Is it just me or does anyone else think that advertising your brand by paying people to get tattoos of your slogans/logos a horrible idea. I mean sooner or later someone with a brand tattoo gets arrested for some high profile crime? I can just see the press talking about the “Energizer Rapist” or the “Geico Serial Killer.” Even if you avoid this risk using background checks how long will it be before someone gets checky and gets a second tattoo mounting/eating/shooting your logo. Using a slogan, rather than your logo, might minimize these risks but remember how dumb slogans from the 50s sound now? Do you really want to keep people reminded of what your slogan was back in the naughts.

Of course I think most large companies are smart enough to realize this which is why tattoo advertising is nothing but an attempt to gain free press. Once the media gets tired of reporting on the people who were paid to tattoo some corporate logo on their body companies will stop paying them to do it.

Supposedly a Chinese submarine snuck up on one of our aircraft carriers in the middle of a military exercise. However, if this was really true why wouldn’t we pretend we knew about it and did nothing? After all we wouldn’t want to signal to China that our sensors weren’t any better. On the other hand if we had detected it what would we have done about it? Surely we weren’t going to sink the Chinese submarine but we might very well want to pretend that we didn’t see it.

Then again pride plays into it on our side just as it does theres and for the conspiracy theorists out there this is a wonderful ploy to increase support for spending on new weapons systems or sonar tests (I wonder if they were using the whale killing sonar at the time). In short this sort of story, without much more background information, tells us absolutely nothing even if it is kinda amusing.

The big novelty story in the news this week is the study that is being reported as showing that liberals’ brains are wired differently and are better able to “tolerate ambiguity and conflict” than conservatives. Of course no one should ever trust public interest science reporting like this so those of you who have access to Nature Neuroscience can find the original journal article here. While the original article is careful to say nothing that is technically wrong¹ it is almost totally without real content. In particular the original journal article throws together what are essentially two unrelated results.

The study subjected volunteers to a test which required them to quickly press a button in response to a ‘go’ stimulus (for instance a green light) but not to do so when presented with a ‘no go’ stimulus (maybe a red light) and measured their ability to avoid pressing the button when a no go stimulus was presented after they were conditioned with many go stimuluses. They verified as had previously been suspected (or even known) that performance on this test was correlated with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). They also noted that liberals tended to perform better at this task (less frequently press the button in response to a no go stimulus) than conservatives. Of course in the absence of confounding factors this will likely mean that liberal political orientation will tend to correlate with higher activity in the ACC and the article presents this correlation rather than breaking it down into separate claims as I did.

Now the conclusion of the report that:

Taken together, our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation

is technically true but then again the fact that I’m not a six foot tall intelligent spider is also consistent with that conclusion. Of course the fact that

At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal.

While this might seems suggestive that liberals and conservatives attitudes might stem from (deep seated) brain differences it is such week evidence that it should barely budge one’s prior probability. No effort seems to have been done to recruit a random sample of subjects from any particular population nor was any regression run to determine if the correlation persisted once other factors were discounted. For instance at a fairly liberal college campus it might turn out that people with lots of friends are going to experience greater social pressure to call themselves liberal and that people who are quicker at go/no go tasks are also quicker whits or more socially apt. A hundred other possible correlations could explain this result. Besides, I think our prior probability that liberal and conservative viewpoints would be correlated with fairly general cognitive features should be quite high. For instance in this era I suspect that being more strongly affected by reactions of immediate sympathy would probably turn out to correlate with liberalism and it would be amazing to me if no broad cognitive feature correlated with political affiliation somehow.

Unfortunately, either do to poor wording or deliberate attempt to make boring research seem more interesting the journal article functions as the perfect template for an urban legend. The introductory statement in the journal article that said

Across dozens of behavioral studies, conservatives have been found to be more structured and persistent in their judgments and approaches to decision-making, as indicated by higher average scores on psychological measures of personal needs for order, structure and closure. Liberals, by contrast, report higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and greater openness to new experiences on psychological measures.

May be technically correct but the media is unlikely to understand “higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity” as a technical term. Indeed they didn’t saying things like

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

and

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a “flip-flopper” for changing his mind about the conflict. Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

This is just silly. We could describe the exact same thing by saying, “Conservatives are more principled than liberals.” Hell in the sense meant in the article I tend to think that tolerance of ambiguity, while pragmatically useful, is a logical flaw². Unsurprisingly the association of the pretty banal results about behavior correlation with neurological activity tended to result in the impression that whether one was liberal or conservative was the result of inherent properties. When will people learn that all behavioral differences can be traced to brain differences.

I thought that the whole Branson and Colbert thing was probably a set up (though I wasn’t totally sure) and it’s nice to see myself vindicated.

