Facebook and more

Courtesy of The Atlantic and the NY Review of books comes this interesting analysis of the new Facebook movie and the Facebook phenomenon and a rebuttal of said article. Both posts are good reads, although I disagree with their fundamental conclusions. I don't think Zadie Smith really understands how Facebook is used, and like everyone else on the Facebook bandwagon really gives it way too much credit for shaping our beliefs and habits. Likewise, I think the Atlantic blogger is a bit off base in his analysis of Zadie's position as well. I don't think she's really worried about bad writing...

The ever reliable NY Times blogs gives us this article on brains and metaphors and how the brain uses the same structure to process philosophically similar yet fundamentally different things. In a similar vein, there's a post up on IO9 about the Bouba Kiki effect. Since "sharpness" is a frequency effect (take the Fourier transform of a sharp signal, visual or auditory, and there's a lot of high frequency components), it makes sense that the brain would use similar or the same bits to process high frequency objects versus low frequency ones.

Porco Russo

Very cool hand-drawn manga that was the original story/inspiration behind Porco Russo: to be found here.

Hisashiburi desu, ne?

Long time indeed. Getting bad about keeping these up.

Fascinating article that I read a while back, but really need to save: Gladwell on New Yorker discussing why modern social networking tools fail as instruments of revolution. Very insightful, and certainly true as far as my personal experiences go. Worth a read.

And because it's Halloween: let's get a little raven in the house.

Games and goodness!

Long time no post, but a couple of good ones, at least as far as my own peculiar obsessions are concerned. I've discovered an insightful voice writing about gaming and storytelling: Fraser Allison, blogging under the name Red King's Dream. Here is an excellent post about violence in games. Specifically, when it is meaningful, and when it is not. It makes me think of the critique from the Phantom Menace review about the relative meaninglessness of the lightsaber fights in the prequels. I found Mr. Allison's blog after reading this post on kotaku about the elements of storytelling in games. It's a very good way of breaking down the key sources of "story" in gaming.

Finally, we have a very good post in NY Times about the evolutionary pressures behind morality.

Triple header

We start on a lighter (figuratively speaking) note, with a real life giant mech, complete with egg-crushing kung-fu action. If only I had one of these as a kid...

The Atlantic has a hilarious article on job opportunities for white folks in China. It almost makes me wish I were white, just so I could be the token representative white guy in all those commercials and stuff they shoot all the time. It's getting less so, but there was a time when "white man who speaks English" made you a bigger celebrity in China than a talking dog. No kidding.

Courtesy of friend and fellow grad-student-with-too-much-time-on-hands M. Yan is this fascinating look at the state of science/research jobs in the US. Especially relevant for the poor biologists who have to spend an eternity in the limbo that is the post-doctoral researcher, but true for everyone. This is why I'm leaving academia (also because I suck at research). So long, suckers!

Finally, on a slightly more serious note, we have an announcement for all those who are stupid, and also too stupid to know better. This is something I have often seen in myself (see above paragraph on leaving academia). Also, looking at the title of this post, I realize I can't count.

Back!

Back from gallivanting around the world! Will have to put up pictures and tell stories at some point, but for now just gotta dump some links before I forget them forever. First, a pair of articles on food (because it's almost dinner time). As I have always suspected, just because food is tastier and "greener" doesn't mean it's any healthier. Well damn. Secondly, apparently we used to be a lot dumber about enjoying rare meat.

On completely unrelated notes, terrorists are actually pretty dumb (I especially enjoyed the part about the hugs) and unsurprisingly classical liberal educations are good for you!

Ok, that is all for now. Will have interesting/amusing posts up sometime over weekend, theoretically.

Lab Life & Oysters

Ok, so the blogging from Sweden plan is currently failing, mostly due to the fact that a) I've been busy conferencing, shopping, and enjoying Stockholm and b)I forgot my camera cable, so I can't post many pictures. Doh!

Instead we bring you the usual cool links! First up, Olivia Judson has a fascinating brief article about how evolutionary pressure creates major differences between lab animals and wild types. Second, nice Slate article on why eating oysters is awesome. Mmmm, oysters. At some point I will get around to posting pictures and stories from Sweden. Stay tuned!

