Obama on Mohammadenism

Someone has compiled a video from clips of Pres. Obama commenting on Islam.

Meanwhile, Fort Hood gunman had told US military colleagues that infidels should have their throats cut and the Mohammaden shrink lectured that the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of fighting in wars against other Muslims.

Court reconsiders software patents

The US Supreme Court just heard oral arguments on the Bilski case:

Chief Justice Roberts told him that he had understood the government’s argument until one of the final footnotes in the merits brief. There, in footnote 30, the Solicitor General’s brief said the Bilski/Warsaw claims might satisfy the Federal Circuit test if they had tied it to “machine implementation,” such as using a computer network.

“That takes away everything you said in 54 pages,” the Chief Justice commented acidly. Stewart backed off a bit, saying that the risk-management notion would not be patentable if a computer were “just used to crunch numbers.” It would have to have something that “gives it functionality.”

What does that mean, that number crunching is not functionality?

The case involves a lower court decision that appeared to abolish business method patents, and computer software patents also. Unless the computer is used for some functionality besides number crunching, whatever that means. The core of the problem is that the courts are unable to separate software from hardware.

I made the point many years ago that the first software patent was not in the modern computer era at all, but the Morse Code patent from 150 years ago. It had a claim for the system of dots and dashes, and the supreme court upheld it. Apparent there was discussion today by the justices about that patent claim.

High-functioning crazy people

From a Santa Cruz California:

The crazy people in Berkeley wander around pushing shopping carts; the crazy people in Glastonbury sit in fields smoking pot. What is distinctive about Santa Cruz is its peculiarly high-functioning crazy people, like this guy, who are entirely divorced from reality, yet somehow manage to, for instance, run a record label. ...

Santa Cruz, California -- also known as the World's Largest Open Air Mental Institution.
P.S. Sorry, but you'll probably only get this if you've actually visited the place.

There is some truth to this.

Jihad in Fort Hood Texas

His name is Major Nidal Malik Hasan. He is a first-generation Palestinian Arab-American. He is a Mohammedan. He is a psychiatrist. He told the Army that he had no religion, and then tried to get out of his military obligations because of his religion. Witnesses say he yelled "Allahu akbar" during his rampage. He gave out copies of the Koran beforehand. He has reportedly spoken in defense of suicide bombers.

President Obama cautioned against "jumping to conclusions". I don't need to jump.

Update: I just watched Nihad Awad. of CAIR on MSNBC-TV making an analogy to Eric Rudolph planting bombs in the name of Christianity. No, he is wrong. Rudolph never did that. He was an atheist.

Update: Someone else pointed out that this is the same Obama who said this a couple of months ago:

The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

Paranormal Activity spoiler

The TV trailer for Paranormal Activity now shows the movie ending! Here is a similar trailer that show the entire plot, along with the ending.

The movie is a cleverly amateurish production. You are supposed to believe that it is an edited compilation of some home movies. It is advertised as a scary movie, but all the scariness is in the trailer. The rest of the movie is just long tedious scenes in which nothing happens.

The new show V on ABC TV

The Chicago Tribune TV critic writes:

Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

The news media swoons in admiration -- one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: "Why don't you show some respect?!" The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader's origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: "Embracing change is never easy."

So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait -- did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who's come here to eat us?

The alien leader Anna has the liberal media brainwashed. But she is a short-haired smooth-talking manipulative phony who is not what she appears to be. She is an evil space alien reptile disguised as a human.

A blogger also compares:

They come promoting goodness, peace and light – they’re here to help us with their technology, including setting up healing centers where they can easily cure over 60 incurable diseases. The world is “hurting” according to one of the characters, so it seems the vast majority of the population accepts them on their word without much questioning at all. There are small protests breaking out everywhere, but those folks are looked at as rabble rousers who need to get with the program.

The aliens are all good looking and about hope and change (their words, not mine) and interestingly when reporters begin to ask hard questions upon Anna’s arrival, the newscaster mentioned above accuses them of being rude(!). ...

During the interview the phrase “universal health care” is actually used in describing what they are offering and why they should be accepted.

There’s an underground group that knows what the Visitors are up to, but they are looked upon as nutjobs and terrorists even though they are in the right and know what the Visitors are really up to.

If this TV show is a parody of Obama, then it is brutal. It portrays the leader as alien, effeminate, publicity-seeking, dishonest, reptilian, tricky, and bent on world domination, and yet somehow lulling the gullible public into subservience with bogus promises.

Phony dog evidence

The NY Times reports:

HOUSTON — A dog’s sniff helped put Curvis Bickham in jail for eight months. Now that the case against him has been dropped, he wants to tell the world that the investigative technique that justified his arrest smells to high heaven.

The police told Mr. Bickham they had tied him to a triple homicide through a dog-scent lineup, in which dogs choose a suspect’s smell out of a group. The dogs are exposed to the scent from items found at crime scene, and are then walked by a series of containers with samples swabbed from a suspect and from others not involved in the crime. If the dog finds a can with a matching scent, it signals — stiffening, barking or giving some other alert its handler recognizes. ...

