Budgets, Weather, One’s choices…

Weather
Yes, people’s moods ARE affected by the seasons: (via the New York Times)

A new study using the patterns of Google search queries suggests that mental illnesses flourish in winter and decline in summer.

In both the United States and Australia, researchers found distinct seasonal patterns, high in winter and low in summer, in searches pertaining to anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, depression, suicide, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia. The study appears in the May issue of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Searches related to eating disorders varied the most — 37 percent higher in winter than summer in the United States and 42 percent higher in Australia. The smallest variations were in searches related to anxiety: 7 percent and 15 percent more common in winter than summer in the United States and Australia, respectively. The variations persisted after he researchers controlled for seasonal differences in Internet use, mentions of the diseases in news articles and other factors.

Why this happens, and whether it is connected to increased incidence, is unclear, but it is known that varying hours of daylight, variations in physical activity and seasonal changes in blood levels of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids can affect mood. [...]

The drought in the southwest: probably not CAUSED by global warming:

Extreme natural events, not man-made climate change, led to last summer’s historic drought in the Great Plains, a new federal study said Friday.
Drought occurred in six Plains states between last May and August because moist Gulf of Mexico air “failed to stream northward in late spring,” and summer storms were few and stingy with rainfall, said a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Neither ocean states nor human-induced climate change, factors that can provide long-lead predictability, appeared to play significant roles in causing severe rainfall deficits over the major corn producing regions of central Great Plains,” the report summary said.
The drought in Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota was the worst since record keeping began in 1895, even eclipsing the notorious Dust Bowl droughts of 1934 and 1936, said study leader Martin Hoerling, a NOAA meteorologist.

“The event was rare, and we estimated maybe a once in a couple of hundred years event,” Hoerling said. “But for as extreme as it was, it didn’t have any strong indications for early warning.

[...]

“I’m an advocate of global warming because science tells me that greenhouse gases have warmed the planet by about 1 degree Celsius in the last 100 years. So there’s no question about that,” he said. “But the science also tells that every drought that’s occurring isn’t a result of climate change.”

Politics
Some people’s minds might not be THAT hard to change, if you are willing to stoop to trickery:

Researchers in Sweden have discovered a clever way to trick partisan voters into switching parties, through the application of a simple survey and some slight of hand.

Exploiting a known defect in human psychology called “choice blindness,” researchers writing for the journal PLoS One got 162 voters to fill out surveys pinpointing their views on key issues like taxes and energy, then covertly switched the survey with one created to show the exact opposite answers. Participants were then confronted on why they gave the faux responses.

What the researchers found is astonishing: A whopping 92 percent of respondents did not catch that their answers were manipulated, and only 22 percent of the switched answers were noticed by participants. During questioning after the survey, 10 percent of the subjects actually switched their preference in political party, while another 19 percent of previously partisan voters said they’d become undecided. [...]

Economics/Economy
Bitcoins: ever hear of them? This is a decent article about them and the general nature of money (recommended by Paul Krugman). Upshot: money is about putting your faith in something.

President Obama’s budget: too centrist for many on the left.

I’m not sure what to think. It appears to me that second term Presidents drift somewhat to center during their second terms. I wonder if this is what is happening here.

science and economics

Does excessive salt in your diet harm your autoimmune system? There is some evidence that it might;

Salt may play an important role in autoimmune diseases, according to two new papers published today (March 6) in Nature. Exposure to high levels of salt was found to make both cultured mouse and human T cells more pathogenic, and high-salt diets worsened autoimmune disease in mice.

“I thought the papers were very exciting and provocative,” said John O’Shea, a doctor at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), who wrote a Nature commentary accompanying the new findings and was not involved in the study.

[...]

Meanwhile, David Hafler’s lab at Yale University was coming to similar conclusions from the opposite direction. The group had completed a study where they measured TH17 cells in the blood of healthy human subjects, sequenced the people’s microbiomes, and had them fill out questionnaires about their diets. While the study was supposed to be focused on the influence of the microbiome, the researchers noticed that participants who frequently ate in fast food restaurants had elevated levels of pathogenic TH17 cells. They hypothesized that the saltiness of the food could be part of the explanation.

“That led to a whole series of experiments trying to figure out the role of salt,” Hafler said. Unlike Regev and Kuchroo’s labs, which looked at TH17 differentiation in mouse cells, Hafler’s lab added salt to human cell cultures. They also found that it was associated with more pathogenic TH17 cells. “Salt just seems to trigger all the genes associated with bad autoimmune T cells,” Hafler said.

But the effect hasn’t been proven in humans. There is proof for mice, and some correlation in humans.

The Brain: help for us oldies:

The flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability. Now Yale School of Medicine researchers have reversed the process, recreating a youthful brain that facilitated both learning and healing in the adult mouse.

Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different. Adolescent brains are more malleable or plastic, which allows them to learn languages more quickly than adults and speeds recovery from brain injuries. The comparative rigidity of the adult brain results in part from the function of a single gene that slows the rapid change in synaptic connections between neurons.

By monitoring the synapses in living mice over weeks and months, Yale researchers have identified the key genetic switch for brain maturation a study released March 6 in the journal Neuron. The Nogo Receptor 1 gene is required to suppress high levels of plasticity in the adolescent brain and create the relatively quiescent levels of plasticity in adulthood. In mice without this gene, juvenile levels of brain plasticity persist throughout adulthood. When researchers blocked the function of this gene in old mice, they reset the old brain to adolescent levels of plasticity.

That would be nice; I’ve found it is harder for me to absorb brand new material, though I have more context for other material.

