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Input Junkie
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "nancylebov" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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10:20 am
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Is there a demand for clear-headedness?
A online freelance writer discovered that it was possible to put a career together under a male name, but not under her own name.
The difference in how she was treated under different names was huge.
I'm horrified and angry at the degree of prejudice, but it's also clear that decades of direct work to cut back on the level of prejudice haven't had a lot of success.
And what I'm not seeing is techniques for paying attention to what's in front of you (like the quality of a piece of writing) rather than being distracted by the gender of the author's name.
I'm not seeing people asking for those techniques, either, but maybe I just haven't heard about them. I'd like such techniques for myself.
I realize that gender, or race, or whatever blindness isn't the solution all the time, but it would help with a lot of things.
Link thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) supergee.
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08:43 pm
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Looking for a meeting place in center city (Philadephia)
Any recommendations for somewhere that's quiet and open late?
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03:12 pm
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Slightly futuristic cooking
Some time ago, I read a delightfully geeky chapter in Harold McGee's The Curious Cook (1992 edition) about poaching meat. There was plenty about the difficulty of finding a thermometer that read in the right range (about 132F, iirc) and using engineering info about heat transfer in flat triangles (iirc, a homogeneous cut of pork) to get the cooking time right.
Fast forward a decade and a half, and we have an NYTimes article about a home Sous Vide ($449) for cooking at exact sub-boiling temperatures. The process is slow but doesn't require nearly as much ongoing attention as most cooking does and can produce very good results, some of them probably not attainable by other methods.
Unfortunately, the first link just gives a sketch of setting up the business. There's nothing about why it's so hard to control temperature that tightly.
On the less expensive side, there's the Sous Vide Cooking Controller for $139. You supply the heating element, it supplies the precision. I don't know if it's as satisfactory for something like cooking a whole chicken.
Sous Vide (which means "under vacuum"-- the food is in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag while it's being cooked) backs up a notion of mine-- that there can be a lot of technological advance just by thinking about the science and engineering we already know. I bet there are lots of innovations as good as the invention of left and right shoes just waiting to be made.
I found out about sous vide from Noodle Food. I have no idea whether pasta should be sous vided.
A history of sous vide, with a little about compressing food (sounds like a good idea for watermelon, which I've always thought was too watery) and extreme freezing (get your decadent sour cream brittle on the bottom and room temp on the top).
And you can get a Molecular Gastronomy Starter Kit from ThinkGeek.
On the much less practical side, how to cook a turkey in 30 seconds: with thermite. Don't try this indoors.
I can't remember where I saw the link. I think the memory was burnt away.
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09:26 am
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Better logic, more stats about reported casualties in Afghanistan
Susan Simpson checked on reports of various numbers of civilians killed and made a graph.
Still, any effect is a small one. The real question here is what on earth is going on with the number 7? And, to a lesser extent, 21? I know this survey is far from perfect, but the google returns for 7 deaths are so far out from the rest of the data set that it is hard to believe it is merely a random fluke. Looking at the Google results provides no obvious clues to explain the difference.
The number 21 also has an oddly high number of reports. This is a bit counter-intuitive, as if there was an attempt by the PR machine to make the numbers more appealing, I would guess that they would aim for 18 or 19 instead — you know, the old salesman’s trick of setting the price at $19.99.
I wish I had something clever to say here about what might be going on, but I don’t. Still, if we are going to be questioning the accuracy of military civilian death counts, the alleged ubiquity of the number 30 may be a red herring — 7 and 21 seem like much more promising anamolies to investigate.
There's at least one problem with the graph-- the vertical axis is number of google hits rather than number of uniquie accounts. I don't know whether a few stories which are interesting enough to get linked more could be causing the anomalies. I also don't know whether a statistician would say that blips are to be expected if the situation was random.
in any case, View from LL2, Security Crank, and Moon of Alabama seem to be part of a community that's trying to figure out what's going on, and I'm planning add it to my blog reading list.
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07:47 pm
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But will they be good sports about it "over there"?
The Security Crank sez:But the much more important point remains: how could we possibly have any idea how the war is going, here or anywhere else, when the bad guys seem only to die in groups of 30? The sheer ubiquity of that number in fatality and casualty counts is astounding, to the point where I don’t even pay attention to a story anymore when they use that magic number 30. It is an indicator either of ignorance or deliberate spin… but no matter the case, whenever you see the number 30 used in reference to the Taliban, you should probably close the tab and move onto something else, because you just won’t get a good sense of what happened there.
There's lot in the article about the suspiciously clustered and exact numbers used for the casualties.
Megan Carpetier gathered some information and found
In other words, the Pentagon determined that 30 casualties, even if they were civilian, were too few to matter politically or to attract the attention of the press for more than a few words. If commanders expected more civilian casualties than that, political leaders had to sign off on the attack in advance to make sure they were prepared for the PR fall-out.
Links thanks to Marginal Revolution.
And if you were wondering about the title, it's a reference to the idea of fighting them over there rather than over here.