Mr. Myers, the animal behavior expert, suggested that handlers like Deputy Pikett might believe in the dogs and the methods, but might allow samples to become contaminated or inadvertently allow the dogs to pick up on subtle, even unconscious signals from handlers or detectives.

“They just don’t realize they’re doing it wrong,” he said.

No, it should even obvious to a dumb judge that this is unscientific.

No test is 100% foolproof. For this test to be scientific, someone has to do an objective measure of the reliability of the test. The judge just has to ask, "What is the error rate? Show me how you measured the error rate?"

This dog sniff expert has probably never measured the error rate. He just has a gut feeling that it works. Then it is not scientific, and should not be admissable in court.

Effect of bad genes

People have the funniest ideas about what to do with genetic info. Eg, consider this example:

On the basis of the genetic tests, Judge Reinotti docked a further year off the defendant's sentence, arguing that the defendant's genes "would make him particularly aggressive in stressful situations".

If someone has a killer gene, would you lock him up for a longer time or a shorter time or ignore it?

If someone has a gene for bad driving, should car insurance companies be able to charge him extra? Or maybe he should not even get a drivers license.

It may be decades before the public figures out what to do with genetic info.

The great Mexican pig flu hoax

Michael Fumento writes:

swine flu cases in the last seven months, according to the CDC, equal about four days' worth of seasonal flu deaths during the season. ...

So why did they do it?

You might ask H.L. Mencken, who observed that government, ever seeks "to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Fumento is the best reporter on these medical issues.

It is funny to hear the authorities simultaneously complain that there is a shortage of H1N1 flu vaccine, and that many people don't want it. If there is a shortage anyway, shouldn't we be glad that not everyone wants it?

H-1B visa applications lowest since 2003

The Si Valley newpspaper reports:

More than six months after the federal government began accepting petitions for work visas popular with Silicon Valley companies, thousands of spots remain open, a reflection of the nation's high unemployment and the political pressure to hire citizens, experts say.

As of last week, 46,700 H-1B visa applications had been submitted, thousands less than the 65,000 allocated for fiscal year 2010 and the lowest number since 2003. The cap for 20,000 additional H-1B visas reserved for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges with at least a master's degree was met, though applications are still being accepted.

Tech industry insiders say the recession is primarily responsible for the dearth of applications. "There is definitely a sense that there is a growing hostility toward some of the (visa) programs, but I don't think that is related to the downturn" in petitions, said Jenifer Verdery, Intel's director of work force policy. "You are not going to see big ramp-ups in hiring during the downturn."

If the H-1B visas were used legitimately, then demand would not be dropping so much. The visas are supposed for short-term employment in specialty skills where no American is available. The need for such workers does not vary much with the ups and downs of the economy.

But nearly all of the H-1B workers only have skills that are readily available from USA workers. When there is a recession and high unemployment, American workers can be hired cheaply. When unemployment is low, those same skills are available in those same American workers, but it costs more to hire them. So foreign H-1B workers are attractive because they can be hired more cheaply.

I say that the phonyness of the H-1B program is proved by how sharply demand for H-1B visas varies with the unemployment rate.

High testosterone linked to miserly behaviour

I have finally learned why I am miserly -- too much testosterone! NewScientist reports:

"Our broad conclusion is that testosterone causes men essentially to be stingy," says Karen Redwine, a neuro-economist at Whittier College in California, who presented the work at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago last week.

A previous study of 17 City of London traders found that morning testosterone levels correlated with each day's gains and losses, with more of the hormone associated with a profit. ...

One biological factor could be the dynamics between testosterone and another hormone called oxytocin. Sometimes called the cuddle chemical, oxytocin also influences generosity. In a 2007 study, Zak's team found that oxytocin administration boosted generosity in the same game by 80 per cent.

Redwine notes that testosterone blocks the action of oxytocin in the brain. "It's possible that by creating these alpha males we actually inhibited oxytocin," she says.

Curious research coming from a woman named Redwine. Next she will be claiming that red wine is beneficial.

My testosterone has recovered since it took a hit after the last election:

Men who voted for Republican John McCain in last year's US presidential election saw their testosterone levels fall significantly when they learned he had lost to Barack Obama, a study showed Thursday.

Saliva samples collected from 163 men on the evening of the election showed that voters for both McCain and Obama had similar testosterone levels when polling stations closed on the east coast, but the levels in McCain backers fell when Obama was announced as the winner.

By contrast, testosterone levels among men who voted for Obama remained stable.

My guess is that a lot more of those Obama supporters are eating tofu.

Why the AMA favors

John Goodman writes:

People are fond of believing that the American Medical Association (AMA) represents physicians. But if representation follows revenues, the AMA’s most important customer is probably the federal government.

In1983, an agreement between the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) and the AMA made the AMA’s copyrighted Current Procedural Terminology codes (CPT) the sole coding system that could be used for billing Medicare.

The AMA used to get its money from membership dues, but now it gets $70M per year from CPT codes.

The 2001 codes are here. I don't see how a private company can claim to own some 5-digits used for Medicare billing.

Baby Einstein a failure

The NY Times reports:

Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those ”Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses.

They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect. ...

