no university benefits... All along, the policy, and the official messaging surrounding it, was rife with double-standards and other shenanigans. At one point, the policy’s architect, Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana, appointed himself to lead the policy’s oversight committee and, when the policy received only seven votes from the 27-member committee, Khurana decided to implement the policy anyway. There was also the snuffing out of an early faculty motion opposing the policy, an exemption for student newspaper The Harvard Crimson, and even a hush-hush suggestion to a single-sex female club that they could remain so — as long as they lied about being single-sex."
What's the Difference Between All the Types of Tomatoes?
20 Rules For Making the Best Salads of Your Life
Meme - UK: "invent a new sport, spread it around the world, be bad at it, *repeat*"
US: "Invent new sport, no one else wants to play it, you're world champions"
