Contriving

One of the reasons that Portal 2 remains amongst my favorite video games of all time is:  it's beautiful.

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D'awww

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Basically, they concluded that the equations used by Fredrickson and Losada to calculate the critical positivity ratio had no connection to their emotion data – regardless of the emotions reported by volunteers, they would generate the same, meaningless numbers.
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“What’s shocking is not just that this piece of pseudomathematical nonsense received 322 scholarly citations and 164,000 web mentions, but that no one criticized it publicly for eight years, not even supposed experts in the field,” Sokal says.

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Cited paper suggesting a ‘ratio for a good life’ exposed as nonsense by amateur psychologist

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The impressive drying property stems from the very large internal surface area of Upsalite. MgCO3 is a common mineral that occurs in a variety of forms, most of which have water bound to their surface and are crystalline. By contrast, Upsalite has no water integrated into its structure and is not crystalline. Instead, it is mesoporous—a structure with pores that are a million times smaller than the width of a human hair—which provides it with a much greater surface area.

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Scientists create “impossible material”—dubbed Upsalite—by accident
Reaction left over the weekend produces a material sought since the 1800s.

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Now that I've won my suit under the Freedom of Information Act, I am at liberty to reveal for the first time a curious episode in my life that may be of interest not only to those engaged in research in the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience but also to the general public.

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Where Am I?
Where Am I? by. DANIEL C. DENNETT. Now that I’ve won my suit under the Freedom of Information Act, I am at liberty to reveal for the first time a curious episode in my life that may be of interest not only to those engaged in research in the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, …

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For a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night. No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body. No way to understand how another could dream of a man forcing himself onto her in a field—and then wake up the next morning with grass in her hair.

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The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia | VICE United States

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"It's not a nice job. You start scraping the filth to one end. You designate one corner for pee. Pee runs downhill so don't put your pee corner at the top of the room."

He recommends creating a "living quarter" within the cell, to be kept as clean as possible. Prisoners should also try to keep themselves clean, he says.

"Pick your nails with your own nails – if they are rough and broken scrape them on the walls – every effort you can make to try and retrieve your identity, which is part physical, part psychological."

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How do people survive solitary confinement?

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I don't know what it is, but it's intriguing.

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The American Psychological Association (APA) tried to set the record straight in 1996 with a report written by a committee of experts. Among the specific conclusions drawn by the APA were that IQ tests reliably measure a real human trait, that ethnic differences in average IQ exist, that good tests of IQ are not culturally biased against minority groups, and that IQ is a product of both genetic inheritance and early childhood environment. Another report signed by 52 experts, entitled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” stated similar facts and was printed in the Wall Street Journal.

“These may be harbingers of a shift in the media’s treatment of intelligence,” an optimistic Charles Murray wrote at the time. “There is now a real chance that the press will begin to discover that it has been missing the story.”

He was wrong. The APA report fell down the memory hole, and the media’s understanding of IQ again fell back to that state of comfortable misinformation that Snyderman and Rothman had observed years earlier.

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Opinion: Why can’t we talk about IQ? – Jason Richwine
“IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore,” the Guardian’s Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement. Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for “IQ test” in Google’s academic database yielded more than…

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