Baby Einstein, founded in 1997, was one of the earliest players in what became a huge electronic media market for babies and toddlers. Acquired by Disney in 2001, the company expanded to a full line of books, toys, flashcards and apparel, along with DVDs including “Baby Mozart,” “Baby Shakespeare” and “Baby Galileo.”

Of course it doesn't work. If the parents are stupid enough to buy that junk, then they probably have too low an IQ to have genius kids.

Blogger defends Roman Polanski

A "Pro-Peace" blogger writes:

Legally, Roman Polanski admitted to consensual sex with a minor (statutory rape), he did not plead guilty to forcible rape. The reason given for the plea bargain by the family is that they did not want their daughter to go through the trauma of a trial. ...

One of the great evils of our age is the increasing ability of the State to pursue criminal charges without the consent of the victim which is the very antithesis of victims’ rights. It is evil. ...

Since she has forgiven him and most likely received a large sum of money it is now no longer the interest or concern of the State. ...

No, Polanski did not legally admit to consensual sex. He admitted to a crime. Consensual sex is not a crime.

I agree that the state should not pursue criminal charges against an adult
victim unless that adult victim complains. Many domestic violence advocates
have pushed for laws and processes that punish men even when the woman does
not complain. (A recent example of such punishment is here.) I disagree with that, but it has no resemblance to the Polanski case.

The Polanski victim complained, and Polanski was convicted. That ends the victim's obligation. Now it is the obligation of the state to make him serve the sentence corresponding to his conviction, and to prosecute him for being a fugitive.

Economist writes on global warming

There has been a lot of criticism of the new Levitt-Dubner Super-Freakonomics book. It seems like another case of experts giving opinions outside their expertise.

Levitt is an economist, but he is mostly famous for social science research
on abortion that turned out to be wrong, and for various things to make his
ideas more saleable to the public. I would not expect him to have anything useful to say about global warming anyway.

Levitt responds:

The statements being circulated create the false impression that our analysis of the global-warming crisis is ideological and unscientific. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I guess that means that he will post a substantive response.

Update: More criticism of Levitt here.

New spanking study

A new spanking study (abstract available only) claims that child fussiness at age 1 leads to aggression at age 2 and low IQ at age 3, and all are correlated to spanking. These anti-spanking studies have been criticized by the WSJ and the American College of Pediatricians.

I don't doubt that these correlations exist. If you looked at adults, you would probably find that low IQ and aggressive behavior was correlated with being jailed. But that is not a reason to get rid of jails. It clarifies why we have the jails.

Harvey Milk Day

California news:

Slain gay rights activist Harvey Milk will get a special day of recognition in California, making him only the second person in state history — in addition to conservationist John Muir — to gain such a designation.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's signing of the bill establishing "Harvey Milk Day" each May 22, Milk's birthday, was announced Monday. ...

Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com, said he was appalled by the governor's decision.

"Sadly, children in public schools will now have even more in-your-face, homosexual-bisexual-transsexual indoctrination," he said in a statement.

The schools are already indoctrinating students with false info, as you can see from today's Dear Abby letter:

DEAR ABBY: I am a 15-year-old girl who is losing the will to live. I am bisexual, but my parents are very anti-gay/lesbian, so I can't tell them about my sexual orientation. ...

DEAR HURTING: As you already know, your sexual orientation isn't something you chose. It is something you were born with, and your parents' disapproval -- as intimidating as it may be -- isn't going to change it. ...

No, there is no scientific proof that a bisexual orientation is ever determined in a 15-year-old girl, and certainly no proof that it was determined at birth. This is the sort of nonsense that California schools are going to teach on Harvey Milk Day.

I realize that there are people who claim to know such things to be true from personal experience. There are just as many who claim to know such things are false from personal experience. And a lot of smart academic scientists have done a lot of studies to try to prove that sexual orientation is determined at birth. All of those studies have failed.

Washing hands with warm water

The NY Times writes:

Soap and warm water have long been said to prevent the spread of infections, but is warm or hot water really more effective than cold? ...

“Temperature of water used for hand washing should not be guided by antibacterial effects but comfort,” they wrote, ...

Hot water for hand washing has not been proved to remove germs better than cold water.

There is something seriously wrong with this story. Removing germs is not the only purpose to washing hands.

I wash my hands to get rid of dirt, oils, and germs. I always thought that warm water was more effective at getting rid of dirt, not germs. This article does not even address whether the warm water is better for cleaning dirt, and yet it recommends cold water as being just as good.

This is a problem with a lot of science-based recommendations. Someone will quote a study, but the study may have only looked at one aspect of the matter.

Outage has been restored

I lose electric power whenever there is a storm, and a company (PG&E) robot just called after a 3-hour outage and said (to my answering machine robot):

The outage in your area has been restored to most locations in your area.

This sounds like a near miss, which one usage dictionary says is not an error, despite its apparent lack of logic.

How calorie info influences choices

WSJ blogger Carl Bialik writes:

I wrote last summer about menu labeling of calorie counts, and questioned whether they would influence diners to make healthier choices. This week, a widely reported study of a New York City law mandating menu labeling in chain restaurants revealed that low-income diners didn’t order lower-calorie meals when confronted by the calorie counts, when compared with New York diners before the law was passed and with diners in Newark, which doesn’t have mandatory labeling. The study undercuts a major notion behind menu labeling: that, when confronted with mammoth calorie counts, diners will choose healthier options.