Nature Cicadas have interesting wings: they have a structure that enables them to kill bacteria by an interesting mechanism:

The veined wing of the clanger cicada kills bacteria solely through its physical structure — one of the first natural surfaces found to do so. An international team of biophysicists has now come up with a detailed model of how this defence works on the nanoscale. The results are published in the latest issue of the Biophysical Journal1.

The clanger cicada (Psaltoda claripennis) is a locust-like insect whose wings are covered by a vast hexagonal array of ‘nanopillars’ — blunted spikes on a similar size scale to bacteria (see video, bottom). When a bacterium settles on the wing surface, its cellular membrane sticks to the surface of the nanopillars and stretches into the crevices between them, where it experiences the most strain. If the membrane is soft enough, it ruptures

Note: this is “rupture by stretching” rather than by puncturing.

Economics
Austerity during a recession does NOT drive down the deficit; remember that stimulus puts money into the economy.

Fun: is what you see really there?

I don’t know who to give credit to, but this is fun:

Is there really a woman in this picture? Look carefully.

Actually, I see the human figure in all of these cropped pictures.

Purple crabs and swimsuits with no confusion at all

Swim workout 2650 yards (1.5 miles); 500 of long/free, 500 of fist/free, 500 of 3g/free, 500 of (50 side/50 free), 6 x (25 fly, 25 free, 25 back, 25 free), 50 free.
This was routine and seemed “short”, at least in terms of duration.

Yes, Ms. “purple suit” was back!

Posts
Paul Krugman points out that Keynesian economic ideas ARE/DID win the day, so to speak, though the conservatives constantly lie or attempt to distort what actually happened.

Pretty crabs I am not one to call a crab “pretty”, but Jerry Coyne has an article about such a species.

(click on the small photo to see the larger one at the source, along with the article)

Religion and the mind

Friendly atheist has an article with a provocative title: If you can answer this math problem correctly, you may be an atheist. Yes, the title is illogical: you might get the problems correct and not be an atheist….and….well, there are plenty of atheists who would miss the problems.

What are the problems?

1. “If 5 machines in 5 minutes can make 5 widgets, how long will it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?”
2. “A population of lily pads in a pond doubles every day. On day 48, the pond is completely full. On what day was the pond half full?”
3. “A baseball and a baseball bat together costs 110 dollars. The bat costs 100 dollars more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

What was curious to me wasn’t “what group did better” on the questions; it was THIS (via Scientific American):

But the researchers went beyond this interesting link, running four experiments showing that analytic thinking actually causes disbelief. In one experiment, they randomly assigned participants to either the analytic or control condition. They then showed them photos of either Rodin’s The Thinker or, in the control condition, of the ancient Greek sculpture Discobolus, which depicts an athlete poised to throw a discus. (The Thinker was used because it is such an iconic image of deep reflection that, in a separate test with different participants, seeing the statue improved how well subjects reasoned through logical syllogisms.) After seeing the images, participants took a test measuring their belief in God on a scale of 0 to 100. Their scores on the test varied widely, with a standard deviation of about 35 in the control group. But it is the difference in the averages that tells the real story: In the control group, the average score for belief in God was 61.55, or somewhat above the scale’s midpoint. On the other hand, for the group who had just seen The Thinker, the resulting average was only 41.42. Such a gap is large enough to indicate a mild believer is responding as a mild nonbeliever—all from being visually reminded of the human capacity to think.

Another experiment used a different method to show a similar effect. It exploited the tendency, previously identified by psychologists, of people to override their intuition when faced with the demands of reading a text in a hard-to-read typeface.

The bottom line: reminding people of thinking (turning on the “logic vs. intuition” switch) immediately made people MORE skeptical.

Atheism and labels
The following video troubled some fellow atheists (including a couple that I have a lot of respect for):

I admit that I had no trouble at all with this; all Dr. Tyson was saying is that he really isn’t interested in taking part in this debate, so to speak.

Yes, I think a lot about it and I self identify as an atheist (strictly speaking, I am an agnostic atheist with respect to some amorphic “spirit of the universe”, “higher power”, “creative force”, etc. and an “almost gnostic” atheist with regards to the deities that I am aware of (the Hindu ones, the Mormon ones, the Abrahamic deity(s), etc.)

But, well, I ENJOY thinking about some things. I really don’t care how Dr. Tyson identifies (or doesn’t identify) himself.

This is good enough for me:

And anyone who thinks that we are here because of naturalistic processes and that there is no direct divine intervention in the universe and that we (the earth and humans) were not the intentional outcome of some plan…well, they are a kindred spirit, IMHO.
I really don’t care about the rest.

Religious reasoning, hidden brains

We know some things are wrong (e. g., racism) but sometimes, when under stress, we seem to not be able to help ourselves. What gives? This is a Salon article called “The Hidden Brain”; my reading list has gotten even longer.

For some reason, humans almost seem to enjoy a persecution complex. We see this with Christians in the United States; evidently hearing criticism means “persecution”.

Speaking of believers: Mano Singham points out that while some believers admit “hey, it is faith”. But many (most) attempt to use “reason” (even if they do it poorly).

Speaking of brains: it has been shown that specific memories lay in specific brain cells!

Human evolution: yes, we belong to the ape family; check out this post for details.

On the lighter side (sort of): you can’t make this up. An international sporting event thought that the Borat version of a national anthem was the real one!

Social: I thought that this tribute by the Miami Heat to Trayvon Martin was touching.

Fallacies…

Workout notes
Leg weights (up to 200 on adduction and abduction; 135 on push backs; some lunges and hip hikes)
Swimming: 2200 yards: 10 x 25 fist, 25 free, 5 x 25 fist, 75 free, 5 x 25 free, 25 back, 50 free, 5 x 25 fly, 50 side, 25 free, 200 cool down.

It went ok.

