Weekend Reading

Data shows that Venezuela benefited greatly under Hugo Chavez. How does such a significant positive change of this magnitude get completely buried by the US media's dislike for a person?

How they made and moved the SR-71 Blackbird. Lots of pictures.

Wikipedia article on the General American accent.

More money, certis paribus, makes you happier. The evidence for this has been accumulating for the last five to ten years.

GMO opponents are the climate skeptics of the left.

The first images of individual atoms forming molecules has been produced, and they look just like the chemistry text book said they would.

Picturequote

This was the coach of my paintball team. He and the head photographer from P8NT Magazine ended up in fairly high-up positions in the Obama campaign. Just before the election, maybe two weeks or so, I had a few beers with both of them and some of their co-workers; all of who just happened to be the heads of their departments. My coach is an epic story teller. Not so much because his oratory skills are great but more because he can piece together the truly significant parts of a story that typically escapes others. He's also not prone to embellishment like most, so you know that everything he's saying is, if anything, understated.

Anyways, I show up late and basically get the best introduction ever as he has recently told them the story of our paintball team (apparently one guy has dibs on the movie rights). They were impressed, which is unique for me because it's usually hard to get past even mentioning paintball before the giggles and misunderstanding begins. It spans about seven years and involves the same core group of kids, being broke, going from decent novices to pro, long road trips, eccentric personalities, and plenty or moral dilemma. Sometimes I forget how all that felt, but this passage from Lao Tzu reminds me of what it was like to be that age and have those experiences.

In the pursuit of knowledge:
everyday something is added.
In the pursuit of enlightenment:
everyday something is dropped.

Photo by Dan Mouradian on a Mamiya 6x7. This was a Polaroid test shot. It was taken for a P8NT Magazine gear guide in my parent's basement... moonshine and sharpies ensued.

Income Ineqaulity, Revisited With an fMRI This Time

I don't get this... Okay, so some scientists at Caltech found that the human brain responds to income inequality in a new and fascinating way; sort of, but first a side note.

A while ago I posted about an experiment where monkeys were given different rewards for the same tasks (pressing a lever a certain number of times). As long as the reward was the same, either a grape (preferred) or cucumber, the monkeys would keep working, but if the researcher gave one monkey a cucumber and the other a grape the monkey given the cucumber would soon refuse to work. If only these experiments were done prior to the Fall of 1917... it reminds me of Pike's work post John Rock (holy tangent). The point of all this being that insights into this sort of thing are both to some degree innate in at least primates and not unknown.

So back to the Caltech work. The researchers basically found that people who were better off/richer responded with greater brain activity (were happier) when less advantaged people were given money as opposed to themselves. That is, rich people felt better/reacted more strongly when poor people were given money instead of themselves. The researchers then extrapolate that this must be due to some sort of altruism. But the evidence against altruism is piling up fast. Even searching for it scientifically at this point is to some extent and act of faith.

Isn't it more likely that the rich people reacted more strongly because the poor people getting something means that the less advantaged people are then less likely to seek out the rich and take their stuff? Or to put it like an evolutionary psychologist, which of course I'm not - Caveman makes a kill and the hungry people start staring uneasily. Wouldn't it be nice if they got some meat of their own so that they'd leave you alone? I don't know, maybe I'm completely wrong. Obviously more testing needs to be done.

Why are different disciplines, even within one field such as psychology, so unwilling to look for explanations beyond their own scope? How does this change? I'm finding that very few people care to take on issues too far beyond art or design within architecture, and that crowd would be in charge of everything if they could.

Cohabitation and Marriage Quality, Rates of Divorce, etc.

I decided to research and write this after having a discussion and realizing that all my arguments were anecdotal, so I did what any good dork would do. I searched JSTOR and wrote about it. With the exception of research concerning vitamins and phytochemicals this is easily some of the most frustrating and in many instances poorly done research I've ever read. I rarely feel that I have the right to criticize so many psychological studies and pHDs (especially considering that all I possess is a B.S. in psych and to be honest I wasn't exactly a stellar psych student), but in this case I make an exception.

