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Vuzman
Interesting stuff

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Admiral

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Posted on 26-08-2009 21:50
I'm starting a new thread for posting interesting stuff. I'm thinking mostly stuff which isn't easily linkable or a current event or something like that, which might be more suited for the linkbox.

Sometimes when I read a book I want to share a particular passage, but usually I could only recommend the entire book. Nowadays the book usually can be found online, either readable online or as a pdf. There are even online OCR services, so you can just scan a page from a physical book, upload the image and have the service convert it into text. Or just upload the image itself...

When it comes to copyrighted material (as most books are), the passages must be fairly short, in order to come under the Fair use doctrine.


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Vuzman
RE: Interesting stuff

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Admiral

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Posted on 26-08-2009 21:53
"Eric Harris [leader of the duo that carried out the Columbine massacre] was neither normal nor insane. Psychopathy (si-COP-uh-thee) represents a third category. Psychopathic brains don't function like those in either of the other groups, but they are consistently similar to one another. Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it.

"To a psychopath, both motives make sense. Psychopaths ... can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.' ...

"Psychopaths have likely plagued mankind since the beginning, but they are still poorly understood. In the 1800s, as the fledgling field of psychology began classifying mental disorders, one group refused to fit. Every known psychosis was marked by a failure of reasoning or a debilitating ailment: paralyzing fear, hallucinations, voices, phobias, and so on. In 1885, the term psychopath was introduced to describe vicious human predators who were not deranged, delusional, or depressed. They just enjoyed being bad.

"Psychopaths are distinguished by two characteristics. The first is a ruthless disregard for others: they will defraud, maim, or kill for the most trivial personal gain. The second is an astonishing gift for disguising the first. It's the deception that makes them so dangerous. You never see him coming. (It's usually a him--more than 80 percent are male.) Don't look for the oddball creeping you out. Psychopaths don't act like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates. They come off like Hugh Grant, in his most adorable role. ...

"Psychopaths take great personal pride in their deceptions and extract tremendous joy from them. Lies become the psychopath's occupation, and when the truth will work, they lie for sport. 'I like to con people,' one subject told a researcher during an extended interview. 'I'm conning you right now.' Lying for amusement is so profound in psychopaths, it stands out as their signature characteristic. 'Duping delight,' psychologist Paul Ekman dubbed it. ...

"Symptoms appear so early, and so often in stable homes with normal siblings, that the condition seems to be inborn. Most parents report having been aware of disturbing signs before the child entered kindergarten. Dr. Robert Hare described a five-year-old girl repeatedly attempting to flush her kitten down the toilet. 'I caught her just as she was about to try again,' the mother said. 'She seemed quite unconcerned, maybe a bit angry--about being found out.' When the woman told her husband, the girl calmly denied the whole thing. Shame did not register; neither did fear. Psychopaths are not individuals losing touch with those emotions. They never developed them from the start. ...

"Researchers are still just beginning to understand psychopaths, but they believe psychopaths crave the emotional responses they lack. They are nearly always thrill seekers. They love roller coasters and hang gliding, and they seek out high-anxiety occupations, like ER tech, bond trader, or Marine. Crime, danger, impoverishment, death--any sort of risk will help. They chase new sources of excitement because it is so difficult for them to sustain.

"They rarely stick with a career; they get bored. Even as career criminals, psychopaths underperform. They 'lack clear goals and objectives, getting involved in a wide variety of opportunistic offenses, rather than specializing the way typical career criminals do,' Dr. Hervey Cleckley wrote. They make careless mistakes and pass up stunning opportunities, because they lose interest. They perform spectacularly in short bursts--a few weeks, a few months, a yearlong big con--then walk away. ...

"Rare killer psychopaths nearly always get bored with murder, too. When they slit a throat, their pulse races, but it falls just as fast. It stays down--no more joy from cutting throats for a while; that thrill has already been spent."

Dave Cullen, Columbine, Hachette Book Group, Copyright 2009 by Dave Cullen, pp. 239-244.


When I kill her, I'll have her
Die white girls, die white girls

Edited by Vuzman on 27-08-2009 11:46
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RE: Interesting stuff

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General

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Posted on 26-08-2009 22:20
That was interesting, I'll give you that.

Goes against so much of my picked-up-from-various-tv-shows knowledge smiley




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Vuzman
RE: Interesting stuff

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Admiral

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Posted on 27-08-2009 11:46
On eerie coincidences:

"The more one knows about probabilities, the less amazing the most woo-woo coincidences become. ...

"John Littlewood, a renowned mathematician at the University of Cambridge, formalized the apparent intrusion of the supernatural into ordinary life as a kind of natural law, which he called 'Littlewood's Law of Miracles.' He defined a 'miracle' as many people might: a one-in-a-million event to which we accord real significance when it occurs. By his law, such 'miracles' arise in anyone's life at an average of once a month. Here's how Littlewood explained it: You are out and about and barraged by the world for some eight hours a day. You see and hear things happening at a rate of maybe one per second, amounting to 30,000 or so 'events' a day, or a million per month. The vast majority of events you barely notice, but every so often, from the great stream of happenings, you are treated to a marvel: the pianist at the bar starts playing a song you'd just been thinking of, or you pass the window of a pawnshop and see the heirloom ring that had been stolen from your apartment eighteen months ago. Yes, life is full of miracles, minor, major, middling C. It's called 'not being in a persistent vegetative state' and 'having a life span longer than a click beetle's.'

"And because there is nothing more miraculous than birth, [Professor] Deborah Nolan also likes to wow her new students with the famous birthday game. I'll bet you, she says, that at least two people in this room have the same birthday. The sixty-five people glance around at one another and see nothing close to a year's offering of days represented, and they're dubious. Nolan starts at one end of the classroom, asks the student her birthday, writes it on the blackboard, moves to the next, and jots likewise, and pretty soon, yup, a duplicate emerges. How can that be, the students wonder, with less than 20 percent of 365 on hand to choose from (or 366 if you want to be leap-year sure of it)? First, Nolan reminds them of what they're talking about--not the odds of matching a particular birthday, but of finding a match, any match, somewhere in their classroom sample.

