Mantis cannibalism by Dr Beetle

Mantis cannibalism by Dr Beetle: "Refreshingly, a study by Liske and Davis in 1987 threw the first human light on the importance of the natural environment to behavior in mantises. The Chinese mantis Tenodera aridifolia sinensis was among those wrongly accused of sexual cannibalism during mating in several previous studies. However Liske and Davis, although still stuck in the laboratory, made some concessions to the mantis. They fed the mantises regularly, turned the bright observer lights down, and left the room to replace a fidgeting human observer with a stationary video camera. Surprise surprise, no cannibalism occurred! In fact, a whole courtship behavior by the male and female mantises, new to science, was observed!"

Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy by Volume Training

Not to brag, but my training over the last two years has led me to completely agree with this article.  One set per exercise worked for three months - increased my muscular weight 20 lbs.  But regardless of changing exercises, or increasing weight (intensity) through periodization cycles, I have maintained essentially the same weight for almost two years.  The small results I see come from low--er weight, multiple set phases of my workout routines.  

From the article:

There are two types of muscular hypertrophy. Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is when the volume of sarcoplasmic fluid in the muscle cell increases – this makes the muscles bigger, but does not increase their strength. Myofibrillar hypertrophy is when the myofobrils increase to improve muscular strength. This only leads to a small increase in muscle size. Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is the aim of bodybuilders, whereas myofibrillar hypertrophy is the aim of athletes and power lifters.

Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy which involved the increase in sarcoplasms, means that the muscles store more glycosomes, which are granules of stored glycogen. So for bodybuilders, increased glycogen production is important, and for this more carbs are required.

Research has also shown that increase repetitions (volume training) leads to sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, i.e. bigger muscles.

Maybe the real answer is a combination of high volume (warm up sets) and one work set where you lift until failure. 

--> This will be my new routine for a while - multiple "warm-up" sets followed by a progressive loading set (60% 1RM 1st week, 65% 1RM  2nd week, 70% 1RM 3rd week, 75% 1RM 4th week... to 90% 1RM

Ghosts

Listening to The Moth podcast (Joan Juliet Buck: The Ghost of the Rue Jacob), I remembered the This American Life episode about how carbon monoxide poisoning causes hallucinations very similar to being haunted.  Old homes with gas lights that frequently did not burn efficiently and caused CO poisoning -->

Symptoms such as delirium and hallucinations have led people suffering poisoning to think they have seen ghosts or to believe their house is haunted. (Wikipedia)

 

http://www.ghostvillage.com/resources/2004/resources_10312004.shtml

I respectfully disagree, Mr. Miller

Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, believes Darwinian evolution in humans is actually speeding up. He highlighted sexual selection through mate choice as one key driver.
"You still have powerful mate choice shaping mental traits particularly … traits that are needed to succeed economically and in raising kids," Miller said.

I disagree.

Aside from some direct questions such as:
How many people never marry and never have children? (Not many)
How many uneducated, poor, mean, stupid, ugly people have children?  (More than highly educated, career people)

The fact remains - we have pretty much all of the conditions required for no evolution - Human Evolution Is Dead 

Irish

Who would have guessed that there are more "Irish" than French in Ottawa?

But, really, we all know that those "Irish" and "Scottish" are claiming their ethnicity from immigrants 3 or 4 generations back.  

They speak English, have roots here, were born in Canada, and are Canadian citizens.  

Mothaím ionad ignorant toisc nach raibh a fhios agam go raibh Gaeilge ina teanga sin difriúil ón Béarla.

Conversational Media

Is the progression toward short media-bites bad?

I say no, it is more like regular conversations

- well over a billion views a day on YouTube

- The average number of tweets per day is 1.9 Million

Does this mean we will have a more scattered, less probing attention span? 

Miller

This is hilarious!

I was trolling for Geoffrey Miller articles and -->

Pill bad for Lapdancers' fortunes

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/news/news/1156/

Qu-qu-Twitter

I'm thinking of quiting the blog and twittering my thoughts away instead since:

0) Nora, you are only one who reads this,

1) my entries are short, like a tweet, usually

2) twittering is trendier than blogging

Sucre à la crème au sirop d'érable

Sugar, cream, glucose, brown sugar, butter, maple syrup, natural maple syrup flavor, potassium sorbate

140 calories pour 2 morceaux 

30 g sucres 

Diabetes, diabetes, diabetes 

 

Benford's Law

I was listening to the WNYC Radiolab "Numbers" episode and they discussed Benford's law.  Amazing! 

Check it out on Wikipedia:

Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty. This distribution of first digits arises logically whenever a set of values is distributed logarithmically. Measurements of real world values are often distributed logarithmically (or equivalently, the logarithm of the measurements is distributed uniformly).

Chrz!

Greg Robin

Pinker no like Gladwell

I like Steven Pinker's writing.  He is brilliant and conveys his ideas very effectively.  I have not liked Gladwell's writings.  I reeks of what I think of as a journalistic style (I have mislabeled this) - as if he tries to expand each sentence into 500 words.  I was glad to read that Pinker disapproves of Gladwell in substance and style:

The common thread in Gladwell's writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarter back's rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don't predict a teacher's effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in "Outliers") that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.
The reasoning in "Outliers," which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for "What the Dog Saw," the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell's talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

Why are people racist?

1. People are animals.  
2. Animals have behavioral tendencies.
3. Some of these tendencies, in certain situations, help keep the animal alive and more likely to pass on the innate behavioral wiring.
4. Wariness of strangers is one of these tendencies.

One example is to avoid touching feces. Another example is to be wary of strangers.
Why be wary of strangers?
Because they are not bound or restrained by the rules and social pressures of your community.  
Tourists are notoriously disrespectful.  As are armies on the march.
People who look different from you are typically not from your community.

On the bright side, if there is someone who looks or behaves differently but is long-known within a community, then most people (even small town conservatives) tend to accept them as a person.

So, my short answer to why people are racist is because they have not gotten to know very many of "those strange looking people."  Strange and unfamiliar is High-Risk, Low-Benefit. 

I bring this up because I have the good fortune of working with a couple of racist hicks.