Fallacies

Fallacies of thinking: there are times when I commit some of these. I am ok at overriding my “natural” distrust of probabilities. But there are times when I make up my mind on emotion and then try to “argue the case” with logic; that is, use logic to reinforce my current opinion. Giving up securely held beliefs is tough. I am good about avoiding some of these.

Science
No a penny dropped off the Empire State Building won’t kill you; it reaches terminal velocity at a drop of 50 feet. But a ball point pen is another matter.

Religion and fundamentalism
This is how some creationists see evolution.

Surf to PZ Myers’ blog to see more.

So yes, this claim about “Village Idiots” is not really an exaggeration.

Then we have this:

That is right: Pat Robertson said that prayer could have turned the tornadoes away. It is astonishing how superstitious some adults are.

Icy Moons, Insulated Americans, Infantile Altruism and the Science of Sarcasm

Physics
Nature reports on a paper that claims that the wave function in quantum mechanics is not some mere mathematical/statistical metaphor but rather represents an actual physical “object”:

The debate over how to understand the wavefunction goes back to the 1920s. In the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ pioneered by Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the wavefunction was considered a computational tool: it gave correct results when used to calculate the probability of particles having various properties, but physicists were encouraged not to look for a deeper explanation of what the wavefunction is.

Albert Einstein also favoured a statistical interpretation of the wavefunction, although he thought that there had to be some other as-yet-unknown underlying reality. But others, such as Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, considered the wavefunction, at least initially, to be a real physical object.

The Copenhagen interpretation later fell out of popularity, but the idea that the wavefunction reflects what we can know about the world, rather than physical reality, has come back into vogue in the past 15 years with the rise of quantum information theory, Valentini says.

Rudolph and his colleagues may put a stop to that trend. Their theorem effectively says that individual quantum systems must “know” exactly what state they have been prepared in, or the results of measurements on them would lead to results at odds with quantum mechanics. They declined to comment while their preprint is undergoing the journal-submission process, but say in their paper that their finding is similar to the notion that an individual coin being flipped in a biased way — for example, so that it comes up ‘heads’ six out of ten times — has the intrinsic, physical property of being biased, in contrast to the idea that the bias is simply a statistical property of many coin-flip outcomes.

OF COURSE, this is just a preprint and the paper is undergoing peer review…and we know how this often turns out. Nevertheless, this article interests me as it talks about a key issue.

Astronomy
Does Eurpoa (one of Jupiter’s moons) contain liquid water? Here is a recent paper which says “yes”: a lot of it in shallow lakes. I’ve linked to the paper which actually has some details along with the mathematical modeling.

Obesity
Yes, Americans are fat and getting fatter:

If Americans stay on this path, 83 percent of men will be overweight or obese by 2020. Women are right behind them, with 72 percent projected to be overweight or obese by then.

The implications go far beyond tight pants and groaning sofas. Obesity is a big risk factor for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Imagining an America of overweight, unhealthy people gives public health officials the willies. And it should be frightening to us civilians, too.[...]

He looked at current rates for cardiovascular risk factors including smoking, lack of exercise, diet, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol. He found that reductions in smoking, high cholesterol and high blood pressure since 1988 have been offset by weight gain, diabetes, and pre-diabetes.

Then he took the increases in weight, diabetes, and prediabetes, and predicted where they would go in the next two decades. That’s how he came up with more than three-quarters of Americans becoming overweight.

“It’s really striking,” Huffman told Shots. “It, gosh, it makes you want to figure out solutions.”

That’s especially true because we aren’t exemplars of healthy living right now. Right now, 32 percent of men and 34 percent of women are obese. Those numbers are projected to rise to 43 and 42 percent in 2020, nudging up toward half of all people.

The number of people who have diabetes or are pre-diabetic is also projected to increase, from 6.3 percent and 37 percent of women to 8.3 percent and 44 percent. Huffman said: “That’s more than half of women, if current trends continue. It’s not much better for men, as you would imagine.”

Clearly we need some help. Just about everybody knows they need to eat well and exercise more, but just knowing that isn’t doing the trick.

And, of course, this is a sign of the times: the article points out that doctors avoid discussing their patient’s weight with them, because the oh-so-sensitive patients won’t go to the doctor anymore!

Hmmm, I get snarky and sarcastic at times. Well, there are some studies on the topic of…yes, sarcasm! This made for some interesting reading; here are a couple of findings which surprised me:

Sarcasm seems to exercise the brain more than sincere statements do. Scientists who have monitored the electrical activity of the brains of test subjects exposed to sarcastic statements have found that brains have to work harder to understand sarcasm.

That extra work may make our brains sharper, according to another study. College students in Israel listened to complaints to a cellphone company’s customer service line. The students were better able to solve problems creatively when the complaints were sarcastic as opposed to just plain angry. Sarcasm “appears to stimulate complex thinking and to attenuate the otherwise negative effects of anger,” according to the study authors.

The mental gymnastics needed to perceive sarcasm includes developing a “theory of mind” to see beyond the literal meaning of the words and understand that the speaker may be thinking of something entirely different. A theory of mind allows you to realize that when your brother says “nice job” when you spill the milk, he means just the opposite, the jerk.

and

But others researchers have found that the mocking, smug, superior nature of sarcasm is perceived as more hurtful than a plain-spoken criticism. The Greek root for sarcasm, sarkazein, means to tear flesh like dogs.

According to Haiman, dog-eat-dog sarcastic commentary is just part of our quest to be cool. “You’re distancing yourself, you’re making yourself superior,” Haiman says. “If you’re sincere all the time, you seem naive.”

[...]

Northerners also were more likely to think sarcasm was funny: 56 percent of Northerners found sarcasm humorous while only 35 percent of Southerners did. The New Yorkers and male students from either location were more likely to describe themselves as sarcastic.