"She then has them think about the problem from the other direction: What are the odds of them not finding a match? That figure, she demonstrates, falls rapidly as they proceed. Each time a new birth date is added to the list, another day is dinged from the possible 365 that could subsequently be cited without a match. Yet each time the next person is about to announce a birthday, the pool the student theoretically will pick from remains what it always was--365. One number is shrinking, in other words, while the other remains the same, and because the odds here are calculated on the basis of comparing (through multiplication and division) the initial fixed set of possible options with an ever diminishing set of permissible ones, the probability of finding no birthday match in a group of sixty-five plunges rapidly to below 1 percent. Of course, the prediction is only a probability, not a guarantee. For all its abstract and counterintuitive texture, however, the statistic proves itself time and again in Nolan's classroom a dexterous gauge of reality.

"If you're not looking for such a high degree of confidence, she adds, but are willing to settle for a fifty-fifty probability of finding a shared birthday in a gathering, the necessary number of participants accordingly can be cut to twenty-three."


Natalie Angier, The Canon, Houghton Mifflin, Copyright 2007 by Natalie Angier, pp. 50-52.


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Vuzman
RE: Interesting stuff

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Admiral

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Posted on 03-09-2009 12:11
Symbiosis, the system in which members of different species live in physical contact, strikes us as an arcane concept and a specialized biological term. This is because of our lack of awareness of its prevalence. Not only are our guts and eyelashes festooned with bacterial and animal symbionts, but if you look at your backyard or community park, symbionts are not obvious but they are omnipresent. Clover and vetch, common weeds, have little balls on their roots. These are the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that are essential for healthy growth in nitrogen-poor soil. Then take the trees, the maple, oak, and hickory. As many as three hundred different fungal symbionts, the mycorrhizae we notice as mushrooms, are entwined in their roots. Or look at a dog, who usually fails to notice the symbiotic worms in his gut. We are symbionts on a symbiotic planet, and if we care to, we can find symbiosis everywhere. Physical contact is a nonnegotiable requisite for many differing kinds of life.

Practically everything I work on now was anticipated by unknown scholars or naturalists. One of my most important scientific predecessors thoroughly understood and explained the role of symbiosis in evolution. The University of Colorado anatomist Ivan E. Wallin (1883-1969) wrote a fine book arguing that new species originate through symbiosis. Symbiogenesis, an evolutionary term, refers to the origin of new tissues, organs, organisms--even species--by establishment of long-term permanent symbiosis. Wallin never used the word symbiogenesis, but he entirely understood the idea. He especially emphasized animal symbiosis with bacteria, a process he called "the establishment of microsymbiotic complexes" or "symbionticism." This is important. Although Darwin entitled his magnum opus On the Origin of Species, the appearance of new species is scarcely even discussed in his book.

Symbiosis, and here I fully agree with Wallin, is crucial to an understanding of evolutionary novelty and the origin of species. Indeed, I believe the idea of species itself requires symbiosis. Bacteria do not have species. No species existed before bacteria merged to form larger cells including ancestors to both plants and animals. In this book I will explain how long-standing symbiosis led first to the evolution of complex cells with nuclei and from there to other organisms such as fungi, plants, and animals.

That animal and plant cells originated through symbiosis is no longer controversial. Molecular biology, including gene sequencing, has vindicated this aspect of my theory of cell symbiosis. The permanent incorporation of bacteria inside plant and animal cells as plastids and mitochondria is the part of my serial endosymbiosis theory that now appears even in high school textbooks. But the full impact of the symbiotic view of evolution has yet to be felt. And the idea that new species arise from symbiotic mergers among members of old ones is still not even discussed in polite scientific society.

Here is an example. I once asked the eloquent and personable paleontologist Niles Eldredge whether he knew of any case in which the formation of a new species had been documented. I told him I'd be satisfied if his example were drawn from the laboratory, from the field, or from observations from the fossil record. He could muster only one good example: Theodosius Dobzhansky's experiments with Drosophila, the fruit fly. In this fascinating experiment, populations of fruit flies, bred at progressively hotter temperatures, became genetically separated. After two years or so the hot-bred ones could no longer produce fertile offspring with their cold-breeding brethren. "But," Eldredge quickly added, "that turned out to have something to do with a parasite!" Indeed, it was later discovered that the hot-breeding flies lacked an intracellular symbiotic bacterium found in the cold breeders. Eldredge dismissed this case as an observation of speciation because it entailed a microbial symbiosis! He had been taught, as we all have, that microbes are germs, and when you have germs, you have a disease, not a new species. And he had been taught that evolution through natural selection occurs by the gradual accumulation, over eons, of single gene mutations.

Ironically, Niles Eldredge is author with Stephen Jay Gould of the theory of "punctuated equilibrium." Eldredge and Gould argue that the fossil record shows evolution to be static most of the time and to proceed suddenly: rapid change in fossil populations occurs over brief time spans; stasis then prevails for extended periods. From the long view of geological time, symbioses are like flashes of evolutionary lightning. To me symbiosis as a source of evolutionary novelty helps explain the observation of "punctuated equilibrium," of discontinuities in the fossil record.

Among the only other organisms besides fruit flies in which species have been seen to originate in the laboratory are members of the genus Amoeba and symbiosis was involved. Symbiosis is a kind, but not the notorious kind, of Lamarckianism. "Lamarckianism," named for Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who the French claim was the first evolutionist, is often dismissed as "inheritance of acquired characteristics." In simple Lamarckianism, organisms inherit traits induced in their parents by environmental conditions, whereas through symbiogenesis, organisms acquire not traits but entire other organisms, and of course, their entire sets of genes! I could say, as my French colleagues often have, that symbiogenesis is a form of neo-Larmarckianism. Symbiogenesis is evolutionary change by the inheritance of acquired gene sets.