Many of the studies made use of data from the 1960's through the mid-1990's which is problematic because cohabitation is a fairly recent phenomenon; which also presents some research opportunities as natural experiments. A few studies that I read tried to exploit this but were unable to find a result as the sample sizes they used were too small to procure a significant result. One study (#2) didn't account for the religiosity of the participants in its study. Why bother even publishing your study - to prove that there is a difference between religious couples who get married without living together first and those who cohabit and don't subscribe to any particular religion? You don't need to do a study to know that... never the less it has now been proven. Anyways, less bitching more science.

It is fairly well agreed that those who cohabit, as a general population, are more likely to get divorced and do tend to be less happy with their marriages* (way at the bottom). This is more or less agreed upon although many seem to make this the sole point of their investigation, but to me that seems to miss the point. What's dangerous about just hearing this is that one is inclined to believe that one leads to another (correlation does not equal causation - the mantra of every stats class). But look at popular media. It's not a lie, couples who cohabit are more likely to struggle and fail, but most people who read that are going to imply that living together before marriage is going to negatively effect their relationship, but read carefully. They're just saying that the two are correlated - not that one causes the other. Cohabitation is merely selective of those who are less committed and more approving of divorce.

There are currently three ways to approach why this difference exists. The first is the duration of the relationship, then the selection perspective, and finally the experience of cohabitation perspective.

1- The duration of the relationship effects a marriage (and studies surrounding it) in that those who cohabit before marriage are essentially beginning their marriages earlier. Since half of all divorces occur in the first seven years of marriage and marriage satisfaction tends to decrease with time (Kurdek, 1999) these marriages do tend to be less happy and end earlier. Thus, by the time people end up marrying they are less happy with their relationship and closer to divorce from a statistical perspective.

2 - The selection perspective posits that those who enter into cohabitation are less likely to be religious, more accepting of divorce, to not believe in marriage, are often younger when they get married (which is a really good predictor of divorce), are more likely to have divorced parents, etc. This position is well supported (#1) with the only real objections coming from studies that I find a bit lacking. Sample sizes of 90 and not accounting for religiousness just don't seem scientifically rigorous. Again, people who choose to cohabit as opposed to get married right away are very distinct groups. For a really good reading of this check out the discussion section of #5 below. I won't get into all of it here but it explores the relationship between education, gender, religiousness (not a reliable predictor of promiscuity), cohabitation, and a few other variables in relationship outcomes. Their main conclusion is that cohabiting women tend to act more like dating women than married women, and that the characteristics by which cohabiting people choose partners is different than those used by those who do not live together before marriage.

3 - The experience perspective says that the actual act of cohabiting somehow effects its participants - generally to the detriment of their future relationships. I found less evidence for this effect. Those that did support this conclusion had what I thought was unconvincing if not well done research. The third study below says that although significant results were found they were admittedly small and due to unidentified third-party variables (hmmm), so it essentially became another study linking cohabitation to divorce and less stable marriages.

Some conclusions from what I read:

Couples who cohabit prior to marriage, as a group, tend to have less satisfying marriages (and really relationships) in general for many reasons. While some researchers think the variables determining this effect are known others are unsure.

In the early 1990's about 60% of people lived together before marriage. Contrast that with only 10% in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Divorce rates for first marriages (not second and so on) during that period have stayed relatively stable.

Some studies (#4) have found that when premarital cohabitation and premarital sex are limited to only the person married (in this case the woman marrying her husband, I have no idea why this study was only done for women) the levels of satisfaction and divorce are no different than those who did not engage in premarital sex or premarital cohabitation. By extension, this supports the selection perspective in that those who get married without living together beforehand are in fact a different group of people than those who cohabit long before marriage.

The longer a couple cohabits, the more likely they are to get married. By year ten over 80% of (white) cohabiting couples get married. If a couple that cohabited is still married past seven years the negative effect associated with cohabiting prior to marriage disappears.

As living together prior to marriage first became mildly tolerated, at least legally, the most common reason was to do so was to "see if a marriage was possible." Essentially a trial run. This is no longer the case. People are more likely to respond that they cohabit to see their partner more often and for reasons of convenience and economy.

Cohabitation is illegal in five states: Florida, Mississippi, West Virginia, Virginia, and Michigan. Although, to be fair, it's rarely enforced.

Regardless of living status before being married, marriage increases the level of commitment in a relationship. However, those that marry without living together first tend to be more similar in terms of ascribed characteristics such as age and religion. Those who cohabit tend to select partners based on achieved status (#5).

