You know all that talk from conservatives that Obama has put such onerous rules and regulations on business that they simply can’t create any jobs for fear of falling victim to his socialist interference? Yeah, not so much. Turns out he’s approved fewer regulations than W had at this point.

Obama’s White House has approved fewer regulations than his predecessor George W. Bush at this same point in their tenures, and the estimated costs of those rules haven’t reached the annual peak set in fiscal 1992 under Bush’s father, according to government data reviewed by Bloomberg News.

The average annual cost to businesses under Obama is higher than under his predecessors, the Bloomberg review shows. The increase is estimated to total as little as $100 million or as much as $4.1 billion, or at most three one-hundredths of a percent of the total economy…

Obama’s White House approved 613 federal rules during the first 33 months of his term, 4.7 percent fewer than the 643 cleared by President George W. Bush’s administration in the same time frame, according to an Office of Management and Budget statistical database reviewed by Bloomberg.

The number of significant federal rules, defined as those costing more than $100 million, has gone up under Obama, with 129 approved so far, compared with 90 for Bush, 115 for President Bill Clinton and 127 for the first President Bush over the same period in their first terms. In part that’s because $100 million in past years was worth more than it is now due to inflation, Livermore said.

Wow, three one-hundredths of a percent. Clearly the cause of the recession he inherited.

How does one draw a circle? You wipe the dust off your Foley &
van Dam book and look up the circle drawing algorithm, or simply use
Cairo. But I had to explain to someone how to draw circles and going
directly to the Bresenham method wasn't reasonable. I started with a
basic implementation and we discussed ways to optimize it
in #gimp. The code here was written a few days ago, and is
posted for anyone who searches for it.

Circles are invisible. When we say we want to draw a circle on the
screen, we want to set pixels (light up equally sized rectangular bits
of the screen) at integer coordinates to represent an approximation of
the circle. Let's start off by writing some code which implements
a main(), handles creating an image, setting pixels in
it and writing it to a Portable graymap
(.pgm) file (which can be viewed with programs like Eye of
GNOME, GIMP, ImageMagick's display, etc.). With that out of
the way, we can work on draw_circle() alone.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <math.h>

typedef struct {
size_t width;
size_t height;
unsigned char *data;
} Image;

static Image *
image_new (size_t width,
size_t height)
{
Image *image;

image = malloc (sizeof *image);
image->width = width;
image->height = height;
image->data = malloc (width * height);

return image;
}

static void
image_free (Image *image)
{
free (image->data);
free (image);
}

static void
image_fill (Image *image,
unsigned char value)
{
memset (image->data, value, image->width * image->height);
}

/**
* image_set_pixel:
*
* Sets a pixel passed in signed (x, y) coordinates, where (0,0) is at
* the center of the image.
**/
static void
image_set_pixel (Image *image,
ssize_t x,
ssize_t y,
unsigned char value)
{
size_t tx, ty;
unsigned char *p;

tx = (image->width / 2) + x;
ty = (image->height / 2) + y;

p = image->data + (ty * image->width) + tx;

*p = value;
}

static void
image_save (const Image *image,
const char *filename)
{
FILE *out;

out = fopen (filename, "wb");
if (!out)
return;

fprintf (out, "P5\n");
fprintf (out, "%zu %zu\n", image->width, image->height);
fprintf (out, "255\n");

fwrite (image->data, 1, image->width * image->height, out);

fclose (out);
}

static void
draw_circle (Image *image, int radius, unsigned char value);

int
main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
Image *image;

image = image_new (600, 600);

image_fill (image, 0xff);
draw_circle (image, 200, 0);
image_save (image, "circle.pgm");

image_free (image);

return 0;
}

main() basically creates an 600×600 pixels
image, fills it with white, and asks draw_circle() to
draw a black circle of radius 200 pixels centered in the image. Note
that image_set_pixel() takes signed coordinates, where
(x=0, y=0) is at the center of the image. So for an image created with
image_new (400, 400), calling
image_set_pixel (image, 0, 0, 0x80) will set the pixel at
(200, 200) to 0x80.

