- The AV Club’s Josh Modell on the difficulty with giving reviews a letter grade. There’s a healthy discussion there, but I think Keith Phipps sums it up nicely in the comments:
When I write I know the grade I’m assigning the movie/tv show/album helps me frame my thoughts. But, in the end, it’s the thoughts that matter, not the rating at the end of them.
- Ethics schmethics! So first The Chicago Tribune focus-grouped some news stories before they were published. [via] And then it was revealed that pharmaceutical giant Merck and Elsevier published a fake peer-review journal. [via]
- Thudfactor has an interesting post about the myth of competition:
We sometimes speak of evolutionary strategies, but “strategy†is a poor metaphor. There’s no strategy involved. Mutation is random — at least, we think so. Suggesting that an infectious disease won’t mutate into something deadly because that’s a poor strategy for victory assumes that viruses have something akin to a five-year plan. They don’t think that far. Viruses probably don’t think. I’m certain they don’t caucus to establish behaviors for all of virus-kind.
Sure, it’s survival of the fittest, but “fittest” can mean so many different things.
- Now this is interesting: The Fight Club Theory of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Spoilers for both movies, so be forewarned. [via]
- And finally, the neuropsychology of zombies. [via]