Accusations of sexual harassment against Herman Cain and the Penn State rape scandal have left many saying: “If I were in that situation, I would have done the right thing.” But time and time again, research demonstrates that we are less given to moral behaviour than we would like to think, particularly when we are put on the spot. Individuals imagine themselves to be more upright than those around them, even though most everyone seems willing to act immorally without much provocation.
Read it at The New York Times
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Everything is suddenly a distraction to William Ian Miller. His brain is “balsa wood floating in a helium sea”. In truth, his brain is shrinking. And so is yours... more
How Star Wars Characters Could Have Benefited From Online Training via Stephen's Lighthouse
This would make a great poster to advertise a session on searching and research skills. Common experiences like Star Wars, Star Trek, ET, Indiana Jones, and Wizard of OZ all make great connections to audiences.
See the infographic here
Deep Intellect: Inside the mind of the octopus via 3quarksdaily by Azra Raza
From Orion Magazine:More here
Measuring the minds of other creatures is a perplexing problem. One yardstick scientists use is brain size, since humans have big brains. But size doesn't always match smarts. As is well known in electronics, anything can be miniaturized. Small brain size was the evidence once used to argue that birds were stupid – before some birds were proven intelligent enough to compose music, invent dance steps, ask questions, and do math. Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena’s is the size of a walnut – as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That’s proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.
Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. “It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it – and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Ben Jonson, Britain's first literary celebrity, was a bruiser, intellectually and physically. It surprised no one that he stabbed a man to death... more
Elizabeth And Hazel Story Humanizes Little Rock Nine Icon via Big Think by Kris Broughton
“Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate!” The black and white picture from the fifties of a teenaged white girl yelling racial epithets at a young black coed who marches through an angry white mob to desegregate a Deep South high school in 1957 is world famous. Read More
Evolution of Apple Ads 1975-2002 via HOW TO BE A RETRONAUT by Chris
Thank you to Nikola Lazarevic
Some of these are absolutely stunning – hard to pick a favourite from so many but this caught my eye.
See them all here
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
From seamstress to mistress to magnate, Coco Chanel never kept her little black dress on for very long... more
Bunnies and science, minus the ethical debates via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Speaking of smart games, Spongelab's Natural Selection is almost more of an interactive demonstration than an actual game, but it's still way cool. The goal: Learn about how evolution works by causing mutations in populations of cute, fluffy bunnies.
Image: Bunny, a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from aigle_dore's photostream
A Man With A Mission: Ban Speaks To The World via Big Think by Mark Seddon
Sir Brian Urquhart, one of the oldest surviving senior UN staff members, reminded us recently in an article in the New York Times that a former Secretary General of the UN, Dag Hammarskjold, had once said; “The United Nations was not created to bring us heaven, but to save us from hell”. …
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In 2007 the Anaktuvuk River fire burned 1,039 square kilometers of Alaska’s Arctic 
‘I dreamed I was ‘X’ in my Maidenform bra’, 1944-1966 via HOW TO BE A RETRONAUT by Chris
Over in the blogosphere, a debate seems to be emerging. So far 