Living beings defy neat definition. They fight, they feed, they dance, they mate, they die. At the base of the creativity of all large familiar forms of life, symbiosis generates novelty. It brings together different life-forms, always for a reason. Often, hunger unites the predator with the prey or the mouth with the photosynthetic bacterium or algal victim. Symbiogenesis brings together unlike individuals to make large, more complex entities. Symbiogenetic life-forms are even more unlike than their unlikely "parents." "Individuals" permanently merge and regulate their reproduction. They generate new populations that become multiunit symbiotic new individuals. These become "new individuals" at larger, more inclusive levels of integration. Symbiosis is not a marginal or rare phenomenon. It is natural and common. We abide in a symbiotic world.

In Brittany, on the northwest coast of France, and along beaches bordering the English Channel is found a strange sort of "seaweed" that is not seaweed at all. From a distance it is a bright green patch on the sand. The patches slosh around, shimmering in shallow puddles. When you pick up the green water and let it slip through your fingers you notice gooey ribbons much like seaweed. A small hand lens or low-power microscope reveals that what looked like seaweed are really green worms. These masses of sunbathing green worms, unlike any seaweed, burrow into the sand and effectively disappear. They were first described in the 1920s by an Englishman, J. Keeble, who spent his summers at Roscoff. Keeble called them "plant-animals" and diagrammed them splendidly in the color frontispiece of his book, Plant-Animals. The flatworms of the species Convoluta roscoffensis are all green because their tissues are packed with Platymonas cells; as the worms are translucent, the green color of Platymonas, photosynthesizing algae, shows through. Although lovely, the green algae are not merely decorative: they live and grow, die and reproduce, inside the bodies of the worms. Indeed they produce the food that the worms "eat". The mouths of the worms become superfluous and do not function after the worm larvae hatch. Sunlight reaches the algae inside their mobile greenhouses and allows them to grow and feed themselves as they leak photosynthestic products and feed their hosts from the inside. The symbiotic algae even do the worm a waste management favor: they recycle the worm's uric acid waste into nutrients for themselves. Algae and worm make a miniature ecosystem swimming in the sun. Indeed, these two beings are so intimate that it is difficult, without very high-power microscopy, to say where the animal ends and the algae begin.

Such partnerships abound. Bodies of Plachobranchus, snails, harbor green symbionts growing in such even rows they appear to have been planted. Giant clams act as living gardens, in which their bodies hold algae toward the light. Mastigias is a man-of-war type of medusoid that swims in the Pacific Ocean. Like myriad small green umbrellas, Mastigias medusoids float through the light beams near the water's surface by the thousands.

Similarly, freshwater tentacled hydras may be white or green, depending on whether or not their bodies are packed with green photosynthetic partners. Are hydras animals or plants? When a green hydra is permanently inhabited by its food producing partners (called Chlorella), it is hard to tell. Hydras, if green, are symbionts. They are capable of photosynthesizing, of swimming, of moving, and of staying put. They have remained in the game of life because they become individuals by incorporation.

We animals, all thirty million species of us, emanate from the microcosm. The microbial world, the source and wellspring of soil and air, informs our own survival. A major theme of the microbial drama is the emergence of individuality from the community interactions of once-independent actors.

I love to gaze on the daily life struggles of our nonhuman planetmates. For many years Lorraine Olendzenski, my former student, now at the University of Connecticut, and I have videographed life in the microcosm. More recently we have worked with Lois Byrnes, the vivacious former associate director of the New England Science Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. Together we and a fine group of U MASS students make films and videos that introduce people to our microbial acquaintances.

Ophrydium, a pond water scum that, upon close inspection, seems to be countable green "jelly ball" bodies is an example of emergent individuality that we recently discovered in Massachusetts and redescribed. Our films show these water balls with exquisite clarity. The larger "individual" green jelly ball is composed of smaller cone-shaped actively contractile "individuals." These in turn are composite: green Chlorella dwell inside ciliates, all packed into rows. Inside each upside-down cone are hundreds of spherical symbionts, cells of Chlorella. Chlorella is a common green alga; those of Ophrydium are trapped into service for the jelly ball community. Each "individual organism" in this "species" is really a group, a membrane-bounded packet of microbes that looks like and acts as a single individual.

A nutritious drink called kefir consumed in the Caucasus Mountains is also a symbiotic complex. Kefir contains grainy curds the Georgians call "Mohammed pellets." The curd is an integrated packet of more than twenty-five different kinds of yeast and bacteria. Millions of individuals make up each curd. From such interactive bodies of fused organisms new beings sometimes emerge. The tendency of "independent" life is to bind together and reemerge in a new wholeness at a higher, larger level of organization. I suspect that the near future of Homo sapiens as a species requires our reorientation toward the fusions and mergers of the planetmates that have preceded us in the microcosm. One of my ambitions is to coax some great director into producing evolutionary history as the microcosmic image in IMAX or OMNIMAX, showing spectacular living relationships as they form and dissolve.

Now and throughout Earth's history, symbioses, both stable and ephemeral, have prevailed. Stories about this kind of evolution deserve broadcasting.


Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, Perseus Publishing, Copyright 2000 by Lynn Margulis, from chapter 1.


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Die white girls, die white girls

Edited by Vuzman on 10-09-2009 22:15
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Admiral

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Posted on 10-09-2009 22:15
Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar you would know better than to say ignorami) who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin.

Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rearguard defence of the proposition that the Romans existed at all: a defence against an exhibition of ignorant prejudice that would make you weep if you weren’t too busy fighting it.

If my fantasy of the Latin teacher seems too wayward, here’s a more realistic example. Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally “respected”.

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context — which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word “evolution” systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into “change over time”. Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing Islamic presence in the classroom — abetted by the official commitment to “multiculturalism” and the terror of being thought racist.

It is frequently, and rightly, said that senior clergy and theologians have no problem with evolution and, in many cases, actively support scientists in this respect. This is often true, as I know from the agreeable experience of collaborating with the Bishop of Oxford, now Lord Harries, on two separate occasions. In 2004 we wrote a joint article in The Sunday Times whose concluding words were: “Nowadays there is nothing to debate. Evolution is a fact and, from a Christian perspective, one of the greatest of God’s works.” The last sentence was written by Richard Harries, but we agreed about all the rest of our article. Two years previously, Bishop Harries and I had organised a joint letter to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

[In the letter, eminent scientists and churchmen, including seven bishops, expressed concern over the teaching of evolution and their alarm at it being posed as a “faith position”at the Emmanuel City Technology College in Gateshead.] Bishop Harries and I organised this letter in a hurry. As far as I remember, the signatories to the letter constituted 100 per cent of those we approached. There was no disagreement either from scientists or from bishops.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope (give or take the odd wobble over the precise palaeontological juncture when the human soul was injected), nor do educated priests and professors of theology. The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it. Some may do so reluctantly, some, like Richard Harries, enthusiastically, but all except the woefully uninformed are forced to accept the fact of evolution.