So let's implement various versions of draw_circle()
now. The well-known equation of a circle is . The variables are
shown relative to each other in the figure below:

This type of an equation is called an implicit equation. You
can substitute values for , and to see if the equation holds
true. If it does, then the point is on the circle. So the
implicit equation lets you determine if a point is on the circle or
not.

In the figure above, you can see that for every line parallel to
the -axis through some , the circle intersects it in two
points. If we scan from to and plot the two
intersection points and in every vertical
scanline, at the end of the scan we'll have drawn a circle. For this,
we have to determine and for every . The implicit
equation is no good for it, because it is only useful in checking values
and not for determining them. So let's rearrange terms to
find :

The square-root returns a positive and negative value
for , so and , and the points at
which the circle intersects a scanline through
are and . So let's write
a draw_circle() based on this:

static void
draw_circle (Image *image,
int radius,
unsigned char value)
{
int x, y;

for (x = -radius; x <= radius; x++) {
y = (int) sqrt ((double) (radius * radius) - (x * x));

image_set_pixel (image, x, y, value);
image_set_pixel (image, x, -y, value);
}
}

Download circle1.c. This program generates
the following image:

This looks like a circle, but it is discontinuous near the
-axis. At those places, for every new scanline
, changes by more than 1
().. sometimes far more than 1. Notice that
there are discontinuities between angles 0 and 45 degrees, and no
discontinuities between angles 45 and 90 degrees in the drawn
circle.

In a circle, all points are at the same distance from the center. In
the code above, we only compute a semi-circle and mirror it by plotting
at and . In the same
way, we can only compute points between the angles 45 degrees and 90
degrees and mirror it 8 ways by plotting , , , , , , , . It plots
8 arcs, each of 45 degrees. So let's modify
draw_circle() to do this:

static void
draw_circle (Image *image,
int radius,
unsigned char value)
{
int x, y;
int l;

l = (int) radius * cos (M_PI / 4);

for (x = 0; x <= l; x++) {
y = (int) sqrt ((double) (radius * radius) - (x * x));

image_set_pixel (image, x, y, value);
image_set_pixel (image, x, -y, value);
image_set_pixel (image, -x, y, value);
image_set_pixel (image, -x, -y, value);

image_set_pixel (image, y, x, value);
image_set_pixel (image, y, -x, value);
image_set_pixel (image, -y, x, value);
image_set_pixel (image, -y, -x, value);
}
}

Download circle2.c. This program generates
the following image:

So we're done, right? If code to draw a circle is all we need, then
we are done. On the other hand, if you want to optimize it a bit so it
performs acceptably on very slow processors, keep reading.

At this point I posted a link to the code
in #gimp. pippin noted that filling the disk
(the area inside the circle) can be much faster than drawing the
circle. The square root computation is not needed as you're merely
checking every pixel's coordinates to see if it lies inside the disk or
outside. This just needs testing against the implicit equation of the
disk . Note how it is very similar to the implicit
equation of the circle which just checks the boundary of the disk. As
the implicit equation is checked for every pixel, filling the disk can
be done in a ridiculously parallel manner. Here's a modified version
of draw_circle() which plots a filled disk:

static void
draw_circle (Image *image,
int radius,
unsigned char value)
{
int x, y;

for (y = -radius; y <= radius; y++)
for (x = -radius; x <= radius; x++)
if ((x * x) + (y * y) <= (radius * radius))
image_set_pixel (image, x, y, value);
}

Download circle3.c. This program generates
the following image:

Ideally you'd rewrite such code to inline
the image_set_pixel() as the pixels are filled in an
ordered manner. A good C compiler should also eliminate redundant
subexpressions and move invariants out of loops, but some embedded
compilers are not good. So you'd want to add temporaries in such
cases:

static void
draw_circle (Image *image,
int radius,
unsigned char value)
{
unsigned char *buffer;
size_t pad;
int r2;
int x, y;

buffer = image->data + (((image->height / 2) - radius) * image->width);
pad = (image->width / 2) - radius;
r2 = radius * radius;

for (y = -radius; y <= radius; y++) {
int y2;
unsigned char *p;

y2 = y * y;
p = buffer + pad;

for (x = -radius; x <= radius; x++) {
int x2 = x * x;

if (x2 + y2 <= r2)
*p = value;

p++;
}

buffer += image->width;
}
}

Download circle4.c which generates the same
filled disk. Then the conversation in #gimp dropped away
that night. I couldn't think of a way to avoid
that sqrt(), and resigned I went to bed.

