Getting Primes Numbered

The Hot and Cold of Priming
Psychologists are divided on whether unnoticed cues can influence behavior
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/340408/title/The_Hot_and_Cold_of_Priming

This is an interesting idea, though it appears to be a bit challenging to reproduce. I am dubious about a lot of social science reports because they tend to have very high noise to signal ratios and statistical significance, to me, anyway, tends to ride right along the cutting edge where it is very easy to say the result was due to chance and not something real. I suspect, also, that priming people is highly culturally dependent, so working to replicate the same results in a different culture might lead to no results simply because of the strong tie to culture. Personally I think that the average human is very easy to prime, at least the average American, because of all the stupid shit I see in politics. Since I see people believing stuff that is demonstrability false all the time I expect that there is a huge element bias built into people’s cognitive capabilities. If you happen to design an experiment that is testing this bias, I would expect a very substantial statistically significant result. However, if you test something that doesn’t trigger bias in your experimental group, you might get nothing.

Then there is the self-selection that goes into participating in these sorts of experiments. I like this line from Kay in ‘Men in Black’: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” Looking at individuals who have consented to be part of a psychology experiment is different from looking at groups of people who are not consenting.

Shockwave Rider

I was reading this article:

Surveillance State democracy
As the FBI seeks full access to all forms of Internet communication, it is not voters who need to be convinced
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/06/surveillance_state_democracy/

when I was reminded of one of my favorite books called “The Shockwave Rider” by John Brunner. Written in the early ’70’s there are very few anachronisms and it could easily have been written last week. The book is available (legally, I think) as a PDF, so for those of you interested you can get it just by searching on the title and adding ‘pdf’. For those of you who can’t muster the effort, the upshot is that the government has been taken over by organized criminals and operated for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many (any of this sound the least bit familiar?). It is about a new class of paranoia: being aware that information exists about you, but being unable to access it or correct it. Ever try to fix a problem with your credit report? If you have, then you are aware of the looking-glass weirdness where an organization that has no legal standing whatsoever, yet has near total control over what happens to your fiscal life is none-the-less almost impossible to communicate with. I talk about this here.

They insist the problem isn’t with them

Wall Street’s oil scam
Who’s really to blame for high gas prices? Greedy finance speculators
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/wall_streets_oil_scam/

And we should believe them since they ask us to, right? It isn’t like they have a long and extensive track record of illegal acts that are covered up by compliant government, not to mention the trillion dollar bailouts that cost them nothing.

Of course, repeat the lie often enough, like everything else, and enough of the moron sheeple will buy into it.

Americans Elect falls on its face

Americans Elect canceling caucuses, has no candidates
Elites discover actual voters don’t share their thirst for a “moderate” deficit hawk independent candidate
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/03/americans_elect_canceling_caucuses_has_no_candidates/

I am not shocked that this happened. Almost by default Americans Elect (AE) is attempting to attract the more thoughtful people in the electorate, the ones most likely to be offended by the insane babble on the right and left, yet they have carefully crafted a set of rules and bylaws that create an opaque selection process that clearly favors the decisions of the major financial backers of the group. Then, to further insult the intelligence of their target audience, they won’t be bothered with actually identifying those financial backers. It isn’t any wonder to me that they failed to get the target number of participants, it is a wonder to me that they got as many as they did! It didn’t take me much research to realize that they were no better than the idiots we already have to deal with, I am sure that others of my ilk made the same sort of conclusion very early on. Had it been something I could believe in you can be sure that AE would be all over my blog and I would have been aggressively promoting it. I detest the status quo in our insane popularity contest, but I am not going to lift a finger if I think that any alternative is just as bad.

I can’t help but wonder if the principals behind this effort really don’t get it. Since they are members of the 1%, that is highly likely the case.

Romneybot

Reboot the Romney-bot
Since clinching the nomination, the candidate’s behavior has become even less recognizably human
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/02/reboot_the_romney_bot/

Very amusing! I encourage everyone to read it, hopefully you will get at least as many smiles and chuckles as I did. Here is a small example to try to encourage you to read the whole thing…

Romney’s performance in the primary debates also provided strong empirical support for the Mitt-is-a-cyborg thesis. For the entity claiming to be “Mitt Romney” that appeared onstage bore no resemblance to the Romney-like entity Americans had come to know in previous years. The moderate, conciliatory governor of Massachusetts was gone, his place taken by a strange, harsh figure who appeared to have been programmed by a disciple of Torquemada. Romney Version One had strongly supported a healthcare plan identical to Obama’s; Romney Version Two denounced “Obamacare” as opening the door to socialism. Beta Romney, who had defended a woman’s right to choose, had been replaced by an updated model that, like a doll that speaks a few simple phrases when its bottom is squeezed, intoned “abortion is immoral” again and again.

Different observers had different explanations for this strange phenomenon. Some maintained that “Mitt Romney” had been originally programmed in the factory to flip-flop when politically necessary. Others held that the earlier version had been surreptitiously refurbished, or possibly completely replaced.

