Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

By now, our overwhelming tendency to look for what confirms our beliefs and ignore what contradicts our beliefs is well documented. Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, and its ubiquity is observed in both academia and in our everyday lives: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats watch MSNB; creationists see fossils as evidence of God, evolutionary biologists see fossils as evidence of evolution; doomsayers see signs of the end of the world, and the rest of us see just another day

By Molly O'Toole WASHINGTON, July 16 (Reuters) - Fiery reds and oranges [More]

Oh weather; a joy, a pain, the making of a beautiful day or a miserable evening.

Everyone knows what narcolepsy looks like from movies like the ridiculous display in Deuce Bigalow (one of the `adorable misfit bunch of suitors') to other more subdued examples like Mike in My Own Private Idaho.

Have you heard about the highly endangered tree octopus of the forests of the Pacific Northwest?

It’s one of the most commonly consumed snacks in the Western world and has been made in one form or another for at least three centuries, so you might think nothing new could come of the humble french fry.

[More]

[More]

Eleventh-hour negotiations aren't uncommon in Washington, D.C., but the most recent duel over the debt limit seems especially tense. Unless its debt ceiling is raised from its current $14.3 trillion, or its budget is miraculously balanced, the U.S. will default on its financial obligations on August 2, leading to a credit downgrade, delayed government payments and other serious economic troubles.

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine Cyclist Borut Bozic drew his hands to his chest with a look of joy, disbelief and exhaustion after defeating some of the world's best sprinters in the Swiss village of Tobel.

It was summer of 2008 and the rhetoric was getting as hot as a globally warmed hood on a ’91 Chevy Camaro RS (my 2nd car, with t-tops of course). [More]

Most people know jellyfish and their ilk — the cnidarians, of sea pen, anemone, coral, and man’o'war fame — live in water and (happily for us) stay pretty well confined to it. [More]

By James Mitchell Crow of Nature magazine It might be among the hardest materials known, but place a diamond in a patch of sunlight and it will start to lose atoms, say a team of physicists in Australia. [More]

[More]

Hello everyone, and welcome again to The Ocelloid! The intro post before was a little too formal and impersonal, I think, at least for my usual style anyway. [More]