So, Science is getting better at figuring out what is going on in our brains:
The Fundamentalist Psyche
New research unlocks the genius of George W. Bush:
In two studies led by Assistant Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht, participants performed a Stroop task – a well-known test of cognitive control – while hooked up to electrodes that measured their brain activity.
Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake.
The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God, the less their ACC fired in response to their own errors, and the fewer errors they made. "You could think of this part of the brain like a cortical alarm bell that rings when an individual has just made a mistake or experiences uncertainty," says lead author Inzlicht, who teaches and conducts research at the University of Toronto Scarborough. "We found that religious people or even people who simply believe in the existence of God show significantly less brain activity in relation to their own errors. They're much less anxious and feel less stressed when they have made an error."
They're much less anxious and feel less stressed when they have made an error.
That is very interesting indeed. I wonder if that spools out into behavioural differences.
Part of the mystery is solved. The Calfiornia Bar Association is housed in the next building over.
What they are boycotting is still a mystery, but, man, that guy has strong lungs.
So. We were being gaslighted. Lit. Whatever.
Someone had been running something in the background that was in direct competition to our system.
Now to try AGAIN.
Trader Joe's stops selling King Arthur flour, so King Arthur flour creates recipe for Candy Cane Joe-Joe's.
Am I crazy, or does that entry not have the measurements for the ingredients in the recipe?
Recipe is here: [link]
The King Arthur blog always does a long writeup/walkthrough, with a link to the recipe on their recipe site. Annoying as heck, although I love their baking pron.
Excellent
Time
magazine article on the current health-care system in the US: The Health-Care Crisis Hits Home
Might be good to forward to people who think the current system is fine, and that Obama wants to "ration" health care (as if it's not rationed now)....
When we talk about health-care reform, we usually start with the problem of the roughly 45 million (and rising) uninsured Americans who have no health coverage at all. But Pat represents the shadow problem facing an additional 25 million people who spend more than 10% of their income on out-of-pocket medical costs. They are the underinsured, who may be all the more vulnerable because, until a health catastrophe hits, they're often blind to the danger they're in. In a 2005 Harvard University study of more than 1,700 bankruptcies across the country, researchers found that medical problems were behind half of them — and three-quarters of those bankrupt people actually had health insurance. As Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor who helped conduct the study, wrote in the Washington Post, "Nobody's safe ... A comfortable middle-class lifestyle? Good education? Decent job? No safeguards there. Most of the medically bankrupt were middle-class homeowners who had been to college and had responsible jobs — until illness struck."
An update of the classic "Rosie the Riveter" image "We Can Do It!" on a t-shirt: We Can Do It! Michelle Obama Shirt
