Word: thingness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...then you have little details everywhere, like the fact that there are soldiers encamped near Meryton in the original book, for seemingly no reason whatsoever. I mean, there's just this huge regiment of soldiers there, and the obvious thing to do in this case is to say that, well, they're there digging up graves and burning bodies and fighting the unmentionable menace. (See the top 10 fiction books...
...Such alertness may not seem like a bad thing, except that in a second paper in the same issue of Science, Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin found that sleep appears to function as a critical shutoff valve for the fruit-fly brain. After a period of sleep, the volume of connections between nerve cells in the brain decreased, a condition that Tononi theorizes offsets the wakeful brain's activity. During waking hours, the brain keeps adding new information about its environment, forming new circuits and new connections in an ever thickening neural network. But even the fruit...
...sense of self-confidence here," says Sezgin Tanrikulu, a prominent lawyer in Diyarbakir. "Not because people want independence. Or to live there. But it shows that there is indeed a distinct Kurdish culture. For a long time we were told 'you don't exist', 'there's no such thing as a Kurd,' and yet, look, there they...
...really act like the superrational Homo economicus of the neoclassical-model world. Years of studies of patients who don't take their meds, grownups who have unsafe sex, and other flawed decision makers have chronicled the irrationality of Homo sapiens. Some of our foibles are quite specific, like overvaluing things we have, overeating food in larger containers and overestimating the probability of improbable events - the quirk that made the Meet Barack Obama fundraising lottery such a smart idea. But in general, we're ignorant, shortsighted and biased toward the status quo. We're not as smart as Larry Summers...
Social norms help explain the attraction of opt-out 401(k)s as well: it's not just that we're too lazy to check a box but also that we assume the default is the accepted thing to do. Obama's push to weatherize millions of homes - another stimulus bonanza - will require new norms. In Oregon, a countywide program to upgrade windows and insulation at almost no cost to homeowners got a tepid response. But after an intense mobilization campaign - through citizen councils, churches and Girl Scouts who went door-to-door asking residents why they hadn't weatherized...