*This study (#6) bucks the trend in saying that cohabitation may not in fact be deleterious to a marriage. At least not intrinsically. Its discussion section is well worth a read. Here's an excerpt:

"Far from being a mere rite of passage, the act of becoming formally married may have deep and quite different meaning for those who marry after cohabiting or after traditional courtship. To the latter, marriage is a liberating ritual through which new possibilities, notably, the public establishment of a common household, are opened to a couple and are celebrated. Cohabiters have already established common residence and have had to define their roles to each other and before friends and, often, to defend their action before parents. To them, the aspect of marriage which is emphasized is not the freedom it brings but the assumption of new responsibilities. It is this which, reflected in responses to the items of the scale, leads to their lower scores. If this latter explanation of the score differentials is valid, one would predict that as couples move further into their first decade, their premarital practice, whether courtship or cohabitation, would have progressively less influence on marital adjustment."

The studies I consulted were the following (these aren't full citations, I'm assuming no one is going to look them up but if you do this info should be sufficient):

1 - The Relationship between Cohabitation and Divorce: Selectivity or Causal Influence?, by William G. Axinn and Arland Thornton Demography, 1992 Population Association of America.

2 - The Relationship between Cohabitation and Marital Quality and Stability: Change across Cohorts?, by Claire M. Kamp Dush, Catherine L. Cohan and Paul R. Amato Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003 National Council on Family Relations.

3 - Toward a Greater Understanding of the Cohabitation Effect: Premarital Cohabitation and Marital Communication, by Catherine L. Cohan and Stacey Kleinbaum Journal of Marriage and Family, 2002 National Council on Family Relations.

4 - Premarital Sex, Premarital Cohabitation, and the Risk of Subsequent Marital Dissolution among Women, by Jay Teachman Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003 National Council on Family Relations.

5- Sexual Exclusivity among Dating, Cohabiting, and Married Women, by Renata Forste and Koray Tanfer Journal of Marriage and Family, 1996 National Council on Family Relations.

6 - Premarital Cohabitation vs. Traditional Courtship: Their Effects on Subsequent Marital Adjustment, by Roy E. L. Watson Family Relations, 1983 National Council on Family Relations.

Science, Religion, and Human Trafficking

All in one semi-easy to read, hastily thrown together, and poorly edited post!

Let me begin as usual by lamenting about my inability to post due to grad school. Although, I finally figured out architects and why I don't fit in at school. Wait for it... people become architects because they like design. They are fascinated with the beauty of things more so than the average person. They become architects because buildings are the biggest things you can design. Essentially, they are artists with egos. This is why me and my ideas will never fit in here, but that's fine because:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If they're original, you'll have to ram it down their throats." - Howard Aiken (he built one of IBM's first computers)

Bare with me here for a moment:

Recently there's been a mostly academic battle over global warming vis a vie some of my favorite economists and bloggers. Notably the authors of Freakonomics Levitt and Dubner and another favorite blogger, Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman.

It starts with this flame piece by Joe Romm, a respected environmental blogger, about the new book Superfreakonomics which prompts Paul Krugman to weigh in. Levitt and Dubner (authors of the book) realize what's going on and then reply which then sets off another two posts (1,2) by Krugman and the grand finale (great read) by Nathan Myhrvold; a man of which Bill Gates said “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan."

How do we understand such smart people essentially flinging poo at one another from their ivory towers?

I first saw Johnathan Haidt in a TED talk a few months ago. It was one of the best talks I've ever seen. Well now he's back with a Q&A on health care as it relates to his previous talk. Those are both must see/reads. Here he gets at what I want to talk about:

"I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement. Rather, my message to secular liberals is, Don't dismiss these entirely. Be wary of them, sure; they can motivate violations of civil liberties and human rights. But we need them at times, and to a limited degree. Above all recognize that matters related to ingroup (such as immigration, or the flag), authority (such as crime and punishment), and purity (such as sexuality) are the ones that take on a kind of religious importance for most Americans, because they are about binding groups together around sacred values. Liberals often trigger outrage by ignoring these concerns in their pursuit of social justice, or of efficient policy."

