11.26.06
Sounds for sleeping
Megs doesn’t seem to need this, but it’s nice. Sounds for sleeping from your computer—you custom-mix the sound you want. Only drawback is that you have to have the computer in the room and leave it on. Still…
Donate to support school projects
I like the opportunity, but I’m unhappy that it’s necessary. Shouldn’t public schools be funded at reasonable levels, and teachers paid good salaries, for the good of the country at large? Why is this sort of effort even necessary? But it does allow one to help.
Fun with book titles
This site gives you the likelihood that a particular title will be a best-seller. One could, of course, enter titles of actual books, but it’s more fun to make up titles:
The Lincoln Killer – 26% chance of bestsellerdom
Eschaton Overdrive – 72% chance
I had no idea prosopagnosia was so common
Prosopagnosia = inability to recognize faces. Much more common than I thought:
Like most prosopagnosics, Grüter has spent his whole life inventing strategies to compensate for his face blindness. He says he recognises people by the way they walk, the clothes they wear or the way they speak. Hodes finds hairstyles useful, although he admits this strategy isn’t foolproof. He describes watching a colleague pull her hair into a ponytail and “disappear” before his eyes. “Her identity dissolved in front of me,” he says. “It was very disconcerting.”
Here’s the article:
It was the ultimate cold shoulder. Having spent a perfectly nice evening on a date with a girl from college, Jacob Hodes then spent the rest of the year ignoring her. “I never saw her again,” he says. “Well, I’m sure I walked past her plenty of times, but I just didn’t see her.”
Hodes didn’t set out to play it cool. He just couldn’t for the life of him remember what his date looked like. He had had the same trouble all his life: people would say “Hi”, and he wouldn’t have a clue who they were, and he’d feel shy even with people he’d met several times. He knew the names of celebs but he could have walked past any one of them in the street without batting an eyelid.
It wasn’t until five years ago that it all made sense. That was when Hodes was diagnosed with prosopagnosia, a condition that means he is unable to recognise faces. He is far from alone. In fact, the condition is so common that if you’re not prosopagnosic yourself, you almost certainly know someone who is. Strange as it might sound, until they’re tested most sufferers don’t even realise they have a problem with face recognition.
Research into prosopagnosia, or face blindness, may do more than just explain why some people cannot recognise their nearest and dearest. It might also settle an ongoing debate about how the rest of us recognise faces, which happens to be one of the hottest topics in brain research. Do our brains have specialised modules for the job, or are faces dealt with by generic recognition modules that also recognise other objects, be they makes of car or breeds of dog? This, in turn, is part of a wider debate about how the brain deals with information: is it like a Swiss army knife with a separate tool for each task or is it more of a general-purpose information processor? With more cases of prosopagnosia being diagnosed every year, and a glut of papers on the subject, we could soon have some answers.
Entertaining stop-motion animation video
Pretty cool, guys. Bernd & sein Leben
Portland Art Institute student expelled…
For questioning a classmate’s belief in leprechauns:
Bob Averill’s classmates at the Art Institute of Portland had finished up their work in a character development class on November 8, and were chatting to pass the time until class was over. The discussion moved toward spirituality. Averill, a Game Art Design student and a devoted atheist—he even runs a blog called Portland Atheist—sidled over and joined the conversation.
It was the last time he’d be in an Art Institute class—within two weeks, he was expelled, less than a year before he’d hoped to graduate.
In the classroom that day, Averill says one young woman was talking about her belief in energy layers and astral beings.
“I jokingly asked her if she believed in leprechauns. It turns out, she does. They live on another energy layer,” Averill wrote in notes to himself later that day. “In the interest of bringing my own view to the discussion, I began to ask her how she knew these things. Again I know all too well that people can be sensitive about their spiritual beliefs, so I was pretty much walking on glass as I did so.”
Averill says he wasn’t trying to disprove the other student’s religious beliefs, but “to convince her not to insist that they were scientifically proven.”