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01:34 pm
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On false confessions
From The Association for Psychological Science:
It wouldn't surprise me if confessions are so convincing that even some of the police who push for false confessions end up believing that the confessions are true.
False confessions seem so illogical, especially for someone like Joseph Dick of the Norfolk Four, who got a double life sentence after confessing. Why do people confess to crimes they didn’t commit? Some do it for the chance at fame (more than 200 people confessed to kidnapping Charles Lindbergh’s baby), but many more do it for reasons that are far more puzzling to the average person. In the November 2004 issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, APS Fellow Saul Kassin looked at the body of research and described how the police are able to interrogate suspects until they confess to a crime they didn’t commit.
Generally, it starts because people give up their Miranda rights. In fact, Richard A. Leo found that a majority of people give up the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney. In fact, according to self-report data, innocent suspects gave up their rights more often than guilty suspects (most told Leo either that this was because they felt that they didn’t have anything to hide because they were innocent or that they thought it would make them look guilty).
Once a suspect starts talking, the police can use a variety of techniques to make the accused feel as though they are better off confessing than continuing to deny (these include promises of leniency and threats of harsher interrogation or sentences). If a suspect feels like a conviction is inevitable not matter what he or she says, confessing may seem like a good idea.
But, in some cases, the accused comes to believe that he or she actually did commit the crime. It’s been shown repeatedly that memory is quite malleable and unreliable. Elizabeth Loftus has repeatedly shown that the human brain can create memories out of thin air with some prompting. In a famous series of experiments, Loftus, APS Past President, was able to help people create memories for events that never happened in their lives simply through prompting. She helped them “remember” being lost in a shopping mall when they were children, and the longer the experiment went on, the more details they “remembered.” The longer police interrogate a suspect, emphatic about his guilt and peppering their interrogation with details of the crime, the more likely a suspect is to become convinced himself.
I've never heard of any research on whether some people have more stable memories than others, but I bet there's a large amount of variation.
The results show that confessions can have a powerful effect on other evidence. Of the people who had identified a subject from the original lineup, 60 percent changed their identification when told that someone else had confessed. Plus, 44 percent of the people who originally determined that none of the suspects in the lineup committed the crime changed their mind when told that someone had confessed (and 50 percent changed when told that a specific person had confessed). When asked about their decision, “about half of the people seemed to say, ‘Well, the investigator told me there was a confession, so that must be true.’ So they were just believing the investigator,” Hasel said. “But the other half really seemed to be changing their memory. So that memory can never really be regained once it’s been tainted.” What’s more, people who were told that the person they wrongly pinpointed as the culprit had confessed saw their confidence levels soar. After that confirmation, they remembered the crime better and were more sure about details. The implications for inside the courtroom are obvious if eyewitnesses who incorrectly picked someone out of a lineup can become so sure of their choice after learning that the person confessed. “It is noteworthy that whereas physical evidence is immutable (once collected and preserved, it can always be retested), an eyewitness’s identification decision cannot later be revisited without contamination,” Kassin and Hasel write.
Link thanks to Less Wrong.
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11:44 am
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Peter Watts assaulted by border guards, and some epistomology
Peter Watts, a Canadian science fiction author, was beaten, thrown out into the cold without transportation or coat, and charged with felony assault.
What he did was to get out of his car and ask (twice!) why his car was being searched-- he was on his way back into Canada, and he was dealing with American border guards.
Contributions to his legal defense fund can be sent here.
papersky explains that living in a free country means not being afraid of arbitrary attack from the police.
pecuniam on why letting governments get away with torture is a disaster.
comodorified on the emotional meaning of throwing someone out, unprotected, into deadly cold. And an update on why Watts survived this-- he was dropped off on the Canadian side, not far from Canadian Customs.
Digby on why having police that you need to treat like thugs is a bad thing.
In the comments to the various posts about what happened, there are some who say "I've crossed the border any number of times and nothing went wrong, so I'm not believing that this was an arbitrary abuse of authority." I've recently read The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb-- the premise is that people wildly underestimate how often unusual events with large consequences happen.
It isn't nonsense to assume that your experience has something to do with how things usually are, but it needs to be tempered with information from other people, and a check for asymetries. Does it make sense that only the low status people behave badly?
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10:58 am
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It's a jungle out there
Stealth carnivores
Link thanks to The Agitator.
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10:56 am
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Fishing bloopers
Rather gentle slapstick
Link thanks to Marginal Revolution.
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06:17 am
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Domain registration
I've been using Godaddy. Is there any reason not to switch to Name.com? It's cheaper. Any other recommendations?
Is "Make private" actually useful?
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11:13 am
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Inch-thick marble panelling in the stairwell
Discussion of high-quality construction and finishing in old buildings
Just a pleasant amassing of detail-- those panels probably were an inch thick because that was the thinnest marble they could cut and transport.
I do look at the nice old buildings in Philadelphia and wonder why people a century ago seemed to be able to afford so much more ornament than we can. I realize cheap labor is part of it, but I think it's also because they thought it was important.