In his TED talk one of the issues that Haidt speaks about is how liberal people will often view certain aspects of eating and exercise as an act of "purity." Think, Wholefoods, organic, spin class, yoga, and other stuff that's kind of nice minus the piles of bullshit you have to walk through to get to their real substance. Whereas more traditional people generally associate purity with sexuality, morals, etc. That is, to liberals (read: most college professors) certain issues generally outside of morality take on a moral meaning. Things like what you eat and global warming are increasingly no longer scientific discussions (although who really talks like that anyways). So when the authors of one book, who admit that global warming is a problem and are working on a reasonable solution, suggest that perhaps the current path we're taking to fight global warming is unrealistic, people - smart people, lose their damn minds because you've just touched something very dear to their psyche. Essentially, arguments take on a sense of religiousness.

Which brings me to the sex trade. I watched a movie tonight called Lilya 4-Ever (Hat tip: Vija via Todd). It was a good movie although I'm not sure I'd recommend it. It was sad to say the least, but it portrays the sex trade in a manner that is quite believable. In fact, I imagine that's more or less just how it happens.

Here's my issue. This is one of those subjects that elicits what I earlier termed the "PETA version of how a slaughter house operates." Is it true? Sure, sometimes, but how do most of these things really operate? In this case, I think the only people who know are those actually involved... and I'm not convinced that a lot of them are giving in depth accounts of their activities. Talk about lack of incentives on all sides.

My issue is this. I am in favor of legalizing a regulated form of prostitution. Do I know exactly how this will work or what the unintended consequences will be? Nope, my heads in the sky. It's my belief that it'd have a similar effect as would legalizing drugs. Drug dealers go out of business and people get a safer product at market prices. There are, of course, all sorts of downsides. I just think the upsides outweigh them in both of these cases. But if the positions in these newly regulated legalized brothels are filled by what are essentially slaves who are forced to have sex... yea. Not okay at all.

The argument I'm hearing over and over is that more or less anything to do with prostitutes, escorts, and strip clubs involves the sex trade. Most guys have been to a strip club. According to what I'm being told, many of those women are slaves. Really? When I think of human trafficking and the sex trade I think of a shady brothel or escort service run by scary men operating completely outside of any sort of law. Am I completely off base? I'm not saying this stuff doesn't exist. I know it does. My question is, to what extent is this true? I have no idea, but I'm just not convinced that other people know either. And again, if prostitution were legalized and regulated (so that no slaves could be "workers") wouldn't that serve to curb the sex trade?

There's so much to say here, and most of which I know little to nothing about. I just want some reliable data.

Backlog of Readings

Now every time I post one of these obnoxious lists I'll point out the best article, or at least the one's that you can't skip.

Required Reading - This is a great (and lengthy) article by Malcolm Gladwell on brain damage and football. Kind of glad I never played.

Google says they overpaid when they purchased YouTube to the tune of 1 billion (they paid 1.65 billion for the site). Best part, they knew they were doing it.

According to Krugman the Fed, even under really rosy circumstances, won't raise rates for at least 2 years.

Ever hear of Conservapedia? They're hilarious, but now they've outdone themselves. They're going to rewrite the Bible to "remove the liberal bias."

New York City made a law requiring restaurants to show calorie counts on menu items. Oddly, the new law doesn't seem to be changing the amount of calories that people purchase in any given transaction.

New theories on altruism vis a vie termites.

A Nobel in medicine this year went to three scientists who discovered telomerase, an enzyme that allows a cell to divide perpetually without dying. It has implications for future cancer research.

Krugman says healthcare reform will happen.

Google's Android OS is about to tip. By the end of the year it'll be available on 12 phones.

Ugh, this wasn't even half of my list... more later.

Required Reading

Color-blind monkeys get gene therapy and are cured. That's insane. They did it by injecting a type of virus carrying a gene that essentially activates a protein that the monkeys are lacking in their cone cells. Wired and MIT.

Interesting video on tangible statistics. So fascinating...

More interesting food research by Brian Wansink. Short

More on high speed rail. It's so cool but just not cost effective for the most part. More on this later when I eventually talk about sunk cost fallacy.

Great article on entrepreneurs in Africa. Must read.

Cameras in London and cops driving around in cars in America are really expensive and both don't do ANYTHING to deter crime... (sarcasm) shocking (/sarcasm)!