In the Old Country

Hola, amigos and amigas. or as they say in Swedish: actually I have no idea how to say hello in Swedish. May need to remedy that. Looking back over the last two years, I realized that I actually have had some fairly interesting experiences while traveling recently. The airport girl in China, the awesome students and the crazy historical revisionist in Japan, the fat man in the river in Switzerland... it's a shame not to keep a record of these things. So, mostly for my own remembrance, what will follow over the next two weeks will be a series of self-indulgent narcissistic posts chronicling my adventures in Sweden. This will mostly consist of sitting through incredibly boring conference talks. You have been warned.

Initial impressions upon arrival in Sweden:
- Europe hates visible street signs. This is not helpful to idiot foreigners trying to find their way to their hotel based on google directions.
- It is not cool to wear a bike helmet.
- Stockholm loves sushi. Passed at least 6 sushi places on the one mile walk from the train station.
- "Elite double room" means one bed in a room slightly larger than the trunk of my car. This may be a long two weeks.

Mathematical Cold warriors

An oldie but goodie: using game theory to predict iran's nuclear policy, elections, companies and really pretty much anything. It's kind of interesting and amazing to think about, isn't it? This lovely interplay between the precision of the algorithm's calculations, and the messy, human task of assigning weights and costs to people's desires and motivations.

Robots and writing

Robots are cool. The way modern robots "think" is even cooler. Check it out. Also the author of said piece is dead sexy.

On a related note, here are some nice tips for folks who want to write. But a lot of it boils down to the classic: write a lot!

The very definition of badass

WATCH THIS. Get psyched. The 2010 Chinese Martial Arts Tournament hosted by Berkeley is coming up. There will be badassery in all manner of shapes, forms, and sizes here. Put it on your calendar. May 1st. There will be awesome.

Also if you have time read this article from NYTimes magazine. The interesting is not just how to make teachers better, but that really there should be metrics and methods for all manner of professions. For example, there are a lot of effective ways to be researchers and grad students... why is this not taught> There have to be some good ways of figuring out research problems... are we purely limited to our advisers here?

Sleep is for the weak

NYTimes has an interesting opinionator piece on how anxiety about falling asleep can make it impossible to fall asleep. There's also a bit of interesting exploration of about meta-thought in general.

On an entirely unrelated note, Slate has a neat bit on how music sounds different on old instruments. It's intriguing to think that what we think of as the Moonlight Sonata now sounded entirely different to Beethoven when he wrote it (and not just because the old dude was deaf).

Time, space, and evolution

Wired has a neat interview up with a physicist working on the nature of time. The idea about multiple universes is fascinating. Too bad it seems like it will be impossible to prove.

Two tidbits combining psych with evolution today. First up, TIME's report on a paper on intelligence and political leanings. This paper has been making the rounds of the big publications lately, basically noting there's a correlation between self-expressing liberal beliefs and higher average IQ. The thought is that evolutionary pressure links intelligence with acceptance of unorthodox thoughts to aid survival, although there are some caveats.

NYTimes has an in-depth article about possible benefits of depression. Again, interesting thoughts, although obviously no real answers. Still, useful distinction to be made between chronic depression and sorta acute depression brought on by some triggering external circumstance.

The color pink

Short update today: a little slideshow on the history of pink. Battleships and little boys... who knew?

Statistical Analysis + Love = AWESOME

Late Valentine's Day update today, folks! This one is is another dump, although most of the juicy bits come from various posts on a single blog site. Here goes!

Let's start with the mainstream media summaries, for our friends with slightly less spare time. My interest was piqued by this NY Times article that discusses data from an online dating site called okcupid, which apparently was started by math peeps. Some of the more interesting results concerned racial preferences, which is the focus of a TIME article on essentially the same subject.

The real interesting stuff is on the blog itself, to be found here. This you really should spend some time on. The two most fascinating ones that I saw were tthis one, on racial preferences, and another on the effect of looks and pictures on your results. The most interesting thing about the looks post is twofold: one of course is that it confirms that looks are way more important for a woman than for a man. That much, as a certain female friend of mine noted, is obvious starting from middle school (I guess obvious to the girls, at least, us guys are a bit slower...).

