brainrow

While we’re on the subject of flow charts, here’s one, via Boing Boing, from WellingtonGrey.net: W.W.G.W.B.D.?

Now we can understand how the Decider decides.

I’m an old-fashioned guy. I don’t have a cell phone, so I don’t need a customized ring tone.

This blog, however, is thoroughly cutting-edge. So when I heard about these eight distinctive short MP3s, I thought, “Oh, the young kids today, they love this stuff. They can use it for their ringy-dingy thingys.” From Wired.com:

Last year, Americans spent an estimated $600 million on ringtones, thanks to the popularity of realtones — those 10- to 30-second snippets of popular songs. But with tinny sound and abrupt edits, they’re a sorry substitute for the real thing. Now preeminent indie rockers They Might Be Giants have embraced the ringtone as a stand-alone medium. The Brooklyn-based band, which was an early short-form innovator with “Dial-a-Song” – an answering machine that played a different tune each day for callers – has started composing original songlettes as an alternative to the canned loop. “We take a little sketch of a lyric or idea and make it as intense as possible,” says singer-songwriter John Flansburgh. “These songs are built for repeated listens.” To prove it, TMBG composed several original “snacktones” just for Wired readers.

They’re free downloads.

From Dr. Charles, The Cure for Loneliness.

One of my most-awaited TV series is finally being released on DVD: WKRP in Cincinnati.

According to Amazon.com, the first season will be released on April 24. I’m ready!

In two blog entries (one and two) Dr. Janet D. Stemwedel discusses the difference between scientific and non-scientific thinking.

First, here’s the process that no one thinks is a good description of how to come to a scientific conclusion:

Believing something doesn’t make it so. Science is an endeavor that is not concerned with what a person believes about the world but instead with what one can establish about the world, usually on the basis of empirical evidence.

The second drawing is based on the late Sir Karl Popper’s philosophy of science.

Popper didn’t see the problem of induction — that inductive inferences drawn from limited data could go wrong — as something that could be “solved”. However, he thought that the methodology of science avoided the problem by not identifying conclusions arrived at through inductive inference as “knowledge” in the strong sense of “there is no way this could fail to be true”. Here’s Popper’s picture of the process of building scientific knowledge:

Notice that Popper doesn’t think it matters all that much where your hypothesis P comes from. Maybe it comes from lots of poking around and observing your phenomena. Maybe it comes from that recurring nightmare of the snake biting his own tail. It’s not important. The thing that can make P a respectable scientific claim is that it is tested in the right kind of way.

In an earlier discussion of Popper, Stemwedel wrote:

The big difference Popper identifies between science and pseudo-science is a difference in attitude. While a pseudo-science is set up to look for evidence that supports its claims, Popper says, a science is set up to challenge its claims and look for evidence that might prove it false. In other words, pseudo-science seeks confirmations and science seeks falsifications.

No wonder some politicians are at war with science. A big bag of hot air might not carry you very high if you keep looking for ways to poke holes in it.

I’m reading a programming book called Perl Best Practices. There’s some good stuff in it, though most of it is fairly technical. My favorite things are the short quotes that begin each chapter. Most of them are pretty nerdy, but a few of them speak to all of us:

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. –Charles Babbage

This is why everyone should learn at least a little bit of computer programming. There is no magic inside the computer, but it can certainly seem like magic until you get in and poke around a bit for yourself.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. –Erica Jong, How to Save Your Own Life

Advice is what you ignore when you already know the answer and think it might magically change.

Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction. –Albert Einstein

Haven’t you heard? That emboldens the other fools.

What do you do when the facts don’t support your conclusions?

You get new facts, of course!

Ladies and gentlemen, the Conservapedia.

On unicorns:

The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times, which provides an unimpeachable de facto argument for their once having been in existence.

On kangaroos:

After the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land — as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart — or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.

On the cactus:

Cacti are known for their high content of alkaloids, and have often been used in the sacramental rights of the Native Americans. Because of this, the early Catholic missionaries in the west thought the plants to be the work of Satan, and this is perhaps a preferable view to that of materialistic evolution since it is difficult to imagine how something like mescaline could have evolved by natural selection. Besides that, the psychoactive content of many cacti have inspired the writings of such ungodly men as Aldous Huxley and Albert Hoffman.