The researchers and experts were baffled at the study results.

I think that all of these articles miss the point. The most immediate effect to posting calorie info is that it allows the customer to calculate the cost of the calories. He can figure how many calories per dollar he can buy. Or if he needs 500 calories to satisfy his appetite, then he can choose the dish that gets him those calories most cheaply.

The obvious consequence of this is that low-income customers would use the info to buy more calories for their dollar. The high-income customers would not care so much.
It is like supermarket unit pricing. The low-income customers use the unit price labels to buy cheaper generic foods, while the high-income customers are more likely to ignore the unit price and buy a brand name.

This is exactly what the study shows.

The experts make the mistake is that they assume that poor people will think that low calorie dishes are healthier, and therefore be willing to pay more money for them. That seems crazy to me. The low calorie dishes are not necessarily healthier, and the poor are the least likely to pay extra for them even if they were. If poor people want to cut calories, they just buy less and eat less.

Why Obama got the prize

Roissy has a theory. Pres. Obama was elected by bitter unmarried women, and Norwegian women gave him the prize. Sailor call it the The Affirmative Action Nobel. I think that Obama is becoming a caricature of himself.

Foreign born prize winners

San Jose Mercury News columnist Chris O'Brien writes:

If you're looking for reasons to puff out your chest and take pride in being American, then take note that the first six Nobel Prize winners announced this week are U.S. citizens.

Here's something else you should know: Four of those winners were born outside the U.S. ...

However you feel about the H-1B visas that our tech companies hunger for, or the swarms of bodies crossing our borders to pick our crops, these hot-button topics obscure the reality: We need these immigrants to renew our economy and to prosper. Our demonization of them is shameful.

And now the Nobel Peace Prize winner is a US citizen from Hawaii and Indonesia!

O'Brien's argument is debunked by VDARE.

The first thing you notice about Chris O'Brien is that you cannot tell whether he is a man or a woman from either his name or his picture. (His picture is always in the print edition, but not online on his blog.)

O'Brien's biggest story as a SJMN reporter was his page one story that the Microsoft takeover of Yahoo was a done deal. Not just an intention, but a certainty. No, the takeover never happened. He has been wrong on a lot of other issues also.

His argument is absurd. H-1B visas do not goto potential Nobel prize winners. They goto wage slaves doing grunt work in order to displace American workers.

Reading nonsense makes you smarter

The NY Timesreports:

In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.

After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.

The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

This sounds bogus to me, and the research report is not online. If it checks out, maybe I will post some nonsense for my readers' benefit.

The Sorry State Of Psychotherapy

The high-status psychologists badmouth their colleagues who got their degrees from second-rate colleges:

Where's The Science? The Sorry State Of Psychotherapy

ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2009) — The prevalence of mental health disorders in this country has nearly doubled in the past 20 years. Who is treating all of these patients? Clinical psychologists and therapists are charged with the task, but many are falling short by using methods that are out of date and lack scientific rigor. This is in part because many of the training programs—especially some Doctorate of Psychology (PsyD) programs and for-profit training centers—are not grounded in science. ...

For example, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to be the most effective treatment for PTSD and has the fewest side-effects, yet many psychologists do not use this method. Baker and colleagues cite one study in which only 30 percent of psychologists were trained to perform CBT for PTSD and only half of those psychologists elected to use it. ... whereas medications such as Paxil have shown 25 to 50 percent relapse rates.

They also badmouth prescription drugs, as they don't have licenses to prescribe drugs.

Meanwhile, those quacks who can prescribe drugs tell a different story:

According to Nutt, few psychotherapy trials meet the requirements demanded of drug tests, and even those that do frequently show that psychotherapy performs no better -- and often worse -- than pharmacological interventions. What is more, he points out, many psychotherapy trials do not even consider the possibility that their treatment could harm. Yet all therapists should be aware that therapy can have adverse effects on some patients and a major part of psychotherapy training is how to deal with issues such as counter-transference that can mediate these negative effects.

I am not sure about the drugs, but I do agree that the psychologist study is not scientific if it does not even recognize the possibility of a treatment doing harm.

New childrearing book

A new book, NurtureShock, offers scientific evidence on child rearing, reviewed here:

Frequent and oft-undeserved rewards in the form of praise, the authors caution, deprive a child of motivation and discourage persistence. “It’s a neuro­biological fact,” they write, pointing to studies of M.R.I. scans and trained rodents. True, but far from new. Albeit without the sci-techy benefit of brain imaging, in 1964, “Children: The Challenge,” a popular manual of the day, warned, “Praise, as a means of encouragement, must be used very cautiously.” It can be “dangerous” if a child sees praise as a reward and “could easily lead to discouragement,” the author, Rudolf Dreikurs, noted.

People probably had more common sense in 1964. It is since then that there had been a big fad to overpraise kids for everything.

The review goes on:

One of the most valuable chapters looks at how white parents deal with race. For those who think it best to describe Caucasians as “pinkish white” and blacks as “brown skinned” (raise your hands, Upper West Siders), recent research delivers a strong rebuke. Pretending race doesn’t exist leaves young children to form their own — often racist — opinions.

