Measured Against Reality

Hybrid

2010-04-27T18:15:00.000-07:00

For some reason immediately upon getting my job offer after graduation I bought a Ford Fusion Hybrid (ok, not immediately, demand on them way exceeds supply so every dealership had a long-ish wait). Why a fresh-out-of-college physicist who hates commuting and doesn't drive a lot outside of that would buy a car whose biggest plus is gas savings (and you'd probably need to drive a ridiculous number of miles for those to actually end up being cash-positive) is a good question, but one for a different post. What I want to talk about is how it has modified my driving behavior.

I am a rather impatient person and I used to be a rather impatient driver. I now drive more slowly (5 MPH above posted limits instead of 10+), accelerate much less quickly, and brake from a further distance (although I always had a pretty large braking distance, driving with people who don't is terrifying). All of these things because of the little meter on my dash that tells me my instantaneous fuel efficiency. The measurement is approximate for sure, but I can tell that when I floor it the number plummets, and when my speed is steady it's nice and high. And because the car keeps track of the numbers over the lifetime, there's an incentive to keep it high. People like to get high numbers, this is a manifestation of that weird drive.

Which brings me to my main point, we should put little doodads that show lifetime fuels use in all cars. That would be the best way to get people to change their driving habits to be more moderate (and hence safer) as well as save more fuel. Although I know I tend to look at the gauge too often, so maybe it'd increase distracted driving.

I'd like to see if cars that have those displays (my coworker's diesel car has one, so it's not just hybrids) tend to get above-average (for their cars) fuel mileage. Could be interesting.

Opinions

2010-04-19T20:23:00.000-07:00

One of the things I've been finding distressing lately is the general contempt Americans hold toward experts. You see this all the time in the media at large, most flagrantly when someone uses the word "elitist" in a derogatory sense. There are particular avenues where it's most pronounced, such as climate change and other controversial topics.

There seems to be this idea that all opinions are created equal. I'm not sure where it comes from, but if I were to hazard a guess it would be the idea that all people are created equal. From this it would follow that all our opinions and thoughts are equal, because we're all equals, right?

That's facile. We're not all equal. That statement is an ideal, not a fact. It should be blatantly obvious that we're not actually created equal. I had a much better chance of success (however defined) than someone born into a poor family. Demographics matter, far more than they should. But that's another topic.

Additionally it's a statement about rights. We are all equal in the eyes of the law (again, we're not actually, but that's another topic). It does not follow that our beliefs and opinions are all equal.

Why does this distress me? Because our national discourse suffers for it. When experts on health care say that our system needs these reforms and uninformed idiots prattle on about death panels it hurts us all. When experts on the financial system say we need to enact these regulations and uninformed idiots say the reforms will create bailouts in perpetuity it hurts us all. When experts on climate change say we need to enact policies to counter it and uninformed idiots prattle on about how warm it was last week it hurts us all. I could go on and on, picking topic after topic where there is widespread agreement among experts that something needs to be done (if not widespread agreement about exactly what) and the uninformed disagree based on nothing, nothing at all.

What really irks me about this, though, is how someone saying what I'm saying is generally viewed. I'm arrogant. I'm elitist. I'm condescending. This is exactly backwards. If you have spent your life studying a topic and someone who learned everything he knows about it from a 15-second segment on the local news comes up to you and starts lecturing you on it, who there is being arrogant? Who is being condescending? Believing you can formulate an opinion equivalent to someone who has spent a lifetime studying an issue, that is the height of arrogance.

But it doesn't matter. Because for some reason Americans think their opinion of health care is the same as John Cohn's, their opinion of financial reform is the same as Tim Geithner's, their opinion on climate change is the same as climate scientists. It is not. Learn some humility and admit that when it comes to topics you know nothing about your opinion means precisely as much as you know: nothing.

Hiatus

2010-04-18T12:24:00.000-07:00

I am going to start posting somewhat regularly again. Less reaction to the bullshit others are posting, more original writing. No real focus, just whatever I feel like. Should be interesting.