And here is one finding that didn’t surprise me:

Sarcasm detection is an essential skill if one is going to function in a modern society dripping with irony. “Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “People who don’t understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They’re not getting it. They’re not socially adept.”

Sarcasm so saturates 21st-century America that according to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase “yeah, right” was used, it was uttered sarcastically. Entire phrases have almost lost their literal meanings because they are so frequently said with a sneer. “Big deal,” for example. When’s the last time someone said that to you and meant it sincerely? “My heart bleeds for you” almost always equals “Tell it to someone who cares,” and “Aren’t you special” means you aren’t.

“It’s practically the primary language” in modern society, says John Haiman, a linguist at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the author of Talk is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation and the Evolution of Language.

Altruism: is it fundamental?

In a new study, researchers had 15-month old babies watch movies of a person distributing crackers or milk to two others, either evenly or unevenly. Babies look at things longer when they’re surprised, so measuring looking time can be used to gain insight into what babies expect to happen. In the study, the infants looked longer when the person in the video distributed the foods unevenly, suggesting surprise, and perhaps even an early perception of fairness.

But the team also say they established a link between fairness and altruism. In a second part of the experiment, the babies chose between two toys, and were then asked to share one of the toys with an experimenter. About a third of the babies were “selfish sharers”: they shared the toy they hadn’t chosen. Another third were “altruistic sharers”: they shared their chosen toy. (The rest chose not to share. They may have been inhibited by the unfamiliarity of the experimenter, or maybe they just weren’t that into sharing.)

What’s interesting about the second half of the study was that by and large it was the babies who had previously been surprised by the unfair cracker and milk distribution who tended to share the preferred toy with the experimenter (the altruistic sharers). The babies who shared the rejected toy hadn’t expressed much surprise over unequal distribution. This led the researchers to suggest that there’s a fundamental link between altruism and a sense of equity.

An alternative interpretation for babies’ perception of fairness could be that babies merely show surprise when physical things are divided unevenly, the authors suggest. For example, that they could just be taken aback by “violations of non-moral conventions,” naturally assuming “that goods are usually divided into equal amounts.” But, the authors argue, the fact that the second part of the study connected the “altruistic” behaviors to the perception of unevenness speaks to the fact that babies “evaluate events along morally relevant dimensions.” This led the researchers to conclude that social and moral development occur in tandem. [...]

In fact, argue the authors, it’s even possible that babies are more likely to be altruistic than older people, because they think less about it. Study author Jessica Sommerville says that “some researchers have suggested that young children and infants may be more blindly altruistic than older children and adults, because they don’t yet possess the ability to be discerning.”

So maybe we should take a lesson from the youngsters who share their toys with random people without a second thought. Maybe thinking about it less is the key to kindness.

That is interesting, isn’t it. But this type of study have more value than “hey, this is neat”; it has some practical applications as well, as Schneier points out on his security blog:.

What does this have to do with security? Everything. It’s not until we understand the natural human tendencies of fairness and altruism that we can really understand people who take advantage of those tendencies, and build systems to prevent them from taking advantage.

Krugman’s Army and Republican non-candidates (the stupid and the obese)

Workout notes
Racewalking (sort of) and Swimming:

Walking: university track (200 meter): 13:45 warm up mile; I finished the whole thing (4 miles) in 47:13:
11:14-11:20-10:52. How I did it: after the warm up, I did 2-1-2-1-2 (2 laps hard, 1 easy) for mile 1, then 1-2-1-3-1 for mile 2 (hence the slower time) then 3-1-3-1 to finish it off. There were some slower runners on the track by my last mile hence the faster time.

Then swimming: my first 5 x 100 free was SLOW (couldn’t even go sub 2!). Then 10 x (25 kick, 25 free with fins); again, SLOW. The the next 10 x (25 fist, 25 free) was much better and I finished it with 5 x 100 pull with a 10-count rest between each one (9:2x). 200 of free/back was the cool down.

Oddly enough, though the walk fatigued me a bit, it did NOT warm me up for swimming.

Posts
Social Media
Some time ago, a facebook person called “Ginger Snaps” “friended” me. She was an atheist and a liberal, and a pretty, young woman. Last weekend she died in an automobile wreck; you can draw your own conclusions. I don’t know the full story, but this might be a nice reminder: DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE!

Science

NPR: has a great story on how researchers used the theory of how people remember things to locate a shipwreck. Setting: Australian military officials questioned the German sailors as to where their ship was when it was sunk in battle. Most of the Germans got the location wrong…but the stories had a certain consistency that comes with honest forgetting and filling in the “memory holes” with “what makes sense in the narrative”.

Paul Krugman’s Army!

Paul Krugman finally has his army:

The Wall Street protests seem to be gathering strength and expanding beyond the geographic limits of downtown Manhattan. The media, too, is finally amplifying the story. Whether they will grow larger and sustain themselves beyond these initial street actions will depend upon four things: the work of skilled organizers; the success of those organizers in getting people, once these events end, to meet over and over and over again; whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters; and the ability of liberalism’s infrastructure of intellectuals, writers, artists and professionals to expend an enormous amount of their cultural capital in support of the movement.

Americans–infatuated with the next new thing, and proud to believe they are outside the constraints and burdens of history–love neophytes, gifted amateurs. We’re action-oriented and suspicious of elitist expertise, and we thrill to the idea that anybody with moxie can jump in and deliver a baby or land a 737. Right now, it appears that anti-hierarchical, relatively inexperienced people are “running” the Wall Street protest. And they are doing big demonstrations really well. So far, so good. Anger can beget action. And action itself can be a battering ram that knocks down the doors of history.

But anger alone can’t sustain action. And action alone can’t sustain political militancy. [...]

