TheBlueNebula

"In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning."
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language", 1946

One may expect to encounter this sort of thing in many of my blog posts, too.

"The [US] federal government, which is among the world’s largest producer [sic] of electronic waste, disposes more than 10,000 computers a week on average."

We've been manufacturing a lot of tech stuff that we have no idea what to do with when we don't want it any more. Abandoning it in large piles turns out to be unhealthy and unwise. Economic incentives to recycle have largely vanished.

"A little over a decade ago, there were at least 12 plants in the United States and 13 more worldwide that were taking these old televisions and monitors and using the cathode ray tube glass to produce new tubes. But now, there are only two plants in India doing this work." 

Should consumers/end-users bear any of the burden of this "glass tsunami?"

Unwanted Electronic Gear Rising in Toxic Piles

Assuming that conclusions based on research involving Western (and mostly American) subjects can lead to a fundamental, universal understanding of human nature is a major mistake made by anthropologists and psychologists, according to this new analysis.

"Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds."

We Aren't The World

Site Recommendation

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
Henry David Thoreau 

A worthwhile blog, featuring posts about law, freedom, social criticism, popular culture, and more. Interesting topics appear regularly here.

Popehat

"To think of ourselves as misfits in our own time and of our own making flatly contradicts what we now understand about the way evolution works—namely, that rate matters. That evolution can be fast, slow, or in-between, and understanding what makes the difference is far more enlightening, and exciting, than holding our flabby modern selves up against a vision—accurate or not—of our well-muscled and harmoniously adapted ancestors."

A new book  Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet and How We Live by Marlene Zuk, labels as "fantasy" the popular notion that we humans have been (and continue to be) better suited anatomically and behaviorally to the life style experienced by our distant ancestors. Was there ever a time when our species was superbly adapted to our environment?

I, for one, am more concerned to be what we are becoming than I am desirous of becoming more of what we have been.

Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past

"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion."
Edmund Burke

Here is a short video that purports to show the difference between what people generally believe and what is actually true regarding the economic disparity between the wealthy and the majority of Americans.

Wealth Inequality in America, Perception vs Reality

Gobekli Tepe is probably 11,500 years old. People living at that time were supposed (according to a prevailing archeological opinion) to have been hunter-gatherers who never settled in one spot for long and who certainly never erected buildings, monuments, or permanent temples. 

Göbekli Tepe is now considered to comprise the world's oldest known religious structures. Located on a hilltop, the site contains 20 round structures surrounded by large T-shaped, limestone pillars Slabs used for the pillars were sourced from bedrock pits about 100 meters away, Many of the pillars are decorated with carved reliefs of animals and other pictograms.

Somewhere around 8000 BCE someone buried the entire site in dirt and left it abandoned. So, not only does Gobekli Tepe represent a scope of building project that wasn't supposed to be happening at its time period, but it also represents an attempt at preservation, concealment, or perhaps repudiation that, to put it mildly, is difficult to explain.

Gobekli Tepe raises more questions than answers. Unfortunately, so does this article by Paul D. Burley, who has been studying the pictograms. 

"What is important here is for some unknown reason the builders of Gobekli Tepe constructed a temple apparently highlighting a time 11,600 years in their future."

 It seems that he intended to make a case based on his interpretation of the images he claims depict the location of the ecliptic intersecting the galactic plane. Maybe that location is correct only during our time, and not at the time the pictograms were made. But for those of us not thoroughly schooled in archeoastronomy this conclusion is much less than obvious.

Gobekli Tepe - Temples Communicating Ancient Cosmic Geography

A good friend recently mentioned that he had just finished the audiobook version of Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. (Highly recommends it, by the way.)  

I find it somewhat surprising that no film version of that novel was ever made. Both Childhood's End and 2001: A Space Odyssey begin with pretty straightforward near-future Science Fiction settings and trundle headlong toward seriously mystical, eschatological stuff in their endings. I don't know why one would have been filmworthy and the other not.

Could it be because studios didn't think the idea of an invasion by benevolent aliens would sell? Or, maybe they were leery of those creepy telekinetic kids who emerge as mankind's ultimate generation. 

"Gambler's fallacy" refers to a mistake that people often make in assessing the probability of a particular outcome from a repeated random action. For example, a coin toss actually has a fifty-fifty chance of either a heads or tails outcome every time the coin is flipped. However, most of us tend to think that a greater probability of a heads would follow . . . oh, say a run of twenty tails in sequence.

Unless there is something wrong with the coin or the flipper (and the process is not truly random), the chance remains fifty-fifty even after a series of highly improbable outcomes, such as 1,000 heads in a row. Outcomes do not become any less random or any more predictable just because the process is repeated.

This piece from NPR's Shankar Vedantam suggests that current popular myths about interviewing for a job might have basis in the gambler's fallacy. Is it better to have your interview scheduled late in the day? Perhaps so--if you happen to follow a series of poorly-perceived candidates. The interviewer is likely to commit this fallacy and assume that a series of tails (bad interviews) should not persist. By following a string of unqualified wannabees you will look good if only because the interviewer is mistakenly inclined to expect a heads (favorable interview) to be more likely.   

I suspect that some interviewers think this way. But I have also (personally) observed another kind of bias among interviewers. I think of it as a failure to "zero-out" all of the registers or re-initialize all of the variables from one interview to the next. What happens, it seems to me, is that an interviewer carries impressions of what  occurred in the first interview forward into the second, third, and so on. 

For example, if the first candidate was moderately bright, outgoing and friendly, then (at least for a while) subsequent candidates seem brighter, more outgoing and friendly. Once the interviewer loads these values into his mental variables they tend to remain there, influencing perceptions until something forces a reset.

This pattern persists when candidates are generally similar; extreme cases tend to force a reset. A seriously sullen candidate will likely erase the predilection to regard candidates as friendly, and may foster a new tendency to see them as moody. 

When you have an interviewer like this, that cheerful, confident candidate who breezed through the door just in front of you may have done you a favor instead of creating an expectation that you will land as a tails.

Deciphering Hidden Biases During Interviews

Site Recommendation

I'm not a real militantly dissatisfied customer, but I play one on Youtube. (Real actors read Yelp reviews . . . beautifully.)

Gotta Kid to Feed Productions - YouTube

Originally posted 7 Jan 2013 on Google+