The entire entry on the Stone Age:

The Stone age is the prehistoric time before the Age of Metal. It is divided into two parts; Paleolithic and Neolithic. During the Paleolithic age, man harvested wild plants and animals for food. Agriculture began in the Neolithic age. The dates of the Stone age are debated. Biased historians often give older dates than can be proven by archaeology.

An early entry on the Theory of Relativity:

This theory rejects Isaac Newton’s God-given theory of gravitation and replaces it with a concept that there is a continuum of space and time, and that large masses (like the sun) bend space in a manner similar to how a finger can depress an area of a balloon. From this proposed bending of space the expression arose that “space is curved.” But experiments later proved that space is flat overall.

Nothing useful has even been built based on the theory of relativity. Scientists claim that this is because relativity only applies to extremely heavy or fast objects and rely on future scientists to finally come up with the proof that will vindicate their life’s work. Most conservatives are skeptical since science is supposed to be about finding proof before a theory becomes a fact, not after.

I found Conservapedia via a lot of blogs at ScienceBlogs, and found links to specific entries on many different blogs.

Thrilling Wonder has collected some interesting signs. (They have more here and here.)

Also at Thrilling Wonder, a sequence of photos shows one way you might be cheated out of your card and your secret PIN code at an automated teller machine (ATM). Be careful out there.

Iran rushes over the cliff:

Iran has no brake and no reverse gear in its nuclear program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday, while a deputy foreign minister vowed Tehran was prepared for any eventuality, “even for war.”

No brake? No reverse gear? Listen, Mahmoud — George W. Bush is not a good role model.

I don’t think we can eradicate the influence of stupidity in any human endeavor. But isn’t it about time we all stopped making it the core of every plan?

Does it ever end?

At times, it seems the world’s supply of ignorance and pettiness is inexhaustible:

Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.

“I sensed the disrespect with which this was to be carried out and got fed up,” Ms. Holloway added. “I didn’t have room in my life for these women to come in and tell my sisters of three years that they weren’t needed.”

At times, we find ourselves once again in old battles we thought had been fought and won years ago.

This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join, provoking accusations of racial discrimination.

Are we in a rut?

The trouble is that prejudice and ignorance and pettiness are not enemies that can be overthrown once and for all. They are like stones that must be eroded over a long, long time — worn down, and worn down, and worn away, slowly, steadily, ceaselessly, by every breath we take.

It never ends.

A mix of genres that gives me chills: the great Irish folk band The Chieftains, and Ziggy Marley:

Political cartoonist Ward Sutton illustrates the new way forward in Iraq and a handy White House guide to Troop Morale. Among the things that hurt morale:

American lawmakers debating the Iraq War. Or talking about it. Or even thinking about it…

The Dixie Chicks opting not to shut up and still winning five Grammy Awards.

Among the things that strengthen troop morale:

Not babying them with things like body armor….

The record profits of oil companies.

Totally cool new styles of prosthetic limbs.

And finally, Sutton on Bush, Iraq, and something about a corner.

King Midas turned everything he touched into gold. It wasn’t as much of a blessing as you might think.

I don’t want to tell you what King George turns everything he touches into.

Dick Cheney on the reduction of British forces in Iraq:

I look at it, and what I see is an affirmation of the fact that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well.

Sure, only the parts of Iraq controlled by Bush, Cheney and Co. are a total disaster.

It’s like their super-power.

Via Crooks and Liars, Conan O’Brien shows us Meet the Press for Idiots:

I took an economics class many years ago. I didn’t learn much.

One thing I do remember is the concept of opportunity costs. The cost of any economic decision can be measured not only in dollars and cents, but in the things you must forego to pay for that choice: buying the giant-screen plasma TV means you can’t remodel the bathroom — and vice versa. Every choice is a trade-off.

Via Daily Kos, Matt Taibbi takes note of some Bush administration trade-offs (Warning: strong profanity in the linked article):

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush’s proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush’s tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what’s interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders’s office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family — the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune — would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Oh, we definitely need a better Decider.