They may think God had a hand in starting the process off, and perhaps didn’t stay his hand in guiding its future progress. They probably think God cranked the Universe up in the first place, and solemnised its birth with a harmonious set of laws and physical constants calculated to fulfil some inscrutable purpose in which we were eventually to play a role.

But, grudgingly in some cases, happily in others, thoughtful and rational churchmen and women accept the evidence for evolution.

What we must not do is complacently assume that, because bishops and educated clergy accept evolution, so do their congregations. Alas there is ample evidence to the contrary from opinion polls. More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we — and by implication all of life — were created by God within the last 10,000 years. The figure is not quite so high in Britain, but it is still worryingly large. And it should be as worrying to the churches as it is to scientists. This book is necessary. I shall be using the name “historydeniers” for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world’s age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of millions of years, and who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.

To repeat, they constitute more than 40 per cent of the American population. The equivalent figure is higher in some countries, lower in others, but 40 per cent is a good average and I shall from time to time refer to the history-deniers as the “40percenters”.

To return to the enlightened bishops and theologians, it would be nice if they’d put a bit more effort into combating the anti-scientific nonsense that they deplore. All too many preachers, while agreeing that evolution is true and Adam and Eve never existed, will then blithely go into the pulpit and make some moral or theological point about Adam and Eve in their sermons without once mentioning that, of course, Adam and Eve never actually existed! If challenged, they will protest that they intended a purely “symbolic” meaning, perhaps something to do with “original sin”, or the virtues of innocence. They may add witheringly that, obviously, nobody would be so foolish as to take their words literally. But do their congregations know that? How is the person in the pew, or on the prayer-mat, supposed to know which bits of scripture to take literally, which symbolically? Is it really so easy for an uneducated churchgoer to guess? In all too many cases the answer is clearly no, and anybody could be forgiven for feeling confused.

Think about it, Bishop. Be careful, Vicar. You are playing with dynamite, fooling around with a misunderstanding that’s waiting to happen — one might even say almost bound to happen if not forestalled. Shouldn’t you take greater care, when speaking in public, to let your yea be yea and your nay be nay? Lest ye fall into condemnation, shouldn’t you be going out of your way to counter that already extremely widespread popular misunderstanding and lend active and enthusiastic support to scientists and science teachers? The history-deniers themselves are among those who I am trying to reach. But, perhaps more importantly, I aspire to arm those who are not history-deniers but know some — perhaps members of their own family or church — and find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case.

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and [my] book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.

Why, then, do we speak of “Darwin’s theory of evolution”, thereby, it seems, giving spurious comfort to those of a creationist persuasion — the history-deniers, the 40-percenters — who think the word “theory” is a concession, handing them some kind of gift or victory? Evolution is a theory in the same sense as the heliocentric theory. In neither case should the word “only” be used, as in “only a theory”. As for the claim that evolution has never been “proved”, proof is a notion that scientists have been intimidated into mistrusting.

Influential philosophers tell us we can’t prove anything in science.

Mathematicians can prove things — according to one strict view, they are the only people who can — but the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried. Even the undisputed theory that the Moon is smaller than the Sun cannot, to the satisfaction of a certain kind of philosopher, be proved in the way that, for example, the Pythagorean Theorem can be proved. But massive accretions of evidence support it so strongly that to deny it the status of “fact” seems ridiculous to all but pedants. The same is true of evolution. Evolution is a fact in the same sense as it is a fact that Paris is in the northern hemisphere. Though logic-choppers rule the town,* some theories are beyond sensible doubt, and we call them facts. The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.

We are like detectives who come on the scene after a crime has been committed. The murderer’s actions have vanished into the past.

The detective has no hope of witnessing the actual crime with his own eyes. What the detective does have is traces that remain, and there is a great deal to trust there. There are footprints, fingerprints (and nowadays DNA fingerprints too), bloodstains, letters, diaries. The world is the way the world should be if this and this history, but not that and that history, led up to the present.

Evolution is an inescapable fact, and we should celebrate its astonishing power, simplicity and beauty. Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of aeons past. Given that, in most cases, we don’t live long enough to watch evolution happening before our eyes, we shall revisit the metaphor of the detective coming upon the scene of a crime after the event and making inferences. The aids to inference that lead scientists to the fact of evolution are far more numerous, more convincing, more incontrovertible, than any eyewitness reports that have ever been used, in any court of law, in any century, to establish guilt in any crime. Proof beyond reasonable doubt? Reasonable doubt? That is the understatement of all time.

*Not my favourite Yeats line, but apt in this case.

Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, Bantam Press, © Richard Dawkins 2009, chapter 1.


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Die white girls, die white girls

Edited by Vuzman on 23-09-2009 15:47
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Admiral

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Posted on 21-09-2009 13:02
In species after species, females are coy and males are not. Indeed, males are so dim in their sexual discernment they may pursue things other than females. Among some kinds of frogs, mistaken homosexual courtship is so common that a 'release call' is used by males who find themselves in the clutches of another male to notify them that they are both wasting their time. Male snakes, for their part, have been known to spend a while with dead females before moving on to a live prospect. And male turkeys will avidly court a stuffed replica of a female turkey. In fact, a replica of a female turkey's head suspended fifteen inches from the ground will generally do the trick. The male circles the head, does its ritual displays, and then (confident, presumably, that its performance has been impressive) rises into the air and comes down in the proximity of the female's backside, which turns out not to exist. The more virile males will show such interest even when a wooden head is used, and a few can summon lust for a wooden head with no eyes or beak. ...