ClimateGate

My father, an avowed right-wing muck racker, (I think he thoroughly enjoys being contrary and conservative) sent me several links regarding Climategate last week. I dug into it and found a bunch of polarized crap; so I passed it off as just another case of right wing ranting. This, however, appeared today in the NYTimes Freakonomics column. I've included a short except here:

Many blogs covering the topic are just as bombastic. The most prominent blogs in the arena, however, tend to be less so. That said, emotions still run high — particularly in the comments sections. If you feel like wading into the conversation, you might wish to sample Dot Earth, Watts Up With That, andRealClimate, which presents "climate science from climate scientists." The discussions at RealClimate are intense, for at least two reasons: they are more about the science itself than the conversations at other blogs; and several of its contributors are the very scientists whose e-mails were among the C.R.U. leak, including Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State and one of the scientists responsible for the now-famous"hockey stick" graph, which has been widely used as evidence of a dangerous global-warming trend.

I find it interesting that many people have completely uninformed opinions. In this case, many people believe there is no such thing as global warming and others who believe it is perfectly reasonable to pass draconian command and control laws to

reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In some circles, if you say that you believe in global warming, it is almost as flaky as saying that you believe in god. You have to quickly qualify your statement to make it seem more reasonable and thought-out that simple blind conformity.

But, back to my original topic, I'll just say that I am surprised ClimateGate made it to the popular media... And with a big splash too - currently 114 length comments on Dubner's blog!

StatCounter

I am smiling right now. This is very cool.

I installed StatCounter on my blog and found the one person in the world, aside from my wife, who has at least glanced at writing: somebody in

Country	Korea, Republic Of
Region	Pusan-jikhalsi
City	Busa

They were looking for "political return on investment" and happened across my blog!

Celebrity appeal

Why do people care about celebrity gossip? 

If I turn off my sense of superiority and cynicism, it is fun to hear the gos in bite-size format.  

It is about the same as hearing gossip about someone I know personally.  For example, someone I know sent out a text message saying he couldn't ride that morning because he had too much drink and blow.  This is classic what-the-f**k gossip. "Blow"? 

Am I low-class or innately stupid and unrefined if I look at traffic accidents as I pass by?  Or if my interest is peaked by people behaving badly or bizarrely? 

Have you heard of George Clooney?  Probably.  

Have you heard of Chris Smith?  Probably not - so my gossip about him probably not too interesting to you.

Cheers,

Greg Robin

How to think about genes

As a kid, I had the feeling that genes were somehow different from chemicals because they were so essential for life. Biochemistry classes diminished this feeling somewhat, and reading The Selfish Gene diminished it even further.

It is easy to think of chemical reactions occurring at a rate partially determined by the concentration of substrate molecules, but integrating this concept into genetic expression is more difficult. Genes are chemicals. They react like chemicals because they are chemicals. Adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine are relatively stable molecules that link together weak hydrogen bonds which are broken up and reformed fairly easily - just like many other molecular chains.

The key lesson of The Selfish Gene is that genes do not any influence over their fate other than the amino acid they code for. Whatever happens after the amino acid is created is completely out of the control of the gene. The gene does not know or care what larger context it belongs to – it simply exists if it's amino acid byproduct somehow or another allows it to continue to exist.

A gene is completely and utterly stupid, has no sentience, thought, feelings, or concerns. Despite the title of Dawkins' book, a gene is not selfish and it certainly does not care about the creature it happens to exist in, the species the creature belongs to, or Mother Earth.

If you think about genes as lifeless chemical fragments, then you will be much, much closer to understanding the true nature of genes than most people.

How to think about protein

What is the best protein?  What is the cheapest source of protein?  If you need to consume 200 grams of protein per day, how can you do this without eating all day long?

In addition to price and taste, sources of protein vary with respect to their Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDAAS), which a measure of overall protein digestibility in foods.  In short, whey protein supplements and eggs are very efficient, economical sources of protein.  Your cost per digestible gram of protein is lowest with these sources.

An excellent article which explains all of this in clear English can be found here.

http://www.answerfitness.com/331/highest-protein-content-food/

How to think about global warming

Good people know that we need to do something to prevent global warming, right?

Some people care enough to dig up numbers and try to make informed judgments.  

Question: What percent of global warming is due to human activities?

Answer: We are responsible for about 0.28% of greenhouse gases.

This is one of the clearest and most articulate discussion of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions I have stumbled across.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

How to Think about Economics

I have a degree in economics but haven't practiced the profession a day in my life.  Am I qualified to say how one should think about economics?  Probably not, but I just finished Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.  It was originally written in 1946, but, as someone once said, history has a tendency to repeat itself.  The lesson applies as much, or more, today than it did then.  Especially in regards to the "economic stimulus package".

The Lesson: The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Question:  Is the Economic Stimulus Package a good thing?  Will it reduce unemployment?

Answer: No.  It will have several negative results which will adversely affect the work poor the most severely.  But don't just take my word for it, read what Hazlitt has to say.

Friends!

When I see someone with 300+ friends, I feel a little dimmed and unpopular.  

Damn good thing my salary is not listed.

There are many automatically suggested friends, but I don't want to befriend them for various reasons.  

Mostly because I don't really like them, or was never really friends with them.  

It feels cheap and whorish to ask to be friends with people I hardly talked to when I had a chance (high school acquaintances, mostly).

Lots of people are not very active, of those who are, many struggle to have anything interesting to say.

It is mostly very banal.

The more friends you have, however, the more likely you are to have one or two interesting posts per day.

The more the merrier.

Bigger is Better.

With regards to popularity, what key words are most searched for in the bloggersphere? 

I don't know about blogs, but Google lists these

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

American Thanksgiving seems to be on everyone's minds... and I hadn't heard about Tiger Woods cheating on his wife.  Wasn't she a Swedish bikini model?

Quite interesting - a perfect pop culture snapshot

1. adam lambert ama video youtube

2. walmart black friday deals

3. thanksgiving quotes inspirational

4. turkey brine recipes

5. turkey cooking times

6. cornbread dressing recipes

7. michelle obama pictures

8. state dinner photos

9. best buy black friday 2009 flyer

10. home depot black friday ad 2009

11. navy seals court martial

12. thanksgiving jokes

13. wilmington ohio

14. how long to cook a turkey per pound

15. cell phone blocker

16. nfl week 12 expert picks

17. adam sandler turkey song

18. thanksgiving wishes

19. thanksgiving trivia

20. tiger woods affair

21. toyota recall

22. butterball turkey questions

23. toyota recall gas pedal

24. happy thanksgiving

25. cara quici 

26. megan allen

27. offensive michelle obama image <-- Just talking about this kind of crap last night with Nora

28. dalia dippolito

29. googlegooglegooglegoogle

30. black friday at wal mart

31. ben maisani

32. michelle obama monkey pics

33. adam lambert early show

34. sweet potato recipes

35. kmart thanksgiving day sale

36. googlegooglegooglegooglegooglegooglegooglegooglegooglegoogle  <-- what is this all about?