The student, apparently offended, complained to the teacher. Averill was called into a meeting that evening, he says, with the Art Institute’s dean of education, associate dean, and the dean of student affairs.
According to Averill, he was told the meeting was “because of my altercation with [the other student].” Averill says he pointed out that he’d “only offered a different viewpoint in a discussion that [my classmate] had started.”
“They didn’t respond well,” Averill told the Mercury. “Their mantra was ‘no discussing religion in school,’ which is fine except that I did not initiate the conversation, she had.” Averill was suspended for four days, until a judicial hearing with the dean of student affairs.
In the US, people owe more than they make
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
If you’re like most people, you’ll be giving your credit cards a healthy workout over the next few weeks. So this is as good a time as any to consider a few harsh realities.
First off, the Center for American Progress, a liberal-minded think tank, has crunched data from the Federal Reserve and found that Americans for the first time owe more money than they make.
According to the center, average household debt levels topped average after-tax income by more than 29 percent as of this summer. Moreover, the average family is now spending 14.4 percent of its disposable income on debt repayments — the largest share since the Fed began collecting such data in 1980.
“This is an unsustainable trend,” said Christian Weller, senior economist at the center. “People simply can’t borrow at the same rate they’ve borrowed in the past.”
According to the Fed, total consumer credit debt, excluding mortgages, hit a record $2.4 trillion in September. Factoring in mortgages, outstanding household debt soars to about $12.3 trillion.
Average credit card interest rates were running about 13 percent last week. But you never know.
That’s because credit cards are the only consumer product for which the terms of sale can change after you sign a contract. Virtually all card agreements include language stipulating that the card provider can change the terms of the deal, including interest rates, “at any time for any reason.”
And as if that didn’t seem sufficiently unfair for consumers, don’t forget the universal default provision. This is an element of many card agreements that allows an issuer to jack up your rates if you miss a payment to another creditor — even if you’ve never been tardy with payments to the issuer in question.
Milton Friedman: “Drug war = bad policy”
Milton Friedman predicted the mess:
In 1971, when Richard Nixon declared his “War on Drugs,” calling for harsher penalties and stricter enforcement of drug laws, the renowned Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman had a John Lennon moment. He suggested we give peace a chance.
To Friedman, who died earlier this month at 94, drug prohibition was unsound public policy, economic insanity and inherently immoral. It wasn’t the drug user who was immoral, as the political world asserted with so much vim and vinegar – the immorality stemmed from making users into criminals.
In a Newsweek article Friedman authored dated May 1, 1972, he took a step outside his realm of monetary policy and free marketeering and laid out in clear, unequivocal terms what kind of social disaster we were buying with Nixon’s drug war. Thirty years later, we know he couldn’t have been more right.
Friedman’s views emanated from libertarianism. He resented the government’s interference in an adult’s free will. But the economist in him also recognized the inexorable market forces that drove the illicit drug trade. He understood that as long as there was demand there would be supply, and by making drugs illegal, those enriched by the drug trade would be a violent, corrupting element of society.
In 1989, in a famous exchange he had on the pages of the Wall Street Journal with then-drug czar William Bennett, Friedman told Bennett that the prohibitionist’s model was doomed to fail and would grind up freedom in the process.
White House alteration of history
Interesting. They were so proud of this at the time. And now?… Via Atrios.
UPDATE: Oops, it seems not. I was easily convinced because of the many instances in which the Bush Administartion has altered Web sites and information on those sites. But in this case, they are apparently innocent.
Nine ways to manage money
Here, I would argue, are nine of the most important financial ideas.
1) Just Say No - To save and invest successfully, nothing is more critical than self-discipline.
That means settling on a mix of stock, bond and money-market funds and then sticking with that mix, no matter how unnerving you find the market’s daily turmoil and no matter how tempted you are to buy the latest hot stock.
More important, you also need the ability to delay gratification, so you save a healthy sum on a regular basis.
