For some reason immediately upon getting my job offer after graduation I bought a Ford Fusion Hybrid (ok, not immediately, demand on them way exceeds supply so every dealership had a long-ish wait). Why a fresh-out-of-college physicist who hates commuting and doesn't drive a lot outside of that would buy a car whose biggest plus is gas savings (and you'd probably need to drive a ridiculous number of miles for those to actually end up being cash-positive) is a good question, but one for a different post. What I want to talk about is how it has modified my driving behavior.

I am a rather impatient person and I used to be a rather impatient driver. I now drive more slowly (5 MPH above posted limits instead of 10+), accelerate much less quickly, and brake from a further distance (although I always had a pretty large braking distance, driving with people who don't is terrifying). All of these things because of the little meter on my dash that tells me my instantaneous fuel efficiency. The measurement is approximate for sure, but I can tell that when I floor it the number plummets, and when my speed is steady it's nice and high. And because the car keeps track of the numbers over the lifetime, there's an incentive to keep it high. People like to get high numbers, this is a manifestation of that weird drive.

Which brings me to my main point, we should put little doodads that show lifetime fuels use in all cars. That would be the best way to get people to change their driving habits to be more moderate (and hence safer) as well as save more fuel. Although I know I tend to look at the gauge too often, so maybe it'd increase distracted driving.

I'd like to see if cars that have those displays (my coworker's diesel car has one, so it's not just hybrids) tend to get above-average (for their cars) fuel mileage. Could be interesting.

I am going to start posting somewhat regularly again. Less reaction to the bullshit others are posting, more original writing. No real focus, just whatever I feel like. Should be interesting.

If you've read this blog for a while, you'll know that the ridiculous misapplication of sex laws to minors doing things to themselves/with other minors is something that infuriates me. So this story got my blood pressure up.

A 15-year-old girl is accused of distributing nude photos of herself to other minors, and one state legislator is questioning whether she should be labeled a sex offender.
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The Licking Valley High School student was arrested Friday after school officials discovered the materials and brought in the school's resource officer for a police investigation.

After spending the weekend incarcerated, she pleaded deny Monday to both charges: illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material, a second-degree felony; and possession of criminal tools, a fifth-degree felony.

Look, I'm not going to defend what she did, kids shouldn't be doing that crap. But expecting them not to is absurd, given our culture (I'm not complaining about it, but it's a reality people have to face). What we should do in these cases is give a strong reprimand, make the parents know that they need to be in charge of their children, and leave it be. Punish repeat offenders, but even then be lenient. I just cannot fathom why these people think labeling some poor 15-year-old a sex offender and charging her with felonies is in any way productive. It's not, and ANY reasonable person will agree.

The good news is that it seems like she won't get that life-destroying label, but I still think that holding her over the weekend was a ridiculous overreaction. Best of luck to her (and all like her), they'll need it dealing with our fucked-up legal system.

I just moved into my new dorm, and today coming back from work (research, more on that later) I noticed a couple of white sheets of paper on the door across the hall from me. It said something to the effect of:

Prayer list.

Put the things you'd like [myself and my roommate] to pray for, and we'll pray for them. Leave your name or be anonymous, God knows who you are.

I just don't know how to react. A part of me wants to do something destructive to it, but that's just counterproductive. A much bigger part of me wants to write something incredibly mean/offensive on it, something along the lines of, "Pray for you two to get some brains and realize that your religion is a fairy tail." Although I'd probably go for something more ironic, "Pray for a world without the institutionalized evil that is religion." (And really, who doesn't love irony?)

I'll probably just end up doing nothing (believe it or not, I don't actually like starting conflicts), but I'll definitely watch what people put up, I wouldn't be too surprised to see something like my comments, although frankly I'd put money on nothing serious being put up at all. My experience here says that very, very few people are religious. But who knows? My experience also says they tend to be clustered, last year I lived around a bunch of people who regularly went to church, whereas I'd known one in the previous two years. So maybe there will be a bunch of asinine, selfish prayer requests combined with the few "noble" gestures ("world peace!!!11 lol"), because, after all, we're concerned about people other than ourselves, right?

Right?

(As a PS, I wonder what would happen if I put something up on my door that was quite offensive to religious people. I'm thinking along the lines of "university personnel start to harass me". I bet that I would be targeted, while I'm doing nothing that they weren't. Yeah, seeing the stupid thing made me angry, but guess what, it's their right to put up stupid things that make me angry. Just an idle thought.)

Holy freaking crap:

ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

That's absolutely unbelievable. Is this really what Britain has come to?

I don't think I can actually comment cogently on this. It's just too absurd, too shocking, too ridiculous. All I can say is that I can't even fathom something like it happening in the US, at least for the time being.

Absolutely unbelievable.

Read this. It's about the motivation for keeping the spying program alive and detainees in prison despite their almost certain uselessness and innocence (respectively). I'll wait.

