Adam Curtis | BBC | 14 November 2012 A bit of video and music fun. Curtis has cut together some arresting footage from the BBC archives of people dancing; and put the footage to two different soundtracks to show how music affects your perception of what you're seeing Comments Deborah Blum | Wired | 15 November 2012 Chain of fatal poisonings in Thailand, mostly of foreign tourists. Police refuse to investigate. Authorities blame insecticide in hotels. "I used to work in Phuket and have seen it to be a common practice to poison foreigners" Comments Jonathan Derbyshire | New Statesman | 8 November 2012 Succinct Q&A about Soviet power in post-war Europe. "If Austria had been taken over, Austria would have been a communist country. And if the Soviets hadn’t taken over Poland, Poland wouldn’t have been a communist country" Comments Mat Honan | Wired | 15 November 2012 "Nothing you do, no precaution you take, no long or random string of characters can stop a dedicated and devious individual from cracking your account. The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realised it yet" Comments Marc Lynch | Foreign Policy | 16 November 2012 "Israel is gambling that the Arab uprisings have changed little, and that Arab leaders will continue to act much as they did during its 2008-09 war against Gaza, controlling popular anger while doing little beyond heated rhetoric" Comments Nassim Nicholas Taleb | WSJ | 16 November 2012 We must learn to benefit from disorder that "black swans" bring. Taleb's term for this quality is "antifragile", and here are his "five policy rules that can help to establish antifragility as a principle of our socioeconomic life" Comments |