The next morning I woke up to the news that Steve Jobs had
died. Reading the Slashdot story, I saw
a comment
about rounded rectangles. The linked article mentioned how Bill
Atkinson had used the arithmetic progression . Of course! We don't need exact square
roots, only the nearest integer root. And between the angles 45 and 90
degrees where we work, . So we can estimate
whether is a decrement by comparing
with . Awesome, eh? This progression
was in the Knuth book, but somehow this and the circle case both didn't
take their clothes off and jump into the same pool to get me all
excited. Rather than give up that something can't be solved further,
it's better to think that there's always a solution. It was there from
before we were born just waiting to be found.

Also, let's see what happens to when
(the next vertical scanline).

So let's update draw_circle() to implement this:

static void
draw_circle (Image *image,
int radius,
unsigned char value)
{
int x, y;
int l;
int r2, y2;
int y2_new;
int ty;

/* cos pi/4 = 185363 / 2^18 (approx) */
l = (radius * 185363) >> 18;

/* At x=0, y=radius */
y = radius;

r2 = y2 = y * y;
ty = (2 * y) - 1;
y2_new = r2 + 3;

for (x = 0; x <= l; x++) {
y2_new -= (2 * x) - 3;

if ((y2 - y2_new) >= ty) {
y2 -= ty;
y -= 1;
ty -= 2;
}

image_set_pixel (image, x, y, value);
image_set_pixel (image, x, -y, value);
image_set_pixel (image, -x, y, value);
image_set_pixel (image, -x, -y, value);

image_set_pixel (image, y, x, value);
image_set_pixel (image, y, -x, value);
image_set_pixel (image[…]

Every time I hear a politician from either party blather on about how we have to “borrow money from China” for any deficit spending, or suggest that we are somehow at the mercy of the Chinese because they own so much American debt, I cringe. I cringe both because it isn’t true and because it is classic fear-mongering (precisely because it isn’t true). Daniel Blumenthal debunks this claim in Foreign Policy:

In fact, China is more like a depositor. It deposits money in U.S. Treasurys because its economy does not allow investors to put money elsewhere. There is nothing else it can do with its surpluses unless it changes its financial system radically (see above). It makes a pittance on its deposits. If the United States starts to bring down its debts and deficits, China will have even fewer options. China is desperate for U.S. investment, U.S. Treasurys, and the U.S. market. The balance of leverage leans toward the United States.

China owns 8% of American debt (treasury bills). They can’t “call it in” as I’ve heard suggested by some terribly ignorant people; those instruments have fixed payback schedules. The most they could do is sell them off to other investors, but A) they have very good reasons not to do so; and B) that would only temporarily and marginally depress the value of those bonds. It is China’s manipulation of its currency to keep it artificially low and therefore keep their products artificially cheap that is a problem for us, not the fact that they buy up a small percentage of our debt on the open markets.

Blumenthal is also correct when he points out that we have far more to fear from a China in decline than a China that is growing richer.

Bruce Bartlett, former policy adviser to Reagan and Bush as well as a staffer for Ron Paul and Jack Kemp, has a column in the New York Times debunking the ubiquitous claim from conservatives that businesses aren’t hiring because they’re terrified that Obama is going to shackle them with new job-killing regulations.

“By pursuing a steady repeal of job-destroying regulations, we can help lift the cloud of uncertainty hanging over small and large employers alike, empowering them to hire more workers,” Mr. Cantor said.

Evidence supporting Mr. Cantor’s contention that deregulation would increase unemployment is very weak. For some years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has had a program that tracks mass layoffs. In 2007, the program was expanded, and businesses were asked their reasons for laying off workers. Among the reasons offered was “government regulations/intervention.” There is only partial data for 2007, but we have data since then through the second quarter of this year.

The table below presents the bureau’s data. As one can see, the number of layoffs nationwide caused by government regulation is minuscule and shows no evidence of getting worse during the Obama administration. Lack of demand for business products and services is vastly more important.

