Best of 2014

Posted on 2014-12-30 by arjaybe
Credit - Ltikorea CC-BY-SA

Credit – Ltikorea CC-BY-SA

Leaving out the home, contact, downloads and welcome pages, these posts are the best of 2014 by visit.

14. Near Death Experience – Part Three
What happened to parts One and Two? How does the third one outrank the others?

13. Flesch Reading Ease
This surprises me. Why is there so much interest in a method for rating how easy it is to read text?

12. Yawning
Of things our bodies do, including Synesthesia, Smell (1, 2 & 3), Earworms and Handedness, yawning is the most popular.

11. Ball Lightning – Part Three
Again part three is first.

10. Ball Lightning
And it appears readers jumped right over Part Two to read these.

9. BitTorrent Bundles
Good. I’m glad people are interested in my BitTorrent Bundle. No idea how this fits in with the rest, though.

8. Gecko Feet
I’m glad to see this. I have a soft spot for these little guys.

7. Altocumulus Castellanus
This is the only entry from the Cloud of the Day series. Maybe because it sounds so grand?

6. Collective Nouns
I like this series. It’s a lot of fun. Even Part Two.

5. Aquatic Ape – The Theory Evolves
The Bipedal series did well, taking three of the top five spots.

4. Whispering Galleries
This is no surprise. There’s something intrinsically interesting about whispering galleries.

3. Spanking for Love
This is no surprise either. Humans, eh?

2. Bipedal – The Aquatic Ape Theory
The Aquatic Ape is popular, but the Savanna Ape is even more so.

1. Bipedal – The Savanna Theory
This post got more than twice the number of views of the two Aquatic Ape posts combined.

That’s what you were looking at in 2014. Thank you for your interest, and thank you for keeping it interesting for me. Without you, it could be a pretty bleak job maintaining Green Comet’s home on the Internet. You encourage me to carry on, both with this site and with the sequel to the novel, which should be ready in the middle of 2015.

That was the best of 2014. See you in the new year.

rjb

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Getting Better

Posted on 2014-12-24 by arjaybe
Credit - Jenny - CC-BY

Credit – Jenny – CC-BY

We’ve never lived in such peaceful times – from a Slate article by Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) and Andrew Mack (The Human Security Report Project)

The numbers show that things are getting better, so why do we think they’re getting worse? Journalists have better access to news than ever, so they have more to report. Naturally, they’re going to report on what is happening, not on what is not happening. More reports of violence, and no reports of no violence. That, put simply, is why things look worse than ever. And it’s a fact of our primitive brains that we assess risk based on the number of times we hear about something.

Quoting Slate

“The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable – homicide, rape, battering, child abuse – have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states – by far the most destructive of all conflicts – are all but obsolete. The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate.”

Image from Slate

Image from Slate

More Slate

“Why is the world always “more dangerous than it has ever been” – even as a greater and greater majority of humanity lives in peace and dies of old age?

Too much of our impression of the world comes from a misleading formula of journalistic narration. Reporters give lavish coverage to gun bursts, explosions, and viral videos, oblivious to how representative they are and apparently innocent of the fact that many were contrived as journalist bait. Then come sound bites from “experts” with vested interests in maximizing the impression of mayhem: generals, politicians, security officials, moral activists. The talking heads on cable news filibuster about the event, desperately hoping to avoid dead air. Newspaper columnists instruct their readers on what emotions to feel.”

Read the Slate story to see that things really are getting better.

Merry Christmas

rjb

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Truffles

Posted on 2014-12-18 by arjaybe
Credit - Scott Darbey - CC-BY

Credit – Scott Darbey – CC-BY

Just a quick note as a heads-up. If you like truffles you’d better enjoy them while you can. If this gets out, someone will want to make them illegal. It appears truffles contain a chemical, anandamide, that affects the brain the same way cannabis does. Just like tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), anandamide locks onto receptors on neurons, producing psychoactive effects. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the effect doesn’t last as long since anandamide breaks down in the body more quickly than THC does. So, in effect, truffles encourage animals to eat them by giving them a chemical reward, but without debilitating them too much.

Credit - Alistair Campbell - CC-BY

Credit – Alistair Campbell – CC-BY

Check out this article at the BBC for more details.

rjb

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