37. how to thaw a turkey fast

38. tiger woods cheating on wife

39. happy thanksgiving clip art

40. thanksgiving greetings

(How to make friends on Facebook)

Health warning - Swine Flu

Jokes, complements of my Padre.

If you received an e-mail from the Department of Health telling you not
to eat canned pork because of Swine Flu, you may ignore it.

It's just Spam!

Kezmonk Gwrant email exchange

Kezmonk :

Bittersweet Destiny - like I said, is 85% of what I would write myself. I was going to go chapter by chapter (assuming that would mean something to you) but, mostly the parts that are written poorly are those that lacked data (baby brain development)...and i am still thinking about his strong argument that sex (in plants, animals) was driven or kicked off by pathogen pressure.

two things I have always been dragging around with me

female promiscuity and marriage; since humans are 85% polygamous and some bit thereafter monogamous .... I always get the feeling that the female is still treated as "passively" having sex, but usually sex ONLY within monogamous relationships. the book makes a good attempt....but still...

okay
my assumptions are for some form of life before agriculture, say ~200,000 years to then, when Homo sapiens is on the scene.

idea: females take advantage of their security in knowing which offspring is theirs and want TWO things - a strong healthy male (sexual selection causing size dimorphism) AND a provider/caretaker to share the work load (selection for mother aspects in males).  There is no reason at all to presume that females need these two to be one in the same. The strategy is still K (few mates) ... I don't also see why a female, even though she is limited to the number of offspring, would only invest in one sperm donor. The male, needs a strategy to ensure that at least some of the offspring that he has, are actually his. This is more telling that simply sperm is cheap and because of that, males want to mate with everyone. This gives are reason for the high sex drive in males. Kind of like fish. More sperm, more chance, and you need to take those chances. The female always knows.

One the flip side, if he (if he is the caretaker version) has to raise a child that is not his own, some of his own children will be born anyway. This is where marriage comes in. It is a compromise on both sides - the males' attempt to control cuckolding and the females chance at trapping a caretaker.

Humans have large penises (in view of primates, from what I learned in my anthropology course), large sperm count; indicative of the polygamous life style - but more importantly, the penis does not evolve like that without direct selection pressure in the vagina, in combating sperm with sperm in the same female at the same time.
(you can find anything, but: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18424731.500-sleeping-around-boosts-evolution.html ; http://www.news-medical.net/news/2004/11/08/6147.aspx ; i do have access to the paper, i downloaded it - humans are in the middle.. maybe the numbers are correct, maybe not - but on average)


*
Can twins have two different fathers? One in 12 fraternal twin sets have two different fathers worldwide, while in the US the rate is 1 in 400 twinsets.
data: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7871943
One 1992 study estimates that the frequency of heteropaternal superfecundation among dizygotic twins whose parents were involved in paternity suits was approximately 2.4%; see the references section, below, for more details.

expand that with the rare probability of that happening: The number of living human twins in the world has been estimated to be approximately 125 million in 2006[1] (roughly 1.9% of the world population), with just 10 million monozygotic twins (roughly 0.2% of the world population and 8% of all twins). The twin birth rate in the United States in 2004, 2005 and 2006 was slightly above 32 twin live births per 1,000 live births[2].

Gwrant:

Amazing, eh? That so many women would have multiple partners slop inside of them at the same time... Obviously I'm on the other end of the spectrum.
I have a hard time imagining how people could regularly achieve that these days.  I am utterly dull, apparently.

In a tribal setting 200k years ago, I imagine (letting my non-researched fantasies run amok) the relationships would be looser for two reasons.  
One, because teenagers tend to fall in and out of love fairly quickly and the average age of the Ancients was very young.  Women (girls) would be as fickle and sentimental as teenagers today. If they survived to adulthood (18+), then they might settle down and behave more "monogamously".
Could you imagine a evolutionary process based on the mentalities of horny teenagers?  
Two, in a group of 50 people, 25 are of the same sex and only 10 or so would make suitable partners, a young person does not have a whole lot to choose from.  It would be like being born and raised in a small classroom of teenagers.  A bunch of f-ing losers except maybe one or two decent catches...

With regards to being a provider- gift giving (care-taking) is highest in the honeymoon period (first few months).  Romancing with words, gifts, heroic deeds, etc...  After a year or so, the infatuation plummets.  

I think boy/men would take care of children or provide for them primarily as a way of looking good for the girls/women.  I feel within myself and urge to show-off how fun, kind, and physically fit (throwing kids up in the air) I am with kids when women are around...

Boys/Men are not really trapped (except in the modern legal sense) and I believe harems where much more overtly common (versus the covert commonality the data reveal today).

For a good read, check out Helen Fisher's Anatomy of Love.
It has been a long while since I've read Bittersweet Destiny.  I can't remember the arguments specifically.

Diesel House

Our house is like a big idling diesel truck with a 128 gallon gas tank.

The gas gauge is currently hovering over empty.

I had a little setback

We moved across town and managed to injure myself while moving, so I couldn't go to the gym for a week.
When I finally did walk into the new gym, two guys at the squat rack were talking about how many cc's they're taking an how many days "on" they run. WTF? What kind of gym is this that guys are openly discussing steroids?
This is the GoodLife on Walkley and Conroy (Ottawa, Ontario).

Aside from the shady clients, my only other complaint is the lack of a weight belt with a chain. I've put in two requests for one to be made available.

Penske

Penske agreed to refund the fuel charge they billed me, but I'm still irritated. I refilled the tank on the truck I rented until the diesel pump repeatedly clicked off, yet I still got billed for 23 liters of fuel! I only drove the truck 74 km. That would mean the truck only goes 3.2 km per liter.

I should have only used about $14.41 for the trip.

Warning: Bad Roofer

Let it be known that T&T Roofing in Ottawa, Ontario - Trevor Chesebro - is exceedingly bad.

He and his crew did not show up on time, banged up the siding, did not provide a proper receipt, did not clean up, and, most importantly, put leaks in our roof!

