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Burn Rate — the Internet start-up strategy card game.
Here's your chance to go back to 1999 and do it wrong, all over again.
[...] you and your friends will become dot-com CEOs with great funding and terrible business sense.
The object: be the last one to lose all your money.
I think it probably hasn't been long enough for me to be able to play this.
Behind me at the cafe tonight, a dance Ph.D. student discussed her thesis with a yoga instructor. Two guys next to me were practicing their Greek by reading the New Testament. In the corner, a DJ was proving that cafe offices aren't just for laptops anymore — he has a little cart with a boombox, turntable, keyboard, and was listening to LP's on headphones. And all around, students were studying and talking and typing on their laptops.
At my table, some guy was drawing mind maps from his personal trainer manual.
I love this town.
Good Christian Science Monitor article on Edward O. Wilson, who literally wrote the book on biodiversity.
Preserving species and ecosystems] makes economic sense. Wilson points to a group of biologists and economists who in 1997 estimated that the services the natural world provides — things like clean air, clean water, and arable soil — amounted to about $33 trillion a year.
[...] Saving species and ecosystems is a moral issue. Not to do so, in his opinion, would be a supreme ethical failure in terms of our debt to the world, to future generations, to the very sanctity of creation.
[...] People are in denial... When someone comes along and says — whether it's Rush Limbaugh, or [author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist"] Bjorn Lomborg, or a petroleum industry spokesman — and says, 'Well, you know, we just don't believe these figures ...," that's a denial.
The other denial is to say, 'Wait, aren't human beings just part of nature? Aren't they just another extinction element?... The answer is really very simple: Before humanity came along, species were dying at a rate of about 1 per million, per year, and they were being born 1 per million per year. So, through time immemorial, things have been pretty much in balance.
Now we're speeding up the death rate of the species 1,000 times and we're lowering the birthrate. The cradles are being destroyed.
When you say humanity is a part of nature, so we're just an extinction agent... it's like saying the giant meteorite is part of nature. We don't want to be a force of mass destruction.
Regarding the economic point, see also Ecological Economics on how economists have to learn to subtract.
The "science" of economics has us under its spell. We sway to its mystical incantations: Gross National Product, interest rates, the monetary supply. We revel in its traditions, in its formalism, in its abstract and irrelevant models of the world; where air and water are free and forests grow forever; where the worth of vanishing resources are disregarded because they cannot easily be quantified; where the wealth of a nation goes up with every automobile accident, with every oil spill, with every newly diagnosed cancer patient.
And Economics for 4-year-olds:
My four-year-old daughter spent the afternoon at a local science museum the other day, exploring an exhibit on biodiversity. She returned home full of determination, found a pencil and paper, and composed a letter. Now she distributes copies to friends and strangers alike. The letter begins:
From Jenna to the world: Please stop making all this pollution. It's making all the animals sick and die. The fish can't live if the coral can't live and the polar bears can't live if the fish can't live.
Approaching the problems of polar bears and coral reefs by writing a letter to the world makes sense if you think like a four-year-old. Surely, people would not knowingly live in ways that threaten polar bears or coral reefs. If people understood the consequences of their behavior, the world would change.
My grown-up mind wishes my daughter's theory worked.
(The last link via Eclectica, my new favorite blog of this synaptic decay time constant)
The most successful prophecy I know in science fiction is in E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops".
"Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes — for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on 'Music during the Australian Period'."
She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness.
"Be quick!" She called, her irritation returning. "Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time."
[contents of a videophone call elided]
Vashanti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? — say this day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation — a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one — that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
I first encountered this story in a course in "Post-Modern Literature and Science" taught by David Porush at dear old RPI. He gave it to us without context and challenged us to guess its year of publication, correctly confident that foreknowledge of Forster's oeuvre wouldn't significantly prejudice the results from a bunch of RPI undergrads.
I guessed 1910; the correct year is 1909. I was tipped off by its opening:
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds.
He didn't have a word for the artificial production of music. I was surprised to hear others in the class guess as late as 1960.
