Cathy N. Davidson’s new book, Now You See it: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform thw Way We Live, Work, and Learn (see my review on Open Parenthesis), takes one of its core inspirations from an experiment by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, which you may have seen:

in a symbolic move today, House members from both parties read the Constitution aloud on the House floor (NPR) Otto West: Apes don’t read philosophy. Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it. Further: NewSouth Books’ upcoming edition of Mark Twain’s seminal novel “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” will remove all instances of the N-word — I’ll give you [...]

(via Economist’s View) Some very interesting data from the Congressional Budget Office and analysis by Chuck Marr the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities describing the shift in income since 1979. The bars represent the difference between what actually happened (the real income distribution in 2007) against what would have happened had the income distribution which held in 1979 been [...]

(via BoingBoing) Banksy directed intro to the Simpsons. The good stuff comes in about 0:36 in, so don’t miss it. Wonder what 20th Century Fox thought of that one? Would have been a fun production meeting to be a fly-on-the-wall for.

Just a quick pointer to two new recently updated web resources useful for vegans and people who’d like to be vegan. The first is brought to you by the good doctors at Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine (PMRC). It’s a 21 day “kickstart” program starting January 1st, 2010. The Kickstart program includes daily messages, breakfast, lunch and dinner menus, webcasts, [...]

Loved this, from a discussion on Making Hay of Dr. Melanie Joy’s new book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: What we eat – what we choose to consider food – is the product of ideology when we aren’t forced by necessity to eat whatever we can get. And this: Our goal isn’t to simply get people [...]

It never ceases to amaze me how, when one cow (or goat, or pig, or chicken, or turkey) escapes from the slaughterhouse, the public at large want to save him/her, but then don’t recognize how their own eating habits put said animal in that position in the first place. This week, Molly (so named by the workers at the Brooklyn [...]

Interesting that this appeared in the Huffington Post just before the H1N1 stories starting popping up: Enemies of the People, by Carl Pope. In it, he describes the efforts of Louise Slaughter (we’ll ignore the irony of her name) to pass legislation in congress to “ban the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock.” The issue? Feeding antibiotics to healthy animals [...]

As H1N1, aka the flu formerly known as swine flu, aka “The Other White Death,” continues to dominate the public media, it’s important to recognize the contribution factory farming (and animal agriculture in general) makes to these superviruses. Here’s video from CNN with Dr. Michael Greger from the HSUS: Embedded video from CNN Video Related links: What You Should Know [...]

This is all I’m going to say about Bo Obama, the first family’s new non-rescue, non-shelter dog: see more dog and puppy pictures (And yes, I have purebred dogs myself, but no, I wouldn’t get another dog from a breeder. Our next family member will be from a shelter or a rescue).