The step flashing slid down, leaving gaps, and they did not bother to slide it back up - so, of course, it channeled the rain water right into our house.



These guys also did not seal/caulk the nails they used for the flashing. We had unsealed nail holes straight through the roof.

They are completely unprofessional. Avoid them. Warn others against them.

How to squat

I recently learned about keeping my shoulder blades together for bench presses, but I did not know I needed to do this for squats too.

http://doubleyourgains.com/how-to-squat

Deconditioning

Current schedule:
Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday (upper), Sunday (ride)
Last week, 75% (of 1RM):

Squat 225
Dead Lift 185
Shrug 225
Bench 205
Pull up 250
Dip 250

205 is 100% of my 10RM for bench, and 35 extra is about all I can pullup for 10 reps.
I could do a few more for everything else - squat, dead, shrug, dip.
http://www.exrx.net/WeightTraining/Periodization.html

Need to do my deconditioning/rest week. It is not the right time of the cycle, but I haven't taken a break in months and I feel it...

Change

With regards to weight lifting and building muscle, just about anything works, but nothing works for ever.
It is a challenge to keep changing this up. Multiple sets, progressive loading, super-sets, slow down, heavy weights, high reps, etc, etc...

I've been asked to do another Hot August Nights race... $150 for a weekend of pain and misery. Should I do it?

Holland Code

[snip, snip]

Here are my results from a Holland Codes quiz...

Organic CropScience

"[A] study, by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It reviewed 50 years of research into the health and nutritional benefits of organic foods. The study concluded that while there were small differences in nutritional benefits of organic produce, they weren't enough to be of any public health relevance. Overall, there were no differences in most nutrients found in organically or conventionally grown crops, including vitamin C, calcium and iron." - http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/05/07/f-food-organic.html

But what about pesticides, eh?
As it turns out, most organic foods have pesticide residues when tested and many have more pesticide residues than the maximum residue levels (MRLs), which "are generally-acceptable limits of pesticide deposits."

3.99% of conventionally grown foods and 1.24% of organic foods exceed the (MRLs).
..."from spray drift and other situations where there are interfaces among organic and conventional environments".

"Our experience shows that cases with residues above set MRLs had their origin not in organic agriculture but from unintended or intended mislabelling or persistant compounds in the soils."
- http://www.euractiv.com/en/cap/eu-report-reveals-pesticides-organic-food/article-183986

How about the environment?
"organic farming yields only 75 to 90 percent of the crop of conventional systems, meaning that more land must be planted in order to have an equal return."
- http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/diet.fitness/04/13/cl.organics/index.html

But it's just a small price to pay, isn't it?
"A recent study by ERS examined price premiums for organic broccoli, carrots, and mesclun (lettuce) mix. During 2000-04, the highest premiums (near 100 percent over conventional) were observed for broccoli and carrots..."



Lettuce looks good though.

This cynical reality check brought to you by Bayer CropScience, BASF, Syngenta and Monsanto.

Monkey's Uncle

While it is fun to hop on the conspiracy theory bandwagon every now and then, I really can’t take it seriously. I like to research ideas before I honestly subscribe to them, so I looked into the faked lunar landing and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

It is almost too incredible that we landed on the moon 40 years ago. It is history which occurred before I was born yet seems more advanced than our current technology. The key, I think, are the effects of gravity and atmosphere on landing and taking off. The moon has 1/6 the gravitation pull as Earth and no atmosphere, so the challenges of ascent and descent are much simpler. I am not a rocket scientist, so it’s all black magic to me.

The collapse of the World Trade Centers looks too controlled and neat for non-engineered processes. It looks like a controlled, engineered demolition. But, of course, I am not a demolition expert or a real structural engineer, so I don’t really know. As an ignorant outsider, I just have to take the word of the structural engineering community and the peer reviewed reports they have published, such as http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/people/bazant/PDFs/Papers/466.pdf

So, for conspiracy theories, the problem is lack of information. I honestly don’t have enough information to either believe or disbelieve almost anything. We could have landed on the moon; it could have been an elaborate hoax. The Trade Center towers could have collapsed from heat softened buckling; they could have been demolished to make an excuse for renewed investment in the military.

Does God exist? I don’t know; I’m just a monkey’s uncle and you can’t teach a monkey calculus.

Crayons

Type Junky

What is the appeal of personality tests and descriptions? I am guilty of being addicted to trying to find the perfect description of me. Is this vanity, narcissism, insecurity, a need for structure...? It feels so good to find a description that works. "Wow, this is dead on. That is so me. Its amazing how accurate this is!" I crave these moments of clarity like a drug addict. The MBTI is my drug - despite the fact that it is obsolete, inaccurate, useless, no longer in favor, etc. The fundamental premise of bimodal, one-extreme-or-the-other, type distribution is empirically incorrect. People are normally distributed over the dimensions. Most people (68%) are normal for extroversion, thinking-feeling, sensory-intuition, and perceiving-judging. Less than one sixth of the population are greater than one standard deviation from the average for any one of these dimensions, and less than (1/6)^4 are any pure type, eg ESTJ - 1/6 unusually E times 1/6 unusually S times 1/6 unusually T times 1/6 unusually J or 1/1296. So, can't find your type? This is probably why.
Despite this knowledge and irritation, I still find myself craving a description. What is wrong with me? I have taken Five Factor Model tests and self reported myself to be high on extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and stability. Translated into MBTI, that would make me a ENFJ - which utterly fails to describe me accurately (I'm much closer to an INTP).
I think I want a benevolent dictation of how to live my life - what career to choose, what hobbies, what style of dress, etc - to optimize my satisfaction and contentment. I am a machine in need of a tune up - just give me the right repair manual and I'll be humming as good as new.
Greg Robin, to be happy, be physically and socially active and think well of yourself. The end.

Plan

Architects rely too much on plan views and aerial perspectives. Not too many people fly over buildings or gardens.
It irritates me to look through Francis Ching's book on architecture form, space and order and see examples of interesting plan views. Plan views are good for traffic flow and basic functionality, but it almost completely irrelevant for beauty.
It also irritates me that we are designing a unique roof structure (for a government building in Toledo, Ohio) that will be completely invisible to any of the occupants.

