Francesca Gino’s new study, which links creativity to dishonesty, opens with a quote from 18th-century French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot: “Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.”

Gino is not suggesting, as some artists at the time complained, that creative people are evil. But she is saying that, according to her research, creative people are more apt to cheat, lie and justify their evil. Gino, associate professor of business administration at Harvard University, spoke to the Post about her study, co-authored by Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at Duke University. (Their findings were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology last month.)

Boing Boing has come across a cozy little place that any future super-villain would be happy to call home on Sotheby’s International Realty website. Situated in the scenic Adirondack Mountains of New York, this silo and air park were operational for a short time in 1961. Hundreds of these Atlas F missile silos were built across the U.S. in the 1960′s in anticipation of attacks on the country.

As if the promise of moving into your very own missile silo isn’t tempting enough, Sotheby’s has recently dropped the price from $4.6 million USD to a mere $750,000. Not a bad deal if you’re looking to save money on your lair so you can splurge on that death ray you’ve always wanted.

In addition to the house perched atop the missile, you may also be interested in the adjoining air craft hanger, seven buildings spread out over neighbouring acres of land and an additional log cabin with runway access. To get the whole package, it’ll cost you $1.76 million USD.

The article also linked to this related video:

It’s your mutinous immune system that gives you that sozzled feeling after a boozy session, scientists claim in a paper published today in the British Journal of Pharmacology.

Conk out certain immuno receptors in your brain and you’ll be able to walk in a straight line, perform complex manual tasks and probably even stay awake on the night bus home after a heavy dose of alcoholic refreshment.

These receptors are a particular part of your immune system and scientists have been trying to figure out their connection to alcohol for years. When active TLR4s react with alcohol they release an inflammatory chemical called cytokine that seems to contribute to making us sleepy and poorly-coordinated.

It was a research team at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois, that made the breakthrough. Their pill works for mice, at least.

British Telecom is, as a telecoms company, worth minus £30bn. Yes, that’s a negative number there. And yet it is literally sitting on top of billions in assets.

[. . .]

Ten pairs of copper cabling weighs around 132kg per mile. Which by the miracle of multiplication can be seen to be about 10 million tonnes of copper. Which, at current LME prices of just over £5,000 a tonne, is £50bn.

BT’s current market capitalisation is just north of £20bn. So, as an operating telecoms company they’re worth £30bn less than the mountain of copper they’re sitting upon: that is, they’re worth less than the physical assets or they have, as a telecoms company not a mountain of scrap copper, a negative value.

H/T to James M. Bryant for the link.

Update: On the same list, John Lennard points out this possibly cautionary note: “It is interesting, but without knowing how they’re performing their calculations I’m kinda suspicious. [. . .] Shakespeare’s total recorded active vocabulary (all words used in all his printed works) is 29,066.”

I don’t like vampire novels. I don’t even like vampire stories. Never did. They lack verisimilitude if vampires have to bite people frequently, and the people they bite turn into vampires, why aren’t we all vampires by now? And what’s the deal with sunlight? And the garlic and the wooden stake? That all sounds like superstition. So to me, vampires belong in the realm of fantasy, not in science fiction at all, and, for the most part, I don’t enjoy fantasy very much. Now, there are some exceptions I like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld vampires, because the story is humorous, like all his stuff. But most vampire stories are dead serious, with all kinds of gothic, fifteen-year-old-girl orientation Twilight is nothing new, just a continuation of the old pattern. Same old same old rape fantasies porn for teeny-boppers.

Since it makes little sense to order a single book from Amazon, due to shipping costs, I clicked the Recommendations list to see what else is new, interesting, or Amazon’s algorithms consider might be appealing to me. Of the fifteen offerings on the first page, twelve of them are by Steven Brust. As I recently started reading his Vlad Taltos series, that kinda makes sense, but 12/15ths?

Page two of the recommendations were also heavily weighted to match a recent purchase, but this time the recommendations included The Iliad, The Odessey, Plato’s Republic, and works by Saint Augustine, Aristophanes, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Epictetus. The seed book for that seems to have been Peloponnesian War by Thucidides.

Page three appears to be an attempt to patch between the first two pages — Xenophon and several SF books by David Weber, John Ringo, George R.R. Martin, David Drake, and Tom Kratman.

Reminds me of an old riddle, Paul. Which weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers? You will know the answer…

Thanks all tweets re: @paullewismoney and whether a pound of gold weighs more than a pound of feathers. Most of you are wrong…

…but @adam_j666 @andrew_F_smith and @cleverwithmoney have it right. Congrats. And I’m sure @paullewismoney had it right.

The answer is a pound of feathers weighs more than a pound of gold. But an ounce of feathers weighs less than an ounce of gold…

…Gold weighed in troy ounces (31.1g) with 12 to pound = 373.24g. Feathers weighed avoirdupois oz (28.35g) x 16 to pound = 453.59g.

H/T to David Akin for the link.

H/T to Gerard Vanderleun who posted it on his Tumblr site.