The left does have something important however: a coterie of several thousand intellectuals, academics, writers, and engaged professionals who articulate liberal public policy, generate empirical and analytical expertise through the Internet, the media, and universities, and staff the offices of advocacy groups and progressive politicians on the local and national level.

This is, as I said, important, but, up to now, some people have imagined that the byplay between smart bloggers and tweeters, or even the charged pen of brilliantly argumentative and intellectually courageous Nobel Prize winners, in economics actually represent a vast swell of citizens demanding substantive change. But to paraphrase a guy who understood real political power: How many troops does Paul Krugman have?

But when a movement does arise, it needs an articulate exposition, and the brainy liberal left infrastructure’s time has come. Edmund Wilson put down his Proust long enough to report from the bloody coal mines of Eastern Kentucky. College professors all over the country held public “teach-ins” to educate their students and others about the history of the Vietnam War and American interventionism.

So there’s a big job out to do explaining and defending the Wall Street demonstrators to curious Americans. Krugman’s Army may be on its way.

(note: it was Stalin who asked “how many divisions does the Pope have?”)

My take on the demonstrations: I have no idea on what to think. I believe that the current gap between the ultra wealthy and the rest of us is unsustainable, especially given that the top seems to have purchased the government. My hope is that the conservatives will grow to understand that a reasonably well off middle class is good for the country and, in the long run, good for them too. I don’t think that the public, on the whole, will tolerate a new Gilded Age. We’ll see.

Republican non-candidates: the Fat and the Stupid
Sarah Palin isn’t running. That is a pity because we do have something of representative democracy and her simplistic ignorance fits right in with a large block of the Republican party (the NewsMax crowd).

The fat governor isn’t running either. Yes, I know that some thought that his obesity would have hurt him but I don’t; after all most Republicans ARE fat. Then again, so are most Democrats, most Libertarians, etc…
What would have hurt him, at least in the primary, is things like this:

Yes, I like what he said here, but I doubt that many in the Tea Party would tolerate it. Mr. Christie does not suffer fools well, and, well, part of being a national candidate involves putting up with very loud, ignorant voters, almost all who are unaware of their ignorance. He wouldn’t have lasted the campaign.

But back to obesity: Mr. Rush Limbaugh used some of the slurs directed at Mr. Christie to slur many “female politicians” as “lard asses”. This isn’t the first time he attacked public women for their weight:

You might ask how someone as obese as Mr. Limbaugh gets away with it. Simple: remember that a large segment of the Republican voting block consists of sociopaths; they have no accountability for themselves but are happy to attempt to hold others accountable. They reject evidence in favor of “what seems right to them.”

Religious Topics
The “New Atheists” (often called “gnu-atheists”; hence the red A with horns on my sidebar) are often accused of attacking simplistic, fundamentalist versions of religion and ignoring the arguments of the “sophisticated” believers.
Here is what such attacks miss: most of us are interested in the possible existence of deities that actively interfere in the events of the universe. IF such as deity exists, show the evidence (saying “I just know it” is not evidence). Mano Singham really states this well here.

Yes, it is great that you accept at least a version of evolution and that you reject many of the supernatural claims of the Bible. But many of the “sophisticated” believers don’t reject ALL of the supernatural claims as Jerry Coyne points out. There is no more reason to believe these than the ones that the “sophisticated” reject.

Yes, there are some “believers” who reject ALL the supernatural claims. I call such believers “agnostics” or “atheists” who happen to like religion or miss going to church. Yes, THEY don’t call themselves that and I suppose one can parse the definitions finely enough to say that they aren’t that. But I return to the “the only gods I am interested in are the ones who perform supernatural acts”. If someone embraces naturalism, then (e. g., no direction from some deity), well, who really cares? I have no interest on attacking them on intellectual grounds.

The good that religion does
There seems to be some research that says that religious people are happier than non-religious ones. But then, on the average (when one looks at world wide statistics), societies tend to become less religious when they become more prosperous and when times are good, church attendance goes down. The article I linked to argues that religion makes some types of people happier in certain circumstances.

The harm that religion does
Yes, there are some countries where people kill others for “insulting their religion” and are lauded for it, at least among the public at large!
Note: living in such a society causes some resonant feedback in “religious zeal”:

So he’s going to swing – perhaps. On Saturday a Pakistani judge sentenced Mumtaz Qadri, the police bodyguard who assassinated the Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, to death by hanging. The young policeman smiled and thanked God. “My dream has come true,” he reportedly said.

It was a predictably theatrical turn from Qadri, a former nobody who murdered Taseer in cowardly fashion – shooting the governor 27 times in the back – and who has since revelled in the notoriety of his blood-stained celebrity. Equally predictable, alas, was the reaction on the streets outside.[...]

What accounts for such madness? In some parts Taseer’s death has inspired a McCarthyite atmosphere in which nobody wants to seen to be soft on blasphemy. But there is also a more profound reason. Devotion to the prophet Muhammad is central to the faith of the Barelvi Sunnis, who make up the majority of Pakistani Muslims. Even a whiff of insult to the prophet can whip up feverish anger.

You know, if these Islamic whack-jobs were to embrace trickle-down economics (say, were they to be taught that to reject trickle down economics is to “insult the prophet”), they’d make great Tea-Party Republicans!

16 September 2011 PM

Workout notes No swim; no lifeguard.
But I did lift: lunges and rotator cuff
100 sit ups (4 sets of 25 with two sets together)
adduction: 3 sets with 180
abduction: 3 sets with 180
dumbbell military: seated: two sets of 15 x 40 lb., standing: one set of 10
incline bench: 10 x 120, 8 x 120
bench press: 135 x 10, 155 x 7, 155 x 6
curls (dumbbell) 3 sets of 12 x 25 lb.
pull down: 3 sets of 10 x 145
rows: 3 sets of 10 x 200

Posts
Wisdom of the crowd? It depends: yes, there is wisdom in following the smartest and most capable, and there is wisdom in averaging responses. But on consulting with the average? Not so much.