So almost a century ago, Forster not only anticipated the Web, but the anxiety of Internet withdrawal — when the closest analog I can think of would have been trying to keep on top of all the newspapers and new books in London (which I don't doubt would have been daunting.)
Revisiting the story now, I'm even more impressed by the degree to which it anticipates blogging, with everyone sharing their opinions, and placing great weight on their responsibility to maintain their output... independently of whether they have anything to say.
It's a relief to get this out — I hadn't updated my blog in a day and a half!
Calloo! Callay! It's Free Comic Book Day! And I'm missing it to go take my personal trainer exam. Feh.
=v= My reality collided with toon reality again. I'm more of a comic strip guy than a comic book guy, to the point of actually having my reality (and myself) show up in comic strips. Why, just last Thursday, an email exchange I'd had with a local cartoonist blossomed into a comic strip in the local paper.
I got more than I bargained for that day, though.
I was walking up Broadway — the Broadway in San Francisco, that is — to see my editor for lunch, when I was stopped at a corner to let some emergency vehicles pass by. I noticed the vehicles on the side of the road, just sitting there, idling, while a picturesque firefighter or two stood on them, striking heroic poses. I was a bit confused until I noticed the movie cameras. Somebody presumably said, "Action!" because all of a sudden the vehicles all came to life and zoomed up a picturesque San Francisco hill.
A block further down, I noticed that the city had been occupied by a bunch of excessively handsome men in Army fatigues.
After a few inquiries, I learned that the apparent state of emergency had something to do with The Incredible Hulk, who had, it seemed, smashed up a cable car. I was pretty upset about this, since our public transportation has enough problems already. I supposed destroying cable cars is one way to let people know what city you're in (cf. The Rock), but you can achieve the same effect with another typical San Francisco scene: footage of sidewalks with SUVs parked on them. Which I would have to admit I'd like to see Hulk SMASH!
Returning from lunch, I walked past The Wall where the bike messengers hang out, and there was Spider-Man, jumping over urban obstacles while somebody filmed him. I was already pretty disoriented by having Marvel comics wander into my reality, so the prospect of a Marvel "guest star" crossover in real life made me woozy.
I noticed that Spidey and his cameraman both had bikes, so I figured they'd be sympathetic to my alternative transportation concerns. "Hey Spider-Man! The Hulk's smashing cable cars up the street!" One of the messengers chimed in, "Go up there and kick his ass!" But Spidey responded, sadly, that the police up there were giving him attitude.
I understood: J. Jonah Jameson, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, has pretty much smeared Spidey's reputation, so of course the police wouldn't look too kindly on him. You'd think that J.J.J. would've mellowed out a little after marrying Sharon Stone, but apparently not.
It's just as well. A real-life double super hero comic book crossover would probably have had a bad effect on my reality ...
Citizens for a Murder-Free America needs you to support Precrime.
Precrime is a groundbreaking homicide prevention system developed by a team of technologists and crime specialists under the authority of the United States government. Unlike conventional law enforcement methods, Precrime never fails. This is because Precrime uses a revolutionary new technology called previsualization that allows police detectives to witness, verify and halt murders before they occur.
Law enforcement agencies have often used remote viewing and other precognitive technologies to aid them with the apprehension of criminals and the recovery of missing persons. The Precrime system marks the first time that these technologies have been placed at the center of a crime prevention system.
And in case one has any doubts, their fancy multimedia site assures one over and over: "It works."
(Via Memo to Myself)
1994: Mike Diana is convicted of obscenity for creating and publishing his zine, "Boiled Angel." The terms of his 3-year probation include that his home is subject to search at any time to verify he hasn't been creating more obscenity.
2001: Brian Dalton, serving probation for pandering involving child porn, is convicted of obscenity for sadistic pedophilic fantasies he wrote in his private journal, and sentenced to ten years.
2002: Becca Johnson, a 6th-grade honor-roll student, gets 3 days suspension for drawing a cartoon of some teachers with arrows through their heads in her notebook after she received a D on a test.
Guess I better burn that notebook I wrote "Down with Big Brother" in. Americans need to watch what they say. Even in private.
Need to get bugs to take direction? Who ya gonna call? Steven Kutcher.
