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Different cognitive processes underlie human mate choices and mate preferences — Todd et al. 104 (38): 15011 — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Apparently men have an ugly-avoidance mate selection strategy and woman have a strategy that is pickier about actual mate compatibility that correlates with their perceived attractiveness.

Mark Guzdial’s Amazon Blog: Software Engineering and the Cause of the CS Enrollment Crisis, Part 2:

The fact that we still primarily use an edit-compile-link-execute cycle 50 years after the first commercial release of Fortran is an indication of how little programming language designers and software engineers talk to HCI designers and cognitive scientists. That’s not how people best work, so why are we still doing it that way?

Kevin picked up on the 106 books owned but not read. I’m a copycat.

Bold shows ones read. Italics shows not well-remembered. I will bold those I only read part of with partial bolding.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• The Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury tales
• The Historian : a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

The Responsibility of Intellectuals, by Noam Chomsky, is a deep analysis of 1960’s hypocrisy by intellectuals, and a call to expose lies by all those trained to seek truth.

Chomsky does a brilliant job at critiquing power in this essay, particularly the power of intellectuals who have ensconced themselves in Western society. Ultimately though, as we, in America, all live in a democracy, we all have power to expose lies. He further states that ultimately we have to ask ourselves, “What have I done?”, when asked about our government’s actions.

It seems unavoidable that the American citizens as a whole are responsible for their government’s actions, either by intention or neglect. Obviously, no one talks about this on the news or on talk shows (I suppose, since I quit watching them. I am glad to learn otherwise).

So, how will a nation that does not recognize it’s own responsibility, let alone discuss the exigencies in fulfilling that responsibility, keep from being abused by a small minority intent on installing a kleptocracy?

(Via Wikipedia entry on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr..)