The experiment was carried out at The Royal Veterinary College’s annual Open Day in May this year when RVC researchers asked prospective students and their families to guess the number of sweets in a jar. The average guesses of 82 people who guessed in isolation came within just one sweet of the true quantity.

However, in the real-world people have access to public information, so the researchers re-ran the experiment but told people what others had guessed. Whether the researchers provided the last person’s guess, the mean guess, or a random guess, collective wisdom plummeted.

In fact, individuals with access to public information over-estimated the number of sweets in the jar, resembling information cascades that result in economic bubbles where people drive prices of items (e.g. stocks) above their value.
Use of public information did prove to be beneficial however, when individuals were given access to the current best guess. This reduced the likelihood of extreme predictions, and individuals in this test both performed better individually and collectively at smaller group sizes than the other conditions studied. [...]

What our work demonstrates is that for accurate collective decisions, you either aggregate completely independent opinions, or copy successful individuals; anything in-between seems doomed to failure.”

Media
Yes, the media is pretty stupid….instead of reporting facts it tries to give “both sides” even when there is only one:

There is a specter haunting America today. It is the specter of stupidity. A few months ago, I wrote a column I called “The Problem of Republican Idiots.” Believe me, this problem has not gone away. Rick Perry, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner right now, believes the phenomenon of man-made global warming to be a conspiracy by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data.” No less alarming is that this stupidity is apparently contagious. The men and women who inhabit the upper reaches of the US media (and pull down the multimillion-dollar salaries) appear to believe that to do their jobs properly, they must make themselves behave like idiots in order to be “fair” to the Republicans and their idiotic ideas.

I have in mind two examples, both involving, as it happens, David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. Neither one is exactly new, but I picked them because not only is Gregory host of television’s highest-rated Sunday morning news show, by far, but his program is also considered to be the most influential and important of all TV news programs. As the alleged gold standard of television interviewing and discussion, it sets the tone for much of the rest of the week’s reporting. Also, I just can’t get these two examples out of my head, they are so damn stupid. See if you agree.

I. On August 13, discussing the Ames, Iowa, straw poll, Gregory made this observation on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown: “You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that’s extreme. Well, people on the other side think introducing healthcare reform for the whole country is akin to European socialism.” To be honest, in the space allotted to me I’m not sure I can do justice to the multiple forms of stupidity this comment manages to combine. But let me try. To begin with, we have the stupidity of lavishing so much attention on the wholly meaningless Ames straw poll in the first place. Leave that aside. Gregory was trying to create a sense of moral and intellectual equivalence between Rick Perry’s 2009 suggestion that Texas might secede from the United States—an action that set off the Civil War when South Carolina did it in 1860—and Obama’s proposal and Congress’s passage of a healthcare reform bill modeled on the one put in place by Mitt Romney when he was the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Given that Obama dropped the bill’s public option, the legislation relies entirely on private healthcare providers and does not create any significant new government bureaucracies to help implement it. When all is said and done, the program is a modest—and in many ways disappointing—version of a vision that has been part of American debate since Teddy Roosevelt proposed it in 1912 and Harry Truman made it a central part of the Democratic Party platform since 1948.

Moreover, Gregory applies the word “socialism” not only to the legislation but also to contemporary European economies. Here one is forced to inquire, “Which ones?” France, Germany, Britain, Italy, etc., are all capitalist economies led by conservative governments. True, Republican idiots like Newt Gingrich—Gregory’s most frequent guest in 2009—use the word “socialist” to mean “enjoys a higher tax rate on wealthy people than Republican funders would prefer,” but why must Gregory misuse it in the service of the same cause?

The answer is, of course, to prevent angering the stupid Republican viewers.
Lest you think that this is aimed only at Republicans, I have to admit (very reluctantly) that the stupidity comes when we talk about woo that is in fashion with liberals (e. g., “alternative” medicine, new age nonsense and the like). Also note that Michelle Bachmann’s concern about mental retardation and vaccines is shared by many on the left. Yes, The Nation (the article that called out the stupidity of the “socialist” claim) ran “climate change denialist” stuff too.

Republicans and safety nets
Paul Krugman weighs in on what some of the tea party behavior at some of the recent debates says:

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”

And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”

The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.

Now, there are two things you should know about the Blitzer-Paul exchange. The first is that after the crowd weighed in, Mr. Paul basically tried to evade the question, asserting that warm-hearted doctors and charitable individuals would always make sure that people received the care they needed — or at least they would if they hadn’t been corrupted by the welfare state. Sorry, but that’s a fantasy. People who can’t afford essential medical care often fail to get it, and always have — and sometimes they die as a result.

The second is that very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer’s hypothetical individual who could and should have bought insurance. In reality, most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions.

So would people on the right be willing to let those who are uninsured through no fault of their own die from lack of care? The answer, based on recent history, is a resounding “Yeah!”

Think, in particular, of the children.

The day after the debate, the Census Bureau released its latest estimates on income, poverty and health insurance. The overall picture was terrible: the weak economy continues to wreak havoc on American lives. One relatively bright spot, however, was health care for children: the percentage of children without health coverage was lower in 2010 than before the recession, largely thanks to the 2009 expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip.

And the reason S-chip was expanded in 2009 but not earlier was, of course, that former President George W. Bush blocked earlier attempts to cover more children — to the cheers of many on the right. Did I mention that one in six children in Texas lacks health insurance, the second-highest rate in the nation?