"I know how to get a cockroach to run across the floor and flip onto its back. I can get cockroaches, beetles and spiders to crawl to a quarter four feet away on cue. I can make bees swarm indoors and I can repair butterfly wings," says Kutcher. He has even made a live wasp fly into an actor's mouth.
[...] "People find me and I'm off on these adventures," says Kutcher, "problem solving, and exploring, and teaching, and educating people about insects." But Steven Kutcher's hat best describes his life, his love and his philosophy: "Bugs are my business."
Wouldn't that make a great line for an entomology noir film? (And, yes, he does point out that spiders aren't bugs.)
A former FBI profiler says the mailbox bomber "is angry with the government." Looking at his note: duh.
But perhaps the profilers still on the payroll haven't come to that conclusion, given this gambit:
On Saturday, FBI special agent Jim Bogner invited the bomber to contact the FBI with his grievances.
"We want to assure him he has our attention and we want to understand what the situation is," Bogner said. "It's a much better option to exercise than planting bombs and injuring people who have nothing to do with these grievances."
Ah, it's nice to know that kind of innocent childlike optimism is still alive in this world.
One of my most indispensible Palm apps is Pimlico Software's DateBk5. I've been a satisfied customer since DateBk3. It's incredibly powerful and immensely extends how one can view and use one's info. The creator, an active participant in the mailing list on his products, donates all revenue from his products to Gorilla Haven, a conservation organization. It's cool all around, but that's not the point of this entry.
Its chief competitor for the hearts, minds, and cash of Palm users is Iambic's Action Names. And guess where DateBk5.com and DateBk4.com take you.
Boo, Iambic! You just guaranteed my non-customer status.
Update, later on 5/8 Iambic was getting a lot of complaints about this and those URL's now point to blank pages. Yay for our team!
Check out Bringweather and the Portal of Giving and Taking by Barth Anderson, the current story at Strange Horizons.
"Beer. Yeast. Life!" He breathed in the Dumpster's aroma again. "Some cruciferous vegetable is rotting down there, providing nitro. And more importantly -- fungi! And actinomycetes! Why, I bet those bugglies could digest a telephone book." He swept off his Vikings cap, and his hat-hair made him look like a deranged William Shakespeare. "Jump in, Brune!" He shoved the lid all the way open with a loud clang.
A 240 lb. aerobics instructor in San Francisco won her discrimination case against Jazzercise. Their "fit appearance" requirement violates San Francisco's "short and fat" law.
A semivegetarian who stands 5 feet, 8 inches tall and wears size 16 to 18, Portnick had been doing high-impact aerobics for 15 years.
Last spring, her Jazzercise teacher was so impressed by her stamina and ability that she invited Portnick to audition to become a Jazzercise certified instructor.
But a company manager said Portnick would have to develop "a more fit appearance."
Yay for a victory against fat discrimination, a very real problem. Portnick obviously has a high level of cardio fitness, and the case demonstrates that the 'fit appearance' rule had everything to do with appearance and nothing to do with fitness, that there isn't one fit appearance.
Boo for the inevitable use of this story as evidence that there is absolutely no correlation between carrying any degree of fat and any negative health consequences whatsoever, which belief I consider another very real problem.
=v= If you use Google to search for something with the word "hemp" in it, you'll get a Sponsored Link at the top of the page for a lurid anti-drug website. I was just looking for a new pair of durable pants, and instead I got alarmist warnings about a hybrid of Reefer Madness and the Axis of Evil.
So, it's finally happened; Google has done something that perturbs me. It's not nearly as bad as what all the other search engines have perpetrated on us, and I'm actually quite impressed that they've been mostly flawless for such a long time, but I'm sorry to see them bellyflop like this.
Interestingly, a search for "poppies" doesn't trigger the anti-drug link, but it sure leads to a lot of sites devoted to opium...
Night before last, I got a spinach/mushrooms/peppers/onions/'tofurella''not-a-ricotta' pizza for dinner at Lanesplitter Pub in Berkeley, my favorite vegan-friendly biker bar. Last night, I realized that the leftover pizza had been in my bike bag, pretty much at room temperature, for the past 24 hours. It had accompanied me on trips ranging from Albany to Emeryville.