This is funny. Brainwash your kids, or they might figure things out for themselves.

How soccer gets it wrong

Soccer fan David Post writes:

in a good healthy weekend’s dose of soccer-watching (say, 3 or 4 games), you will see, guaranteed, anywhere from a half-dozen to twenty incorrect offside calls. Not “possibly wrong” or “arguably wrong,” or “judgment-call wrong” — just wrong, plain and simple, as shown on the slow-motion replays. A study published in Nature several years ago confirmed what every soccer fan knows – the linesmen get a lot (around 20%) of the offside calls wrong. ...

And the really extraordinary thing is: it’s not going to get fixed anytime soon, or ever. Nobody is proposing video replay for offside calls, and soccer fans would revolt around the world if they did. Not that we like all these mistakes, exactly — we yell and scream and moan about lousy offside calls all the time. But in a very strange way that I only vaguely understand, that’s kind of the point, and it makes us love the game even more than we otherwise would. It’s just a part of the game, ...

This, I realize, is simply inconceivable to most American sports fans. The whole point of having referees is to “get it right” – it seems obvious — and so we’ll do whatever it takes ...

It is not just that the soccer referees are incompetent or crooked. The soccer rules are so silly that they invite bad calls. It is almost as if the game were designed to make it easy for a referee to throw a game.

My simple explanation is that soccer is a Third World sport with Third World rules. Non-Americans don't seem to have the concepts of fair play and victory to the better team.

Several months ago someone pointed me to a video of a recent championship soccer match that he said was one of the most excited games played in many years. But not only was the outcome of the game determined by a series of very bad referee calls, but the outcome was a 1-1 tie! According to the rules, the visiting team was to be declared the winner on a tie score.

Zero is even

Volokh has a poll on the evenness of zero. Over half his readers get it wrong. I am becoming convinced that most people do not understand that zero is a number. Situations requiring the most trivial understanding of zero seem very difficult for many people.

Free will is not an illusion after all

NewScientist mag reports:

Champions of free will, take heart. A landmark 1980s experiment that purported to show free will doesn't exist is being challenged.

In 1983, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet asked volunteers wearing scalp electrodes to flex a finger or wrist. When they did, the movements were preceded by a dip in the signals being recorded, called the "readiness potential". Libet interpreted this RP as the brain preparing for movement.

Crucially, the RP came a few tenths of a second before the volunteers said they had decided to move. Libet concluded that unconscious neural processesMovie Camera determine our actions before we are ever aware of making a decision.

Since then, others have quoted the experiment as evidence that free will is an illusion – a conclusion that was always controversial, particularly as there is no proof the RP represents a decision to move.

Long sceptical of Libet's interpretation, Jeff Miller and Judy Trevena of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, attempted to tease apart what prompts the RP using a similar experiment, with a key twist.

I have long been skeptical about that experiment also, because it does not seem to say anything about free will. Now these new experiments disprove the no-free-will interpretation.

Don't expect the determinists to give up easily, tho:

Marcel Brass of Ghent University in Belgium says it is wrong to use Miller and Trevena's results to reinterpret Libet's experiment, in which volunteers were not prompted to make a decision. The audio tone "changes the paradigm", so the two can't be compared, he says.

Be wary of the paradigm-shifting mindreaders.

The Man's Book

I am reading The Man's Book: The Essential Guide for the Modern Man. It is written by a European physicist. It is very retro and and most of it reads as if it could have been written a century ago. Much of it is archaic or trivial, but there is also some old-fashioned common sense.

Here is some of its best advice:

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them. [P. G. Wodehouse in The Man Upstairs]

He has a point. The book also has this quote:

People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding. [Richard Feynman]

That is correct. Some things cannot be explained to an innumerate.

The evils of conditional parenting

The NY Times reports:

In effect, we’re given tips in conditional parenting, which comes in two flavors: turn up the affection when they’re good, withhold affection when they’re not.

Thus, the talk show host Phil McGraw tells us in his book “Family First” (Free Press, 2004) that what children need or enjoy should be offered contingently, turned into rewards to be doled out or withheld so they “behave according to your wishes.” And “one of the most powerful currencies for a child,” he adds, “is the parents’ acceptance and approval.”

Likewise, Jo Frost of “Supernanny,” in her book of the same name (Hyperion, 2005), says, “The best rewards are attention, praise and love,” and these should be held back “when the child behaves badly until she says she is sorry,” at which point the love is turned back on.

Dr. Phil and the Supernanny don't have any research to back them up. They just have their opinions, and they are sure dogmatic about them. It turns out that research by Avi Assor, Guy Roth, and Edward L. Deci proves them wrong:

This July, the same researchers, now joined by two of Dr. Deci’s colleagues at the University of Rochester, published two replications and extensions of the 2004 study. This time the subjects were ninth graders, and this time giving more approval when children did what parents wanted was carefully distinguished from giving less when they did not.

The studies found that both positive and negative conditional parenting were harmful, but in slightly different ways. The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn’t even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers’ negative feelings about their parents.