3 of 4

"The percentage of the children born in London who died before the age of five decreased from 74.5% in 1730-1749 to 31.8% in 1810-1829."
^ Mabel C. Buer, Health, Wealth and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution, London: George Routledge & Sons, 1926, page 30 ISBN 0-415-38218-1

Wow. 3 out of 4 kids died before the age of five. How could you live without a completely irrational sense of hope and optimism?

Worldometers

I asked some people at work if they knew what the world population was and I was surprised how completely uninterested and far-off they were... then, a couple of weeks later, my boss asked me if I knew who painted a picture he showed me - I had no clue. Nora knew immediately that it was Emily Carr, but she couldn't care less about the world population.
For those who are interested in world metrics, check this out: http://www.worldometers.info/

Waste of money or economic stimulus?

Rambling and disorganized... thinking.

I am not really talking about the stimulus package here - I am more curious about the benefits of spending exorbitant amounts on architecture, new medical procedures, luxury goods, etc. While my initial reaction to people spending insane amounts on basically useless things is negative and exasperated, I think it might actually be a good thing or a neutral thing. Money spent is money earned by someone else. The faster money is spent, or the more it is spent in a given period of time, the more it is used, right? A dollar spent 10 times in a year is more useful than a dollar spent once.

Foolish spending, however, does not promote efficient industries.
Inefficiency leads to costing more for the same thing - which is basically inflation, no?
If you invest in a foolish project, you are not going to get your money back plus interest, you are going to lose money.

So all spending is not equal.

Architecture is not necessarily foolish - it can promote business, tourism, etc. But I am suspicion when government money is spent on extravagant airports that are going to be used regardless.

24 Hour Mountain Biking

24 hours? More like 5 hours with 4 hour breaks in between... or maybe, if I'm lucky, 4 hours with 5 hour breaks in between.

The Summer Solstice 24-hr race in Albion Hills, Ontario is this weekend. Once again I'll be riding with a Clydesdale team. Unlike last year, I do not plan to push it too hard - I will be doing more leisurely 1 hr plus lap times. We probably will not win 1st this year, but if there are only 3 teams registered, like last year, we will probably podium!

With an 80% chance of rain for Saturday, we are probably going to be having a wet and wild time. Oh, how I love getting pumped up for a ride when I'm tired, wet, and muddy!

After that, I will be focusing on weight training. Hopefully, if I pay attention and actually do scheduled workouts, I will break the 220 lbs plateau I've been at for the past 6 months. It is appealingly mindless to just do sets of 10 with the standard exercises.

Nunavut

How sad it would be to live in Nunavut.
The total population is about 30,000 people.
The number of criminal offenses in 2006 and 2007 was 9,607 and 9,308.
Of those who are not living off the land, 28 percent are unemployed.

Spent

Spin-off ideas from Geoffrey Miller’s new book…

This book is based in evolutionary psychology, or evolutionary sexual selection psychology. Socializing is beneficial for our survival as human animals, but better for the high status individuals than for the low status ones. So we vie to be high status and have high status offspring – males and females alike, similarly, but differently… Through their real and perceived effects, general traits are amplified over generations through differential mating and survival success. Beauty, health, and fertility are clear and easy to accept examples – it is easy to imagine handsome, healthy, vigorous pre-historic men having more kids than ugly, sickly, infertile men. It is also easy to imagine healthier, more fertile women having more kids. It is only slightly more difficult to image prehistoric men and women who were nicer, more conscientious, more intelligent, more social, and more risk taking had more kids.

In tight, social, tribal communities like the societies humans evolved in, it is easy to be accurately evaluated by everyone in your community. It is not necessary to advertise your qualities in any other way except the way you interact and live your life, and possibly through ornamentation and possessions. The qualities themselves result in more alliances, more friends, and more lovers. Emphasizing and advertising these traits through ornamentation results in more friends and lovers, unless, of course, everyone else is advertising just as much as you… Then you up the ante and result in an arms race – where everyone is striving to seem better than average, or where those that seem better win more friends and lovers. And all of this is done more or less unconsciously through our likings, preferences, urges, wants, and needs and is monitored through our self-esteem, or sense of social worth.

How do you increase your sense of social worth (self-esteem) in a world with virtually no face-to-face interaction with the 10,000 people we see or pass by every day? Through ornamentation and possessions? Can I sell you on the idea that this thing (whatever it may be) will make you stand-out of the crowd as distinctively intelligent, fun, risk taking, or conscientious? Yes, I can. Will you feel better and have a higher self esteem? Yes, probably, but only for a little while because your social status will not really be raised among those who know you – at least not for very long. Those who do not know you do not interact with you enough to affirm your status sense, so you lose confidence in the boost. Unless, of course, the product actually changes the way in which you interact with the people you know, it has no effect on your social worth.

"Of Modern Poetry," Wallace Stevens

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Happy Narcissist

...they tend to be "more extraverted and less socially anxious," he says. "There's no good evidence that deep down, narcissists hate themselves."

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/297/5586/1474d

NY Times

Message in What We Buy, but Nobody’s Listening
By JOHN TIERNEY

Why does a diploma from Harvard cost $100,000 more than a similar piece of paper from City College? Why might a BMW cost $25,000 more than a Subaru WRX with equally fast acceleration? Why do “sophisticated” consumers demand 16-gigabyte iPhones and “fair trade” coffee from Starbucks?

If you ask market researchers or advertising executives, you might hear about the difference between “rational” and “emotional” buying decisions, or about products falling into categories like “hedonic” or “utilitarian” or “positional.” But Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, says that even the slickest minds on Madison Avenue are still in the prescientific dark ages.

Instead of running focus groups and spinning theories, he says, marketers could learn more by administering scientifically calibrated tests of intelligence and personality traits. If marketers (or their customers) understood biologists’ new calculations about animals’ “costly signaling,” Dr. Miller says, they’d see that Harvard diplomas and iPhones send the same kind of signal as the ornate tail of a peacock.

Sometimes the message is as simple as “I’ve got resources to burn,” the classic conspicuous waste demonstrated by the energy expended to lift a peacock’s tail or the fuel guzzled by a Hummer. But brand-name products aren’t just about flaunting transient wealth. The audience for our signals — prospective mates, friends, rivals — care more about the permanent traits measured in tests of intelligence and personality, as Dr. Miller explains in his new book, “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.”

Suppose, during a date, you casually say, “The sugar maples in Harvard Yard were so beautiful every fall term.” Here’s what you’re signaling, as translated by Dr. Miller:

“My S.A.T. scores were sufficiently high (roughly 720 out of 800) that I could get admitted, so my I.Q. is above 135, and I had sufficient conscientiousness, emotional stability and intellectual openness to pass my classes. Plus, I can recognize a tree.”