Had it for dinner last night. It was good.
Try that with sausage/extra cheese.
I dare you.
=v= I used to work for an online greeting card company, and we would flog cards for every holiday imaginable. Including the Hallmark® holidays, even though they were our competitors. Somehow, though, I never found out until this year that May is National Masturbation Month.
In the spirit of the season, I'd like to direct your attention to a rebuttal of that widely-distributed photo which suggested that such activities kill kittens: Think of the Domo-kuns.
To be honest, I hadn't really given much thought to domo-kuns before now, knowing them not by name but only in their puported role as kitten-killing agents of God's wrath. Now that I've learned their names, I've spent much of this beautiful sunny day in May just looking at domo-kun websites that range from the very disorienting to the merely bizarre.
You, too, can have hours of indoor fun searching for domo-kuns.
(Kudos to Journeyman Onanist, who created the graphic and reminds us of the reason for the season.)
The first time I saw how MemeMachineGo! looked in a non-CSS browser, I was appalled. I mean, I was still using lynx when everyone else had moved on to Mosaic, so outdated-browser-users of the world: I feel your pain. I vowed then and there that I'd write another template to support old browsers and make it easier to view on, say, a Palm. And I promptly never got around to it.
Well, yesterday, a friend complained that MemeMachineGo! looked horrible in lynx. So I finally did it; the link's above. See, we here at MemeMachineGo! are customer-focused.
Let me know if you end up using it, and with what browser — I'm curious (and suggestions for improvements are welcome.) It's aiming for HTML 2.0-compliant, but doesn't make it because the entries themselves contain things like — and <strike>. I'll have to think about what to do about that.
Further update on the sleazy domain name registration story:
Iambic is unregistering the datebk4.com and datebk5.com domains, a small triumph for the public successfully pressuring a company to do the right thing. (It remains the case that registered customers of their who questioned their actions on their support forums have been banned.)
The viewpoint of a vocal minority in the discussion of the subject at Palminfocenter and Metafilter troubles me. Basically, they were disinterested in any consideration of ethics beyond legality. Their perspective: Pimlico was some combination of lazy or stupid in not specifically anticipating a competitor pulling a sleazy stunt and taking the necessary steps to head it off in advance — they deserved to have their product's name hijacked. That it's illegitimate to question whether Iambic should have done this; they could and that's all that matters.
This is the same basic attitude I discussed in How many Earths?, and I am gravely concerned by its popularity.
When citing the things I do personally with a high environmental impact in How Many Earths? (yes, the self-reference keeps on coming), plane travel featured prominently. Well, it's worse than I thought.
The average jet pumps around a tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for every passenger it carries from London to New York. One return flight to, say, Miami, and you're responsible for more carbon dioxide production than a year's motoring.
It's a British article, so their idea of a year's motoring is probably very different from an American's, but still...
I do love being able to attend events, visit people, and see places all over the contintent. All of my family is on the East Coast. I enjoy rail travel and have crossed the whole country by train, and would love to take the train for all of my domestic travel... were it not for a day job and finite vacation time.
So the big question is what weight am I willing to put on my obligation to leave the Earth in as good shape as I found it vs. my enjoyment of my economically privileged ability to be a jet-setter? (It took some effort to write that without invoking the word 'sacrifice', with all its connotations of giving up something that is my right.)
(Thanks, Kate!)
So tonight I was listening to someone going on about "the imperative tense." Naturally, I was grinding my teeth. Not satisfied with merely being wrong, he went for inconsistent, also, referring subsequently to "the imperative voice."
I smiled and nodded, but inside I screamed "Mood! Mood! The imperative mood!"
After years of effort, I have socialized myself to the extent to which I don't compulsively correct people anymore. But the instinct lives on.
In his day, Reginald Bretnor was a huge name in science fiction. Now, he's fairly obscure. I really like his story Unknown Things, online as a free sample of a small press collection of his stories, The Timeless Tales of Reginald Bretnor.