These results are supported by surveys. During June and July, Small Business Majority asked 1,257 small-business owners to name the two biggest problems they face. Only 13 percent listed government regulation as one of them. Almost half said their biggest problem was uncertainty about the future course of the economy — another way of saying a lack of customers and sales.

The Wall Street Journal’s July survey of business economists found, “The main reason U.S. companies are reluctant to step up hiring is scant demand, rather than uncertainty over government policies, according to a majority of economists.”

In August, McClatchy Newspapers canvassed small businesses, asking them if regulation was a big problem. It could find no evidence that this was the case.

“None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it,” McClatchy reported. “Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-9 and its grim aftermath.”

The latest monthly survey of its members by the National Federation of Independent Business shows that poor sales are far and away their biggest problem. While concerns about regulation have risen during the Obama administration, they are about the same now as they were during Ronald Reagan’s administration, according to an analysis of the federation’s data by the Economic Policy Institute.

Academic research has also failed to find evidence that regulation is a significant factor in unemployment. In a blog post on Sept. 5, Jay Livingston, a sociologist at Montclair State University, hypothesized that if regulation were a major problem it would show up in the unemployment rates of industries where regulation has been increasing: the financial sector, medical care and mining/fuel extraction. He found that unemployment rates in these sectors were actually well below the national average. Unemployment is much higher in those industries that one would expect to suffer most from a lack of aggregate demand: construction, leisure and hospitality, business services, wholesale and retail trade, and durable goods…

In my opinion, regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out. In other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.

Ubiquitous and pervasive applications, where the Wireless Sensor Networks are
typically deployed, lead to the susceptibility to many kinds of security
attacks. Sensors used for real time response capability also make it difficult
to devise the resource intensive security protocols because of their limited
battery, power, memory and processing capabilities. One of potent form of
Denial of Service attacks is Wormhole attack that affects on the network layer.
In this paper, the techniques dealing with wormhole attack are investigated and
an approach for wormhole prevention is proposed. Our approach is based on the
analysis of the two-hop neighbors forwarding Route Reply packet. To check the
validity of the sender, a unique key between the individual sensor node and the
base station is required to be generated by suitable scheme.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks form one of the most serious
threats that plague the Internet today. However, despite over a decade of
research, and the existence of several proposals to address this problem, there
has been little progress to date on actual adoption. In this work, we argue
that adoption would be simplified by lowering the cost of deployment. Towards
this goal, we present Mirage, an approach to DDoS defense that lowers the cost
of adoption. Mirage achieves comparable performance to other DDoS mitigation
schemes while providing benefits when deployed only in the server's local
network and its upstream ISP, where local business objectives may incentivize
deployment. In particular, Mirage does not require source end hosts to install
any software to access Mirage protected websites. Unlike previous proposals,
Mirage only requires functionality from routers that is already deployed in
today's routers, though this functionality may need to be scaled depending on
the point of deployment.

Our key approach in this architecture is that end hosts can thwart the
attackers by employing the principle of a moving target: end hosts in our
architecture periodically change IP addresses to keep the attackers guessing.
Knowledge of an active IP address of the destination end host can act as an
implicit authorization to send data. We evaluate Mirage using theoretical
analysis, simulations and a prototype implementation on PlanetLab. We find that
our design provides a first step towards a deployable, yet effective DDoS
defense.

Travel is one of those activities where small failures
cascade into larger ones, and
simple preparations
make for an outsized impact on quality-of-life.

An unlikely event.

Almost every piece of advice below is the result
of something that went wrong or something that
could have gone better in the past three years.

Below are
my
tips on
airlines,
road trips,
hotels
and international travel.

As always, share your own tips so that I can post them there.

Click here to read the rest of the article

After a certain point in math education, like some time during high school, the relevance of the concepts to the everyday and the real world seem to fade. However, in many ways, math lets you describe real life better than you can with just words. Designer Bret Victor hopes to make the abstract and conceptual to real and concrete with Kill Math.

Kill Math is my umbrella project for techniques that enable people to model and solve meaningful problems of quantity using concrete representations and intuition-guided exploration. In the long term, I hope to develop a widely-usable, insight-generating alternative to symbolic math.