What these and other studies tell us, if we’re able to hear the news, is that praising children for doing something right isn’t a meaningful alternative to pulling back or punishing when they do something wrong. Both are examples of conditional parenting, and both are counterproductive.

I don't expect this to change many opinions. People like Dr. Phil are especially impervious to the evidence.

White girl is racist for not dating blacks

A Sacramento women writes:

Q: Some friends had been talking up this guy they thought would be perfect for me, so I finally went on a blind date with him. It turns out he's black, and while I am NOT racist and have no problem with interracial dating in general, I just prefer to date white guys.

I told my friends why I wouldn't be seeing him again, and they were horrified. Did I miss something here? I know interracial dating is more prevalent than it used to be, but I didn't realize it was SO common that you get in trouble if you don't want to do it.

Wash. Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax also chews her out for being a racist. This dame has to date all races indiscriminately, or else she will be called a racist.

The real racists are her so-called friends who played this prank on her. They could have more fully described her date, but they chose not to, and chose instead to try to impose their values on her personal life. She does not need friends like that.

Brits fear boy might scare fish

A UK newspaper reports:

Security guards reduced a nine-year-old boy to tears after banning him from sailing his toy boat on a pond because it 'frightens the fish'.

Noah Bailey was distraught after staff at Chiswick Business Park, in west London, stopped him playing with his model of the German battleship Bismarck.

His grandfather Paul Fabricius, 57, said that when they went to complain about the draconian rule the guard refused to tell him the name of the manager for 'security reasons'.

The Brits seem to be a little ahead of us when it comes to advancing paranoia.

Meanwhile, the satirical site The Onion reports that Scientists Discover Portal To Outside World.

No sex tests in sports

Why do we have separate athletic competitions for women, but no standards to assure that only women compete?

When Caster Semenya won a big 800m race, everyone said that she was obviously a man. Now the tests confirm that. Not a hermaphroditism as some have reported, but a man with testes and no ovaries. He looks and talks like a man. See this blog for detailed info.

The Olympics have very strict drug tests and other eligibility tests, but no sex tests. Apparently it is politically incorrect to have rules that make transexuals and intersexuals feel awkward. I think that they are going to feel awkward anyway.

Now some people are saying that Semenya will be allowed to compete as a woman if he has his testes removed and enrolls in some sort of sex-change medical program.

This is crazy. The male hormones and steroids have already made him stronger and faster. The sports authorities should just allow geniune women in the women's events, and do some standardized test to prove it.

The news reports:

South Africa's sports minister says there will be a "third world war" if 800-metre world champion athlete Caster Semenya is barred from competing, after media reports that the gold medallist is a hermaphrodite.

No, a hermaphrodite would have male and female organs. Semenya only has male organs.

Here is a science site:

Experts say Semenya should be allowed to race as a woman and they cringe at how her case is exploding publicly in the news media. They worry about psychological scars. Two years ago, a star female track athlete who tested male attempted suicide.

Psychological scars? Since when does anyone care about anybody else's psychological scars?

Dr. Louis Elsas, chairman of biochemistry at the University of Miami and a member of the IAAF panel with Genel, said he had hoped the genetic gender testing issue was over after the 1996 Olympics, when most major sports abandoned regular testing.

No, abolishing testing did not solve the problem.

Scouts cannot have knives

And other news.

Newsweek mag says kids as young as 6 months judge others based on skin color.

British men cannot have guns, and now British boy scouts can
no longer bring penknives on camping trips.

Swedish taxpayers have to fund feminist porn.

Murder conviction overturned

The San Jose paper reports:

Rena Alspaw was only 16 when she pulled out a stolen pistol along an isolated wooded trail and shot her ex-boyfriend four times — three to the body and one to the back of the head.

After a brief trial in 1994, the San Jose teen was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 30 years to life.

Now, fifteen years later, a judge has taken the rare step of voiding that guilty verdict, opening up the possibility that the girlish-looking 31-year-old killer with long auburn hair could be retried — or even freed — on the grounds that she was a battered woman.

What makes this case so unusual is that Alspaw isn't a classic battered woman. She didn't live with the man she killed, and he didn't physically abuse her, except for handcuffing her once against her will. But there's evidence he harassed her, including calling the police on her for no reason and broadcasting insults about her over a loudspeaker. His violent past, and the threat of violence are what Alspaw contends made her a battered woman.

Her case is getting a second look thanks to a 2002 state law that allows certain convictions to be overturned because jurors didn't get a chance to take into account substantial evidence of the role of battering.

No, she was not physically abused. Her complaint is that the jury was not told that her victim had served time for killing cats!

But most compelling might be Swanson's substantial record of animal cruelty.

"All you need," said Kelly, Alspaw's lawyer, "are animal lovers on the jury."

This is crazy. She confessed to a cold-blooded premeditated murder of her boyfriend. Are cat lovers going to excuse this because he was a cat-killer? If so, I would favor keeping all the cat lovers off the jury.

Woman says women are the biggest cheats

A UK newspaper columnist cites studies that women cheat more than men, and writes:

Why do women lie? Because we must, and because we can. In spite of apparent equality and a more sexually open society, we are still more harshly judged for our sex lives than men. ...

