Boxing Day Tabs

A possible cure for insomnia that worked, in studies, for 75 percent of insomniacs, vs. only 25 percent helped by current treatments. And it's not a drug. Amazing.

There's no reason to turn off an iPad or Kindle during takeoff or landing.

If you've ever wondered what the difference is among geek, nerd, dweeb, and dork, this is the Venn diagram for you.

In a recent Mother Jones story about Highland Park, Texas, the most Republican of all zip codes, I noticed that the sidebar table had some unexpected factoids to share. Comparing Berkeley (used as the antithesis of Highland Park):


But notice -- most of the listed cultural affectations one generally associates with Berkeley are instead true of Highland Park, and vice versa: Highland Park leads in yoga and natural/organic food buying, while Berkeley leads in golf-playing and belonging to a religious club. Who would have thought it?

Tom Stites, writing on the Nieman Journalism Lab site, proposes the idea of co-ops as the new business model for journalism.

Jonah Lehrer has written a few times lately on how science is beginning to fail us. Here's his piece from Wired.

Charles Mann (author of 1491 and 1493) visits a busy airport with security expert and skeptic Bruce Schneier to witness the security theater and ruminate on all the wasted money (the four ins: "ineffective, invasive, incompetent, inexcusably costly"). As Mann quotes Schneier: “The only useful airport security measures since 9/11,” he says, “were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and then not board them —“and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.”