For a species low in [the need] for male parental [involvement], the basic dynamic of courtship, as we've seen, is pretty simple: the male really wants sex; the female isn't so sure. She may want time to (unconsciously) assess the quality of his genes, whether by inspecting him or letting him battle with other males for her favor. She may also pause to weigh the chances that he carries a disease. And she may try to extract a precopulation gift, taking advantage of the high demand for her eggs. This 'nuptial offering'--which technically constitutes a tiny male parental investment, since it nourishes her and her eggs--is seen in a variety of species, ranging from primates to black-tipped hanging flies. The female hanging fly insists on having a dead insect to eat during sex. If she finishes before the male is finished, she may head off in search of another meal, leaving him high and dry. If she isn't so quick, the male may repossess the leftovers for subsequent dates.

Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, First Vintage, © 1994 by Robert Wright, pp. 46-47, 59-60.


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RE: Interesting stuff

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Posted on 21-09-2009 17:48
...insists on having a dead insect to eat during sex.


From now on I'll keep a jar of dried moths by the bed just in case she gets the munchies!




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RE: Interesting stuff

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Posted on 23-09-2009 15:50
On the curse of abundant oil resources in developing countries. Developing countries without oil grow four times faster than those with oil. Developing countries with oil are far more likely to be militarized and devolve into civil war:

[With its oil wealth], Venezuela began to import more and more and produce less, a typical symptom of Dutch disease, where resource-rich countries see other parts of their economics wither. (Venezuela actually had Dutch disease before the Dutch, but that term wouldn't be invented until the natural gas boom in the Netherlands in the 1960s torpedoed the country's economy. The condition should be called the Caracas cramp.)

[After the discovery of oil in Venezuela in 1921], nobody paid taxes. If you're an oil state, it's far more efficient to ask oil buyers for more money than to collect taxes from your population, which requires a vast network of tax collectors, a bureaucracy, laws that are fair, and a justice system to administer them. Collecting oil money, by contrast, requires a small cadre of intellectuals to set policy and diplomats to make it happen. ... The political, economic, and psychological ramifications of this ... are profound.

'Systematically the government went after oil money rather than raising taxes,' says economist Francisco Monaldi. 'There is no taxation and therefore no representation here. The state here is extremely autonomous.' Whether it's a dictatorship, a democracy, or something in between, the state's only patron is the oil industry, and all of its attention is focused outward. What's more, the state owes nothing more than promises to the people of Venezuela, because they have so little leverage on the state's income.

When a state develops the ability to collect taxes, the bureaucracy and mechanisms it creates are expensive. They perpetuate their existence by diligently collecting as much money as possible and encouraging the growth of a private economy to collect taxes from. A strong private economy, so the thinking goes, creates a strong civil society, fostering other centers of power that keep the state in check. Like other intellectuals I talk with in other oil states, Monaldi finds taxes more interesting and more useful than abstract ideas about democracy and ballot boxes. Taxes aren't democracy, but they seem to connect taxpayers and government in a way that has democratizing effects. Studies by Michael L. Ross at UCLA found that taxes alone don't foster accountability, but the relationship of taxes to government services creates a struggle for value between the state and citizens, which is some kind of accountability. ...

Abdoulaye Djonouma, president of Chad's Chamber of Commerce, says oil brought about economic and agricultural collapse in Nigeria and Gabon. For Chad, which has fewer resources, he fears worse: militarization. He ticks off all the former French colonies that have become militarized. Virtually all. (One study found that oil-exporting countries spend between two and ten times more on their militaries than other developing countries.) ...

At Stanford, Terry Lynn Karl's analysis of Venezuela's economy during the 1970s and '80s shows that countries whose economy is dominated by oil exports tend to experience shrinking standards of living - something that Chad can hardly afford. Oil has opportunity costs: A study by Jeffrey Sachs and Andres Warner showed that of ninety-seven developing countries, those without oil grew four times as much as those with oil. At UCLA, Michael L. Ross did regression studies showing that governments that export oil tend to become less democratic over time. At Oxford, Paul Collier's regression studies show that oil, and mineral-exporting countries have a 23 percent likelihood of civil war within five years, compared to less than 1 percent for nondependent countries.

Lisa Margonelli, Oil on the Brain, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, © 2007 by Lisa Margonelli, pp. 146-147,174-176


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RE: Interesting stuff

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Posted on 25-09-2009 17:05
Very interesting all in all.

Taxes aren't democracy, but they seem to connect taxpayers and government in a way that has democratizing effects. Studies by Michael L. Ross at UCLA found that taxes alone don't foster accountability, but the relationship of taxes to government services creates a struggle for value between the state and citizens, which is some kind of accountability. ...


This makes sense to me. When money from outside the taxpayer-system enter the equation, there's less "accountability" overall. Directly comparable to danish subsidies in the Faroes afaic.




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RE: Interesting stuff

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Posted on 28-09-2009 14:57
Of the many ways in which we can define ourselves, the nation, at least for the last two centuries, has been one of the most enticing. The idea that we are part of a very large family, or, in Benedict Anderson's words, an imagined community, has been as powerful a force as Fascism or Communism. Nationalism brought Germany and Italy into being, destroyed Austria-Hungary, and, more recently, broke apart Yugoslavia. People have suffered and died, and have harmed and killed others, for their 'nation.'

History provides much of the fuel for nationalism. It creates the collective memories that help to bring the nation into being. The shared celebration of the nation's great achievements - and the shared sorrow at its defeats - sustain and foster it. The further back the history appears to go, the more solid and enduring the nation seems - and the worthier its claims. Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century French thinker who wrote an early classic on nationalism, dismissed all the other justifications for the existence of nations, such as blood, geography, language or religion. 'A nation', he wrote, 'is a great solidarity created by the sentiment of the sacrifices which have been made and those which one is disposed to make in the future.' As one of his critics preferred to put it, 'A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours.' Renan saw the nation as something that depended on the assent of its members. 'The existence of a nation is a plebiscite of every day, as the existence of an individual is a perpetual affirmation of life.' For many nationalists, there is no such thing as voluntary assent; you were born into a nation and had no choice about whether or not you belonged, even if history had intervened. When France claimed the Rhineland after World War I, one of the arguments it used was that, even though they spoke German, its inhabitants were really French. Although ill fortune had allowed them to fall under German rule, they had remained French in essence, as their love of wine, their Catholicism, and their joie de vivre so clearly demonstrated.

