Even though the data around productivity has proved pretty remorseless, humans have found the message hard to accept. It seems so logical that two units of work will produce twice the output. Logical but wrong. The critical measure of work isn't and never should be input but output. What matters isn't how many hours your team puts in, but the quality and quantity of work they produce.

Which is where sleep comes in. Although we might all like to imagine that we can work happily through the night, once again the data's all against us. Lose just one night's sleep and your cognitive capacity is roughly the same as being over the alcohol limit. Yet we regularly hail as heroes the executives who take the red eye, jump into a rental car, and zoom down the highway to the next meeting. Would we, I wonder, be so impressed if they arrived drunk?

The reason sleep is so important is because fatigue isn't simple. When we are tired, our performance doesn't degrade equally. Instead, when you lose a night's sleep, the parietal and occipital lobes in your brain become less active. The parietal lobe integrates information from the senses and is involved in our knowledge of numbers and manipulation of objects. The occipital lobe is involved in visual processing. So the parts of our mind responsible for understanding the world and the data around us start to slow down. This is because the brain is prioritizing the thalamus—the part of your brain responsible for keeping you awake. In evolutionary terms, this makes sense. If you're driven to find food, you need to stay awake and search, not compare recipes.

After 24 hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall reduction of six percent in glucose reaching the brain. (That's why you crave donuts and candy.) But the loss isn't shared equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12 percent to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas we most need for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas, for social control, and to be able to tell the difference between good and bad.

I am constantly amazed at how many otherwise intelligent people insist on burning the midnight oil, producing important work (reports, essays, etc) late at night. Meanwhile, I get odd looks when I insist on trying to get at least 7.5 hours of sleep (preferably eight) each night.

In the last month of the election, negative ads ran nearly every minute of every day.

John Nichols and Robert McChesney take a very interesting in-depth look at the rise of Super PACs and their corrosive effects on US democracy.

Like the Laffer Curve it suggests that there is a point at which cutting government spending becomes self-defeating, it simply lowers growth, depresses tax revenues and pushes up social security spending by more than the government is cutting.

The question for policy-makers then, is are they past the point and at which the curve becomes downwards sloping? Will more austerity simply lead to higher deficits?

Judging by the tone of S&P’s downgrade of several European sovereigns last week, it certainly seems to think that many countries have passed this point.

Duncan Weldon from the TUC Touchstone blog raises an interesting point about Europe's austerity measures. But I wonder, as raised by commenter Migeru, whether this is just fighting pseudoscience with pseudoscience.

The South Australian Opposition’s policy on wind farms would threaten more than $3 billion of investment and push up power prices for South Australian householders if implemented in its current form, the renewable energy industry’s peak body said today.

More than 948 jobs would be at risk under the SA Liberal Party's wind turbine policy and electricity prices would rise. One wonders why the CEC started their media release with rubbish about investment.

(Let's not forget that the Liberal Party is in the pocket of the carbon lobby, who wants to destroy renewable energy and keep electricity prices high.)

Nuclear power is no magic solution, argues Pervez Hoodbhoy — it's not safe, or cheap, and it leads to weapons programmes.

A string of energy-starved developing countries have looked at nuclear power as the magic solution. No oil, no gas, no coal needed – it's a fuel with zero air pollution or carbon dioxide emissions. High-tech and prestigious, it was seen as relatively safe.

But then Fukushima came along. The disaster's global psychological impact exceeded Chernobyl's, and left a world that's now unsure if nuclear electricity is the answer.

I, like many others, was very disappointed to read in the latest Quarterly Essay, that Andrew Charlton has joined the poisonous bandwagon of pundits and wonks calling for Australia to build a nuclear industry as a response to climate change.

An Illinois man is suing Pepsi Co. because, he says, he found a mouse in his can of Mountain Dew. But Pepsi says the guy is pulling a Strange Brew, and here's how they know: If there really were a mouse in a Mountain Dew can, it would have dissolved into "a jelly-like substance" before the guy could find it. Seriously, this is their defense.

This means, unfortunately, that if there really was a mouse in your Mountain Dew, you'd never know...