An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement.
Book · Climatechange · Consciousness · English · Globalwarming · Science · Uncategorized
2 minutes
A pretty informal study made the global headlines a week back about how 40% of everything posted to Twitter amounts to just "pointless babble". That conclusion is seriously flawed, and likely stems from a misunderstanding on how humans communicate. Our consciousness has very low bandwidth. Exactly how low is hard to measure, but in The User Illusion author Tor Nørretranders argues it to be around 16 bits-or-so per second. Thus, when humans communicate we do so trying to guess as to how many bits we need to use to get our full message across to another person, and that requires us to share a lot of background information.
Book · Consciousness · Culture · English · Twitter
2 minutes
“Thus, we need to abandon the Kyoto process”
I’ve just spent 1.5h this day before Christmas Eve doing something I wholeheartedly recommend everyone else to do as well - reading Bjorn Lomborg’s book on climate change. Named “Cool It” (and yes, while I am a quick reader it is quite short) it makes an excellent case explaining that even though humans indeed cause some of the climate change in the world our response to that should be to basically continue on the same path as we already are instead of throwing money on projects like Kyoto that actually might cause more harm than good.
Book · Climatechange · English · Globalwarming · Uncategorized
2 minutes
[it’s teh book review](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop "I am a strange loop") A few weeks ago I read an interesting book; [I am a strange loop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop "I am a strange loop") - by Douglas Hofstadter. He’s quite famous for earlier works, and this book is supposed to set the record straight regarding some things he felt didn’t came out right earlier. I don’t know - I haven’t read his previous material. I liked this book, however, because it elaborated along the same views that I hold myself regarding the human consciousness - what constitutes an "I".
Book · Consciousness · English · Transhumanism
2 minutes
[it’s teh book review] I’ve just finished reading Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking - a book dealing with the common mistakes us humans often make when judging events in the world around us. Depending on how much you already know about those pitfalls the book might be anything from a yawn to a revelation. Myself, I thought I knew more than I did.
Book · Consciousness · English · Funny · Transhumanism
1 minute