Hate politics

2008-10-21T13:13:00.000-07:00

Just once you think politics can't get any more disgusting, someone goes and kills a bear and staples Obama signs on it, then dumps it on a NC campus.

A dead bear was found dumped this morning on the Western Carolina University campus, draped with a pair of Obama campaign signs, university police said.
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Maintenance workers reported about 7:45 a.m. finding a 75-pound bear cub dumped at the roundabout near the Catamount statute at the entrance to campus, said Tom Johnson, chief of university police.

“It looked like it had been shot in the head as best we can tell. A couple of Obama campaign signs had been stapled together and stuck over its head,” Johnson said.

This is just disgusting. I honestly cannot believe how vile people can be. What's the message even supposed to be? I'm guessing along the lines of the sick bastards saying things like "kill him!" at McCain campaign rallies (there is just no way Obama supporters did this).

How about this doozie:

Leroy C. McLaughlin finished his workday on Friday and was cooking dinner when a family member phoned.

The 4-foot-by-8-foot Barack Obama campaign sign that McLaughlin had posted in the front yard of his Chesterfield County home was gone.

A Confederate flag hung in its place.

Simply unbelievable.

15-year-old Sex Offender?

2008-10-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

If you've read this blog for a while, you'll know that the ridiculous misapplication of sex laws to minors doing things to themselves/with other minors is something that infuriates me. So this story got my blood pressure up.

A 15-year-old girl is accused of distributing nude photos of herself to other minors, and one state legislator is questioning whether she should be labeled a sex offender.
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The Licking Valley High School student was arrested Friday after school officials discovered the materials and brought in the school's resource officer for a police investigation.

After spending the weekend incarcerated, she pleaded deny Monday to both charges: illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material, a second-degree felony; and possession of criminal tools, a fifth-degree felony.

Look, I'm not going to defend what she did, kids shouldn't be doing that crap. But expecting them not to is absurd, given our culture (I'm not complaining about it, but it's a reality people have to face). What we should do in these cases is give a strong reprimand, make the parents know that they need to be in charge of their children, and leave it be. Punish repeat offenders, but even then be lenient. I just cannot fathom why these people think labeling some poor 15-year-old a sex offender and charging her with felonies is in any way productive. It's not, and ANY reasonable person will agree.

The good news is that it seems like she won't get that life-destroying label, but I still think that holding her over the weekend was a ridiculous overreaction. Best of luck to her (and all like her), they'll need it dealing with our fucked-up legal system.

I think they found step 2

2008-09-29T19:21:00.000-07:00

This is simply brilliant. So brilliant I won't even quote it, he deserves the pageviews.

It's about the ADF's Freedom Pulpit (or whatever the crap the stupid scam was called) yesterday, and how it's just a giant stunt for them to get tons of money, whether or not they win.

If it's true, and that's how they actually think, I have to say they're damn clever. Much more so than I would have guessed, given that they're the ADF. But thinking about them in the business of scaring stupid gullible Christians into giving up their money, it's very elucidating. Maybe they don't believe their rhetoric, maybe they know it's a scam...

It would certainly restore some of my faith in humanity. (Restore it because I'd rather people exploit others than actually be idiots.)

Prayer poster

2008-09-18T07:38:00.001-07:00

I just moved into my new dorm, and today coming back from work (research, more on that later) I noticed a couple of white sheets of paper on the door across the hall from me. It said something to the effect of:

Prayer list.

Put the things you'd like [myself and my roommate] to pray for, and we'll pray for them. Leave your name or be anonymous, God knows who you are.

I just don't know how to react. A part of me wants to do something destructive to it, but that's just counterproductive. A much bigger part of me wants to write something incredibly mean/offensive on it, something along the lines of, "Pray for you two to get some brains and realize that your religion is a fairy tail." Although I'd probably go for something more ironic, "Pray for a world without the institutionalized evil that is religion." (And really, who doesn't love irony?)