2) Get Off the Treadmill - You can’t spend your way to happiness. But lots of folks try, setting themselves up for a lifetime of hefty credit-card bills and emotional disappointment.
You know the cycle: You see something in the store, you decide you just have to have it, you pony up the bucks and, a few weeks or months later, the purchase is all but forgotten — and you’re hankering after something else.
Academics refer to this as the hedonic treadmill. The lesson? If you want happiness, you won’t find it at the shopping mall.
Extremely handy free organizer thingy
A Web-based way of creating a useful little reminder booklet/list thingy. Just go and make one and you’ll see what I mean.
Ten-part mental-fitness program
Via Lifehacker, these ten steps to mental/life fitness. The trick is actually doing them. For example, one’s life goals: few people can bring themselves to write down specific goals, yet if the goal is made specific and recorded and reviewed, the chances of actually achieving the goal increase significantly.
These steps are particularly important for anyone just setting out in life—for example, those who will graduate from college in the coming year.
Megs having a post-nap bath
Megs, having had a nice nap on my lap, takes a careful post-nap bath. Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Books from childhood
Occasionally one recalls a book from childhood—a book that one loved—and wants to read it again. One book of this sort from my own childhood was Bear, Mouse, and Waterbeetle, the story three close friends and their adventures in the jungle. I actually was finally able to find a copy, and while it was interesting, I had not realized how strongly it favored class distinctions and how everyone would be happier if they stayed in their place.
Another book that I’ve search for over the years had a title I couldn’t recall. It was about several children and their adventure with a magic ring. I recalled some of that, and also the room in which the ring was kept, which had some kind of hidden shelves which came out of the wall when the catch was pressed.
I bought various books through Abebooks.com, trying to find it. Five Golden Keys. Not it. The Hidden Garden. Not it.
Then the other day, I happened to discover it. I had picked from DailyLit.com, quite by chance, The Enchanted Castle, by E. Nesbit. That’s the book!
I have a copy on order, but I couldn’t wait, so I’m reading the library copy. Wonderful to find the book at last, and so far, so good. The copy on order will go to The Oldest Grandson in hopes that, when he’s in his mid-sixties, he’ll vaguely recall a wonderful book he read as a boy, an enthralling book… if only he could recall the title…
It’s interesting, BTW, that the book is still in print. It must indeed have general appeal.
Cheney truly believes the President is king
An excellent article in the Boston Globe makes clear that Cheney has always believed that the President is free to ignore the law and is somehow above the law. George Washington, in the initial shaping of the office of President, was offered great powers and a royal mode, but wisely rejected the offer. Cheney would have accepted in a heartbeat.
So the next two years, with a Congress at last willing to exercise its Constitutional duty of oversight, is going to be interesting. Depending on the amount of influence Cheney and his minions have, there will be much digging in and resistance.
The article:
In July 1987, then-Representative Dick Cheney, the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, turned on his hearing room microphone and delivered, in his characteristically measured tone, a revolutionary claim.
President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.
“I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff,” Cheney said.
Most of Cheney’s colleagues did not share his vision of a presidency empowered to bypass US laws governing foreign policy. The committee issued a scathing, bipartisan report accusing White House officials of “disdain for the law.”
Cheney refused to sign it. Instead, he commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution “does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power.”
The Iran-contra scandal was not the first time the future vice president articulated a philosophy of unfettered executive power — nor would it be the last. The Constitution empowers Congress to pass laws regulating the executive branch, but over the course of his career, Cheney came to believe that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for a president’s hands to be tied. He embraced a belief that presidents have vast “inherent” powers, not spelled out in the Constitution, that allow them to defy Congress.
Fun post to read
Ann Althouse and Glenn Reynolds are right-wing bloggers of a particularly dishonest sort—and that’s saying something, since right-wing bloggers are wedded to ideology, not reality. Glenn Greenwald had the temerity to point out the dishonesty of their arguments, which has enraged them. Fun to read, and makes clear that Ann and Glenn are the sort whom sensible people avoid.
