links for 2009-08-13

• Jabberwock: Tales from the crematorium; "the done things"
  The whole sordid experience might have been trying even for a person of fervent religious conviction…For me, as a non-believer with a visceral dislike towards the following of tradition for its own sake, it wasn’t just trying: it was pointless, exhausting, even offensive. It was an accumulation of bad memories, stacked up in a domino-pile, on a day when only good memories were needed…
  Most of the important people in my life have a quiet, steadfast faith in a Higher Power…I go along with them to an extent…But even non-confrontational non-believers do feel the need to draw a line on occasion, and it’s at such times that the full weight of religious hegemony comes bearing down on us.
  There’s a cosy, politically correct “live and let live” theory of religion…everyone should be allowed to follow their own beliefs and traditions without imposing them on anyone else. This sounds perfectly reasonable and high-minded in principle…But…doesn’t necessarily work in practice
  (tags: rituals religion atheism priesthood)
• Official Google Reader Blog: A flurry of features for feed readers
  We've made it easier to share posts you like to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, and more, with our new "Send to" feature. (Incidentally, Blogger is celebrating its tenth birthday this month, and we're hoping our friends there will like this little birthday present.)
  Just head over to the settings page, and enable the services you want to use. If your favorite service isn't listed (and you're feeling extra geeky), you can create your own "Send to" link with a URL template.
  (tags: blogs google rss googlereader reader feeds sharing socialmedia socialnetworking)
• Brain Rules—Required Reading in the Information Age | Visual Business Intelligence
  Our classrooms, workplaces, and homes are in many ways designed to thwart brain health, effective learning, personal fulfillment, and overall progress as a species. In many ways, the information technologies that dominate our lives today have contributed to this sad state of affairs, not because of anything inherently wrong with technology, but because most of it was developed without understanding how our brains work. As such, reliance on technology can actually make us unhappy and dumb.
  (tags: brian neuroscience understanding Health Science)
• The Idiot’s Guide to Answering Queen Elizabeth (Aid Watch)
  First, Your Majesty, economists did something even better than predict the crisis. We correctly predicted that we would not be able to predict it. The most important part of the much-maligned Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) is that nobody can systematically beat the stock market. Which implies nobody can predict a market crash, because if you could, then you would obviously beat the market. This applies also to other asset markets like housing prices.
  (tags: satire economics economy financialcrisis)