linkfarming

The Internet has been busy!

• Thailand takes moral panic to a new level.
• Different maps of Europe.
• Incentives in baseball: batters about to finish the season with a .299 or .300 average hit .463 in their last at-bat.
• Video of 24 different English accents. He's really good. Contains profanity, but it's funny.
• An excellent New Yorker essay on the origins of the modern conservative nuttiness.
• For people like NPR-guy-turned-Fox-stooge Juan Williams: Muslims Wearing Things.

Finally, an awesome Atlantic piece about a meta-researcher who's busy proving the failures of modern medical research. It's of a piece with Michael Pollan's more specific discussion of nutritionism, since scientific food recommendations are driven by all this shockingly flawed research:

"Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all."

Or, put another way: "one large randomized controlled trial even proved that secret prayer by unknown parties can save the lives of heart-surgery patients, while another proved that secret prayer can harm them."

And people think the way I choose what to eat is weird. (It is--the only thing weirder than the system itself is that it works.)