Or suppose a young man, after listening to the specifications of the newest iPhone or hearing about a BMW’s “Servotronic variable-ratio power steering,” says to himself, “Those features sound awesome.” Here’s Dr. Miller’s translation:

“Those features can be talked about in ways that will display my general intelligence to potential mates and friends, who will bow down before my godlike technopowers, which rival those of Iron Man himself.”

Most of us will insist there are other reasons for going to Harvard or buying a BMW or an iPhone — and there are, of course. The education and the products can yield many kinds of rewards. But Dr. Miller says that much of the pleasure we derive from products stems from the unconscious instinct that they will either enhance or signal our fitness by demonstrating intelligence or some of the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion.

In a series of experiments, Dr. Miller and other researchers found that people were more likely to expend money and effort on products and activities if they were first primed with photographs of the opposite sex or stories about dating.

After this priming, men were more willing to splurge on designer sunglasses, expensive watches and European vacations. Women became more willing to do volunteer work and perform other acts of conspicuous charity — a signal of high conscientiousness and agreeableness, like demonstrating your concern for third world farmers by spending extra for Starbucks’s “fair trade” coffee.

These signals can be finely nuanced, as Dr. Miller parses them in his book. The “conspicuous precision” of a BMW or a Lexus helps signal the intelligence of all the owners, but the BMW’s “conspicuous reputation” also marks its owner as more extraverted and less agreeable (i.e., more aggressive). Owners of Toyotas and Hondas are signaling high conscientiousness by driving reliable and economical cars.

But once you’ve spent the money, once you’ve got the personality-appropriate appliance or watch or handbag, how much good are these signals actually doing you? Not much, Dr. Miller says. The fundamental consumerist delusion, as he calls it, is that purchases affect the way we’re treated.

The grand edifice of brand-name consumerism rests on the narcissistic fantasy that everyone else cares about what we buy. (It’s no accident that narcissistic teenagers are the most brand-obsessed consumers.) But who else even notices? Can you remember what your partner or your best friend was wearing the day before yesterday? Or what kind of watch your boss has?

A Harvard diploma might help get you a date or a job interview, but what you say during the date or conversation will make the difference. An elegantly thin Skagen watch might send a signal to a stranger at a cocktail party or in an airport lounge, but even if it were noticed, anyone who talked to you for just a few minutes would get a much better gauge of your intelligence and personality.

To get over your consuming obsessions, Dr. Miller suggests exercises like comparing the relative costs and pleasures of the stuff you’ve bought. (You can try the exercise at nytimes.com/tierneylab.) It may seem odd that we need these exercises — why would natural selection leave us with such unproductive fetishes? — but Dr. Miller says it’s not surprising.

“Evolution is good at getting us to avoid death, desperation and celibacy, but it’s not that good at getting us to feel happy,” he says, calling our desire to impress strangers a quirky evolutionary byproduct of a smaller social world.

“We evolved as social primates who hardly ever encountered strangers in prehistory,” Dr. Miller says. “So we instinctively treat all strangers as if they’re potential mates or friends or enemies. But your happiness and survival today don’t depend on your relationships with strangers. It doesn’t matter whether you get a nanosecond of deference from a shopkeeper or a stranger in an airport.”

Sea Oh Two

Our current CO2 levels are 388.79 ppmv.
The highest it has been in 400,000 years is about 300 ppmv.
Is climate change happening? Yes
Are humans partially responsible? Yes
Can we do anything about it? Probably not
Is there a profitable opportunity in coming cataclysm? Surely there is!





Figure 2.22: Variations of temperature, methane, and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations derived from air trapped within ice cores from Antarctica (adapted from Sowers and Bender, 1995; Blunier et al., 1997; Fischer et al., 1999; Petit et al., 1999).25 years.
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/095.htm

polymerase

I know everyone has probably heard this already, but I think it is amazing to reflect on every once in a while…
There are approximately 100 trillion cells in the human body, each with 3 billion DNA base pairs. Right now, every one of these cells is buzzing with chemical activity with billions of electrons popping from molecule to molecule… causing molecules to grab and clutch and push and shove each other around at millions of reactions per second. Amazingly all of this mayhem and resulting gook keeps going – it somehow keeps resetting itself.
This is amazing even without caffeine.

EDM

In the next ten years, I predict that all cars will be equipped with electronic driving monitors (EDM) that will provide feedback on your driving style and efficiency as well as provide insurers information on how safe you drive. Initially the driving monitors will be optional and insurers will offer discounts to people providing driving data.

So thereafter, tax payers will be convinced that valuable money and police person-power is saved by not needing to enforce traffic laws like speeding, stopping at stop signs, etc. if EDMs are required.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=1499
http://ezinearticles.com/?Ensure-That-Your-Teen-is-Driving-Safely&id=921264
http://casr.adelaide.edu.au/T95/paper/s24p3.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/15/vehicle_movement_database/

Cost of Living Index

The cost of living is a funny thing - two people may make the same amount of money in two different places, but the cost of living can make the real value of their incomes very different. Take, for instance, the cost of living in Ottawa, Canada versus Austin, Texas. Based off of data I pulled from the web, the cost of living in Ottawa (75.6) is 64% more than in Austin (46.2).

As an arbitrary example, if you made $50,000 in Austin, you would need to make $81,818 in Ottawa to have the same standard of living. ($108,000 in New York City (100)) Or, put another way, if you made $50k in Ottawa, you would have the same standard of living as someone making $30,555 in Austin.

Career Advice

If you are a young 'un in Central Texas and you want to have a high paying job, you could do worse than to visit
http://socrates.cdr.state.tx.us//iSocrates/occprofiles/profile_select.asp

You can sort all the careers in Central Texas by expected growth, salary, etc.
Here, for example, is a list of careers that have over 100 new openings per year and make over $80,000 per year.

Cluster Flock

We are all individuals, but wouldn't it be funny if someone could predict what you are going to do tonight - what you are going to eat, read, watch - and know what you value most in life?

e.g.:
Andy pulls into his row house in his Honda Civic. His wife he helps his wife prepare dinner and take care of their 4-year-old while listening to a classical music radio station. She goes to the gym while Andy puts their daughter to bed and reads a developmental economics book, "The Bottom Billion". Tomorrow will be his turn to go to the gym.