So the freedom to die extends, in practice, to children and the unlucky as well as the improvident. And the right’s embrace of that notion signals an important shift in the nature of American politics. [...]

Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.

And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

There was a time when I had conservative friends; our discussions were about HOW to have a more just, more compassionate society and not on whether to have one at all. We had rough agreement of where we wanted to go but disagreed on how to get there.

Politics
Of course the Presidents approval ratings have taken a hit with everyone but blacks and liberal Democrats.

But Congress is rated even lower; well at least people rate OTHER PEOPLE’s Representatives and Senators pretty darned low:

Congress faces historically low approval ratings as it wades into the debate over the $447 billion jobs package proposed by President Obama, with just 12 percent of Americans now approving of the way Congress is handling its job, matching its all-time low, recorded in October 2008 at the height of the economic crisis, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
Voters are slightly more disapproving of the Republicans in Congress than they are of the Democrats, with just 19 percent approving of Republicans, compared with 28 percent that approve of Democrats.

Republican voters are more dissatisfied with their party’s representatives than are Democrats. Half of Republican voters say they disapprove of Republicans in Congress, while 43 percent of Democratic voters say they disapprove of Democrats in Congress. Independents are slightly less approving of Congressional Republicans than Congressional Democrats.

But as far as their own…well, that is low too but, of course, not as low:

When pollsters asked about voters’ own representatives in Congress, they expressed generally more positive or supportive views. But public opinion has changed, with many now saying it’s time for someone else to have a chance. Just 33 percent of voters say their own representative in Congress deserves to be re-elected, and 57 percent say it’s time to elect someone else — another record level of dissatisfaction.

Democratic and independent voters are slightly more frustrated with their own representatives, with about 6 in 10 of each saying it’s time for a new person. This isn’t entirely surprising, with Republicans currently in control of the House. But nearly half of Republican voters also say their representative does not deserve re-election.

I suppose that isn’t a surprise: conservatives are disgusted at the socialist liberals who won’t go along and liberals don’t like conservative obstructionism either (one person’s obstructionism is another person’s “willingness to fight for principle”).

30 May 2011 early am

Workout notes
I ran an easy 3 miles (3.14 by google) this morning. I started at 6:32 am and finished at 7:03; I did have to dodge one car that didn’t realize that the intersection was NOT a 4 way stop; still that car has a lot more “M” and “V” than I do…better to be alive than “right but dead or crippled”.

The weather was about as pretty as possible (sun, not that hot yet) but I was surprised that there were so many cars on the neighborhood road. Then again this is a working class neighborhood and people are used to getting up early.

Later: Lynn has talked me into going to Zumba class:

Don’t worry; though I’ll be the only male, this class is lead by and mostly populated by middle aged women; there is little danger that I’ll pull something or throw out my back. But who knows; with any luck maybe I’ll get eyestrain? (I like MILF’s and GILF’s).

Fun
Hmmm, maybe I should frown and scowl more?

Women find happy guys significantly less sexually attractive than swaggering or brooding men, according to a new University of British Columbia study that helps to explain the enduring allure of “bad boys” and other iconic gender types. The study – which may cause men to smile less on dates, and inspire online daters to update their profile photos – finds dramatic gender differences in how men and women rank the sexual attractiveness of non-verbal expressions of commonly displayed emotions, including happiness, pride, and shame.
[...]
“While showing a happy face is considered essential to friendly social interactions, including those involving sexual attraction – few studies have actually examined whether a smile is, in fact, attractive,” says Prof. Jessica Tracy of UBC’s Dept. of Psychology. “This study finds that men and women respond very differently to displays of emotion, including smiles.”

In a series of studies, more than 1,000 adult participants rated the sexual attractiveness of hundreds of images of the opposite sex engaged in universal displays of happiness (broad smiles), pride (raised heads, puffed-up chests) and shame (lowered heads, averted eyes).

The study found that women were least attracted to smiling, happy men, preferring those who looked proud and powerful or moody and ashamed. In contrast, male participants were most sexually attracted to women who looked happy, and least attracted to women who appeared proud and confident.

No, I don’t take this study very seriously; though maybe there is something there?

Political Fun

Good for Mitt Romney:

The big important news of the Romney campaign today is that he apparently swung by some touristy deep-dish pizza place while on a fundraising swing through Chicago, ate some pie — I imagine very daintily, with a knife and fork — and then decided, for the LOLs, to send over the leftovers to the Obama re-elect headquarters, who confirmed the receipt of Romney’s leavings.

Yes, this Huffington Post article makes fun of him for doing this, but I think that it is great that Mr. Romney is interjecting some levity into things. We can disagree on policy without hating each other….well, maybe some can. I sometimes struggle with this.

So I salute Mr. Romney for setting a nice tone.

Politics

Here is what we are up against. This is part of a letter to the editor written by a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” old man

How many times during my youth did mentors – parents, grandparents, teachers, religious leaders, etc. – explain the importance of caring for the poor? I bought into the fact that many among us were not privileged to wealth, good health, higher education or proper guidance. I accepted the fact that not all were born equal and some need societal protection against the unscrupulous among us.

All of those reasons have flooded my memory bank as I listen to our elected officials explain why cuts in funding cannot happen to our school systems and our relief agencies. “The poor among us need our help” seems to be a constant theme among our political leaders to maintain the status quo when it comes to the transfer of wealth in this country.

Personally, I’ve stopped buying into the “woe is me” philosophy of yet another generation of under-educated, under-employed “poor” people. How difficult can it be to grasp the simple truth that education will usually lead to a richer, fuller life? How difficult can it be to explain to your child that living in public housing is not the norm and that better economic conditions usually follow better-educated people? How difficult is it to stress the obvious truth that doing drugs is terribly detrimental to one’s health and overall well-being? How difficult can it be to convince your child that learning to read is probably the single most important improvement one can ever make it climbing out of poverty?

