The Dish

Jonah Lehrer spotlights a wine connoisseur whose tasting talents did not survive a blindfold. His take-out:

[O]ur sensations require interpretation. When we take a sip of wine, we don’t taste the wine first, and the cheapness or redness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of thiswineisred, or thiswineisexpensive. As a result, the wine “experts” sincerely believed that the white wine [mixed with food coloring] was red, or that Lafite was actually Troplong-Mondot. Such mistakes are inevitable: Our brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that our prejudices feel like facts, our opinions indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think a wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a grand cru, then we will taste a grand cru.

Tanner Ringerud writes:

Steve Porter has a new remixed video, and apparently he’s a big fan of the new show Community. I am too, and this just confirms the shows awesomeness.

Stephen J. Dubner passes along a study:

[F]ewer than one-third of young adults possess basic knowledge of interest rates, inflation, and risk diversification. Financial literacy is strongly related to sociodemographic characteristics and family financial sophistication. Specifically, a college-educated male whose parents had stocks and retirement savings is about 50 percentage points more likely to know about risk diversification than a female with less than a high school education whose parents were not wealthy.

Stunning and disturbing images.

Freddie forwards along a document:

[C]heck out this amazing letter from Dwight Eisenhower from the last days of World War II. Some of the people who have commented on it have remarked about Eisenhower’s writing style, which is really remarkable in its clarity and directness. It’s also really interesting to read his personal reflections on towering historical figures like Omar Bradley or Patton. What really stays with you, though, is his brief description of touring a liberated death camp, and in particular, his prediction even then of Holocaust denial. This is almost a month before V-E day; the world doesn’t yet know the extent of Germany’s crimes. There’s no greater knowledge of the Holocaust yet to invite denial. And yet the terrible and persistent history of anti-Jewish hatred already compels Eisenhower to vow to stand witness against those who would in the future dismiss the Holocaust as propaganda.

Will Sherman writes:

Visiting the Midway Atoll, at the center of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, [Chris] Jordan took these disturbing photos of dead albatross chicks raised on a steady diet of plastic debris floating in the water: lighters, bottle caps and other colorful trash. He writes:

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

The rest of his fascinating, heartbreaking series here.

Psychcentral passes along a fascinating study:

Previous research has shown that people spend more physical effort in a demanding physical task when they could gain a high-value monetary reward, than when they could gain a low-value reward. But the intriguing finding from this research was that this behavior occurred even when the monetary reward was presented subliminally, below the threshold of our conscious awareness. In other words, a person would work harder for more money, even if they weren’t consciously aware that more money was the reward.

McSweeney's offers the challenge – which is which?

1. loog a his lirow nose
2. there is some shit I will not eat
3. LISN bud LISN
4. this i bad sorry to saY
5. leave her alone
    she's not your gal
6. She is Lucifierian !
7. THuNdeRB loSSo!M iN
8. aThe):l
9. stunned. i. am. stunned. every question speaks to us
10. What is nothing?

Answers after the jump:

YouTube comment: 1, 4, 6, 9, 10
e. e. cummings: 2, 3, 5, 7, 8

Amy Wallace reports on the consequences of the anti-vaccine movement:

In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

Steven Heller gets the answer from designer Michael Cronan:

Jeff [Bezos, the CEO] wanted to talk about the future of reading, but in a small, not braggadocio way. We didn't want it to be 'techie' or trite, and we wanted it to be memorable, and meaningful in many ways of expression, from 'I love curling up with my Kindle to read a new book' to 'When I'm stuck in the airport or on line, I can Kindle my newspaper, favorite blogs or half a dozen books I'm reading.'" Kindle means to set alight or start to burn, to arouse or be aroused, to make or become bright. The word's roots are from the Old Norse word kyndill, meaning Candle. "I verified that it had deep roots in literature," adds Hibma. "From Voltaire: 'The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others and it becomes the property of all.'"

No other name could hold a candle to Kindle.