Republican Fear Factor and Terror Babies

Republican fear factor
Conservatives’ paranoid alternate-reality can be explained by their brain chemistry — and their media choices
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/03/republican_fear_factor_salpart/

It helps to understand how people think, even if the act of understanding them sometimes gives you a headache. Some people I know (including some people I am related to, both by blood and by marriage) really seem to believe a lot of this shit:

The White House has been usurped by a Kenyan socialist named Barry Soetero, who hatched an elaborate plot to pass himself off as a citizen of the United States – a plot the media refuse to even investigate. This president doesn’t just claim the right to assassinate suspected terrorists who are beyond the reach of law enforcement – he may be planning on rounding up his ideological opponents and putting them into concentration camps if he is reelected. He may have murdered a blogger who was critical of his administration, but authorities refuse to investigate. At the very least, he is plotting on disarming the American public after the election, in accordance with a secret deal cut with the UN and possibly with the assistance of foreign troops.
…
Imagine believing that the Democrats’ business-friendly insurance reforms included panels of bureaucrats who would decide when to let you die, as Sarah Palin infamously suggested. Or that virtually the entire field of climatology is perpetrating a “hoax,” as senator James Inhofe claims, in order to undermine capitalism and impose a one-world government. Imagine seeing energy-efficient light bulbs as part of an international plot to, again, undermine capitalism, as Michele Bachmann believes. Imagine thinking that the public school system “indoctrinates” young children into the “gay lifestyle,” as influential members of the religious right – Pat Dobson, Bryan Fischer, Anita Bryant – have claimed for years. Imagine believing our electoral system is tarnished by massive voter fraud or that union thugs are running amok or that the Department of Homeland Security is making a list of people who advocate for “limited government.” Imagine if there really were a War on Christmas!

Check this out if your brain hasn’t exploded yet:

Rep. Louie Gohmert’s “Terror Baby” Meltdown
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2010/08/rep-louie-gohmerts-terror-baby-meltdown

…keep in mind that Gohmert is a former district and appeals court judge.

As the first article notes, these stories would be hilarious if they weren’t so damn serious. The problem is these nut cases have slipped into our decision making apparatus (as the bottom article alludes) and now the crazies really are running the asylum. I have difficulty conceiving of ways to reverse this trend as our political system is so thoroughly stacked in favor of extremist idealism on either end. How much worse will it get before it gets better? I wish I was in a position where I didn’t need to care!

Government conspiracy: time travel!

Seattle Attorney Andrew Basiago Claims U.S. Sent Him On Time Travels
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/28/andrew-basiago-seattle-attorney-time-travels_n_1438216.html

For those of you needing your conspiracy theory fix, here we have definitive proof that our government has been practicing time travel for decades. There is NO OTHER explanation!

I have been reading the often thoughtful and generally quite interesting comics at xkcd: Etymology-Man and one in particular that is apropos:

Time Machine

Happy News! The end of the world just got 12% less bad!

The Next Yellowstone Supereruption Is Closer Than You Think
http://gizmodo.com/5906622/the-yellowstone-supereruption-is-closer-than-you-think/

For those of you who don’t know, we have here in the US heartland one of the most dangerous types of volcanoes on this planet. It is the Yellowstone ‘super’ volcano and if it gets a bee in its bonnet could pretty much destroy all life in the US to the East of the park in just a few days. Life would suck for the rest of the Northern Hemisphere and the fallout (literally, the ash fallout) will likely impact the entire globe at some point. Nuclear winter and all that, so all this babble about global warming will seem quite quaint.

So the article is saying that new and improved dating techniques show that there have been more eruptions than previously thought, thus the magnitude of each eruption is less. How much less, though, is the kicker. What point is there in being 12% less dead? Maybe there will be some sparing of the people south of the equator, but I doubt that 12% will matter much to anyone in the North.

Anyway, if you needed any other reasons to lay awake at night worrying, here you go…

The end of Software?

Oracle and the End of Programming As We Know It
If Oracle prevails in its claim that APIs can be copyrighted, nearly every aspect of programming will be changed for the worse.
http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/232901227

This is a really big deal and is the illogical extreme of allowing IP protection on source code. There is a chance, though, that the jury will award a fair use exemption and we can all go back to our lives, but it would not be shocking at all for the 12 clueless morons to like Oracle’s lawyers better than Google’s lawyers (few people know how thoroughly ‘evil’ Oracle is as they manage to stay mostly out of the press) and thus make it illegal to reproduce an API via reverse engineering. In the vast majority of the cases the API name must be identical (generally even including case) so how valuable would a competing API be if you had to rewrite your own source to make use of it? Plus, there are just so many ways to self-document an API through naming.

I never read the Java license (those things are damn near impossible to make sense of if you haven’t a law degree anyway (not to mention boring as hell)) but I do recall the point in time where Sun was basically forced to make Java open source or risk losing all the developers and as I recall they decided to make some portion open source. That Sun never complained about anything Google did before Oracle bought them makes me think that there isn’t a huge amount of evidence that Sun ever attempted to enforce any sort of infringement. Timing is everything, though, and Oracle can always state that, as new owners, they didn’t have the chance to object when the behavior was first manifest.

Personally I think that the only people who benefit from all these legal attacks are the lawyers. If Oracle wins Google will simply stop using the problematic bits, pay a fine and then move to something not quite as good and developers will have a really really good reason to get away from Java and onto the next thing. Of course I have never had a good opinion about Oracle or its CEO, so I am clearly twin fannied in this respect.

Tools to block political BS

5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-to-spot-b.s.-political-story-in-under-10-seconds

I highly recommend reading the whole article, but for those of you too busy (or lazy) to read it, here are the highlights…

#5. The Headline Contains the Word “Gaffe”
#4. The Headline Ends in a Question Mark
#3. The Headline Contains the Word “Blasts”
#2. The Headline Is About a “Lawmaker” Saying Something Stupid
and
#1. The Headline Includes the Phrase “Blow To”

Since it appears that the whole point of modern political reporting is to amplify the left and right’s need to suppress the moderate and independent voter by drowning them in bullshit, this article serves as a handy guide for those who still want to read the “only 17 percent of stories are about stuff that matters”.