Buzz Aldrin gives a Q&A on Freakonomics.

Well written piece about the future of cars, or rather; electric cars are taking over.

New Scientist puts out a list of 13 things in science that can't be explained. Here's round two.

Contact lenses that can monitor your bodily functions. They actually have a working model too.

Penn and Teller's show, Bullshit, covers The Bible. It's good but I wish they'd scream less and be a bit more objective. Then again, it's a show called bullshit.

Some college professors are giving money back to their students that they receive in royalties for required texts that they authored.

Some 9/11 Bush hate pieces. One by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture and excerpt of an article in The Atlantic (long) commented on by Chris Blattman (short), a professor of economics and political science at Yale who runs this insightful blog.

Finally, an explanation of why people who don't necessarily agree with Republican candidates vote Republican; they prefer their moral values and views on personal wealth. The strongest indicator? "Whether candidates view themselves as 'better than normal' human beings because of their wealth."

Think the Tevatron (ever notice that just about everything cool was either invented in Chicago [skyscraper] or resides near Chicago?) or Large Hadron Collider is huge? The US was planning one back in the 90's that was over twice as big as the LHC and actually started construction. Here's a photo gallery and story about what remains - yeah I'd totally live there. Here's a piece from Wired about how Fermi Lab's Tevatron is working around the clock to churn out ground breaking research before the LHC comes online.

A company has found a way to detect autism in children much earlier - 2 years old instead of the usual 5 to 6.

A university professor lands in jail for sharing research with Chinese graduate students... really? And apparently The State Department classifies satellites as munitions so that some cutting edge research done on them is considered classified. Short.

A 48 pound genetically engineered rainbow trout was caught in Canada. Just go look at the photo.

The highest resolution photo of Andromeda ever taken can be seen here. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away and is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Tons of Links

"I believe in arithmetic." - Ben Bernacke when asked how he felt about Bush's tax cuts. According to Paul Krugman the Bush years are responsible for roughly 20% of our national debt.

Astronomers discover a HUGE sun.

Windows 7 might not suck like just about everything else Microsoft. Even Bing isn't too bad.

Olympus came out with a camera that I think is a step in the right direction. See, point and shoot cameras (the small ones that just about everyone has) are awesome in a number of ways. They're small (so you always have them), relatively inexpensive, and are really powerful (most image sensors on point and shoots aren't much worse than my nice DSLR). But they lack manual control and nice lenses. Here's Olympus's solution... not amazing, but definitely worth noting.

A crazy smart mathematician solves an age old math problem (video, kind of long).

Crows are amazingly smart as demonstrated here. Then it turns out they're not only smart but also better than us at recognizing members of another species. Both are must reads/watches for the truly dorky.

Starbucks goes incognito to look like a local coffee shop.

Neatorama

Musicians can pick out sounds and hear better in crowds than the non-musically gifted.

Apologizing x 304,059,724

I read this post by Paul Krugman which is basically him finding a now public email from Slate's publisher stating that he thinks Krugman (soon to be Nobel Prize winner) is a crank - supposedly because of his early on anti-Bush Administration rhetoric.

Anyways, this got me thinking. I felt like there was a general feeling of unhappiness in America beginning some time in 2002 or 2003 and lasting through the last part of 2008. I have absolutely no evidence for this. It's very possible that it was just my perception, but I really feel as though a lot of people were unsure about what our country was up to. Slight aside. My parents are a great source of information about the past events. One that I remember very vividly is my mum telling me about JFK. According to her the whole country was in somewhat of an emotional slump and it made everyone feel better to have a youthful and beautiful couple in the White House. Kennedy didn't really get anything done. He was way too young to have any sort of pull in Washington, but he made people feel better and to my mind that really counts for something. The president is, after all, mostly a figure head. I've always told people that regardless of what Obama does his initial appeal to me is that he'll make us feel better. Sounds corny I know, but when you're talking about 305 million people feeling better about their lives and their future prospects it has serious ramifications.

World War II had a deep and profound effect on the psychology of the Germans that persists to this day. We joke about it a bit - think; crazy scientist from Dr. Stangelove. We all laugh when he calls the president "mein Fuhrer!" but it's just a thinly veiled joke about the reality that Germans have to live with. What they did as a nation will go down as one of the worst atrocities that humans have ever been subjected to. How do you live down allowing a man now synonymous with mass murder to rule your country? You got behind him as a nation and undertook his bidding. Germany must now live with that. One would have to imagine that it has a profound effect on their collective psychology.