All done? Noam's comment:

I mean, it's just fricking grotesque. You're tempted to call it Bond villain-esque, except in this case Cheney's evil seems more banal than Bond-ian.

reminded me of Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect. One of the key takeaways from that book was the notion of "the banality of evil", that normal people placed in terrible conditions can do terrible, evil things despite being utterly mundane, completely boring, and banal. We think that it takes some great evil power to do great evil, but in reality it just takes a bunch of normal guys in an absurd situation.

Although in this case it was self-made. I'm currently reading The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, (buy it, buy it now), and I just finished the part about how the paranoia and fear infected the administration after 9/11, and how a few guys hijacked the national security agenda and made it into a tool for torture, just because they were convinced it was Necessary. It's all so bureaucratic, so inane, so banal, that it's infuriating. It's like watching Generation Kill (which, by the way, you should also be doing), at times it makes you gasp with horror, and it makes your blood boil. But knowing the whole infuriating story is absolutely essential, lest we repeat this descent into madness.

This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read:

"I believe 9/11 could have been prevented if we'd had a Republican president at the time," Meehan said Wednesday on CNN's "American Morning."

I wonder what kind of stupid you'd need to say that. I'm guessing a pretty severe case.

I'll let Wikipedia explain the various failings of the Bush administration leading to 911. It's absolutely insane that just about no one knows about this.

Dave Weigel of Reason the reason that the anti-gay marriage amendment is going to fail in November. This is great news, especially the survey showing humanity up 51-42.

As my old readers know, I'm a big proponent of equality in all its forms, and cannot stand any argument saying gay marriage shouldn't exist. I'm so proud that California has become the second state in the nation to allow it, and will be devastated if the amendment passes this November. It looks like it will, but this far off nothing is certain.

Except this one truth: history is progressive. Eventually, whether it's 10, 20, or 100 years from now, people will look at gay marriage like any other civil rights issue, and they will ask, "How could those people deny them their right?" I'm proud to be on the right side of this issue, and I hope you can say the same.

I'm incredibly dubious about this: People Found Who Don't Use Numbers, in part because you hear these claims made about remote tribes all the time and they usually end up being wrong, and also because I've read about Piraha before. Their language is really odd and (supposedly) simple, but unless things have changed dramatically since the papers I read, it's quite controversial. Literally one anthropologist was saying one thing and another was directly contradicting him. I think it's largely a problem of learning these languages that have no bilingual speakers, it's difficult to do. Granted, but that's not my only rationale.

Wikipedia backs up the story, but I'm still suspicious. Anthropological claims like this one are just of the type where I think they should be heavily scrutinized. For one they smack of cultural hubris, a kind of "they're so primitive" attitude. I don't actually think anyone believes that, but it's the kind of thing that's very ingrained into Western culture, and that kind of bias (like racism) is damn near impossibly to overcome at a subconscious level. Secondly, it's just so easy to get them wrong.

In Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought he describes a group descended from the Mayans called the Tzeltal, who live on the side of a mountain and generally refer to things as being "up the slope" or "down the slope". A linguist performed an experiment on them to see if this affected how they think (for the details see around p. 140 in the book, I don't think the details are important) and concluded that it did. In short, they "thought" in a geocentric frame, whereas most Westerners use an egocentric (axes centered on your body) or an object-centered frame (axes relative to objects near you). Anyway, another set of anthropologists (or perhaps linguists) performed a second, more careful experiment, and found that they, in fact, can use another frame of reference.

Actually, in this same chapter Pinker deals with the Piraha (they're quite famous), and thoroughly skewers the Sapir-Worf hypothesis (which is tangential to this anyway). For the full discussion see his book (I'm far too tired to transcribe it, and it's a fantastic book anyway).

But the point described in the SciAm podcast (and in the thousand articles I've seen on this today) seems to be a bit absurd to me. If these peoples don't, in the course of their daily lives, need to count anything, then why would they develop a precise language for counting?

And the claim that they "don't use numbers" is probably misleading, since there are other ways to keep track of reasonable numbers of objects. If you're a teacher on a field trip, you could either repeatedly count your kids and notice you have 23 instead of 24, or you could just notice that Billy is missing (that's how Pinker described it, keeping track of individuals one by one rather than keeping track of the number of individuals). There's no particular reason one of these systems is better than the other, until you start to deal with large numbers or complex operations. To expect an individual who doesn't (whether a Piraha or an American) to be able to just spontaneously start to do it is simply absurd, like testing the average American on calculus. They probably never learned it, they don't ever need to do it, so why on earth would we expect them to be able to?

The entire situation just strikes me as cultural elitism, like a kind of freak show, "Oh my god, how could they not have numbers!" Maybe that's not how people are actually seeing it, but that's how it seems, and I think it's absurd (that last line is SciAm just seems so incredibly condescending).

But these newspaper-level articles about indigenous peoples always infuriate me. Although, newspaper-level articles about any science do that, since they always screw it up somehow.

So I'm dubious about whether this experiment proved what they claim it did, even if it did it's hardly useful or meaningful, and I'm depressed by the coverage. All in all, a great story.