The transition from Bush to Obama has been a strange one for me. There is a certain ease to opposing someone whose ideology is so different from yours. There is no need to be subtle, to try and tease apart where things are going wrong – you know why they are doing this thing that [...]
When it comes to social psychology, everyone seems to know two names: Milgram and Zimbardo. It’s funny, because they both studied essentially the same thing – under what circumstances otherwise normal, compassionate people will act to hurt others. I happen to prefer Milgram’s experiments. They’re a lot sounder, experimentally and ethically. Zimbardo sort of threw [...]
With a subject as complex and influential as Alan Turing, how could this biography fail to be fascinating? The premise of the book is an examination of Turing as an outsider, someone prone to working alone, a trait which helped him come up with outside-the-box ideas of universal machines. It explores Turing’s deep-seated sense of [...]
Last night, after much fun during the day, Orli, Russ, Keith, Cora and I sat down to play Morton’s List. Now, for those of you who’ve never heard of this game, it’s basically a list of hundreds of different things to do, and you roll a set of dice to randomly select your task for [...]
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