As part of the early project, Victor developed a prototype interface on the iPad to help you understand dynamical systems. It probably sounds boring to you, but the video and explanation will change your mind:

Statistics has the same problem with concepts, and is one of the main reasons why people hate it so much. They learn about curves, hypothesis tests, and distribution tables, and the takeaway is that there are some equations that you plug numbers into. Sad. Of course there are plenty of people working on that, but there's still a ways to go.

[Kill Math | Thanks, Matthew]

There's loads of music on YouTube. However, when I want to
listen to music, I'm not necessarily interested in slideshows. And yes,
that's a euphemism.

Luckily, extracting the video and audio from a youtube clip isn't
very hard.

First, download the clip. Yes, that's possible. This will get you
a movie clip, by default in the highest quality format available for the
particular clip you're trying to download.
You want to know which codecs the clip is using. Mplayer to the rescue:
wouter@carillon:~$ mplayer -frames 1 -v <file> 2>&1|grep -i 'stream.*audio'
[lavf] stream 1: audio (vorbis), -aid 0

meaning, this particular file has Vorbis audio.
Next, extract the audio:
ffmpeg -i <file> -vn -acodec copy <output>.ogg

The critical bit is the '-vn' part, which tells ffmpeg not to encode
the video to the output file. The 'mplayer' step isn't strictly
required; but since youtube only uses lossy audio codecs, re-encoding
the audio to a different codec will cost you audio quality. You may not
want to do that; hence the mplayer step (to figure out which codec the
source file is using), and the '-acodec copy' argument to ffmpeg's
command line (which tells ffmpeg to not re-encode the audio, but just
store the unmodified original audio stream in a different container
file).

Tadaa, music without video.

This post is from new staff writer Sarah Gilbert.

Both my husband and I have spent some periods of unemployment over the past decade, and we have become intimately familiar with financial humiliation. Having had a red tag left on your doorknob notifying you of the impending shutoff of one of your utilities is not just a reminder you might soon lose a vital public service; it’s a public shaming, and it’s hard not to believe that the water bureau, along with a variety of other crafty creditors, are doing it with intention.

Financial uncertainty brings humiliation
As author Wayne Koestenbaum has written, humiliation is a powerful motivation, and we are more likely to feel the emotion when faced with financial problems than just about any other time in our life post-seventh grade, especially in today’s shaky economy. With a shameful quantity of Americans in poverty; with unemployment steadfastly setting records; with home foreclosures continuing to weigh down the housing market; more Americans than ever are experiencing financial humiliation.

On American Public Media’s Marketplace program, Koestenbaum spoke about the difference between shame and humiliation:

I think shame is a private feeling. It may feel lacerating and terrible, but nobody necessarily sees it. I would say that humiliation requires a scene. It usually requires some act of cruelty or some catalyst from the outside, from some oppressor or tyrant. Let’s say, a boss who fires you. And it requires the spectators who see you lose your job, the bill collectors who come knocking.

The spectacle of financial difficulty
Being in a financial mess is all about the spectacle. If you lose your job, there are the unemployment department employees who must approve your claim. There are the friends on Facebook who will see that you no longer have “employer” information on your profile. Working, but struggling to pay the bills? You’ll get those yellow and pink envelopes in the mailboxes that demonstrate just how late you are. You’ll get the collection calls. If things are really bad, you’ll experience the true humiliation of having a process server visit your house, or a tow truck show up around midnight to repossess your car.

Food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), seem designed to enhance the humiliation and let it trickle through your everyday life. The transformation of the program from funny-money bills to debit cards is a step in the right direction, but there are still spectators at every turn (if you think I’m wrong, check out the comments on any article on the Internet anywhere about food stamps; America’s favorite thing to do is to judge what people spend their SNAP benefits on). There are the employees of the county offices who accept and approve your application; there are the employees at the grocery store; there are the people behind you in line, who will inevitably review the contents of your grocery bags and pay attention to what sort of car you drive.

Koestenbaum says that our desire to avoid humiliation is connected to both actual unemployment or even the fear of unemployment:

I think even fearing for the security of one’s job is humiliating. The feeling of being watched or judged. Certainly, losing a job leads to concrete suffering and hardship, but also to a sense of loss of status and self-esteem, a sense of how you appear in others’ eyes. All the markers of identity and dignity are trashed, in a way, when you lose a job.