Renan was trying to grapple with a new phenomenon because nationalism is a very late development indeed in terms of human history. For many centuries, most Europeans thought of themselves not as British (or English or Scottish or Welsh), French, or German but as members of a particular family, clan, region, religion or guild, Sometimes they defined themselves in terms of their overlords, whether local barons or emperors. When they did define themselves as German or French, it was as much a cultural category as a political one, and they certainly did not assume, as modern national movements almost always do, that nations had a right to rule themselves on a specific piece of territory.

Those older ways of defining oneself persisted well into the modern age. When commissions from the League of Nations tried to determine borders after World War I in the center of Europe, they repeatedly came upon locals who had no idea whether they were Czechs or Slovaks, Lithuanians or Poles. We are Catholic or Orthodox, came the answers, merchants or farmers, or simply people of this village or that. Danilo Dolci, the Italian sociologist and activist, was astonished to find in the 1950s that there were people living in the interior of Sicily who had never heard of Italy, even though, in theory, they had been Italians for several generations. They were the anomalies, though, left behind as nationalism increasingly became the way in which Europeans defined themselves. Rapid communications, growing literacy, urbanization, and above all the idea that it was right and proper to see oneself as part of a nation, and a nation, moreover, which ought to have its own state on its own territory, all fed into the great wave of nationalism which shook Europe in the nineteenth century and the wider world in the twentieth.

Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History, Profile, © 2008, 2009 by Margaret MacMillan, pp. 81-83.


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RE: Interesting stuff

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Posted on 29-09-2009 14:53
Are nations irrational and a relatively new concept? Yes. Is that a particularily interesting fact? not to me.

As a way of defining oneself I think the nation is a step up from clan, tribe or family. Maybe Nationalism is the measels of mankind, but we haven't managed to grasp a larger social grouping/identity yet. You might think the world a better place completely without nationalism and nations, but what would take its place? before the idea of a nation, people were still at war with one another as smaller social groups. You would fight for your clan, your family, your tribe or ultimately for yourself. If we someday do away with nationalism and nations and become one united human race (as I hope we do) we would still be subject to the same pitfalls if we ever came across another intelligent, territorial species. The question also remains wether or not having only one large group would be feasable as an identity - collectivism in the extreme. Seems to me that Identity relies on atleast one antagonist - i.e. something to differentiate yourself from.






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RE: Pirate Economics

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Posted on 05-10-2009 15:16
From countless films and books we all know that, historically, pirates were criminally insane, traitorous thieves, torturers and terrorists. Anarchy was the rule, and the rule of law was nonexistent.

Not so, dissents George Mason University economist Peter T. Leeson in his myth-busting book, The Invisible Hook (Princeton University Press, 2009), which shows how the unseen hand of economic exchange produces social cohesion even among pirates. Piratical mythology can't be true, in fact, because no community of people could possibly be successful at anything for any length of time if their society were utterly anarchistic. Thus, Leeson says, pirate life was 'orderly and honest' and had to be to meet buccaneers' economic goal of turning a profit. 'To cooperate for mutual gain - indeed, to advance their criminal organization at all - pirates needed to prevent their outlaw society from degenerating into bedlam. 'There is honor among thieves,' as Adam Smith noted in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: 'Society cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another. ... If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least ... abstain from robbing and murdering one another.'

Pirate societies, in fact, provide evidence for Smith's theory that economies are the result of bottom-up spontaneous self-organized order that naturally arises from social interactions, as opposed to top-down bureaucratic design. Just as historians have demonstrated that the 'Wild West' of 19th-century America was a relatively ordered society in which ranchers, farmers and miners concocted their own rules and institutions for conflict resolution way before the long arm of federal law reached them, Leeson shows how pirate communities democratically elected their captains and constructed constitutions. Those documents commonly outlined rules about drinking, smoking, gambling, sex (no boys or women allowed onboard), use of fire and candles, fighting and disorderly conduct, desertion and shirking one's duties during battle. ... Enforcement was key. Just as civil courts required witnesses to swear on the Bible, pirate crews had to consent to the captain's codes before sailing. In the words of one observer: 'All swore to 'em, upon a Hatchet for want of a Bible. Whenever any enter on board of these Ships voluntarily, they are obliged to sign all their Articles of Agreement ... to prevent Disputes and Ranglings afterwards.' Thus, the pirate code 'emerged from piratical interactions and information sharing, not from a pirate king who centrally designed and imposed a common code on all current and future sea bandits.'

From where, then, did the myth of piratical lawlessness and anarchy arise? From the pirates themselves, who helped to perpetrate the myth to minimize losses and maximize profits. Consider the Jolly Roger flag that displayed the skull and crossbones. Leeson says it was a signal to merchant ships that they were about to be boarded by a marauding horde of heartless heathens; the nonviolent surrender of all booty was therefore perceived as preferable to fighting back. Of course, to maintain that reputation, pirates occasionally had to engage in violence, reports of which they provided to newspaper editors, who duly published them in gory and exaggerated detail. But as 18th century English pirate Captain Sam Bellamy explained, 'I scorn to do any one a Mischief, when it is not for my Advantage.' Leeson concludes, 'By signaling pirates' identity to potential targets, the Jolly Roger prevented bloody battle that would needlessly injure or kill not only pirates, but also innocent merchant seamen.'

This economic analysis also explains why Somali pirates typically receive ransom payoffs instead of violent resistance from shipping crews and their owners. It is in everyone's economic interest to negotiate the transactions as quickly and peacefully as possible. Markets operating in a lawless society are more like black markets than free markets, and because the Somali government has lost control of its society, Somali pirates are essentially free to take the law into their own hands. Until Somalia establishes a rule of law and a lawful free market for its citizens, lawless black market piracy will remain profitable. Until then, an-arrgh-chy will reign.

Michael Shermer, Captain Hook Meets Adam Smith, Scientific American, October 2009, p. 34.