My point is this - hindsight is 20/20. There were people in Nazi Germany that knew what they as a nation were doing was wrong. The problem was that there weren't enough of these people. (Random aside; check out Valkyrie. It's unbelievably historically accurate. They even toned down certain parts to make it more believable.) You'd have to imagine that the majority of people weren't really truly into being a Nazi. But at the time... everyone was involved in it. Who in America hates American soldiers? I don't...

Human psychology fascinates me because it easily explains all sorts of otherwise incomprehensible historic events. In the case of the Nazi's there is one seminal experiment that explains the phenomenon of "I was just doing my job" - type excuses (often uttered at the Nuremberg trials). That is, the Milgram Studies (if you don't know what this is read it). There's also diffusion of responsibility and a few other things that I don't feel like talking about. The point is that people as a whole act surprisingly similar given certain environmental conditions. People tend to think that they're unique and act differently... but it's just not the case. In any given situation your behavior is fairly predictable.

For example there's a TV show called "The First 48." The premise of the show is that they follow around homicide detectives as they try to solve murders. Usually if you don't have a good lead in the first 48 hours it's a sign that you may not ever catch the culprit. It's a really sad show to watch. It's usually the same sad story; young black kid involved in some sort of drug deal shoots someone because he's defending himself. He then sobbingly confesses to the police and gets 20 years to life in jail. Another mainstay of the show is the accomplice. This person usually confesses willingly and proudly to police that they rang the door bell of the house where the person was about to be murdered or in some other way helped but did not actually pull the trigger. Of course, they too get charged with murder because of their involvement - much to their shock. I posit that this is what they, Stanley Milgram's test subjects, German citizens circa 1945, and to some degree Americans from roughly 2003-2008 all felt - to one degree or another. Ours is obviously the most subtle of the four.

We all know we were accomplices in doing something wrong. Seriously. I know, I know, I'm a crazy liberal... but seriously. He allowed torture. He started a war for no good reason. He spied on his own people without warrants and we allowed him to do it. I am of course talking about our last president. Although, oddly enough, you could say the same thing about Hitler and his cronies. The comparison is not meant to be direct. As much as I dislike Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld they and their actions don't hold a candle to Hitler and the Nazis. Wasn't it our duty to protest? This isn't up for debate. Saying what Bush's Administration did was "okay" is no longer acceptable. There were no WMD's, they tortured people, they lied to us, and we did nothing. To deny this is as ignorant as denying evolutions existence.

So what is to be done? Let's act like rational adults who know they screwed up. First, apologize to the world. Then, lets try to fix the stuff we broke as best we can. A touch of humility wouldn't hurt either.

And to those who call me a crazy liberal (my family); Reagan. Love him right? No pun intended. He despised torture (my source is the Atlantic and if that isn't credible then what is?). And I dislike all the presidents back to Woodrow Wilson minus Ike's speech about the military industrial complex.

And one last aside - Teddy Roosevelt was a badass (read the intro).

Nothing but TED Talks

I love TED talks. For those of you who don't know what TED is (technology, entertainment, and design) it's a gathering of the world's best and brightest each year in California. Speakers give talks on a range of fascinating subjects generally related to making the world a better place. I started watching a bunch of videos today and here are some of my favorites.

Paul Collier on "the bottom billion". 17 min.

Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria communicate and what that means for next generation antibiotics. 18 min.

This isn't a very good video, but the story is crazy. Fast forward to 50 seconds into this talk about an African boy who built a windmill when he was 14. "How did you [learn to build a windmill]?" "I went to library, and I read a book titled Using Energy and I get information about windmill and I try and I made it." - William Kamkwamba, on building a windmill out of trash as a 14 year old in Africa.

Joseph Lekuton tells a Kenyan parable. 5 min.

Johnathan Haidt on the psychology of liberals and conservatives. This is a must view. 19 min.

Aubrey de Grey on why we age and why we can and should live to be 1000. 23 min.

