Links for 2010-09-06

"Though President Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day a national holiday in 1894, the occasion was first observed on Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City. A parade was organized by the city's Central Labor Union, a branch of the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, a secretive labor union founded in 1869 by a clique of Philadelphia tailors. Historians still debate over whom, specifically, to credit with the idea of a holiday dedicated to the workingman."

"Let that marinate in your mind for a moment there, dear reader. The Simpsons was nearly snuffed out in its infancy, strangled in the womb.
Can you even imagine a world without The Simpsons? Can you imagine the agonizing silences that would ensue in a world without Simpsons references? What would we say? What would we do? What show would be there to console us in our darkest hours? What show would provide a common cultural currency for multiple generations? If the show never existed we'd all have to develop fascinating and intriguing personalities instead of merely parroting choice lines. Verily, it would be the end of civilization."

"When given a choice, older people prefer to read negative news, rather than positive news, about young adults, a new study suggests.

In fact, older readers who chose to read negative stories about young individuals actually get a small boost in their self-esteem, according to the results.

And what about younger people? Well, they just prefer not to read about older people.

These results come from a study of 276 Germans who were asked to read what they thought was a test version of an online magazine featuring carefully selected stories about younger and older people. "

"If the MBTI approach is valid, we should expect to see two separate bell curves along the introversion/extraversion spectrum, making it valid for Myers & Briggs to decide there are two groups into which people fit. But data have shown that people do not clump into two separately identifiable curves; they clump into a single bell curve, with extreme introverts and extreme extraverts forming the long tails of the curve, and most people gathered somewhere in the middle. Jung himself said "There is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum." This does not support the MBTI assumption that people naturally separate into two groups. MBTI takes a knife and cuts the bell curve right down the center, through the meatiest part, and right through most people's horizontal error bars. Moreover, this forced error is compounded four times, with each of the four dichotomies. "

"For all the triumph of NASA's 1976 Viking mission, which put two unmanned spacecraft on Mars, there was one major disappointment: The landers failed to find carbon-based molecules that could serve as the building blocks of life.

The complete lack of these organic molecules was a surprise, and the notion of a desolate, lifeless Mars persisted for years.

Now, some scientists say that conclusion was premature and perhaps even incorrect. They suggest that such building blocks -- known as organic molecules, although they need not come from living organisms -- were indeed in the soil, but that they were inadvertently destroyed before they could be detected."