Hell, I did it. I listened to my parents and my children listened to me. If I did it, everyone can do it. I was born in 1933. I know what poor is! I watched while my parents dug their way out of poverty and into middle America. It can be done!

Emphasis mine. This guy grew up right wen the New Deal was in full force and the government was spending like crazy (WW II also). Tax rates on the upper income people were sky high. I am NOT saying that this man was employed in a New Deal program directly, but the bottom line is that private enterprise, at that time, was helped by the fact that people had money to spend. But oh no…he did it ALL HIMSELF (so he thinks).

This is a bit like my right wing Naval Academy classmates going on and on about self-sufficiency.
(note: a Naval Academy education is taxpayer funded, and a government paycheck is guaranteed for 4-5 years afterward)

Robert Reich talks more about this era and afterward:

The Great Prosperity

During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced. Mass production and mass consumption proved perfect complements. Almost everyone who wanted a job could find one with good wages, or at least wages that were trending upward.

During these three decades everyone’s wages grew — not just those at or near the top.

Government enforced the basic bargain in several ways. It used Keynesian policy to achieve nearly full employment. It gave ordinary workers more bargaining power. It provided social insurance. And it expanded public investment. Consequently, the portion of total income that went to the middle class grew while the portion going to the top declined. But this was no zero-sum game. As the economy grew almost everyone came out ahead, including those at the top.

The pay of workers in the bottom fifth grew 116 percent over these years — faster than the pay of those in the top fifth (which rose 99 percent), and in the top 5 percent (86 percent).

Productivity also grew quickly. Labor productivity — average output per hour worked — doubled. So did median incomes. Expressed in 2007 dollars, the typical family’s income rose from about $25,000 to $55,000. The basic bargain was cinched.

The middle class had the means to buy, and their buying created new jobs. As the economy grew, the national debt shrank as a percentage of it.

The Great Prosperity also marked the culmination of a reorganization of work that had begun during the Depression. Employers were required by law to provide extra pay — time-and-a-half — for work stretching beyond 40 hours a week. This created an incentive for employers to hire additional workers when demand picked up. Employers also were required to pay a minimum wage, which improved the pay of workers near the bottom as demand picked up.

When workers were laid off, usually during an economic downturn, government provided them with unemployment benefits, usually lasting until the economy recovered and they were rehired. Not only did this tide families over but it kept them buying goods and services — an “automatic stabilizer” for the economy in downturns.

Perhaps most significantly, government increased the bargaining leverage of ordinary workers. They were guaranteed the right to join labor unions, with which employers had to bargain in good faith. By the mid-1950s more than a third of all America workers in the private sector were unionized. And the unions demanded and received a fair slice of the American pie. Non-unionized companies, fearing their workers would otherwise want a union, offered similar deals.

Americans also enjoyed economic security against the risks of economic life — not only unemployment benefits but also, through Social Security, insurance against disability, loss of a major breadwinner, workplace injury and inability to save enough for retirement. In 1965 came health insurance for the elderly and the poor (Medicare and Medicaid). Economic security proved the handmaiden of prosperity. In requiring Americans to share the costs of adversity it enabled them to share the benefits of peace of mind. And by offering peace of mind, it freed them to consume the fruits of their labors.

The government sponsored the dreams of American families to own their own home by providing low-cost mortgages and interest deductions on mortgage payments. In many sections of the country, government subsidized electricity and water to make such homes habitable. And it built the roads and freeways that connected the homes with major commercial centers.

Government also widened access to higher education. The GI Bill paid college costs for those who returned from war. The expansion of public universities made higher education affordable to the American middle class.

Government paid for all of this with tax revenues from an expanding middle class with rising incomes. Revenues were also boosted by those at the top of the income ladder whose marginal taxes were far higher. The top marginal income tax rate during World War II was over 68 percent. In the 1950s, under Dwight Eisenhower, whom few would call a radical, it rose to 91 percent. In the 1960s and 1970s the highest marginal rate was around 70 percent. Even after exploiting all possible deductions and credits, the typical high-income taxpayer paid a marginal federal tax of over 50 percent. But contrary to what conservative commentators had predicted, the high tax rates did not reduce economic growth. To the contrary, they enabled the nation to expand middle-class prosperity and fuel growth.

There is more there (Reich’s article); he talks about how this came tumbling down and how our three main coping mechanisms (individual borrowing, two income families, working more hours) eventually ceased to be effective.

Frankly, I don’t see much hope in compromise; at least the Republicans admit that they aren’t going to compromise:

Education
As we learn more about the brain, we are learning that…surprise, surprise, not everyone can do everything. Here is a blurb about “discalculia”:

What is dyscalculia?

Examples of common indicators of dyscalculia are (i) carrying out simple number comparison and addition tasks by counting, often using fingers, well beyond the age when it is normal, and (ii) finding approximate estimation tasks difficult. Individuals identified as dyscalculic behave differently from their mainstream peers, for example:

* To say which is the larger of two playing cards showing 5 and 8, they count all the symbols on each card.
* To place a playing card of 8 in sequence between a 3 and a 9 they count up spaces between the two to identify where the 8 should be placed.
* To count down from 10 they count up from 1 to 10, then 1 to 9, etc.
* To count up from 70 in tens, they say ’70, 80, 90, 100, 200, 300…’
* They estimate the height of a normal room as ’200 feet?’

Ok, I don’t know enough to know if this is something real or a modern thing that is “just made up”. BUT if it is real, well, ok…just please, please, please, don’t tell people with this affliction that they can be scientists or engineers, ok?