I've been thinking about consumer profiling (clustering) with the ever increasing availability of consumer data... specifically, the "analysis of consumer lifestyles to create a detailed customer profile... [these results] are combined with geographic (place of work or residence) and demographic (age, education, occupation, etc.) characteristics to develop a more 'lifelike' portrait of the targeted consumer segment."

You can (if you fall in to one of the top groups) check out your own profile by (US) zip code at http://www.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp?ID=0&SubID=&pageName=Home

A great many products are moving towards this predictive profiling: Google (Sponsored Links), iTunes' Genius, Amazon, other online booksellers, and TiVo Suggestions ("Users can rate programs from three "thumbs up" to three "thumbs down." TiVo user ratings are combined to create a recommendation, based on what TiVo users with similar viewing habits watch.")

I believe we will soon be seeing much more sophisticated "suggestions" software that pulls from larger data sources and has an almost "Ah, ha!" marketing appeal. A new era of direct marketing is on its way that will have us pegged so accurately that we will be uncertain of our own opinions ("Is the calculator wrong? Maybe Excel didn't add up those numbers right...").

Politics are very closely linked with marketing. While micro-attention to the polls has been around for several election cycles, I believe a much more detailed voter profile is coalesing which will allow for much more effective hooks. Modern and future election campaigns know what people care about, what media they use, and what they had for breakfast...

Political return on investment

Here are some of my views on the economic stimulus package. There are three main parts to this issue: the core issues, inflation, and politics.

The aim of the short term stimulus is to get people to spend more. Consumption is down dramatically, i.e. the market for things that are produced is down. The question is, how do we best get people to spend money? Should the government spend money on contracts which get companies to hire more people and make CEOs richer? Or should the government give everyone a couple of thousand dollars? Which method would cause inflation to increase faster?

Is consumer spending really the core of the problem? Why are people spending less? Do they have less money, less credit, less confidence about the future? Contrast today with the Monetary Policy Report submitted to the Congress on February 11, 2004, "Uncertainty in financial markets had declined, and rising consumer confidence and a wave of mortgage refinancing appeared to be supporting consumer spending." If consumer spending is the problem, then the deeper problems are uncertainty in financial markets and the crash in the value of equities and real estate. These are the issues that need to be addressed

Returning back to the question of inflation, is there inflationary slack in a depressed economy? Normally giving everyone money would simply drive up the price of everything, but if supply exceeds demand, retailers would be happy to get rid of their excess inventory without raising prices much. But after they spend their money, would consumers continue to spend? Would the core problems continue to persist?

What about the politics of government spending? The current bill is widely acknowledged to be loaded with special interest spending. In fact, the political return on investment for this crisis opportunity is far too much to be passed up. Never before in history has a political party had the opportunity to spend so much money to promote its interests. Would it be possible to forego this opportunity - the nation is crying for leadership, something must be done, and the precedent for spending is already established.

In short, my view is that the government spending option is mostly political and will be much less effective than a tax rebate along with serious financial market reform.

Road Kill

Some people say population control is the key to saving the world. US policy makers are putting into effect laws which will kill off nearly 2000 Americans a year. One of these could be you or me, but hey, what can you do? The key to the key is to disguise the murders in something morally upstanding.

Save the world by increasing fuel economy! The "unfortunate" result will be a 4.4% increase in miles driven and/or number of people killed. Since roughly 42,000 Americans die a year in traffic accidents, a 4.4% increase equals nearly 2000 additional deaths.

I think this plan has merit!

- or -

maybe we could use tolling...

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/the-rebound-effect-of-higher-mpg/

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/why-youll-love-paying-for-roads-that-used-to-be-free-a-guest-post/

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/why-youll-love-paying-for-roads-that-used-to-be-free-part-two/

Probabilities

"What are the chances, eh?" asked the cop. "... that I'd pull you over twice in one week?"
Considering the fact that as I waited 10 minutes for him to run up the ticket, I watched well over 100 cars go through the stop sign without stopping, and that I had not gotten a ticket in many years - I'd say the probability is pretty low.

At a party this weekend, someone brought up mbti (personality type) and I reacted with determination to piss all over it. I explained a central fallacy with the idea that traits are normally distributed, so the probability of being a particular "true" type are vanishingly slim. I've written about this before, but I feel like makeing a correction and adding a little explanation. (And what is the probability that someone will actually read both entries?)

In a normal distribution, 68% of the values will be within one standard deviation of the mean. In regards to personality type, 68% of people are normal for a trait and only (100% - 68% =) 32% are "outside of the norm". For two traits, only (32% x 32% =) 10% of people are "outside of the norm" for both traits. For three traits, only 3%; and for four traits, only 1%.
So, only 1% of the population is actually a "true type", (e.g. intp, esfj).

Traits Probability
0 68%
1 32%
2 10%
3 3%
4 1%

Greconomics

I was thinking about the best ways the government can stimulate the economy and came upon a little puzzle for which I have a grand little insight.

The puzzle appeared as I was looking into the debate between tax cuts and government spending, which really boils down to a debate between tax multipliers and fiscal policy multipliers. "The multipliers measure bang for the buck--the amount of short-run GDP expansion one gets from a dollar of spending hikes or tax cuts.
The idea is for the government to either increase government spending (the government increases its purchases of goods and services) or to decrease taxes (the government gives consumers and firms a tax break in order to induce an increase in their spending on goods and services)." - http://homepage.smc.edu/szekely_claudia/OnlineE2/LecturesF05/lectureFiscalPolicy.htm

Going deeper, the effect of a tax cut boils down to the "marginal propensity to consume" (mpc), or how much of a windfall people will actually spend. For example, if you get an extra $1000, will you spend all $1000 or spend $800 and save $200? If you spend all of the money, then your mpc = 1; if you spend $800, then your mpc = 0.8. So, if the government gives you a tax cut, how much of that extra money are you going to spend (to boost the economy)? According to the logic of those who oppose the tax cut, the fact that the mpc is less than 1 means that a trillion dollar tax cut will generate less than a trillion dollars of economic stimulus.

This is a bit of a puzzle to me because money put into the banks is spent by the banks, is it not? Most of it is, anyway - they are required to keep a certain percentage of their holdings in reserve, but the required reserve ratio in the US is only 10%. So, even if the mpc was 0 (100% of the windfall tax cut was saved), the banks would spend 90% of it, so the real mpc = 0.9. In other words, the minimum mpc is determined by the required reserve ratio. (This is my grand little insight.)

