Phil Mayes's Blog, page 6

Our beliefs resist new facts

Mother Jones has a really interesting article on how our beliefs block new information:

Pre-existing beliefs, far more than new facts, skew our thoughts. Feelings arise before conscious thoughts and color them. Confirmation bias gives more weight to facts that match our existing beliefs. Beliefs are adjusted to match the audience.

Encode your IP as a haiku

How eccentric and cool: http://gabrielmartin.net/projects/hipku/

There’s also a Python port:http://pyhipku.lord63.com/

Right-wing commentator tilts left!

David Brooks is the token conservative on the New York Times OpEd page. He replaced the insufferable William Safire, but has still been reliably conservative.

But something has happened as of late; he has been writing columns displaying empathy, such as one eschewing vengeance in response to ISIS. The one that really amazed me was yesterday’s essay on PTSD. Buried inside that was this:

war — no matter how justified or unjustified, noble or ignoble — is always a crime.

Amazing because for the lon...

Ten Years!

Today is the 10th anniversary of this blog, so I’ll celebrate with a bunch of random items.

Interesting postsuggesting that the creation of life can be explained in thermodynamic terms.
A great series of oldJohn Cleese commercials for Compaq.
Can you blow smoke rings?
If you don’t follow xkcd, perhaps you should.

Solitude

Sometimes we just want to be alone,

to meet the self, to commune with nature,

to hope to glimpse that ineffable;

to let our thoughts run shouting

down halls that we’ve never seen,

unthreatened by the jaws of other peoples’ arguments.

Our soul is set free by our heart’s acceptance

that alone is not lonely,

and graced from guilt, goes ranging far and wide

until the human world attracts once more.

12.20.1995

Sharp knives

In my woodworking days I learned how to sharpen knives on a stone, so when invited to Thanksgiving or Christmas, I would offer to sharpen the host’s knives. The offer was always well received, but such a high proportion of cooks promptly cut themselves accidentally that I now don’t offer, or add a severe caveat.

I conclude that the canard about blunt knives being more dangerous is wrong. The logic is that blunt knives cause people to press harder, but I think the added sharpness of a sharpened...

Split Infinitives

I’ve always had a secret liking for split infinitives. Today I found a perfect example.

Therapists are trained not to tell you exactly what to do, no matter how much I ask.

I would much rather see (using brackets to indicatea sentence component)

Therapists are trained to [not tell you exactly what to do], no matter how much I ask.

To my ear, the original sentence implies a logical construction like this

Therapists are trained not to tell you exactly what to do, but to reflect your actions back to...

Modern-day Feudalism

Here’s what the corporate state has come to:

You need a college education to get a job;
You have to pay for it;
You can’t escape that debt (it’s high interest, and not dischargeable in bankruptcy);
Therefore you have to work for us until it is paid off.

Ergo: Capitalism has reinvented the feudal system.

Five Ways America is a Faux Democracy

The existence of elections, civil law and free speech gives the appearance of a functioning democracy, but in practice they are not acting as intended.

1. Voting is not Representative

Voting is skewed in America in many ways.

Districts are gerrymandered to bias the vote:

“Through artful drawing of district boundaries, it is possible to put large groups of voters on the losing side of every election.”

In the 2012 House elections, Democrats won 50.59% of the two-party vote but just 46.21% of seats,...

Political bias measured in Supreme Court Decisions

The NYTimes reports that how Supreme Court Justices vote on 1st Amendment claims depends on their political leanings. The worst liberal bias is 1.3, whereas the conservative biases range from 3 to 7.

This is unsettling enough by itself, but even more disturbing is the implication is that conservative justices may be more biased in other areas besides 1st Amendment issues.