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RE: Atari, Pong, and Apple

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Posted on 14-10-2009 12:27
Apropos:

The more than $6 billion Americans now spend on video games every year started with the first quarter dropped into Computer Space in 1971. That game - a small computer hooked up to a black-and-white TV, housed in a futuristic-looking plastic case - was the creation of Nolan Bushnell, a young engineer from Utah. Bushnell went on to found Atari, whose products, from Pong to Football to the Atari 2600, brought video games into every arcade and millions of homes. And while Computer Space was based on the already-classic computer spaceship battle game called Spacewar, it was Bushnell's genius to see the potential games had beyond the computer lab. ...

He was a tournament chess player, and a fan of the Chinese board game Go. (Atari is a Japanese word announced when a Go player has almost captured an opponent.) He also learned about business when he was young. After his father died, Bushnell took over the family's concrete business. He was just 15.

Bushnell discovered computer games in the early 1960s while studying electrical engineering at the University of Utah. The school's computer had a copy of Spacewar, the seminal game created at MIT by Steve Russell. ... Bushnell was hooked, and he would sneak into the computer lab late at night to play. ... But Spacewar ran on huge, expensive computers.

By 1971, Bushnell had moved to Silicon Valley and had begun to work on [a commercial version of the] game. The biggest technical challenge was the display. The computers that ran Spacewar used what were essentially adapted radar screens, each of which cost about $30,000 - so Bushnell made circuits that would display graphics on an ordinary black-and-white television set. ...

Bushnell began designing other games and he hired a staff of engineers. In 1972, Bally, a company that made pinball and slot machines, contracted him to make a video driving game. He gave the task to one of his new hires, Al Alcorn. But Alcorn didn't yet the tricks of making a video game, so Bushnell gave him a smaller task: to make a game with a ball bouncing back and forth on the screen. 'I defined this very simple game for Alcorn as a learning project,' he explains. 'I thought it was going to be a throwaway. It took him less than a week to get it partially running. And the thing was just incredibly fun.'

Bushnell took a copy of Alcorn's game, named Pong after one of its noises, to Bally's headquarters in Chicago, hoping that they would buy it instead of the driving game. At the same time, Alcorn built a case for their other copy of Pong, complete with a 13-inch TV set and a slot for quarters. There was one sentence of instructions on the cabinet: 'Avoid Missing Ball for High Score.' Alcorn set Pong up at a bar in Sunnyvale, California.

In Chicago, Bally's turned Pong down. Back in California, the reaction was different. People lined up to feed quarters into Pong, and played it nonstop. The next day, the machine suddenly stopped working; Alcorn went to see what was wrong and discovered that the machine was too full of quarters - they'd spilled out of their container and shorted the game out. Pong, released by Atari rather than Bally's, became a hit and ushered in the first golden age of video games. Rich from Pong's success, the company designed dozens of successful games ... like Atari Football, the driving games Night Driver and Sprint, and, in 1978, the best-selling Asteroids.

Bushnell also helped usher in a new era in Silicon Valley. Although the area had long been a center for the electronics industry, most of the companies there were large and corporate. Atari was different. Bushnell always wore jeans, and he encouraged his engineers and technicians to do the same. His management style was not very rigid or hierarchical; as long as someone got his or her job done, almost anything went. These principles were proved in 1976, when Bushnell hired a young technician named Steve Jobs. The long-haired Jobs would often work barefoot, talked of going to India, and was abrasive to some of the other engineers. Bushnell gave Jobs the task of designing a game he had thought of, a new variation on Pong called Breakout. Jobs worked the night shift, and with lots of technical help from his friend Steve Wozniak, built Breakout on a very short schedule. The two would continue their collaboration that year by building and marketing the Apple computer.

David E. Brown, Inventing Modern America, MIT Press, © 2002 MIT, pp. 156-161.


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RE: Cognitive misers

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Posted on 04-11-2009 15:15
We tend to be cognitive misers. When approaching a problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive mechanisms. Some mechanisms have great computational power, letting us solve many problems with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much concentration and can interfere with other cognitive tasks. Others are comparatively low in computational power, but they are fast, require little concentration and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even if they are less accurate. Are you a cognitive miser? Consider the following problem, taken from the work of Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Try to answer it yourself before reading the solution.

Problem: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A: Yes
B: No
C: Cannot be determined





More than 80 percent of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Here is how to think it through logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status is unknown. You need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she would be the married person who is looking at an unmarried person (George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is looking at Anne, the unmarried person. This thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning - reasoning that considers all possibilities. The fact that the problem does not reveal whether Anne is or is not married suggests to people that they do not have enough information, and they make the easiest inference (C) without thinking through all the possibilities. Most people can carry out fully disjunctive reasoning when they are explicitly told that it is necessary (as when there is no option like 'cannot be determined' available). But most do not automatically do so, and the tendency to do so is only weakly correlated with intelligence.

Here is another test of cognitive miserliness, as described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick.

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?




Many people give the first response that comes to mind - 10 cents. But if they thought a little harder, they would realize that this cannot be right: the bat would then have to cost $1.10, for a total of $1.20. IQ is no guarantee against this error. Kahneman and Frederick found that large numbers of highly select university students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Harvard were cognitive misers, just like the rest of us, when given this and similar problems.

Keith E. Stanovich, Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss, © Scientific American, November/December 2009, pp. 35-36.


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RE: Interesting stuff

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Posted on 04-11-2009 16:25
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?


I've been using this one, and a few tests by Kahneman in discussions lately, it's fun how our two minds (gut/head) work.


The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

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RE: Interesting stuff

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Posted on 05-11-2009 10:29
Norlander wrote:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?


I've been using this one, and a few tests by Kahneman in discussions lately, it's fun how our two minds (gut/head) work.


That one I got, the first one I didn't.


No decision is so fine as to not bind us to its consequences.
No consequence is so unexpected as to absolve us of our decisions.
Not even death.
-R. Scott Bakker. 'The Prince of Nothing'

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RE: Interesting stuff

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Posted on 05-11-2009 14:01
I got the married problem wrong. Chose C, didn't think it through smiley


Why would I want to end every post the same way?