I have met any number of collectors during my thirty years in the antique trade: greedy ones (though, of course, they're all greedy one way or another), and some with superb taste and a deep understanding of their fields, some with book knowledge and no taste at all, others who collect status symbols or security blanks, rare people with whom it is a joy to converse and many more utter bores, and others still so unbelievably eccentric that they defy classification. But Andreas Hoogstraten was the strangest of them all. Always polite, almost always smiling, he still seemed to carry with him that eerie coldness you find in haunted houses. Neither his obvious wealth nor his perfect tailoring, neither his patrician nose, sleek blond hair, and thick, impossibly yellow eyebrows, nor a voice as soft and gentle as a wooing dove's could conceal it, at least from me.
The "Earth First Death Manual" is an instruction manual on laying death traps for off-road motorcyclists, basically a lovely little work of misinformation designed to inspire gullible motorcyclists to hate environmentalists.
Off-Road.com presents this material as an example of just how far radical Eco-Terrorist orginizations [sic] are willing to go to stop "off-roaders" from using our public lands. The "disclaimer" about "enemy motorcyclists invading America" fools no one. This pamphlet is in circulation among members of "Earth First", the EDF, and others. It was written under the psudonym [sic] "el Ranchero; a known alias of the Unabomber. It should be noted that The Unabomber has been irefutably [sic] tied in to Earth First by the FBI.
[...] We present it so that the world can be made aware of just how violent the radical Eco groups really are, compaired [sic] to the "friendly & non-violent" facade which they attempt to present publicly.
[...] Remember, this is an Earth First! publication, regardless of how they commonly deny their extreme and teroristic [sic] history.
The FBI never connected the Unabomber and Earth First; however, ABC news made such a claim spuriously.
And the EDF is the Environmental Defense Fund, a scientist-heavy advocacy organization that calls on its members to send money and write letters, basically as conservative an environmental organization as there is. That's not intended to slight their work: I've been a member in the past. I just mean to say that characterizing them as a "radical Eco-Terrorist organization" isn't just wrong, it's moronic even as propaganda.
(Via Captain Rooba's Riposte)
=v= If you buy books with credit cards or any "member discount" card or plan, merchants are now required by law to let the government know what you read. Ditto for library books. It gets even worse, to the point where Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice is reminded of Franz Kafka.
(I won't ask whether you read Kafka. Your privacy's been invaded enough as is.)
=v= Yesterday was Bike to Work Day.
In San Francisco, we usually start this day with the spectacle of politicians riding bicycles, which has had ... interesting ... results.
Three years ago, the Mayor took a limo to a prearranged corner to get onto a bike along with a huge entourage. Two years ago, an impatient road-raging motorcyclist rammed through the Mayor's entourage, injuring the head of the city's bike program. Last year, the Mayor rode a bike to work and then took a limo back home to shower and change his clothes. This year, just two terse lines in the paper and no mention of any limos.
The story behind the story is that, ever since the dot-bomb implosion, many of us don't actually have work to bike to. Instead, we spend this day just riding all over the city looking for free snacks and schwag intended for those with bikes and jobs. Mum's the word!
Yet still they change, so it seems.
We cannot suppose there are any natural laws, or, if there are, that they will continue to exist. — Max Planck (working from years-old memory, here — if anyone can supply the exact quote and attribution, I'd be grateful)
The laws of physics 'may change' — a recent study found evidence for change (across the history of the universe) in the value of Alpha, a universal 'constant' so fundamental that any change would have broad implications for how electromagnetic, nuclear strong, and nuclear weak forces operate.
Another healthy reminder that the universe comes with no guarantees.
Angered by the US government's decision to rule out signing up to Kyoto for the next 10 years, the environment minister, Michael Meacher, writes in today's Guardian that the world is running out of time. "We do not have much time and we do not have any serious option. If we do not act quickly to minimise runaway feedback effects [from global warming] we run the risk of making this planet, our home, uninhabitable."
But, remember, it's just a handful of extremist cranks who disagree with the oil companies and the US government (or do I repeat myself?) about human actions having an effect on the climate.
According to a new statistical analysis based on how quickly life got going on Earth, life will start on at least a third of Earth-like planets within a billion years of them developing suitable conditions. And with recent discoveries that planets are common around Sun-like stars, there's probably no shortage of prospective homes.