Humiliation makes you hungry?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because of recent news that, while record numbers of Americans are getting SNAP benefits, a third of those who are eligible aren’t using the program. While many critics say that food stamps are abused, the numbers tell the opposite story; that, in fact, the stigma is too much for many of those living in poverty. Many millions of people would rather struggle to pay for food — even to go hungry — than suffer the humiliation of getting and using food stamps.

It’s my belief that humiliation works contrary to our best interests during times of crisis, preventing us from reaching out and asking for help either from social services or family and friends.

Past-due bills and humiliation
Take past-due debt. Those who have suffered a financial setback major enough to start racking up late bills, and the phone calls that go along with them, are the best example of a group for which humiliation works against personal interest. Collections agents are counting on your humiliation and your fear of a poor credit score (which will engender even more humiliation) to convince you to pay your past-dues immediately. At the worst case, it’s a cycle of attempts to avoid shame:

You can’t afford to pay the whole bill, so you don’t pay it, and don’t attempt to set up a payment plan with the debtor.
A billing department or collections agent begins calling to make payment arrangements; talking to them would be humiliating, so you avoid the calls.
Late fees begin to greatly increase the total amount owed.
Letters begin to arrive offering settlement arrangements; you take the one you can afford, even if you’re paying far more than the original balance due, to avoid the humiliation of an even worse credit score.
Or, you do not address the balance due until the creditor goes to court, garnishing wages or seizing tax returns, creating even more humiliation and far more expense.

Humiliation does not begin to do its work until things are extremely dire. Avoiding humiliation in small doses (attempting to negotiate a payment plan, or in many cases, simply saying no to a purchase or financial commitment) ends up turning into a huge humiliation wallop, up to and including repossession and foreclosure.

Accept humiliation now to avoid it later
My best advice is to learn to say this now: “I can’t afford that.” My children ask all the time when we’re shopping, “can we afford that?” or “do we have enough money for that?” I look around me at the other shoppers who are within earshot and I say, “no,” even though I’d rather say something more nuanced and prideful (“We can afford that but I’m not comfortable with you buying so many toys,” maybe.). I’ve been through enough financial humiliation to know I’d rather own my budget than aspire to someone else’s.

Being honest with the financial situation with my kids has helped me put my humiliation into perspective. There are far worse faults than not having enough money to buy the Ben 10 Transformer watch. I’d rather teach them that money is not unlimited than let them think I’m just being a meanie (or that I have unlimited funds, until the process servers arrive, that is). And sometimes it’s great to take a call from some obscure-but-well-intentioned non-profit and say to the closer on the phone, “We have absolutely no money for that.”

It can hurt to try, but you should anyway.
It’s our nature to want to avoid pain now at any cost; even greater pain, later. Taking it in small doses is a little like an inoculation; keep doing it, and eventually, you’ll be humiliation-resistant. And hopefully in a far better financial place.

darcy-angelus:

Behold: my world of cats and physics intertwine. 

A toast always lands butter side down. Attach this to a cat which always lands on its feet and the result is antigravity!

Further reading: antigravity cat.

This story is some kind of awesome:

For those who don't want to watch the whole thing, the observation in brief is that color perception is affected by color language. The investigators compare Westerners with our familiar language categories for color (red, blue, green, yellow, etc.) to the people of the Himba tribe in Africa who have very different categories: they use "zoozu", for instance, for dark colors, which includes reds, greens, blues, and purples, "vapa" for white and some yellows, "borou" for specific shades of green and blue. Linguistically, they lump together some colors for which we have distinct names, and they also discriminate other colors that we lump together as one.

The cool thing about it all is that when they give adults a color discrimination test, there are differences in how readily we process and recognize different colors that corresponds well to our language categories. Perception in the brain is colored (see what I did there?) by our experiences while growing up.