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Murder #1

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Posted on 09-11-2009 10:26
The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany. Why? Historians haven't often asked this question. Even historians who like to try to solve cold cases usually cede to sociologists and other social scientists the study of what makes murder rates rise and fall, or what might account for why one country is more murderous than another. Only in the nineteen-seventies did historians begin studying homicide in any systematic way. In the United States, that effort was led by Eric Monkkonen, who died in 2005, his promising work unfinished. Monkkonen's research has been taken up by Randolph Roth, whose book 'American Homicide' offers a vast investigation of murder, in the aggregate, and over time. ...

In the archives, murders are easier to count than other crimes. Rapes go unreported, thefts can be hidden, adultery isn't necessarily actionable, but murder will nearly always out. Murders enter the historical record through coroners' inquests, court transcripts, parish ledgers, and even tombstones. ... The number of uncounted murders, known as the 'dark figure,' is thought to be quite small. Given enough archival research, historians can conceivably count, with fair accuracy, the frequency with which people of earlier eras killed one another, with this caveat: the farther back you go in time - and the documentary trail doesn't go back much farther than 1300 - the more fragmentary the record and the bigger the dark figure....

In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. ... In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century.

In the United States, the picture could hardly be more different. The American homicide rate has been higher than Europe's from the start, and higher at just about every stage since. It has also fluctuated, sometimes wildly. During the Colonial period, the homicide rate fell, but in the nineteenth century, while Europe's kept sinking, the U.S. rate went up and up. In the twentieth century, the rate in the United States dropped to about five during the years following the Second World War, but then rose, reaching about eleven in 1991. It has since fallen once again, to just above five, a rate that is, nevertheless, twice that of any other affluent democracy. ...

2.3 million people are currently behind bars in the United States. That works out to nearly one in every hundred adults, the highest rate anywhere in the world, and four times the world average. ...

[Roth theorizes] that four factors correlate with the homicide rate: faith that government is stable and capable of enforcing just laws; trust in the integrity of legitimately elected officials; solidarity among social groups based on race, religion, or political affiliation; and confidence that the social hierarchy allows for respect to be earned without recourse to violence. When and where people hold these sentiments, the homicide rate is low, when and where they don't, it is high.

Jill Lepore, Rap Sheet, © The New Yorker, November 9, 2009, Full article


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RE: The Men Who Stare at Goats

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Posted on 10-11-2009 14:54
This is a true story. It is the summer of 1983. Major General Albert Stubblebine III is sitting behind his desk in Arlington, Virginia, and he is staring at his wall, upon which hang his numerous military awards. They detail a long and distinguished career. He is the United States Army's chief of intelligence, with sixteen thousand soldiers under his command. He controls the army's signals intelligence, their photographic and technical intelligence, their numerous covert counterintelligence units, and their secret military spying units, which are scattered throughout the world.

He looks past his awards to the wall itself. There is something he feels he needs to do even though the thought of it frightens him. He thinks about the choice he has to make. He can stay in his office or he can go into the next office. That is his choice. And he has made it.

He is going into the next office.

Am I ready? he thinks. Yes, I am ready.

He stands up, moves out from behind his desk, and begins to walk.

I mean, he thinks, what is the atom mostly made up of anyway? Space!

He quickens his pace.

What am I mostly made up of? he thinks. Atoms!

He is almost at a jog now.

What is the wall mostly made up of? he thinks. Atoms! All I have to do is merge the spaces. The wall is an illusion. What is destiny? Am I destined to stay in this room? Ha, no!

Then General Stubblebine bangs his nose hard on the wall of his office.

Damn, he thinks.

General Stubblebine is confounded.

These powers are attainable, so the only question is, by whom? Who in the military is already geared toward this kind of thing? Which section of the army is trained to operate at the peak of their physical and mental capabilities?

And then the answer comes to him.

Special Forces!

This is why, in the late summer of 1983, General Stubblebine flies down to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina.

In the Special Forces Command Center, the general decides to start soft. I'm coming down here with an idea, he begins.

The Special Forces commanders nod.

If you have a unit operating outside the protection of mainline units, what happens if somebody gets hurt? he says. What happens if somebody gets wounded? How do you deal with that?

He surveys the blank faces around the room.

Psychic healing! he says.

There is a silence.

This is what we're talking about, says the general, pointing to his head.

The Special Forces commanders don't look particularly interested in psychic healing.

Okay, says General Stubblebine. The reception he's getting is really quite chilly. Wouldn't it be a neat idea if you could teach somebody to do this?

General Stubblebine rifles through his bag and produces, with a flourish, bent cutlery.

There is a silence.

General Stubblebine finds himself beginning to stammer a little. They're looking at me as if I'm nuts, he thinks. I am not presenting this correctly.

He glances anxiously at the clock.

Let's talk about time! he says. What would happen if time is not an instant? What if time has an X-axis, a Y-axis, and a Z-axis? What if time is not a point but a space? At any particular time we can be anywhere in that space! Is the space confined to the ceiling of this room, or is the space twenty million miles? The general laughs. Physicists go nuts when I say this!

Silence. He tries again.

Animals! says General Stubblebine.

The Special Forces commanders glance at one another.

Stopping the hearts of animals, he continues. Bursting the hearts of animals. This is the idea I'm coming in with. You have access to animals, right?

Uh, say Special Forces. Not really...

General Stubblebine's trip to Fort Bragg was a disaster. He ended up taking early retirement in 1984. Now, the official history of army intelligence, as outlined in their press pack, basically skips the Stubblebine years, 1981-84, almost as if they didn't exist.

In fact, everything you have read so far has for the past two decades been a military intelligence secret.

(...)

What the general didn't know -- what Special Forces kept secret from him -- was that they actually considered his ideas to be excellent ones. Furthermore, as he proposed his clandestine animal-heart-bursting program and they told him that they didn't have access to animals, they were concealing the fact that there were a hundred goats in a shed just a few yards down the road.

This is the story of those goats.

Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Simon & Schuster, © 2009, Jon Ronson, from Chapter 1

Ed: ...and yes, it really is a true story...


When I kill her, I'll have her
Die white girls, die white girls

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