You can read about the rest of the debate in other, better written, blogs and op-ed pieces, if you're interested. I just wanted to get to the required reserve insight.

Two other points, though:
1) If you get a windfall, you are probably more likely to spend it on stupid things, including black-market items like drugs. This might further depress the mpc derived from empirical data.
2) Spending effects lobbyists and special interest groups much more powerfully and directly than general tax cuts. So the political return on investment is much better for spending than for tax-cuts. This moves the debate into the patronage realm – third world (3rd grade) politics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage

EMFs and DNA

I decided to look into the health effects of mobile phones and exposure to low-levels of electromagnetic radiation.

Initially, I thought the topic was pretty simple and straight forward: there should be no health effect.
- Radio wave frequency radiation is non-ionizing and non-dangerous, especially at low power densities.
- Human beings emit higher frequency radiation (infra-red) than cell phones, and radiation does not become dangerous until it gets to very high frequencies with wavelengths similar to molecular bond distances.
- Natural sources (like the sun) bathe us in more radiation than most artificial sources.

But, we've been wrong about health effects before, and, to be honest, I would not want to live under high-power transmission lines.

I was only a little surprised, therefore, to find so much research (millions and millions of dollars, decades of time) focused on the health effects of radio-wave frequency, low-energy radiation.

The World Health Organization has a summary of the health effects research.
http://www.who.int/peh-emf/about/WhatisEMF/en/index4.html

An amateur radio website (tech geeks) gives a very good summary of the research.
http://www.sss-mag.com/rfsafety_bkg.html

An excerpt from this gives a glimpse as to why the topic is not so simple:
There has also been considerable laboratory research about the biological effects of EMR in recent years. For example, it has been shown that even fairly low levels of EMR can alter the human body's circadian rhythms, affect the manner in which cancer-fighting T lymphocytes function in the immune system, and alter the nature of the electrical and chemical signals communicated through the cell membrane and between cells, among other things.

A possible explanation for this effect is discussed here http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2004/112-6/ss.html#emfs

One thing about life that seems to be empirically solid is that we all die.

Movies

Amazon and (for Canadians) Chapters-Indigo have a "others also bought" feature, which is great for recommendations. I figure you could probably make your search for your unique style and identity much more efficient by uploading lists of all the movies, books, and products (clothes, etc) you've liked onto Amazon and then follow the recommendations. In fact, you could probably find the perfect zip code to move into and have a filter notify you of all the bills and political issues you would probably care about. Eventually, you could save time in voting by having the computer vote for you, based on how you have voted in the past and how other people with similar reading, movie watching, buying patterns have voted.
If you have a budget, a system could automatically make purchases for you and have them show up in your mail - better, more interesting books, movies, and clothes you could possibly find on your own.
What an exciting, brave new world we are entering!

To start it off, Nora and I wrote up a list of movies we've seen and liked (with the help of Amazon)("***" means we haven't seen the movie, but it looks interesting)

Punch drunk love
You and me and everyone we know
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
American History X
American Beauty
Memento
The Usual Suspects
me myself and irene
Night at the Roxbury
Cache
I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
My sone the fanatic
the truman show
bhaji on the beach
inch allah dimache
lars and the real girl
little miss sunshine
Persepolis
Paradise Now
Fire
Sam and I
Mississippi Masala
Monsoon Wedding ***
Bend It Like Beckham
Whale Rider
Nurse Betty
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
c.r.a.z.y.
Ali Zaoua*********
Viva La'ldjerie**************
Caramel********
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly *******
The Visitor****
Adaptation
Magnolia
American Psycho*******
A Clockwork Orange *******
Run Lola Run
Cinderella Man****
The Namesake**************
A beautiful mind
Amadeaus
A room with a view
My immortal beloved
my beautiful launderette
My Left Foot (Special Edition)
In the Name of the Father
Men in Black
Torch Song Trilogy***********
bon cop bad cop
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day*******
Le Grande Voyage********
Raja*****
la sex des etoiles*****
Rachida****
Cinema Paradiso
Chocolate
Delecatesin
Strawberry & Chocolate
Il Postino
Amores Perros
Y tu mama tambien
Gandhi
Day without a mexican
Bread and Roses
The Wooden Camera
Al Otro Lado*********
Sarafina *****
Cry Freedom *********
21 Up South Africa Mandela's Children *********
Cry, The Beloved Country****
Yesterday*******
Do the Right Thing
Jungle Fever
Summer of Sam
Donnie Brasco
Trainspotting
Blow
Clerks
21 Grams
Stranger Than Fiction
Fight Club
Return of the Barbarians
Decline of the American Empire
Jesus of Montreal
The Lives of Others *********
Tsotsi*******
Kolya
The Mission
Roxanne
Shakespear in Love
Mrs. Brown
Black Robe

Endearingly Dismal

Continuing with my dismal theme, one problem with negative growth is that people lose jobs and lose the freedom of changing jobs or of moving. Shrinking economies are not just painful to those unlucky millions who become unemployed, it is actually dangerous. Rebellion and civil unrest are extremely likely in periods of continued decline, especially for countries without well developed democratic structures of checks and balances of power.

Just to add more vinegar to the mix, I believe pro-immigration is anti-green as well. Economic growth is comprised of efficiency gains and new people seeking jobs. With more people entering the work force, more resources are consumed and more damage is done.

Most self-respecting democrats and liberals tend to care about the environment and poverty, but does anyone have a solution for solving both issues? I am looking and thinking about this issue, but I cannot find a viable solution.

Energy – solar, wind and bio all require substantial inputs of resources (and continual input, if growth is to continue)
Pollution – point sources are reducible, but are not the major contributors
Materials – clothes, solar panels, computers, zero-emission vehicles, houses, etc do not lend themselves to compatibility between growth and sustainability
Economic sectors dependant on resource consumption – if we reduce mining, oil, and gas, then the economy will need to expand in other sectors

If we had a communist dictator take over the world and made everyone equally poor, equally well educated, and with equal opportunities for non-economic self-expression, then the problem would be solved. But this is like saying that all a doctor has to do is get rid of the cancer cells to cure a patient, or resource scarcity could be solved by moving a few protons and neutrons around.