So I just heard an interesting interview on NPR (fresh air) with Walt (of Mearsheimer and Walt) about their new book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”. This interview was followed by one with Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League and author of “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.” Now Walt’s arguments seemed silly, factually dubious and subtly fallacious, in other words exactly what I expect for any public policy discussion, particularly those involving Israel, but he certainly didn’t appear even slightly antisemitic. Now to be fair Foxman didn’t technically call either Mearsheimer or Walt an antisemite in the interview I heard¹ but he did call Walt and Mearsheimer’s argument a, “sinister antisemitic canard,” accuse them of “defamation of the Jewish community” and do his best to imply they were no different than Pat Buchanan or David Duke not to mention running afoul of Godwin’s Law. Ironically while Foxman blasts M&W for aiding and abetting antisemitism his outraged denunciations do an order of magnitude more harm than Mearsheimer and Walt would have done on their own.

In short I think that Mearsheimer and Walt certainly ought to be blamed for foolishly adopting some silly beliefs and presenting them poorly I think just as much blame lies with their opponents for encouraging people to take this crap seriously. The fact that we tend to blame only one side not the other regardless of the causal impact of their choices is yet another deep seated human irrationality that always seems to bite us in the ass. I argue for this views at far too much length below.

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Does anyone understand what’s going on when they get attacked/bitten/poisoned by some sort of animal and after the fact they say something like, “I don’t blame the animal we were in their habitat so it’s our responsibility to look out,” or even more bafflingly after something like a shark attack say it wasn’t the animal’s fault because it thought I was a seal?

I mean presumably most people believe that animals aren’t ever morally responsible for their actions (certainly the Christian view) but these explanations suggest that the animal could have been at fault if things had been different. What even makes something the animal’s habitat as opposed to our habitat? Would the shark somehow have been blameworthy if it knew it was attacking a human but was hungry anyway?

What seems particularly ironic about all this is that almost all the excuses (except total lack of moral responsibility) given for animals seem to apply equally well to people who destroy the animals habitats or hunt the animal down in revenge.

A few days ago I wrote up a quick tip about how to fix the double dollar sign problem with textmate syntax highlighting for LaTeX. This fixed one problem but whenever I typed something like $\blah$ I’d end up with $\$ on the screen at some point and the slash would escape the second dollar sign causing textmate to believe math mode extended to wherever the next dollar sign occurred. Read on if you want tips on solving this issue as well.

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So I got an iPhone as an early birthday present. I hadn’t been planning on getting a new phone but my calls just kept cutting out in my apartment on sprint and then I ended up losing my phone. Since my contract was about to end I took the opportunity to switch over and get an iPhone. Not only is it just really fucking awesome I can also actually talk to people from my apartment.

The downside is that sprint is utterly fucking evil. My contract with them expired on the 25th of august, i.e., august was my last month of service. I’m like fine I’ll pay them the money for august and be on my way but no they refused to let me pay the money for august and told me that if I tried to use number portability before then I would be charged the full $200 for breaking my contract. I’m fairly sure this is illegal in several respects (according to the contract terms number porting didn’t qualify as breaking the contract) and I probably could have fought my way to getting my number transfered but it was just more difficult to fight with them then to get a new number so my number is now 510.457.5716.

This was only the latest in a long list of evil and sometimes illegal behavior by sprint. From the guy at the sprint store refusing to even try the number I wanted because he disapproved (it had 666 in it) to their fraudulent refusal to give me palm treo the unlimited data rate that applied to all non windows ME devices (a representation I had relied on when signing my contract with them). I was trapped with them for many years because of my treo but now I’m free and I will never purchase service from sprint again for any reason.

The news sites I read have been covering the (unofficial) opening of The Open Library site today. This site, backed by the Open Content Alliance, aims to…well it’s not totally clear. Their vision ‘book’ reads like a feel good oil company advertisement, lots of optimistic “imagine a world” type statements but no clear statement of what this particular website hopes to accomplish. In any case what they are doing right now is presenting (only a few so far) public domain books scanned at high dpi on the web in a very pretty interface¹, even if this sometimes comes at the expense of reading convenience. Obviously it’s good to have a more options to access public domain books and for some books the high resolution scans really make a huge difference. However, I simply don’t understand how the Open Content Alliance is managing to convince people it is the noble defender of public access fighting off google’s evil closed system.

I mean the article linked from slashdot had this to say about the situation:

But the only realistic alternative may well be the library that Google is building, a proprietary database full of low-quality digital copies, a semi-accessible public domain prohibitively difficult to use or repurpose outside the Google reading room, a balkanized landscape of partner libraries and institutions left in its wake, each clutching their small slice of the digitized pie while the whole belongs only to Google, all of it geared ultimately not to readers, researchers and citizens but to consumers.

Even wikipedia has this to say about the Open Content Alliance:

It was conceived in response to Google Book Search’s closed nature, and aims to keep works in the public domain on-line.

These all sound a lot like what the Open Library vision book says:

Won’t some of the big commercial digitalization projects deliver on this future? They are a part of it but, if we go no further, we may have an expanded bookstore, or a single means of organizing the materials, but we may not be building on the open tradition of a library: a place where librarians can help organize and present materials, where patrons can draw from and add to the holdings, where the right to private study is upheld, and where physical facilities offer a meeting place and environment for learning.

