Weekend Reads 1/9/16

Giving money away makes us happy. Then why do so few of us do it?

We find a strong and highly consistent association between generous practices and various measures of personal well-being like happiness, health, a sense of purpose in life, and personal growth. In our book we discuss the various causal mechanisms that produce this association. While greater well-being can encourage generosity, practices of generosity also enhance well-being.

The GOP has become the party from George Orwell’s nightmares

Creating a new lingo used to purposely deceive the people, full of enough euphemisms and phrases to fill up a dictionary, has been quite beneficial. Just to name a few of the most popular: “energy exploration” for oil drilling, “job-creators” for capitalists, “right to work” for anti-union laws, “trickle down economics” for tax cuts for the rich, “death tax” for an estate tax, “job-killing” for tax increases on the rich or corporations (or cracking down on corporate tax avoidance, for that matter), and so on.

The ten greatest steps of the last ten decades

Considering what we know about our Universe today, it’s hard to believe that just a century ago, Einstein’s General Relativity was very much untested and uncertain, and we hadn’t even realized that anything at all lie outside our own Milky Way. But over the past ten decades, ten great discoveries have taken place to give us the Universe we understand today.

Study Finds The 'Era of Climate Science Denial Is Not Over'

Some of the more popular science issues attacked by the think tanks included underplaying the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide, claiming that concern over emissions was just ‘alarmism’ and claiming there was no consensus among scientists that humans were causing global warming.