The Realism Of Pessimists

Linda Besner looks at a study of humanity's innate optimism:

Even in my airplane behaviour, though, there’s a seed of optimism: I always wear my contacts so I can swim to safety if we crash into the ocean. (If I were actually involved in the spectacular fireball of a plane crash that’s scrolling through my imagination, I would almost certainly be too dead to benefit from corrective eyewear.) I picture a scenario in which the probability of survival is incredibly low, and then class myself among the minority of people who survive, instead of the majority who end up at the bottom of the ocean.This kind of thinking is what dominates our predictions: we believe ourselves to be exceptional. Even thinking of myself as more pessimistic than everyone else is rather self-regarding: if optimists make up 80 percent of the population, why do I think I’m so special? In all likelihood, I’m as blind to my own optimism as other people are to theirs; that’s why they call it a bias.
But our illusions are what keep us going. Sharot’s research into the optimism bias has generated evidence to suggest that this persistent tendency to picture ourselves as special cases, immune to the bad things in life and disproportionately favoured with the good, is a basic function of the brain. One of the significant differences, as far as we know, between humans and other animals, is our capacity to project our spectral selves through time—to imagine a past and a future. Our ability to imagine a future has helped us to use tools, build civilizations, and domesticate other animals, but it comes with quite a catch: it also made us aware of our own mortality. When the best-case scenario is that we will all get old and die, and so will everyone we’ve ever loved, optimism isn’t a choice—it’s a necessity.
For humans to conquer life’s despair long enough to reproduce, we need to be able to ignore much of what we learn. As Sharot puts it, “the knowledge of death had to emerge at the same time as its irrational denial.” Unreasonable optimism is how we accept the human condition.

One of the findings is that pessimists are more likely to accurately predict outcomes, because they are more realistic.  I'm guessing that I fall into the pessimist category, even if I'm not highly accurate in predictions.

Nanodots Add Safety Features

Wired:

The things that make Nanodots so awesome are also the things that make them enticing and dangerous for young children. It is easy to see why they would be attracted shiny playthings, especially if the child sees older siblings and parents playing with them. It’s the shiny factor that Nanodots has addressed first with a minor change in packaging.
The retail package has always had an emphasis on safety with high-contrast warnings, 14+ age indicators and clear labels warning that the product is not for children. The new change allows the end caps to be assembled into a compact and opaque container. The NANO container retains most of the package’s warnings and can be just a little stubborn for smaller hands to open.
The next feature, AversiveTech, addresses what happens when a child does get a hold of some dots and tries to swallow them. AversiveTech is a patent pending technology developed by Nano Magnets that puts an extremely bitter coating on their new colored dots.
My son unwittingly volunteered to taste the coating when I asked him to touch them to his tongue. He spent the next 20 minutes spitting and sputtering, even after washing his mouth out with water and eating a bowl of ice cream. They sure are gullible at that age.

Sounds like he's trying to win father of the year.  I'd hate to see toy magnets go away.  They were something I loved playing with as a kid.

Battle For Water Out West

NYT:

A new race for water is rippling through the drought-scorched heartland, pitting farmers against oil and gas interests, driven by new drilling techniques that use powerful streams of water, sand and chemicals to crack the ground and release stores of oil and gas.

A single such well can require five million gallons of water, and energy companies are flocking to water auctions, farm ponds, irrigation ditches and municipal fire hydrants to get what they need.

That thirst is helping to drive an explosion of oil production here, but it is also complicating the long and emotional struggle over who drinks and who does not in the arid and fast-growing West. Farmers and environmental activists say they are worried that deep-pocketed energy companies will have purchase on increasingly scarce water supplies as they drill deep new wells that use the technique of hydraulic fracturing.

And this summer’s record-breaking drought, which dried up wells and ruined crops, has only amplified those concerns.

“It’s not a level playing field,” said Peter V. Anderson, who grows corn and alfalfa on the parched plains of eastern Colorado. “I don’t think in reality that the farmer can compete with the oil and gas companies for that water. Their return is a hell of a lot better than ours.”

How do they truck in up to 5 million gallons of water for a single well?  That is just crazy.  I can't see how fracking could possibly be sustainable.

Republican Crybabies

Mark Thoma:

As for Republicans blaming the troubles on Obama's "arrogance," that's just silly. I know Republicans like Boehner and Cantor are perfect in every way, no reason for Obama to have any problems with them (despite the fact that, according to Woodward they were very childish during the negotiations, "throughout the talks, Boehner and Cantor undercut each other, their animosity so obvious that a White House staffer 'felt awkward being in the same room with the two of them,'" and despite other behavior such as "Boehner screens Obama’s calls and shuns his requests to come back to the White House for yet another meeting. Obama is left to complain — publicly — that 'I’ve been left at the altar.'"). Sounds to me like there's an argument for personality issues on the Republican side -- some of it within the Party -- that's at least as strong as the silliness about "arrogance."
But really, what is it with Republicans and their hurt feelings? They tell us that the CEOs of major corporations stopped investing, stopped maximizing profit for their investors because the president hasn't honored them enough. They'll show him! -- all the while losing money for their investors? Republicans complain endlessly about the debt, it was a theme of their convention, but given a chance to do something about it they walk away because the president didn't treat them exactly as they expected and demanded? Apparently, their feelings got in the way. They show no respect to the president whatsoever -- quite the opposite -- and then break off negotiations they believe are crucial to the future of the country because he didn't show them the respect they think they deserve? Cry me a river (well, everyone but Boehner).