The study is still missing one part, though. It's presented as an example of plasticity in wiring the brain, where language modulates color perception…but we don't know whether people of the Himba tribe might also have subtle genetic differences that effect color processing. The next cool experiment would be to raise a European/American child in a Himba home, or a Himba child in a Western home (this latter experiment is more likely to occur than the former, admittedly) and see if the differences are due entirely to language, or whether there are some actual inherited differences. It would also be interesting to see if adults who learned to be bilingual late experience any shifts in color perception.

(Also on FtB)
Read the comments on this post...

With the abortion debate rekindled and raging once again in the UK, this resurrection seemed timely.

If you need a bit of fresh religious satire, I recommend today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It is a work of genius.



(Donations gratefully received)

There are a lot of people working on the Reason Rally event taking place March 24th, 2012 and those of us on the publicity team (hi!) are kicking things into high gear this weekend.
A few updates:
The first of several promotional videos just went up. This one features PZ Myers talking about why it’s so important that you attend the event:

We have a @ReasonRally Twitter account! You’re following us, right? Excellent. Also, if you don’t like our Facebook page, Dave Silverman will come after you.
The Hilton Garden Inn in Washington, D.C. is offering a 50% discount for Reason Rally attendees and check out the room they’re giving our group:
Well played, Hilton

While we’re on the subject of discounts, Delta Airlines is offering one as well.
The list of Speakers is getting longer and awesomer.More to come soon! Start planning your trip, though, because this is going to be amazing.

There has been a disturbing trend lately in the relationship between science and the public. Actually, I am not sure if it is a trend or if this sort of thing has been going on as long as there has been institutionalized science – but it has been more apparent to me recently.

The issue is with segments of the public trying to intimidate scientists, with various methods, because they don’t like the conclusion those scientists are coming to. This is a potentially serious problem.

A recent example of this phenomenon is the death threats being made against researchers who study chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). It’s ridiculous when you think about it – researchers are just trying to understand a common and troubling syndrome, and some of the people who suffer from that syndrome are trying to inhibit the science by intimidating those scientists. How does this happen?

There are other examples, perhaps the most common being the extreme animal rights activists, who are known for their terrorist tactics and threats. In the case of these activists they appear to be acting from a moral conviction about the rights of animals.

The threats made against the CFS researchers are a different phenomenon, although they can have the same effect. In this case an extreme group of advocates believe that they know something about a puzzling syndrome – that it is caused by disease process that originates outside the body, like an infection. They further feel threatened by any researcher pursing a different hypothesis, such as psychological contributors to CFS.

CFS sufferers who buy into the infection hypothesis then feel animosity toward researchers who disagree with them. This animosity becomes extremely magnified when conspiratorial thinking comes into play – the researchers must be in the pocket of BigPharma or the insurance companies.

This line of thinking turns a scientific controversy into a black-and-white moral struggle. The researchers are not only wrong, they are corrupt and evil, and those with CSF are their victims. Anyone who defends the researchers or their hypotheses is also in on the conspiracy.

This type of thinking speaks to the more primitive, emotional, pattern-seeking part of the brain. It probably will also tend to attract those in the community who have a predisposition to conspiracy thinking. Social media can further be used to magnify these effects, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop. A specific manifestation of this is the comment section of blogs, or in forums.

In these forums people can get each other worked up, and confirmation bias takes over with each person giving their supporting anecdotes. Dissenters may be chased away, or even censored. The conspiratorial jihad group mentality then takes on a life of it own.

And that’s how you end up with mild-mannered honest researchers receiving death threats from the very people they are trying to help.

We see a similar phenomenon with the anti-vaccine movement, with Morgellon’s disease (more properly known as delusional parasitosis), and with the chronic Lyme community.

It should be obvious why all of this is so destructive. Science works best when it exists in a bit of a bubble. This does not mean it is completely cut off from the practical world, but scientists should be free to pursue their ideas, to follow the evidence and their hunches wherever they lead. The process of science will sort out which ideas have merit and which do not.

Whenever someone puts their thumb on the scale, to try to coerce scientific research in a predetermined direction (or away from an unwanted direction), the process of science suffers. This occurs whether the motivation is political (such as Lysenkoism in the former Soviet Union), religious, ideological, for purposes of corporate greed, or any other motivation. Science cannot function when it is lashed to an ideology.

