Link: Who invented the high five? – ESPN
Glenn Burke walked away from baseball after four seasons with a career .237 batting average. But as he told a newspaper reporter years later: “You think about the feeling you get when you give someone the high five. I had that feeling before everybody else.”
Link: Online commenting: the age of rage | Technology | The Observer
The psychologists call it “deindividuation”. It’s what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed. The classic deindividuation experiment concerned American children at Halloween. Trick-or-treaters were invited to take sweets left in the hall of a house on a table on which there was also a sum of money. When children arrived singly, and not wearing masks, only 8% of them stole any of the money. When they were in larger groups, with their identities concealed by fancy dress, that number rose to 80%. The combination of a faceless crowd and personal anonymity provoked individuals into breaking rules that under “normal” circumstances they would not have considered.
Link: The Unselfish Gene
Harvard University mathematical biologist Martin Nowak could declare, in an overview of the evolution of cooperation in Science magazine, “Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world. Thus, we might add ‘natural cooperation’ as a third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and natural selection.”
Link: A Major-League Divorce
If fate had shined differently upon the McCourts—if they had never gotten divorced, and financial disclosures in the case hadn’t turned them into pariahs, and they were heralded as geniuses for creating a new Dodgers network—they would probably have still owned the Dodgers, with billions of dollars to share between them.
Link: Michele Bachmann’s Holy War | Rolling Stone Politics
And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.
Link: The Brain on Trial
Advances in brain science are calling into question the volition behind many criminal acts. A leading neuroscientist describes how the foundations of our criminal-justice system are beginning to crumble, and proposes a new way forward for law and order.
