Bits and pieces from the internet: senseless and sense edition

The blog This is NOT Junk and Michael Eisen have a great post about senseless, automatic prizing of books on Amazon, leading to the advertised price of over $23 million for a book on Drosophila (fruitflies / bananflugor). Worth reading and pondering. [thanks to OK for finding it]

Your brain morphology might influence if you are conservative or liberal, reports a new study in Current Biology.   (Easy read version here: Science Daily)

Take a look at this map of internet use connections (full article here).  Why are some topics 'dead-ends', such as hydrology, physiology, and social works?  I would think those are strongly linked to other fields.  But remember, this is from how scientists click on links, so maybe these three fields largely keep to themselves?  Biodiversity and philosophy seems to be right in the middle of things, with many connections in different directions. Fascinating, like a starmap, but based on virtual internet data use from real people.  However, this is a 3-D map that has been flattened, so it is a bit hard to interpret. Imagine this as a cloud of dots you could twist and turn, then it might make more sense.


Sensible or senseless?  Felix Gonzalez-Torres' art installation "Untitled" of a heap of candy in a corner at the Art Institute of Chicago. The date of this art piece is 1991, so the candy is 20 years old right now.  What do you think about this?