All this vague feel good talk about Open Library without any actual concrete arguments as to why we should regard this organization, instead of google, as the defender of these principles is bad enough but when the next paragraph in the Open Library vision book starts like this it’s enough to make one sick.

We have been asked if authors and publishers will play a role in this vision. The answer is a resounding Yes! Publishers and authors create the works in our libraries.

Obviously they aren’t simply stating the blatantly obvious fact here that authors and publishers are causally responsible for the books they will digitize. Rather they are expressing their support for reduced fair use rights. The real difference between the google book search and the Open Content Alliance is that google book search believes that indexing copyrighted books falls under fair use and will index a work (and show only snippets) unless the copyright owner opts out while the Open Content Alliance will not index a book unless the owner opts in. Especially in light of this provocative article from [freakonomics] which policy do you think better represents the public library tradition? Trying to sneak in substantive and harmful attitudes about copyright (minimization of fair use) while posing as the defender of the public domain and free access really pisses me off

What then about all this clap trap about the danger of google’s closed system. I mean sure google has a closed system for copyrighted books but google actually lets you download the full pdfs and the OCRed text of books that are in the public domain. No one has copyright on these books so you can do what you want with them. Google isn’t trying to lock them down so no one else can have them they are just providing the additional service of letting you find them using google book search. Moreover, providing a flashy user interface can hardly be said to be a great contribution to public knowledge. Especially when it seems better suited to attract attention and impress people than to be a workable interface for reading online. Also many (most? all?) of the books the Open Library has released so far were already available from the internet archive in text form and most of their hyped services seem to be nothing more than better presenting books already available elsewhere on the internet.

The high resolution scans by the Open Content Alliance and the fancy interface are nice features to have but Adobe, MSN and the like are hardly funding this out of the goodness of their heart. These companies are scared that google will become the place to go to for information and they want to make sure that isn’t the case. Not to mention blunt the PR benefit google books gives google. Sure I’m glad they are providing this service but this doesn’t make them the ‘good guy’ anymore than the fact that google lets you search the internet for free makes them a good guy.

So I was just listening to this amusing segment on NPR where they read some of the humorously literal answers to literal questions that Professor Paul Brian has on his webpage. Now the humor is reasonably funny but his motivation for posting them was apparently somewhat serious. Dr. Brian teaches a (fairly interesting looking) course on science fiction and apparently this page was intended as a chide to the sciencey students in his classes who couldn’t appreciate the human interest or metaphorical commentary of the works because they got the science wrong.

Of course not every scientifically incorrect plot point is a flaw, for instance the steam punk style science in His Dark Materials Trilogy is obviously a virtue and even the hardest¹ science fiction like “Timemaster” by Robert L. Forward usually ask us to assume possibly false facts about our universe. However, a great many science fiction works are written in a decidedly realist way and therefore suffer greatly if their major premises turn out to be implausible².

So if Dr. Brian’s complaint was really that some of his students thought some well regarded science fiction works were critically flawed because of their scientific inaccuracies I could disagree more. If the men in “All Quiet on the Western Front” had been shooting ray guns or Gatsby had flown a helicopter instead of a car no one would dispute that the unrealistic elements seriously detracted from the story. The fact that Dr. Brian and others in the literary establishment might not have the background to be viscerally disturbed by the scientific inaccuracies is no different from the fact that some people may be sufficiently ignorant of history that private helicopters in the 1920s³ wouldn’t bother them.

On the other hand if Dr. Brian is merely saying that people should be able to appreciate the virtues of a work despite its serious flaws then I agree. Even if the flaws in a book ruin it for you it doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge what it does well and understand the value it might have to others. However, I think this is a lesson that the literary and humanities crowd needs to learn more than anyone else. For instance science fiction writer Greg Egan might not have particularly complex characters or a great deal of psychological development in his books but he is far and away my favorite author because unlike every other author he actually presents philosophical and imaginative ideas that are worth thinking about⁴. Or consider international thriller type books whose characters and storyline may be generic spy novel but whose detailed background educates about current events and the way international diplomacy works. Or even mystery novels that may do nothing exceptional with their characters or psychology but masterfully lay out the clues and give the reader an intense mental workout.

So if Dr. Brian is serious about wanting people to acknowledge the value of books whose flaws we find too annoying to read he should start with the literary establishment (and for all I know he does). More than anyone else it is they who are unwilling to acknowledge that equally reasonable sensibilities may make a science fiction story without complex character drama better than Shakespeare or that the intellectual workout from an otherwise generic mystery novel is no worse (per unit time) than that of reading Ulysses. After all if it’s perfectly okay for them to overlook absurd scientific claims that viscerally ruin the realism for some of us why is it any worse to overlook characteristics that people with degrees in literature tend to find annoying?