But we also lie naturally and instinctively, as a way to manage and control our relationships, to protect our partners and our families, and to keep our options open.

In fact, we lie so much and for so many reasons that often we don't even think of it as lying at all, but as 'relationship management'.

Women are taught to lie from childhood. Those simple, altruistic lies such as saying we've had a lovely time when we haven't, that someone looks nice when she doesn't, or that we're delighted with a gift we don't really like, are just some of the small ways that lying oils the wheels of our social lives, keeps the peace, and makes other people happy.

Girls will lie to protect someone's feelings or to build a relationship. Honesty, in these circumstances, looks highly overrated, and we quickly learn the value and power of being economical with the truth in relationships.

A commenter there writes:

Plainly, someone doesn't understand statistics! Take it to the extreme, suppose all women in Britain are celibate except 13. All men in Britain have sex with each of these 13 women. Then the average for men would be 13 and the average for women would be almost zero.

Just beacause the reported averages differ doesn't necessarily indicate that men or women are lying.

No, the average for men and women will be exactly the same in that example. And those 13 sluts are likely to lie about it.

Being smart really is sexy

The UK Telegraph newspaper reports:

Psychologists have found that men with the highest IQ also have the healthiest sperm. ...

The research, by the evolutionary psychologist Professor Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, centred around a study of 400 Vietnam War veterans who were put through extensive mental tests and were also asked to provide sperm samples. ...

Professor Miller, who is speaking at a conference of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour at Oxford University, believes that sperm quality was directly related to brain quality.

The two traits could have evolved together as a way to advertise good genes, he said.

He believes a number of human traits – including language, intelligence, humour and selflessness – may have evolved because they are attractive to the opposite sex.

Maybe they are all just correlated with good health.

Meanwhile, an Australian newspaper reports:

High school students allegedly filmed sex acts while believing that the Large Hadron Collider was about to end the world.

At least three teenagers from a Brisbane state high school are being investigated by police for allegedly filming sex acts on a mobile phone and distributing it to other students, the Courier-Mail reports. ...

It is understood the girl wanted to lose her virginity to the boy - believing that the world was about to end.

I am guessing that the boy has a high IQ. More than the girl's, anyway.

The new Philips ipod

I got a Philips GoGear Aria 16GB portable MP3 player. It has a 2-inch screen for pictures and videos, and is much nicer than the ipods made by Apple. Much cheaper also.

It is much easier to use than an Apple ipod because you can just plug it into a computer and it looks like a disc drive. You can just copy your music on, unplug it, and play it. No need to use Apple iTunes or anything like that. It can use MSC or MTP mode.

The one odd thing about it is the behavior of one of its buttons. The player has seven buttons in front, and the one in the middle is used for Select, Play, and Pause. It must be operated with a very brief tap. A slow press does nothing. I thought that the button was defective, so I called Philips tech support, and the guy advised me to return the product. He was not aware of the problem. So I got another one, and it works the same way.

Now that I know that the button works this way, it is not really a problem. I tested the player on two friends of mine, and one of them thought that the button was defective. I don't know whether the Philips engineers intended this behavior or not. I think that they should either change the firmware or put some warnings in the manual, or else they will get a lot of returns. On most devices with a Pause button, you can press Pause as slowly as you wish. And even on this Philips player, a slow Pause works just fine to pause watching a movie.

I am posting this to notify others that the Philips ipod is not really defective, but it just requires a quick tap on the Select/Play/Pause button. It might save someone else from returning it.

Railroading Barry Bonds

Yet another court has ruled that the feds have broken the legal rules in their attempts to prosecute baseball star Barry Bonds.

I have trouble seeing the point. Maybe Bonds took advantage of some ambiguity in the baseball rules to hit a few more home runs that he would have otherwise. The feds have harassed Bonds for five years with a weak case, blackmailed witnesses, and conducted illegal searches. Even if Bonds is somehow guilty of something, I don't see how his conduct could be any worse than that of the feds.

The great sex ratio reversal

Anthropologist Peter Frost writes:

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a reversal took place in the ratio of single men to single women among people of reproductive age. This sex ratio slipped from male scarcity to parity and then to a relative excess of males, due to a decline in male mortality and an increase in divorce and remarriage by older men with younger women (Pedersen, 1991). The imbalance seems to have steadily worsened. In Germany, single men now outnumber single women up to the age of 60 (Glowsky, 2007). ...

Indeed, over the past thirty years the new marriage market has failed to deliver its presumed benefits. Divorce rates have gone up, not down—because more women are filing for divorce. Illegitimacy has gone up, not down—because more women are voluntarily having children out of wedlock. And more women are postponing marriage or rejecting it altogether. True, men are participating more in family life, but this has not offset the overall withdrawal from family life by women. And true, the birth rate has gone up in the last few years, but for the rest of the past thirty years it was trending downward. The current boomlet probably has other causes.

These negative outcomes could have been predicted. ...

So what is the optimal sex ratio? If we wish to have a society with no double standard, i.e., equal limitations on male and female sexual freedom, the optimum would be parity at all reproductive ages. This is something we have not had for thirty years now, and it would take an act of political will to bring it back. We would have to scrap no-fault divorce and make joint custody the norm. We would also have to lower the sex ratio at birth, probably through incentives for the birth of daughters.

