10 stories and links that I found educative, interesting or just plain weird!

and the final miscellany of this long weekend in the UK is below

Testing My Moral DNA
via Big Think by Adam Lee
I read an article this week about a questionnaire whose creator, the “corporate philosopher” Roger Steare, calls the Moral DNA test. Over 50,000 people from 200 countries have taken this survey, which its creator says is designed to help humanity understand how we make moral decisions.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
A combative Buddhist, Steve Jobs lived a life of paradoxes. Here’s one more. Apple's naïve technocratic ethos is suffocating the Internet... more

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How Art Emerged from Pre-Historic Brains
via Big Think by Orion Jones
Famed biologist E.O. Wilson believes that the gulf between art and science — one celebrates the limits of human perspective while the other seeks to overcome them with instrumentation — can only be bridged by understanding what mental processes inspire us to create abstract representations of the world, i.e. art.
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Killing Creativity: Why Kids Draw Pictures of Monsters & Adults Don’t
via Big Think by Sam McNerney
The Monster Engine is one of the best ideas I’ve come across. It’s a book, demonstration, lecture and gallery exhibition created by Dave Devries. The premise is simple: children draw pictures of monsters and Devries paints them realistically.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Who but Elaine Pagels can drain the melodrama from the Book of Revelation, turning the climactic confrontation between good and evil into an anti-Christian polemic?... more


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Tiny animals solve problems of housing and maintaining oversized brains, shedding new light on nervous-system evolution
via 3quarksdaily by Abbas Raza

William G. Eberhard and William T. Wcislo in American Scientist:

By focusing on evolutionary increases in brain size, biologists generally have overlooked nervous system organization in the smallest of animals. But when one looks closely at very small animals, an important question emerges: Where can a relatively large brain fit in a small body? The answers displayed by one animal after another deliver a new perspective on variation in nervous system design among animals. And this variation calls into question some basic assumptions regarding the uniformity of how central nervous systems function overall. In other words, much remains to be learned from the smallest of the small.

More here.

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Lackawanna: 1900
via Dave at Shorpy

Scranton, Pennsylvania, circa 1900
“Group of Lackawanna freight engines. Delaware, Lackawanna & Western R.R.”
Detroit Publishing Co.
View full size

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Bombastic and narcissistic. Woe to those on Conrad Black’s bad side, like the “sociopathic” Richard Posner, “a dreary, unreasoning pustule of animus”... more

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This just in: Internet not actually full of sad, lonely rejects
via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Personally, I’m about to sprain something from rolling my eyes so hard at all the hand-wringing news stories about how the Internet is disconnecting us from other people and making us more lonely. So it’s gratifying to read this piece in the Boston Review that points two key problems with that thesis (besides being fracking obnoxious): First, the evidence doesn't support it; second, humans have apparently been worrying about increasing levels of loneliness since the 1700s.

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The Economics Behind Mining Asteroids for Metals
via Big Think by Orion Jones
Were it not for the list of extremely successful businessmen behind the recent announcement to mine asteroids for precious metals, the idea might be a laughing stock. But when Google executives and private space pioneers team up with James Cameron and the heir to Ross Perot’s fortune, you really have to take the news seriously.
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