Jonathan's blog

You folks who are giving Al Gore and other environmentalists a hard time for talking the talk but not walking the walk (as you see it) should be careful about what you ask for...you might get it. From an article of the same title by Penelope Green in the NY Times:

...Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

Ms. Conlin, acknowledging that she sees her husband as No Impact Man and herself as simply inside his experiment...Ms. Conlin is clearly more than just a good sport - giving up toilet paper seems a fairly profound gesture of commitment...

Don't push them, please! You don't want your neighbors giving up toilet paper, do you?!?

A couple weeks back we celebrated Lisa and Elliot's birthday downstate. Here are some photos and a video:

Via Mike Cope, this video of Craig Ferguson is worth watching: "Craig Ferguson speaks on his past problems as an alcoholic and why he will not ridicule Britney Spears and her shaved head crisis."

Here's a few political videos from YouTube. The first one is the best.

From an article of the same title by Daniel Goleman in the NY Times:

The hallmark of the flame is...thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard [that] would be put more diplomatically - or go unmentioned - face to face. Flaming has a technical name, the "online disinhibition effect," which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming. This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain's social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track. Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off.