This also results from a lack of trust in the institutions of science. I will not argue that these institutions or the people in them are perfect – no human institution is, but science basically works. It’s not maximally efficient, but over time the evidence does seem to win out and our understanding grinds forward.

What the conspiracy theorists are saying is not that the practice of science is flawed but that it is completely broken (at least within their area of concern). They therefore feel justified in substituting their own personal beliefs for the consensus of scientific opinion. It certainly seems as if the personal beliefs come first, and the denigration of science, scientific institutions, and individual researchers is a mechanism of denial to maintain a desired belief system.

In fact research shows this is how people typically operate. Even worse, when confronted with disconfirming evidence, evidence that contradicts a firmly held belief, people will not only dismiss the evidence, they would rather believe the science itself is flawed rather than change their mind. So it can be counterproductive to confront people with scientific evidence that contradicts their beliefs – you may just push them further into pseudoscience and conspiracy thinking.

There is no easy solution to this problem, because it is rooted in human nature. We should certainly have no tolerance for thuggery against scientists who are just trying to do their job. They should be protected and insulated so that scientific inquiry can proceed.

The tactics that such groups employ are varied and changing. Direct threats is only one method. As we saw with ClimateGate, another method is to swamp scientists with freedom of information requests, and to take bits of information out of context to make them seem scandalous. Sometimes a researcher’s reputation is attacked, or they are harassed in various ways, such as flooding their institution with complaints.

Many researchers get out of or stay away from controversial topics to avoid such attacks. These thuggery tactics have an effect – they stifle research and public discourse.

At the very least when people do engage in such activity they should be called on it. They should be made to answer for their thuggery and intimidation. Further, institutions need to recognize what is happening and stand by their scientists and educators.

I also hope that by discussing this phenomenon people will understand the psychology better and perhaps be less susceptible to being sucked into such groups.

Dec 2005. That was a while ago, wasn’t it?

I’m not here. I’ll be back next week.



(Donations gratefully received)

As many people have pointed out, my comic about tweets outrunning seismic waves seems to have been widely verified in yesterday’s earthquake:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-users-learned-tremors-226481

It’s always nice to see real-life confirmation of your calculations! The quake started in Virginia at 13:51:04 EST, where most of my family lives.  Texts from my brother in Charlottesville (25 miles from the epicenter) were slowed down by the spike in cell traffic, but I got an IRC message from my brother in Newport News, VA at 13:52:09. Based on USArray/EarthScope detector readings posted at Bad Astronomy, his message overtook the seismic waves outside Philadelphia, and reached New England over a minute before the quake was felt there.

I once heard a story (originally told by Kevin Young) about Gerson Goldhaber, who was a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He was talking on the phone with another physicist at SLAC near Stanford University near the end of the day on Tuesday, October 17, 1989. The SLAC physicist suddenly interrupted with, “Gerson, I have to go! There’s a very big earthquake happening!” and then hung up. So Gerson stepped out into a group of people in the hall, made a big show of yawning and checking his watch, then said, “Aren’t we about due for an earthquake?” Before anyone could respond, the Loma Prieta earthquake reached Berkeley, and he became a legend.

My best friend from college is from Mineral, VA, a town of a few hundred people and one stoplight, which was at the epicenter of yesterday’s quake. A few years ago, he moved to Sendai, Japan, where he got an apartment just a few miles from the coast. Fortunately, he survived the March earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. Last I heard from him, he was moving back home. He really can’t catch a break. Fortunately, it sounds like there’s not too much damage. (Though from what I remember of Mineral, I can’t help but wonder—if the quake did cause damage, how would you tell?)

I’ve been using git to manage my home dir for a long time now, and I’m very happy with that. My desktop computer, laptop, server,… all share the same files. This solution is great for source code, web pages, contacts, scripts, configuration files and everything else that can be represented as text inside the git repo.

However when it comes to big files, git is a poor solution, and by big files I mean big, like video/music collection, iso images and so on. I tried git-annex which seems to adress the problem, but I never was happy with it.

So I decided to write my own (open source) big files synchronization program called bfsync, and today I made the first public release. It keeps only hashes of the data in a git repository (so the directory is managed by git), and is able to transfer files between checkout copies on different computers as needed.

You can find the first public release of bfsync here.