Jill Bolte is a neuroscientist at Harvard who experienced a stroke and lives to tell you about it. She gets a bit trippy but her insights are stunning. Being a scientist she's very left (rational) hemisphere dominate but this portion of her brain is shut down during her stroke. She then for the first time sees the world from here right hemisphere's perspective. 19 min.

Reading Material

A new study shows that people with schizophrenia aren't fooled by the concave face - lite from the bottom optical illusion that the rest of us are. The video is interesting as hell. I couldn't not watch it. Total side note: at the end of the article it's mention that drunk and high people are often not fooled by the illusion much like people suffering from schizophrenia. Perhaps this explains why when watching a movie in one of these states I often can't buy into whatever the actors and scenery are trying to convince me of. Interesting.

Google talks with newspapers. Not exactly a riveting read, but a bit funny.

Food myths. One of those guys, Brian Wansink, I've been planning to write about forever and just haven't. His research is truly fascinating.

Just found this data website called data360.org... yikes. It's a collaborative open-source place to upload your data for others to see. Getting excited by such things... man. Their about us page is a good read too. Here's an excerpt:

"I continue to believe that responsible citizens must strive for objectivity when thinking about issues. To not strive for objectivity is to leave the realm of facts and enter the realm of dogma, doctrine proclaimed as true without proof. I believe that a current reality does exist and that from that situation, we are both confronted by real problems and that we are making real progress. Knowing specifically where there are problems and where there is progress is one crucial objective"

Word.

Reading Material

Someone finally replicated the Milgram experiments, sort of anyways. It hasn't been replicated because no review board would allow a similarly deceptive experiment to take place. The thoughts by a research assistant to Stanley Milgram are excellent.

The difference between a million and a billion shown graphically and in funnier comic form.

MIT Tech Review reads my blog (joke) and talks about electronic medical records and piracy (previously here and here, none of the links provided are especially great reads).

Q&A's with the author of the books Tyranny of Dead Ideas (good read, I may comment on it later) and Bottom Billion both from Freakonomics. The Bottom Billion guy, Oxford economist Paul Collier, kind of annoyed me. He had some great answers - he even mentioned Kiva as one of the best ways that Americans can get involved in Africa. The one that stuck out was this:

"I don’t know this stuff and don’t want to. But I am just about prepared to believe that the average Chinese person is smarter than the average Englishman." - Paul Collier after being asked about the controversial research of Richard Lynn.

Don't want to? Research regarding the average IQ of Asians by Richard Lynn showed their IQ's to be slightly higher than that of Caucasians. This was later refuted by James Flynn, the world's (likely) leading expert on IQ, who stated counter to Lynn that in fact Asians historically have had slightly lower IQ's than that of whites (Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ, 1991, taken from Outliers p. 231). The delicious irony being that Asians out earn whites significantly here in the US. I'm not trying to be prejudice or inflammatory or whatever. I just believe in scientific rigor. I believe these questions and their answers are important. How can you not want to know?

Blink... and Paintball

For JC's birthday I asked for and received many books that I had been looking for at the library, but had never been able to locate. Apparently libraries are growing in popularity.

Anyways, I read Blink in a little over a day. It's a book by the ever popular and quoted New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell. This is his second book. The first one being The Tipping Point and the latest being Outliers. Both of which I plan on reading after my current slew of books.

It was a good book, not amazing but pretty good. None the less I find myself talking about it a lot. The concepts he talks about are very applicable to everyday life. Namely, the snap judgments we make and how they can be good or bad. Many of the research studies were famous psychology experiments that I was familiar with, but the extra factor that I had never been aware of was all the product development cases he wrote about. Money for experiments flows to the areas where the most profit can be made... so naturally a lot of it goes to product development.

Then an issue was brought up that I think about all the time but never know how to contextualize or really just do anything productive about; firearm fire fights. I always wonder if all those years of playing paintball has taught me anything with a real world application (outside of the whole Randy Pausch head fake theory). To be honest I'm not sure that anyone really knows for certain. I don't know any former professional players who have or would even consider joining the military, police, etc. And I'm not talking about warfare. Just small groups of people shooting at each other.

Gladwell posits that people enter a state of "temporary autism" when put in such a situation. That is, they focus intently on one thing and other stimuli such as noises and time get blurred or entirely erased. It's funny because there are all these cops' stories about shooting a bad guy, and they all say the same (predictable) things, "time slowed down, I don't remember the shots, etc." I feel in some ways like it's wrong of me to chime in. After all, I've never been involved in a shooting of any sort. Nor do I really wish to be, but some things about paintball have always been true for all its participants.