I'll probably just end up doing nothing (believe it or not, I don't actually like starting conflicts), but I'll definitely watch what people put up, I wouldn't be too surprised to see something like my comments, although frankly I'd put money on nothing serious being put up at all. My experience here says that very, very few people are religious. But who knows? My experience also says they tend to be clustered, last year I lived around a bunch of people who regularly went to church, whereas I'd known one in the previous two years. So maybe there will be a bunch of asinine, selfish prayer requests combined with the few "noble" gestures ("world peace!!!11 lol"), because, after all, we're concerned about people other than ourselves, right?

Right?

(As a PS, I wonder what would happen if I put something up on my door that was quite offensive to religious people. I'm thinking along the lines of "university personnel start to harass me". I bet that I would be targeted, while I'm doing nothing that they weren't. Yeah, seeing the stupid thing made me angry, but guess what, it's their right to put up stupid things that make me angry. Just an idle thought.)

Am I back again?

2008-09-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

I don't know if this new flurry of posting will last, but I am tired of writing about politics (every idiot is doing it, I have nothing new to say about anything), so now I'm getting ideas about other things, and I suppose I'll keep it up as long as it lasts. I'm just not fantastic at this whole blogging thing. But news posts coming, one immediately after this one.

Sharia courts in Britain now have binding power

2008-09-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

Holy freaking crap:

ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

That's absolutely unbelievable. Is this really what Britain has come to?

I don't think I can actually comment cogently on this. It's just too absurd, too shocking, too ridiculous. All I can say is that I can't even fathom something like it happening in the US, at least for the time being.

Absolutely unbelievable.

Sexual Harasser acted "gallantly", gotta love Russia

2008-08-04T10:43:00.000-07:00

This is priceless:

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

That's pretty unbelievable. Imagine the furor if that happened in this country. Although, if we had a declining population, who knows what madness would ensue.

The Banality of Evil

2008-08-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

Read this. It's about the motivation for keeping the spying program alive and detainees in prison despite their almost certain uselessness and innocence (respectively). I'll wait.

All done? Noam's comment:

I mean, it's just fricking grotesque. You're tempted to call it Bond villain-esque, except in this case Cheney's evil seems more banal than Bond-ian.

reminded me of Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect. One of the key takeaways from that book was the notion of "the banality of evil", that normal people placed in terrible conditions can do terrible, evil things despite being utterly mundane, completely boring, and banal. We think that it takes some great evil power to do great evil, but in reality it just takes a bunch of normal guys in an absurd situation.

Although in this case it was self-made. I'm currently reading The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, (buy it, buy it now), and I just finished the part about how the paranoia and fear infected the administration after 9/11, and how a few guys hijacked the national security agenda and made it into a tool for torture, just because they were convinced it was Necessary. It's all so bureaucratic, so inane, so banal, that it's infuriating. It's like watching Generation Kill (which, by the way, you should also be doing), at times it makes you gasp with horror, and it makes your blood boil. But knowing the whole infuriating story is absolutely essential, lest we repeat this descent into madness.

The Legend of a Heretic

2008-07-21T15:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a great piece on Robert Ingersoll from a NYT blog. The piece gives an overview of his life, and talks briefly about faith in public life. It is quite amazing to me that Ingersoll could be so prominent in politics while holding those views. The idea of the Republican party consulting Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or PZ Myers is pretty laughable.

Which is too bad.

9/11 idiot

2008-07-19T00:24:00.001-07:00

This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read:

"I believe 9/11 could have been prevented if we'd had a Republican president at the time," Meehan said Wednesday on CNN's "American Morning."

I wonder what kind of stupid you'd need to say that. I'm guessing a pretty severe case.

I'll let Wikipedia explain the various failings of the Bush administration leading to 911. It's absolutely insane that just about no one knows about this.

Irrational Voters

2008-07-18T16:30:00.001-07:00

Jonah Lehrer has a cool article on the irrationality of voters. It's actually kind of scary, but definitely interesting.

I especially love the statement about how misguided the talking heads on the TV news channels are, as though we needed any more proof of that.

Opposition to Gay Marriage in CA

2008-07-18T15:26:00.001-07:00

Dave Weigel of Reason the reason that the anti-gay marriage amendment is going to fail in November. This is great news, especially the survey showing humanity up 51-42.

