Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede.
via NY Daily News
Hell-in-a-Handbasket Dept.
Daily Archives: 29 Nov 08
The Intellectual Decline of the Presidency
John McWhorter on Elvin Lim’s The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush:
“…[This] is not one more rant about the limited cognitive abilities of George W. Bush but a brisk, methodical deconstruction of ‘the relentless simplification of presidential rhetoric in the last two centuries and the increasing substitution of arguments with applause-rendering platitudes, partisan punch lines and emotional and human interest appeals.’ “
via FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life
Also:
Patternicity
Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise: 
Michael Shermer
Michael Shermer: “…whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor patternicity.”
By the way, I am enamored of the term apophenia for this phenomenon. Patternicity seems too cutesy. As a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of psychosis, I think apophenic thinking is at the heart of the paranoid process and one of the core disturbances in schizophrenia. But Shermer’s argument that natural selection will favor patternicity when it has the best adaptive cost undercuts his crusade against irrational belief, doesn’t it? As I have previously pointed out in discussions of apophenia, finding patterns (in the sense of “believing superstitions“) has helped human groups to survive.