So it looks like one of the factors in the Drake equation calculating the number of intelligent extraterrestrial species just got larger, as ever begging the question: where is everyone?
Given my previous entry and any number of other entries here, I'm inclined to believe that technological species are likely to collapse under their own success, overpopulating, polluting and denying these are problems until it's too late.
I hope I'm wrong.
There is a formal notation for describing juggling patterns, site-swap notation.
The strings of numbers that result in legitimate patterns have unexpected mathematical properties. For instance, the number of balls needed for a particular pattern equals the numerical average of the numbers in the site-swap sequence. Thus, the pattern 45141 requires (4+5+1+4+1)/5, or three balls. The number of legitimate site swaps that are n digits long using b (or fewer) balls is exactly b raised to the n power. Despite its simplicity, the formula was surprisingly difficult to prove.
Through its application, juggling researchers have discovered new juggling patterns with catchy names like 441, 531 and 504 and there's a whole host of programs to animate given patterns.
All of this makes me very happy.
Dan Savage writes about a Seattle teenager who reported his father for growing marijuana.
"These thing are always sad," said Stroup. "When I hear of one of these cases where a child turns in his parent, I'm distressed by the damage done to the family." Fifty-seven years old, Stroup went to grade school during some of the darkest moments of the Cold War. "We were constantly told how bad it was in the Soviet Union," said Stroup, "and one of the things that was so awful about the Soviet Union was that Soviet kids were encouraged to report their parents to the police. A police officer was quoted in regards to the Covington story saying that the kid 'did the right thing.' Similar things were no doubt said about children in the Soviet Union who got their parents arrested. The result is, you've got a single father locked up, and a family fractured forever. It's hard to imagine why this should be the case. Who's been helped by this?"
"If it's your job to hunt Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, then it's your job to know that they don't hang out with Jewish lesbians in San Francisco."
=v= It's not often that CBS News comes up with a brilliant pull quote, but that's the best one I've seen in years, from a recent Big Brother Is Watching, Listening story.
It's bad enough that the FBI gets more and more license to invade our privacy, but what's even worse is how they mostly use this license to show the alarming extent of their cluelessness.
A Texas judge sues a reporter for satire.
Denton County Court-at-Law Judge Darlene Whitten and District Attorney Bruce Isaacks sued after the Dallas Observer published a November 1999 story in its news section about a first-grader jailed for a book report on Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are."
Reporter Rose Farley's story was meant to poke fun at the judge's actual decision several weeks earlier to jail a seventh-grader for five days because he read a graphic Halloween story to his class. The case received national media coverage.
[...] The judge is quoted in the parody as admonishing the girl, who wore "handcuffs and ankle shackles."
"Any implication of violence in a school situation, even if it was just contained in a first-grader's book report, is reason enough for panic and overreaction," Whitten was quoted as saying in the parody. "It's time for you to grow up, young lady, and it's time for us to stop treating kids like children."
The Second District Court of Appeals, in a decision earlier this month, said a reasonable reader could find the story believable and that satire is not protected under the First Amendment if it contains a substantially false and defamatory impression.
(Thanks, Larry!)
A decade ago, it was still popular in some crowds to ascribe all behavioral sex differences to social conditioning. That this was the only factor always striked me as unlikely: typically men and women have such different hormones in different quantities varying in different patterns coursing through their bodies, it seemed you'd need a dualistic denial of a correlation between chemistry and behavior to maintain that. And that was before it was known, or I knew, I'm not sure which, how profound an effect hormone exposure in the natal environment had on a developing fetus.
In other words, even if you try to insist that the differences are environmental, men and women have inescapably different environments (in the expected case.)
Of course, in more recent years, when it's seemed like one can't make harebrained offensive sweeping overgeneralizations about innate sex differences without becoming a bestselling author, I've ended up missing the "it's all conditioning" camp.
