Rebecca's Pocket

Amino acid spaghetti

December 2008 flooding in Venice

If you haven't already seen them, don't miss this amazing series of pictures of the flooding in Venice last December. (via @ebertchigago)

November reading recommendations

From the American Bookseller's Association, 10 years of indie recommendations for November reading. (via ra)

Twitter - Time to increase post size?

So when is Twitter going to remove the 140 character limit from posts? At this point it's just vestigial, isn't it?

Health care cost in the US - why they cost so much

Jaw dropping.

As [Kaiser Permanente CEO George ] Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same -- the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need -- but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

Click through if only to see all the charts. (via rc3)

Study: Junk food is as addictive as heroin

Rats fed unlimited amounts of junk food exhibit the same behaviors as herion addicts, a new study shows. After just five days on the junk food diet, rats ate twice as many calories as rats in the control group, showed a reduction in their pleasure centers, and were willing to undergo electric shocks while they ate. Returned to a healthy diet, the rats refused to eat for two weeks.

Jish sez "Awesome flowchart"

Jish is correct.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, proto-Google

The Colbert Report, nominally a review of Jacob Soll's The Information Master, is a fascinating study on post-Gutenberg information overload, ancient information management, and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's chief minister, whose goal was to collect and hoard "all knowledge, formal and practical, [to] be used together in one archival system to understand and master the material world." (via mamr)

FDR's public option: Electricity for all

Reflections on FDR's public option: government-sponsored electrical service for rural America.

Investor-owned utilities, who rejected the farmers for years, wanted them dearly once the competition showed up. They fought in legislatures and courts and newspapers to keep the Rural Electric Coops from lighting the back roads.

And omigawd were [the coops] evil. Socialistic, un-American, undermining the very fabric of democracy. Legislators, businessmen, members of Congress, editorial page editors all over the country railed at the specter of Big Government shouldering into private enterprise, when everyone knew Government couldn't do it right.

Most infuriating of all, government did it right. The cooperatives became the pricing yardstick for electrical power. Investor-owned utilities had to lower their rates to compete.

2009 National Book Award Finalists

Oooh! The National Book Awards finalists. (via tra)

Physicality = metaphor = perception = thinking

Your English teachers probably taught you about metaphor as an advanced technique used by writers to build depth into their work. But it turns out our very thinking is based on our physicality--and our physical enviroment colors our perceptions.

Our instinctive, literal-minded metaphorizing can make us vulnerable to what seem like simple tweaks to our physical environment, with ramifications for everything from how we build polling booths to how we sell cereal. And at a broader level it reveals just how much the human body, in all its particularity, shapes the mind, suggesting that much of what we think of as abstract reasoning is in fact a sometimes awkward piggybacking onto the mental tools we have developed to govern our body's interactions with its physical environment. Put another way, metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies.

By sabotaging the LHC, the Universe has saved itself! (and us)

Why did the Large Hadron Collider fail? To save us from a terrible fate. It's not a crackpot theory unless you consider the man who founded string theory to be a lightweight. Seriously, this is my favorite science story of all time.

Jamie Oliver sets out to reform the American diet

The Naked Chef's new crusade. I'm impressed with his lack of ideological absolutism. Krispy Kreme doughnuts? "They're a treat, there to be loved." A 15-pound burger? "It tasted good." And of course, I'm impressed with his decision to use his power for good. He's quite a guy, really.

How a dedicated librarian changed one student's life

NPR: Boy steals book; librarian changes life.

Let Congress go without health insurance

Kristof: If Congress fails to reform healthcare, let them go without insurance. The last time I was the Netherlands, a native told me the Dutch had enacted universal healthcare out of enlightened self-interest. They realized that the uninsured poor were more likely to be struck by virulent diseases, which they then might pass onto the well-to-do.