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09:05 am
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Slavery in SF redux
I was going to put an addendum on my recent post, but it ran so long I thought I might as well post it separately.
The exact quote was “What if one person could actually own another’s mind, in a new and more complete form of slavery?”
It's fun to have a list of mind control in sf, but none of the nominees (with the possible exception of Necropolis, which I haven't read) seem to quite meet the specs.
I'm assuming chattel slavery-- public, socially acceptable, and including a market. For it to be a more complete slavery, there's presumably surveillance, and probably the ability to make modifications.
It's entirely possible that I'm over-extrapolating and/or that such slavery was brought up as a story possibility in a class discussion rather than being based on an actual story.
Silverberg's To Live Again comes close, though the angle was more about fear of an individual slave revolt and there was no ability to modify.
A Fire Upon the Deep comes close, but the people with Focus mostly seem to be government property, with only one sub rosa case of personal use.
The Blight and the Puppet Masters aren't people.
There's another Vinge story ("The Cookie Monster"?) niggling at my memory about AIs wiggling their way out of repetitious VR, but even that doesn't quite meet the specs. IIRC, it was one scientist rather than the whole social structure-- it was rather in the spirit of Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God".
More generally, slavery is really common in sf and I've never seen a general discussion of it.
And symbolically, trying to control, modify, and sometimes own other people's minds is something people try to do a lot.
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08:26 am
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Potential button slogan
Jesus is my safeword
What do you think?
Addendum:The evidence adds up to the slogan being more offensive that what I want to carry.
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05:19 pm
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SF about owning people's minds
This description of a science fiction course at Harvard mentions a story about a complete sort of slavery-- owning people's minds. Offhand, I can't think of what story this might be. Any ideas?
Link thanks to madfilkentist.
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03:06 pm
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Exurberant Video
You know that delightful processing overload video everyone was linking to lately?
More from the same artists, I think:
Much more interesting music, comprehensible, and lots of fun.
Link thanks to MaryL.
I'm not sure whether Sugimoto Kousuke is the guitarist or the animator-- I think the latter.
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03:15 pm
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If you're tired of Mandelbrot sets
Pretty graphs of the roots of polynomials.
I wish I knew enough math to get the logic of the patterns.
Link thanks to en_ki.
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11:35 am
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Fodder for horror movies
A video of deep sea scavengers, speeded up 500 times (because they move very slowly at that temperature) to get vaguely unnatural looking movement.
I'm a little surprised that there doesn't seem to be anything which shoves starfish off the spots they've softened up so as to take advantage of someone else's stomach acid.
Link thanks to Marginal Revolution.
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08:38 am
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How much difference does religion make?
From Thorne Coyle
Hearing Anwar Ibrahim and Pal Aluwalia – prominent Muslim and Sikh thinkers – state unequivocally and clearly that any inferior or unequal position of women was strictly cultural and not part of their religions, gives me hope for our world. (I have heard this stated by feminist Muslim thinkers, but hearing it from these two respected men was heartening confirmation).
It's not giving me huge amounts of hope-- the Koran's been a center of the religion for some 1300 years, and so far as the treatment of women is concerned, the prestige of the religion has been put behind misogyny rather than being used to moderate or eliminate misogyny.
There was a recent study which concluded that people tend to assume that God agrees with them, even if their opinions change. More discussion here.
On the one hand, the study was done on average American Christians, so it's not clear how far it generalizes to other religions. What's more, it hasn't been done on people with active prayer/meditation lives, nor on those who actively study their religion or who say that their religion has significantly affected their choices.*
Anyway, the question of how much difference religion makes wasn't intended as a snark. It's a real question. What do you think?
*Afaik, studies of religiousness ask about such things as attendance at religious services. I've never heard of a survey which asked people whether their religion had a significant impact on their choices about sex and/or money and/or how they treat people.
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11:27 am
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Cartoon with lots of meta
I may well view this more than once just to get it completely sorted out-- there's much more going on than in the average cartoon, and possibly than in the average movie.
Link thanks to cargoweasel.
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08:56 am
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If a deputy steals a document from a file in court....
and is caught on videotape, what do you think might happen?
Probably not this:
# The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office announced on Tuesday that Stoddard would surrender to jail ahead of his midnight deadline to aplogize. But when Stoddard showed up, the jail refused to book him, citing a “clerical error.” Stoddard insisted on spending the night in jail anyway.
# Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced he has filed a federal lawsuit against the county and its judges, alleging a “widespread conspiracy” against Arpaio and his officers. Arpaio remarkably and apparently with no self-awareness whatsoever called the county a “good ole boys network,” and commented that he had “never seen these kinds of things occur in the justice system.” Arpaio also called Donahoe’s contempt finding against Stoddard a “vendetta,” and said, “For political reasons, [Stoddard's] been thrown to the wolves.”
nor quite this much flamboyant lack of respect for law and civil order.
It's a fascinating case of police being under partial control. They aren't being violent, which goes to show the power of cultural hypnosis. Mind you, I'd rather if things were more honest and orderly and less fascinating.
This story has been unfolding at The Agitator.
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