(Manakamana.)

Scientific American has a post titled “The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology.”

It’s natural for us to reduce the complexity of our rationality into convenient bite-sized ideas. As the trader turned epistemologist Nassim Taleb says: “We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas.” But readers of popular psychology books on rationality must recognize that there’s a lot they don’t know, and they must be beware of how seductive stories are.

(World of Lucid Dreaming. Also checkout the article “The Ways to Control Dreaming.”)

Checkout Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. From a review:

Part of that American story, Piketty writes, reflects the surge in pay for corporate executives and Wall Sreet financiers who make up a large part of the top 1 percent of income earners. As Piketty sees it, their soaring compensation cannot be adequately explained simply by superior education or performance, but also reflects imperfectly competitive labor and product markets that allow the top 1 percent to extract way more than their real economic contribution.

Checkout The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry by Lance Dodes. From a review:

That perception has since radically changed, albeit gradually, thanks in no small part to the concerted efforts of AA’s early pioneers. They “realized early on that to establish true legitimacy, they would eventually need to earn the imprimatur of the scientific community,” writes Dodes. Which they did, with aplomb, largely by manufacturing an establishment for addiction scholarship and advocacy that did not previously exist. They created a space for AA to dictate the conversation.

(Find the image above here.)

Checkout Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte.

Author Brigid Schulte, an award-winning journalist for the Washington Post – and harried mother of two – began the journey quite by accident, after a time-use researcher insisted that she, like all American women, had 30 hours of leisure each week. Stunned, she accepted his challenge to keep a time diary and began a journey that would take her from the depths of what she described as the Time Confetti of her days to a conference in Paris with time researchers from around the world, to North Dakota, of all places, where academics are studying the modern love affair with busyness, to Yale, where neuroscientists are finding that feeling overwhelmed is actually shrinking our brains, to exploring new lawsuits uncovering unconscious bias in the workplace, why the US has no real family policy, and where states and cities are filling the federal vacuum.

(Also checkout Katie Roiphe article “The joy of stress.”)

The NYT has an article titled “Today’s Girls Love Pink Bows as Playthings, but These Shoot.”

Sharon Lamb, a child psychologist and play therapist who teaches counseling psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says toys that allow aggression are healthy for children.

“I don’t see this as making girls more aggressive, but instead as letting girls know that their aggressive impulses are acceptable and they should be able to play them out,” she said.

But, she added, “What I don’t like is the stereotyped girlifying of this. Do they have to be in pink? Why can’t they be rebels and have to be re-BELLES? Why do they need to look sexy when aggressing, defending the weak or fighting off bad guys?”

(The Missing Picture.)

From a review:

As in previous inFAMOUS titles your karma plays a big role in your character advancement from the powers available to unlock, the way people react to you, how your story unfolds and more. Various opportunities exist in the city of Seattle to help in your quest for true heroism or an unbridled rule of terror. You can bust drug dealers and heal people for good karma or knock off annoying sign spinners and street buskers for evil karma. Well to be honest it’s real easy to gain evil karma… go nuts on any city block and the civilians will feel your wrath! Depending on your karma route you’ll have different choices open to you when you advance your powers. As you gain strength to your smoke powers you’ll be able to aid your ability to subdue and heal for example if you’ve chosen good but be able to melee and kill if you’ve went the opposite route.

(Second Son.)

I am still trying to get mind right when it comes to power. Is power authority, presence and/or force? Take authority for example, if I am in a position of control, known as the person who makes the decisions, then others acquiesce to my demands. My use of authority is power.

It’s how we use power that has to constantly be examined. We are always in a power dynamic. Whether things appear to be happening to us or we are making things happen, someone in power is always involved. As I like to think, “who is your owner?” Being owned in effect means who is paying you.

Money is the driver of power. If we have money we have power. The perception of having wealth in regards to power is important to maintain. Money determines where we live, what schools our kids attend, our health. If we are honest, without money there is little to no power. Read more…