As my old readers know, I'm a big proponent of equality in all its forms, and cannot stand any argument saying gay marriage shouldn't exist. I'm so proud that California has become the second state in the nation to allow it, and will be devastated if the amendment passes this November. It looks like it will, but this far off nothing is certain.

Except this one truth: history is progressive. Eventually, whether it's 10, 20, or 100 years from now, people will look at gay marriage like any other civil rights issue, and they will ask, "How could those people deny them their right?" I'm proud to be on the right side of this issue, and I hope you can say the same.

SLAC ceasing to exist?

2008-07-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

Via Zapper Z comes the news that the DOE wants to rename SLAC! The DOE wants the names of the national labs to be trademarked, but Stanford won't let them trademark anything with "Stanford" in it (which is why, I believe, SRI International stopped being an acronym for "Stanford Research Institute").

I mentioned this to my Post Doc, whose husband works at SLAC, and apparently they're having some kind of naming contest (whether real or fake is unknown to me), and NLC, short for National Light Center (or something like that), because SLAC is starting to be used primarily as a light source, is leading the pack (NLC was the name for one of the precursors of the ILC, so it's supposed to be a joke).

Anyway, this is just silly, I think. Lots of bureaucratic silliness, which I find incredibly annoying. I hope this rename doesn't happen, but if it does the new name had better be good.

People Found Who Don't Use Numbers: I cry bullshit

2008-07-17T21:46:00.000-07:00

I'm incredibly dubious about this: People Found Who Don't Use Numbers, in part because you hear these claims made about remote tribes all the time and they usually end up being wrong, and also because I've read about Piraha before. Their language is really odd and (supposedly) simple, but unless things have changed dramatically since the papers I read, it's quite controversial. Literally one anthropologist was saying one thing and another was directly contradicting him. I think it's largely a problem of learning these languages that have no bilingual speakers, it's difficult to do. Granted, but that's not my only rationale.

Wikipedia backs up the story, but I'm still suspicious. Anthropological claims like this one are just of the type where I think they should be heavily scrutinized. For one they smack of cultural hubris, a kind of "they're so primitive" attitude. I don't actually think anyone believes that, but it's the kind of thing that's very ingrained into Western culture, and that kind of bias (like racism) is damn near impossibly to overcome at a subconscious level. Secondly, it's just so easy to get them wrong.

In Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought he describes a group descended from the Mayans called the Tzeltal, who live on the side of a mountain and generally refer to things as being "up the slope" or "down the slope". A linguist performed an experiment on them to see if this affected how they think (for the details see around p. 140 in the book, I don't think the details are important) and concluded that it did. In short, they "thought" in a geocentric frame, whereas most Westerners use an egocentric (axes centered on your body) or an object-centered frame (axes relative to objects near you). Anyway, another set of anthropologists (or perhaps linguists) performed a second, more careful experiment, and found that they, in fact, can use another frame of reference.

Actually, in this same chapter Pinker deals with the Piraha (they're quite famous), and thoroughly skewers the Sapir-Worf hypothesis (which is tangential to this anyway). For the full discussion see his book (I'm far too tired to transcribe it, and it's a fantastic book anyway).

But the point described in the SciAm podcast (and in the thousand articles I've seen on this today) seems to be a bit absurd to me. If these peoples don't, in the course of their daily lives, need to count anything, then why would they develop a precise language for counting?

And the claim that they "don't use numbers" is probably misleading, since there are other ways to keep track of reasonable numbers of objects. If you're a teacher on a field trip, you could either repeatedly count your kids and notice you have 23 instead of 24, or you could just notice that Billy is missing (that's how Pinker described it, keeping track of individuals one by one rather than keeping track of the number of individuals). There's no particular reason one of these systems is better than the other, until you start to deal with large numbers or complex operations. To expect an individual who doesn't (whether a Piraha or an American) to be able to just spontaneously start to do it is simply absurd, like testing the average American on calculus. They probably never learned it, they don't ever need to do it, so why on earth would we expect them to be able to?

