A guy named Miles Lennon has done the science (not really) on the typical life cycle of the blog in “Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?” For me, maintaining a vigorous blog is impossible because of a dozen things every day that make my life thrive better than blogging. What many of the blog-inclined learn is that group blogs work best because constant updating is required. My uncle posts on Salon.com – when he wants. My friend, Valerie, is a publishing expert at about.com. Even a guy like Andrew Sullivan, who often ranks as one of the top individual bloggers, doesn’t do it alone. A while back he had to come clean that he and a staff write his blog. But as a former editor of the New Republic he had the access, means, and know-how to eventually adapt editorial techniques to his blog. (The staff is now credited on his main page and he is listed as “Editor” BTW.)

Due to so few of us being able to call upon staff, we individual bloggers fail. We fail a lot. We fail so much that most of us would be mathematically better off opening up new restaurants which only fail at a rate of 59% in the first year. But for those who cannot cook either, here is what Lennon wants you to know about blogging:

Blog Lifecycle

It turns out that this cycle may not be uncommon. Surveys have shown that 95% of blogs are abandoned within 120 days and 60-80% of them abandoned within the first month.

Writing 5am to 7am is not my habit but the former habit of Brit Raymond Tallis and he’s produced a new book about one of the subjects I love to follow in a pop-culture manner:  neuroscience.    He has a dim view of how publishing and pop culture demands have bent research to what he deems ridiculous conclusions.

Those trends, as Tallis sees them, are like “intellectual illnesses” metastasizing from academic labs into popular culture. He sees the symptoms in neuro-economic thinkers who explain our susceptibility to subprime mortgages by describing how our brains evolved to favor short-term rewards. He sees them in philosophers who claim that our primate minds admire paintings of landscapes that would have supported hunting and gathering. He sees it in neurotheologians who preach that “God is a tingle in the ‘God spot’ in the brain.”

Whatever the case, his book’s title is very pop-culture and most amusing for a guy who disparages pop culture: Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity.

Who knew one could have inflammation of the Darwin?

A bit of a neuroscience debate regarding where evil resides in the brain ran across a couple of publications this weekend. A bit in Slate regarding fMRIs ability to find evil acts in the brain pronounced:

The new neuroscience represents the latest chapter in a millennia-old and still divisive cultural conflict over the problem of evil, the latest chapter in the attempt by science to reduce evil to malfunction or dysfunction rather than malevolence. 

Will Wilkinson at the Big Think responded with a big simplistic tch-tch:

About evil specifically, it seems obvious that people with perfectly normal brains do evil all the time.

It seems inevitable that neuroscientists will eventually discover a pattern of neural activity that coincides with what we deem evil acts or evil thoughts.    If science can identify and address the neural activity that coincides with “evil”, it could also identify and intervene with the neural activity of the perception of “evil”.  Theoretically, evil, as we know it today, could go on and science could negate human capacity to perceive it just as easily as it could be used for a  prevention scenario a la “Minority Report”.

The question once again is:  how will science in the hands of humans be used and who will be using it?

Simply because there is math in everything and the more you see it, the more beautiful everything is.

It puts a little glimmer of hope in my heart to hear that the Department of Energy is following up on a potentially very good development in solar power. From the Boston Herald:

A Massachusetts company has won a conditional $150 million federal loan guarantee to develop a dramatically cheaper way to produce the silicon wafers that are the key component of solar panels.

The U.S. has a small but growing 5 to 7 percent market share of the world’s solar energy industry, according to a report for the Solar Energy Industries Association. China and Germany are leading players in the market.

The price of solar energy is a major competitive disadvantage, even compared to other renewable sources of electricity.

A U.S. Energy Information Administration projection of the cost of electricity from new plants coming on line in 2016 puts the cost of solar at 21.1 cents per kilowatt hour. It’s cheaper than offshore wind (24.3 cents) but much more expensive than land wind (9.6 cents) and conventional coal (9.5 cents), for instance.

But 1366 Technologies says its manufacturing process can chop the price of solar electricity down to about 4 cents per kilowatt hour by 2020.

It has been so disheartening and depressing to watch the market forces that be keep solar and wind priced prohibitively expensive by subsidizing oil, coal and gas and depriving clean energy of investment. If Germany can commit to getting rid of nuclear energy and China can take the lead in developing renewable, non-polluting energy, so can the U.S. It’s just a decision.

It’s actually sort of sorry to have to admit that I’ve never spent a night in a place dark enough to see the Milky Way properly. Shoot. Does this mean I have to start a bucket list now?

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

From the Guardian:

Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

Why is Bolivia the first to do what is necessary? This video explains:

Or “Female Character Flowchart.”   You have to click on the image to see the whole picture.

In the late ’90s, I worked on a film called “Infinity” with Matthew Broderick and Patricia Arquette and screenplay written by Matthew’s mother, Patricia Broderick.   The film was about the early years of physicist Richard Feynmann.   There were no bongos or womanizing in the film and it wasn’t until later that I discovered Feynmann was a bit of a rounder. I came across this flowchart recently and was amused all over again.