It could be done and probably will be. The question is how bad things will get before action is finally taken.

The Boy Who Heard Too Much

I had no idea a blind kid with a telephone and an attitude could cause so much trouble. Read the Matthew Weigman story.

Why lawyers are hated

A lawyer wonders:

A recent Gallup poll on public opinion towards various professions has the legal field once again near the bottom: Only 25% of people polled had a positive view of lawyers.

His readers provide a long list of reasons, including:

A short list of reasons why lawyers are hated:

1) Layers are a symbol of inequity. O.J. gets away with murder because he can hire a team of $400/hr lawyers. Warren Buffet is in a lower tax bracket than me because people like him can hire legions of lawyers to convince the legislature and the courts that capital transactions should be taxed at a lower rate.

2) Aside from economists, lawyers are the most arrogant group of people. I hate being in meetings with lawyers. You can't get anything done.

3) You can't trust a lawyer, ever. They will screw you over if it suits them.

4) You have to hire a lawyer to protect yourself from other lawyers.

5) Lawyers claim to revere the law, and they do. Right up until it suits them not to revere the law. John Yoo and his defenders are a good example of this.

6) Lawyers will argue on behalf of anyone or on behalf of any cause as long as you pay them. If I had enough money I could change the law with a team of talented lawyers. This is not hyperbole.

A lot of other good reasons are posted as well. I am not sure that these reasons quite explain the contempt that many people have for lawyers. Some people regard lawyers as immoral and destructive in most of what they do.

Unamerican Hawaiians

AP reports:

HONOLULU — Protesters will march the streets and Hawaiian chants will echo from the sprawling lawn of Iolani Palace on Hawaii's 50th anniversary of statehood, as high-minded panelists ponder the islands' future at a daylong conference.

While lacking much in the way of public parties or parades, Hawaii's official statehood day festivities will feature entertainment by local musicians and panel discussions emphasizing tourism's future, alternative energy and Native Hawaiian rights.

About 1,000 demonstrators who would rather see Hawaii's independence restored are expected to rally outside the conference at the Hawaii Convention Center.

"We want to show how U.S. imperialism has spread across the Pacific and across the world," said Lynette Cruz, an organizer of the Hawaiian Independence Action Alliance. "It'll be fun."

Maybe it would be better if Pres. Obama were born in Kenya or Indonesia. The folks who immigrate here from Kenya are happy to become Americans. I don't know what is the matter with these Hawaiians.

Pres. Obama even supports the Akaka Bill, a truly insidious bill to reinstate the Kingdom of Hawai'i and create some sort of racist apartheid state.

Fewer male teachers are in K-12 classrooms

The Chicago Tribune reports:

For two years Chezare Warren taught math at a middle school on Chicago's South Side, weathering the kind of situations that keeps so many men from pursuing teaching careers at elementary and secondary schools.

There were the usual jokes from friends about his low pay and cushy workday. There were the awkward moments with women who sometimes belittled his profession. There was the occasional whisper or suspicious glance from parents who questioned why a young man would choose to spend so much time with children.

Soon, we will no longer have men teaching elementary school. The schools are being feminized.

AP distorts health care plan facts

AP claims to educate us:

FACT CHECK: Health overhaul myths taking root

WASHINGTON—The judgment is harsh in a new poll that finds Americans worried about the government taking over health insurance, cutting off treatment to the elderly and giving coverage to illegal immigrants. Harsh, but not based on facts. ...

THE POLL: 45 percent said it's likely the government will decide when to stop care for the elderly; 50 percent said it's not likely. ...

THE POLL: 55 percent expect the overhaul will give coverage to illegal immigrants; 34 percent don't. ...

THE POLL: 54 percent said the overhaul will lead to a government takeover of health care; 39 percent disagree. ...

THE POLL: 50 percent expect taxpayer dollars will be used to pay for abortions; 37 percent don't.

Here is a similar CNN article.

I am with the public on this. The vast majority of those promoting the Obama plan want to give free treatment to illegal aliens in emergency rooms, pay for abortions, ration medical care to the elderly, and they all regard this plan as just a step towards a govt takeover of health care.

If the plan proponents really want to dispel these myths, then they should add features that are directly counter to them. Eg, they could immediately pass a law saying that hospitals do not have to treat illegal aliens.

She Sues for Two Broken Fingers

Here is a NY lawsuit:

On July 12, 2003, Lisa Nutley sought to celebrate her birthday with the thrill of her life - a recreational parachute jump. ...

the main parachute failed to deploy ... Rohemo was able to free up the back-up chute, he and Lisa floated down to safety and no one died that day.

Whew, what a thrill. Maybe Lisa should've paid extra for the additional thrill. Instead, because her third and fourth fingers were fractured during the fall, she lawyered up and sued SkyDive claiming that Rohemo - her savior - had wrongfully told her to hold tight to a dangerous area of the parachute he was trying to cut away and then never told her to let go at an appropriate time. This, she and her lawyer claimed, presented Lisa with an enhanced risk not assumed or inherent in a tandem jump.

I like her name: Lisa Nutley. Most people would have been happy to survive with only two broken fingers.