I have enjoyed all the rugged individualist Republicans whining about how mean Obama is, but what gets me is how Republicans are always playing the victim, even as they accuse Democrats of some utilization of a culture of victimization.  They are always crying about the bias of the "liberal media," even when that same media goes out of their way to make the case that Republican idiocy is a real public policy.  The supposedly brutal and biased media are scared of being attacked by whining Republicans, even though all the drivel put out by the Republicans almost never gets called out for it's stupidity.  The GOP is the national pity party.

On The Road With The Sports Guy

Bill Simmons visits the gym in Knightstown, Indiana, where many of the scenes of Hoosiers were filmed.




Anybody who hasn't watched that movie just shouldn't be allowed to reside in the Midwest.

Purely Pacific Northwest

Purely Pacific Northwest from John Eklund on Vimeo.

Art And Science

NASA Photo of the Day

September 5:

Airglow Over Germany
Image Credit & Copyright: Jens Hackmann Explanation: Does air glow? It does, but it is usually hard to see. When conditions are right, however, a faint glow about 90 kilometers up can be observed, most easily with a wide-angle long-duration camera exposure. The same airglow can also frequently be seen looking down -- in pictures taken from Earth orbit -- as a faint arc hovering above the surface. Pictured above between the beige clouds, above the curving Earth, behind the streaking airplane, and in front of the sparkling stars are some green bands of airglow. The glow is predominantly created by the excitation of atoms by ultraviolet light from the Sun, with the bands resulting from density fluctuations caused by upward moving atmospheric gravity waves. The above image was taken in mid-July above Weikersheim, Germany. Lightning and aurorae can also cause air to glow, but result from particle collisions and are more fleeting.

The Revolution of Google Maps

The Atlantic:

It's probably better not to think of Google Maps as a thing like a paper map. Geographic information systems represent a jump from paper maps like the abacus to the computer. "I honestly think we're seeing a more profound change, for map-making, than the switch from manuscript to print in the Renaissance," University of London cartographic historian Jerry Brotton told the Sydney Morning Herald. "That was huge. But this is bigger."
The maps we used to keep folded in our glove compartments were a collection of lines and shapes that we overlaid with human intelligence. Now, as we've seen, a map is a collection of lines and shapes with Nick Volmar's (and hundreds of others') intelligence encoded within.
It's common when we discuss the future of maps to reference the Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map of the entire world. It seems like a ridiculous notion that we would need a complete representation of the world when we already have the world itself. But to take scholar Nathan Jurgenson's conception of augmented reality seriously, we would have to believe that every physical space is, in his words, "interpenetrated" with information. All physical spaces already are also informational spaces. We humans all hold a Borgesian map in our heads of the places we know and we use it to navigate and compute physical space. Google's strategy is to bring all our mental maps together and process them into accessible, useful forms.
Their MapMaker product makes that ambition clear. Project managed by Gupta during his time in India, it's the "bottom up" version of Ground Truth. It's a publicly accessible way to edit Google Maps by adding landmarks and data about your piece of the world. It's a way of sucking data out of human brains and onto the Internet. And it's a lot like Google's open competitor, Open Street Map, which has proven that it, too, can harness the crowd's intelligence.

Google maps is amazing.  The Street View feature is just great.  

Is Sarcasm Dying?

Simon Doonan wonders:

From the Greek sarkasmos, meaning to sneer at or taunt (and derived from a term for rending the flesh), sarcasm is one of the building blocks of civilization. The ability to express an unwelcome observation in a wickedly passive-aggressive manner is, at the very least, a great alternative to old-fashioned fisticuffs, or rape ‘n’ pillage. When I think about those ancient Greeks and the carte blanche they enjoyed to say horrid things to one another, I get quite jealous. For example: If you were strolling through downtown Thebes and you ran into a pal who was looking particularly soiled and unkempt, you might say, “Going somewhere special?” to which the other Greek might good-naturedly reply, “Oh! You and your flesh-rending ironic observations!” It’s sad to think that such a remark would, in our squishy and oversensitive age, be met with accusations of “hating.”

If sarcasm is dying—it’s now such a rare commodity that when the Republicans decided to insert a little snark into last week’s proceedings, they were obliged to exhume an octogenarian entertainer, hello!—what, pray, will become of the little children of today? Sardonic irony is as critical to healthy child development as vitamins and tick-checks. Raising your brats on an exclusive diet of sincerity is a recipe for disaster. The current mania for relentless positivity and self-esteem building leaves me convinced that we are in real danger of turning out an entire generation of inspirational speakers.

I am happy to say that I was barraged with sarcasm during my formative years. My teachers specialized in subtle-but-withering verbal assaults. Many incidents spring to mind: After jackhammering my way through an entire page of Ulysses in a robotic monotone—how was I supposed to know that James Joyce expected the reader to insert the lilts, pauses, and commas intuitively?—my English teacher announced that he was overcome by the “sensitivity” of my reading and would need to “nip out for a fag” in order to compose himself. While the entire class roared with laughter, I flinched and cringed. But I eventually recovered. Better to be verbally humiliated than whacked upside the head, an outcome that was also on offer, and the benefits of which will doubtless be the subject of some future column.

I have yet to become too sincere.  I can be on occasion, but I generally love to break out the sarcastic comment on someone who is getting a little full of himself.  It always gives the other folks listening a good chuckle.