The more interesting thing I thought was the distribution of attractiveness in guys. The distribution among women was a pretty straightforward Gaussian-looking thing, but for men it's skewed way towards the low end. Apparently women either can't agree on what guys look good, or they just hate all men. I wonder what kind of individual distributions on attractiveness women have. Does everyone just have a gaussian with a really low mean? Girls in the audience, let us know!

Further evidence of this: a friend of mine ran an experiment a while back where he did PCA on male and female faces that were rated for attractiveness by a number of volunteers. There was an obvious and distinct visual difference between the averaged female face constructed from the most attractive faces versus the least attractive faces, but the "most" and "least" attractive averaged male faces were barely distinguishable. The obvious conclusion is that people pretty much agree on good looking girls, but not at all on good looking men. Not surprising from an evolutionary point of view, given that the male reproductive strategy would select for traits indicating health/fertility that could be quickly detected so that they can make quick decisions.

Man, it's amazing when the numbers back up common wisdom! The only caveat is that okcupid's analysis (at least the published stuff) is really fairly simple and basic, with little in the way of controls. Somebody needs to go publish some real papers on this business...

Link dump!

Ok, been bad about updating recently. Perhaps it's because I've been distracted by the thought of armies of desperate women fighting over men on campuses and wondering why the hell my college experience was nothing like that. Oh, wait, I went to tech. But seriously, this reminds me of reading all those articles about sex and debauchery in American high schools when I was younger and wondering "why the hell did I never get to experience any of that in high school?" Answer: because I was/am a nerd.

However, nerd that I am, at least I won't get killed for singing poorly. Good god, Philippines, you make baby Jesus cry.

Finally, this kind of thing makes me ashamed to say I'm from Texas. These revisionist idiots are trying to say that separation of church and state shouldn't exist because the founders were Christians and believed in a Christian nation. As my textbooks would say, the rebuttals are obvious and left as an exercise to the reader. That is all, folks.

Power and Love

First, does power corrupt, or are the corrupt drawn to power? The Economist reports on a rather interesting set of studies about the psychology and ethics of people and power. I'd have liked to see some more "direct" studies, like the blind dice reporting rather than what I think as "indirect", where people report their thoughts, but it's fascinating nonetheless.

Secondly is an article that hits a little closer to home, an exploration of love. Or rather, the lack thereof. I kind of identify with the guy, although maybe more in terms of the immaculately decorated bedroom and culinary obsessions than the emotional issues...

Epigenome

This article in Time brings up a fascinating subject. Some of the studies it talks about seem pretty fantastic and a little unbelievable, but the basic science seems certainly to be there. The article is about the epigenome, which is the set of instructions that your body uses to actually interpret the genes in your genome. I've certainly always believed that it's a combination of nature and nurture that make you who you are, but apparently the nurture can be passed on too...

Culture and Mental Illness

Good old NYT Magazine. Today's link covers the issue of whether or not our definitions of mental illness are shaping the expression of disorders world-wide. In some ways it seems obvious, anorexia is not likely to be a problem in a culture where people don't care about getting fat. The article raises some good points, although it's frustratingly incomplete and spends too much time talking about the risks of medical imperialism rather than focusing on the much more interesting question of just HOW culture affects mental disorders. *sigh* oh well.

Jurisprudence of Siamese Twins

The title says it all: If a Siamese twin commits murder, does his brother get punished too?. I love you slate.

Evolution and Universities

Today we bring you two thematically unrelated topics. This video is primarily a debunking of the blind watchmaker straw man but it's also a great example of the power of mathematical modeling and just physics in general. You take a set of simple governing assumptions, put in some initial conditions, and then run the equations forward, and poof! Out comes meaningful results describing the world. Gotta love it.

Second link is a little more depressing. NYTimes has an article up about how universities are changing curricula in response to student and parental pressure to make their studies more directly relevant to finding a job. I'm all for useful educations, but people need to think more long-term! Higher education really should be about developing a life philosophy and learning HOW to think as well as how to do. *sigh*