Fortunately, there's some work coming out without axes to grind and that's not simply dedicated to turning the clock back to the fifties. This Scientific American article, Sex Differences on the Brain, discusses the subject calmly. It finds not only that men and women score differently on different aptitude tests, but that their performance varies with their hormone levels of the moment, with noticeable differerences for women depending on where they are in their menstrual cycle, and noticeable differences for men depending on the season.
A disappointment I had in the article is that it only discusses averages. I would expect the distribution for each sex for performance with each task is a bell curve, and that these bell curves overlap substantially in some cases. I would have preferred seeing these distributions. As written, I think the article makes it too easy for someone who thinks, for instance, that "girls aren't good at math" to think that his or her prejudices have just been confirmed.
A difference between men and women on average allows you to conclude nothing with certainty about an individual's potentials.
Yes, it's time for more depressing environmental news here at MemeMachineGo!: one quarter of all mammal species face extinction within thirty years, not to mention ten thousand other species, including an eighth of all bird species.
We're going to make that asteroid look like a piker.
Women who have unprotected sex frequently are less likely to be depressed than those who do not, a new study claims.
Researchers at New York University say it's due to mood- changing chemicals that are transferred from the man.
Apparently, semen contains hormones and other chemicals that enter a woman's bloodstream and may act like an antidepressant.
The methodology the article describes, though, is all about tracking sexual activity and depression scores — nothing is mentioned about the researchers hypothesizing a specific mechanism for semen functioning as an antidepressant, or whether that's just speculation at this point. Also nothing was mentioned about controlling the variable of the nature of the relationships the women had with their partners: I find it fairly easy to imagine that unprotected sex might be more common in committed relationships, and that it could be the existence of such a relationship that makes the difference.
(Via The Null Device, where acb comments: " I can see this giving rise to a million dodgy pick-up lines already...")
=v= It was recently found that Sony's CD copy protection can be thwarted with a felt-tip marker. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law reknown for its excesses, bans any device that can be used to thwart copyright protection, whatever its other uses. Be sure to turn in all your pens to the authorities.
Even as Ender's Game enters production as a movie, the army seeks to encourage recruits by distributing America's Army — a free computer game.
=v= Yesterday I was stuck in an inner circle, or at least an infinite loop, of Phone Menu Hell. It was one of those systems where I was expected to either punch in numbers or say them. I was trying to get to Customer Service, but instead I just kept getting back to the Customer Service phone menu.
Exasperated, I mentioned the name Jesus Christ (adding a certain initial for His middle name). The voice recognition system parsed this as "customer service" and put me through to the next level: "All of our representatives are busy helping others." But at least the moral is clear: pray to Jesus.
The presence of such a vast amount of ice — if it were to melt it could cover the planet in an ocean at least 500 metres deep (1,640 feet) — will change profoundly the direction of future exploration.
Of course, we've all been wondering where all the water in the canals went.
(Via MetaFilter)
Don Webb, writer and magician, describes the late R.A. Lafferty's work as effective arcanum.
...Rather than examining his work with the conventional tools of science fiction criticism, we need to examine his system — firstly for our pleasure, and secondly so that we may re-create it (because the sign of an authentic religo-magical system is the power of the followers to reproduce the results).
If you're a writer, and I know the MemeMachineGo! readership includes some, don't miss this.
(Via Memo to Myself)
He constructs the devices with balsa wood, aluminum foil and 30-gauge magnet wire.
Ventura's lifters are triangle-shaped frames that at first glance look like a craft project created by an artistically challenged individual.
But when connected to a power source, a lifter suddenly shoots skyward to the extent that its earthbound tethers permit, and then hovers about in the air.
Ventura uses an old Compaq computer display to power his lifters. Two wires come off the lifter, a positive power lead connected via a high-voltage tap to the monitor's picture tube, which redirects electricity from the picture tube to the lifter, and a ground wire, also connected to the monitor.
Lifters seemingly do levitate and hover without standard propellants, but the problem is that no one is quite sure why.
Having a great fondness for crackpots, garage inventors, and the gizmos of classic science fiction (not to mention wanting to see the human race get beyond this planet), I'd really, really love to see this one pan out. But I'm not going to hold my breath while I await peer-reviewed journal publication on the subject, or even the chance to play with one myself.