The entire situation just strikes me as cultural elitism, like a kind of freak show, "Oh my god, how could they not have numbers!" Maybe that's not how people are actually seeing it, but that's how it seems, and I think it's absurd (that last line is SciAm just seems so incredibly condescending).

But these newspaper-level articles about indigenous peoples always infuriate me. Although, newspaper-level articles about any science do that, since they always screw it up somehow.

So I'm dubious about whether this experiment proved what they claim it did, even if it did it's hardly useful or meaningful, and I'm depressed by the coverage. All in all, a great story.

Obama and Iraq

2008-07-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

If you happen to think Obama has shifted position on Iraq, read this. It also does a good job skewering the right's attacks on his nonexistent repositioning as yet another attempt to paint the democrat as a flip-flopper, simply because they've got nothing else. I guess it's a Rovian tactic of attacking someone's strongest point.

Stuck on pins

2008-07-14T17:26:00.000-07:00

Stuck on lapel pins, what should Obama wear on his lapel?

I know it's from the NYT, but it's easily the funniest thing I've read today.

It's 3 AM, and John McCain needs to read an E-mail

2008-07-14T10:31:00.000-07:00

I don't particularly think that being computer-savvy should be high on the list of qualifications for becoming President, but it is something to think about. And the parody of the 3 AM ad is priceless.

Collins on Obama

2008-07-10T10:14:00.000-07:00

This is the smartest Op-Ed I've read in a while. The main point:

But if you look at the political fights he’s picked throughout his political career, the main theme is not any ideology. It’s that he hates stupidity. “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” he said in 2002 in his big speech against the invasion of Iraq. He did not, you will notice, say he was against unilateral military action or pre-emptive attacks or nation-building. He was antidumb.

Most of the things Obama’s taken heat for saying this summer fall into these two familiar patterns — attempts to find a rational common ground on controversial issues and dumb-avoidance.

This does seem to be true, and it's a decent way of rationalizing his FISA vote, (which which I still disagree, but it's a lemon at this point since the damn thing would have passed no matter what. We we're failed by Obama, we were failed by the Democratic House and Senate leadership). I think this is worth remembering, since some people seem to think that Obama should hold perfect positions (which is insane, because that will differ drastically among the people who support him), and some of the time you're going to disagree with him. But Collins's last point is worth remembering:

Meanwhile, Obama has made it clear what issues he thinks all this cleverness and compromising are supposed to serve: national health care, a smart energy policy and getting American troops out of Iraq. He has tons of other concerns, but those seem to be the top three.

I think that, setting aside all of the other things we disagree with, accomplishing those three things would make an Obama presidency wildly successful. That's what we need to remember when we dislike his positions on FISA, or whatever the next controversy is.

Video games make you better at math?

2008-07-07T12:54:00.000-07:00

This is really cool: playing action video games increases math test scores. It works both for men and women, and could possibly be used to reduce the gender disparity in math. That's really cool, and another great example of how weird our brains are.

HuffPo on FISA

2008-07-06T19:14:00.000-07:00

This sums up my thoughts on FISA perfectly. Best part:

How can even one senator on either side of the aisle in good conscience vote in favor of this law that does nothing to enhance our security and everything to diminish our rights as a free people?

Damn right.

A little list

2008-07-03T10:29:00.000-07:00

I'm finding it very hard to disagree with this list of things Obama should do to remind himself of what got him to where he is, and what he should be doing now.

Police Abuse

2008-07-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

I was watching Penn & Teller's Bullshit! last night, the episode about gun control, and they said (something to the effect of), "Sure, the police can protect you from a criminal, but who can protect you from the police?"

That question is becoming more and more relevant.

The sad thing? That's one of the more benign cases of police abusing their power I've ever seen.

I'd go into how wrong this all is, and how we need so much more oversight of police forces to prevent this kind of thing (and the more terrible abuses), but the entire thing makes me too angry and depressed. It's just amazing that this kind of behavior happens in the USA.