emergentfutures:

Chart Of The Day: People In The UK Have A Much Healthier Relationship With Their Smartphones Than Americans

 

 

Full Story: Business Insider

laughingsquid:

How Common Is Your Birthday, A Chart of Birth Date Frequencies

(Source: wnycradiolab)

Facebook is the living dead: the most popular, least relevant social network where teenagers and adults alike gather out of fear of missing out on things that don’t even make them happy.

— 

Amanda Hess, Teenagers Hate Facebook, but They’re Not Logging Off

Hess cites new Pew Study, Teens, Social Media, and Privacy by Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart, Sandra Cortesi, Urs Gasser, Maeve Duggan, Aaron Smith. Facebook has become a social obligation, and has been colonized by disapproving, ever vigilant adults.

(via stoweboyd)

(Source: nathanjurgenson)

The queue: Dystopias, usually infused with a right-wing social pessimism ... →

queuea:

When I first read Consider Phlebas, I was exhilarated to discover that this was SF that didn’t read in an American accent, and which reflected the same attitude and values that distinguished Iain’s mainstream works. I recall him telling me with typical passion that SF was over-full with…

sleepyurl:

don’t tell me it’s impossible to miss someone whom I never knew

I wish I did have the time to reply to everybody individually but I don’t. I think I’ll only comment on any of the posts if there’s something factually wrong mentioned in them, and so far the only point I can remember is one where an ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he’s just misremembered, as this has never been the case. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round. And… rant over.

— Iain M. Banks (via tythakia)

medicalschool:

Top Pharmaceutical Products by US Retail Sales in 2011

Compiled and Produced by the Njardarson Group (The University of Arizona): Edon Vitaku, Elizabeth A. Ilardi, Jon T. Njardarson

See the rest here along with many other Diseased Focused Pharmaceuticals.

mapsontheweb:

Largest Ancestry Group by County, 2000

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

— James Herriot (via my-spirits-aroma-or)

foucaultscat:

Pines punched a “one way ticket toward genome obesity”

So much junk that it may push the limits of stuffing DNA into a chromosome.

Last week we heard about the genome of a plant that pushed the limits of compacting its DNA: the bladderwort seems to have done away with of most of the genetic material that typically makes plant and animal genomes so large without any apparent ill effects. This week, the genome of a different plant is in the spotlight: the Norway spruce (Picea abies), which also seems to suffer no ill effects, even though it has picked up an enormous amount of DNA. Each one of its chromosomes is nearly the size of the entire human genome—and it has a dozen of them. When researchers looked at what all that extra DNA might be doing, they came up with a simple answer: probably not anything useful.

If you’re aware of the Norway spruce, it’s probably because you have been shopping for a Christmas tree. But conifers (technically Gymnosperms, although the group includes gingkoes and a few other species) are some of the most phenomenally successful organisms on Earth. They’ve dominated forests for over 200 million years, and members of the group include the tallest, heaviest, and oldest things currently alive. All of them seem to have managed this despite having a staggeringly inefficient genome management style.

Unlike many groups that vary widely in the number of chromosomes their species carry, pretty much all the Gymnosperms have a dozen pairs of chromosomes. And pretty much all of these chromosomes are up in the area of two billion bases long, or a bit smaller than the human genome. That size is so consistent, in fact, that the authors think the trees might be pushing up against the limits of how much stuff you can put in a chromosome and still get it copied and shared between two cells when they divide. In other words, if firs wanted to carry any more DNA than they already do, they’d have to start making new chromosomes.

From an evolutionary fitness perspective, would the plants actually want more DNA? Probably not, if the new genome is anything to go by. Despite all the extra DNA, the Norway spruce has almost exactly the same number of genes—28,354 in total—that the bladderwort does, even though the latter has about 1/250th the DNA. But it has plenty of dead copies of genes that have been inactivated by mutation. All told, these pseudogenes take up over seven times as much space in the genome as the working genes do.

(via Pines punched a “one way ticket toward genome obesity” | Ars Technica)

One of the great myths of the school system is that we tell people that everyone should learn exactly the same thing and exactly the same way, at roughly exactly the same speed. And that’s just not true. People learn in different ways, at different speeds, at different times. And so hacking your education allows you to learn what, when, how and where you want.

— 

Dale J. Stephens, author of Hacking Your Education and founder of UnCollege.org

via NPR

(via curiositycounts)

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.

— Albert Einstein  (via barnsburntdownnow)

(Source: januarymidnight)

Saddest of all, it works. One in three of the children said that being told off for playing outside does stop them doing it. If there is one word that sums up the treatment of children today, it is enclosure. Today’s children are enclosed in school and home, enclosed in cars to shuttle between them, enclosed by fear, by surveillance and poverty and rigid schedules.

— Why parents should leave their kids alone | Life and style | The Guardian (via steph)

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.

— Søren Kierkegaard | Either/Or [Part I] (via chughtai)

emergentfutures:

Biologist Paul Ehrlich gives dire prediction for global civilization

“We’re a small-group animal, both genetically and culturally. We have evolved to relate to groups of somewhere between 50 and 150 people,” he said. “And now suddenly we’re trying to live in a group not of 150 or 100 people, but of seven billion people, somewhat over seven billion people at the moment, and that is presenting us with a whole array of problems.”

 

Full story: VTDigger