Science

"I like to think science isn't about right, it's about thorough"

Heat Wave (Nikki Heat) by Richard Castle

On rationalism morality

"We grow into our rationality as caterpillars grow into butterflies. If the caterpillar eats enough leaves, it will (eventually) grow wings. And if the child gets enough experiences of turn taking, sharing, and playground justice, it will (eventually) become a moral creature, able to use its rational capacities to solve ever harder problems. Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development."

~The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

Cause we're all working mothers

"We are all working mothers. What unites us is our motherhood, which – despite the fact that it does involve so much work, work of hands and hearts and souls – is so much more than work."


Taken from an article called "The Work of The Heart" in a blog 'Her Bad Mother'
Link: http://herbadmother.com/2012/04/the-work-of-the-heart/

economic vs political institutions

"Each society functions with a set of economic and political rules created and enforced by the state and the citizens collectively. Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process work. ... This in turn determines whether politicians are agents of the citizens, albeit imperfect, or are able to abuse the power entrusted to them, or that they have usurped, to amass their own fortunes and to pursue their own agendas, ones detrimental to those of the citizens."

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty 

by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

In gossip we're in social order

This quote somehow has an additional link on how gossip could be not that bad

"Gossip gets a bad rap, but we're finding evidence that it plays a critical role in the maintenance of social order"

Gossip can have social and psychological benefits by EurekAlert!

Indonesian political economy of deforestation

"By combining detailed satellite imagery with data on competition between jurisdictions, elections and local resource rents we have shown that local political economy factors are critical to understanding the pattern of tropical deforestation in Indonesia, home to some of the largest tropical forest reserves in the world. We find that increases in the numbers of political jurisdictions are associated with increased deforestation. Illegal logging increases dramatically in the years leading up to local elections. And having access to rents from local oil and gas reserves dampens incentives to engage in illegal logging in the short but not the medium term."

Burgess, Hansen, Olken, Potapov, and Sieber (2011) The political economy of deforestation in the tropics NBER Working Paper 17417

trip rates by male vs female and by family size

"If you look at trip rates by male versus female, and look at that by size of family... the women's trip rates vary tremendously by size of family. Men's trip rates look as if they didn't even know they had a family. The men's trip rates are almost independent of family size. What it obviously says is the mother's the one doing all the hauling." (p.135)

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt (2009)