No matter who you are and how level headed you normally are, after a game of paintball you breath heavier, you're all jacked on adrenaline, your sense of time is screwed up, and you're about 100 times more likely to yell and get in a fight (I'm constantly embarrassed by this). In short, you kind of lose your mind and go on some primitive autopilot. This is what Gladwell attempts to explain. It's also worth mentioning that that feeling you get when playing subsides over time, but never goes away entirely. It's like that part of Fight Club when Edward Norton says that being in Fight Club turns down the volume on everything. Nothing seems like as big of a deal. It takes more to rattle you. But is it really fair to say that playing paintball a lot is in some way really similar to being involved in a fire fight or going to war?

I think, to some extent, yes. I just never know what to do with this idea. It's something that paintball players think a lot about, and something that most military and law enforcement officers will be quick to deny the merit of. Even though their training in actual combat situations or real life experience is severely limited. Blink is essentially a book about how informed people can make snap judgments in their fields of expertise and perform with remarkable accuracy. This is something we can all attest to. Most of us are extremely proficient at at least one thing. It's the nature of our specialized worker society. One of the things I'm really good at (relative to the general population) is paintball. Paintball is a relatively new sport. There aren't a lot of terms for moves, positions, and styles of play. Beyond the basics it's also really hard to teach people how to play it well, and even when you are really good it's hard to explain why you're so good (a similar concept is talked about in the book).

What I'm trying to say is that I think certain professions could get some really cheap and effective training by using paintball as an instructional tool and hiring professional players to help guide them. We're all poor and willing to work cheaply! At the very least it's a good work out and it'll teach its participants to think calmly under pressure. The ability to remain semi-calm under pressure is the biggest plus. This is what should make paintball appealing to a variety of people. Hell, one of my paintball friends trained with a bunch of Navy SEALS and scout sniper teams and Camp Pendleton in CA. Three paintball players (1 old pro, 1 field ref, and probably the best player in the world) against 12 of America's top badasses... all veterans. To be fair he said they were great marksman and learned really quickly, but in the end it was an ass kicking all day by the paintball players. But how is that surprising? Most military personnel are only in for 2-4 years, and most of that time you aren't running close quarters combat simulations. Now compare that to a bunch of kids who grew up playing paintball 2 days a week for several hours for 5,7, or 12 years (for me by the time I was 23). It just seems like a huge waste to not tap some of that talent.

What is the Most Addictive Thing on Earth?

My answer was money.

For some reason I found the answer (below) intriguing. It just hadn't crossed my mind. Whether that's actually more addictive than heroin I'm not sure... it's hard to judge deaths from Becker's answer. Although they certainly exist and likely in great numbers. Note: I consider death to be a primary factor in determining the addictiveness of something.

Contest.

Here's the answer.

Smart Guy Says Americans are Nuts, I Agree

I actually just read this really interesting article and video after my solutions to the world's problems post. I used to get mad that other people had similar ideas, but I remember Steven Levitt commenting repeatedly in the book Freakonomics (which I highly recommend) that great minds think alike. Or maybe that just makes me a pretentious prick.

Stuff I Read and Didn't Find Boring

I read this a while ago and I've talked about it on numerous occasions. A psychologist named Seth Roberts used himself as a guinea pig, and it seems to have worked out.

Cool creepy food experiment. "80 percent of our decisions are made subconsciously."

This one's from Sandy. Places to lock up your bike in New York.

Really?

Daily Photo and Music/Quote

Not the best recording, but this is Milk by The Kings of Leon. Whom I get to see at the Aragon on Halloween. I even have an extra ticket. Too bad I didn't buy more. They're being scalped for a lot.

I came across a great page in my all time favorite book series, The Bathroom Reader. The whole page is from famous psychologists. This one is their Collosal Collection of "Quotable" Quotes.

"When all you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails." - Abraham Maslow

Maslow was a psychologist famous for his theory of the hierarchy of human needs. Interesting stuff.

And finally... Evan as a younger man. He was a hilarious little kid. The Energizer Bunny didn't have shit on him.