Obsidian Wings

Pre-Primary Tab Dump

by Doctor Science

I'm a pollworker tomorrow, so I have to go to bed at 10 tonight and get up at 4:30am, to be at the polling place by 5:15. Here are my tabs, in lieu of an actual post:

• Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era | Matt Richel, New York Times: part of the Times' ongoing series, Kids These Days and That Music They Play on My Lawn. Summary: oh noez! Now poor and/or non-white kids have computers, they mostly use them to waste time! It's the fault of their shiftless parents.
• Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds: the 2010 report which is the only source of actual data cited in the NYT article. It found:
  • race and economic status actually made no difference to the amount of time teens spent using the Internet for homework.
  • the big difference is that black and Hispanic kids watch (or watched -- data are from 2009, which is the Pleistocene in Internet terms) YouTube a lot more, and listen(ed) to music more
  • no information about how much time teens "waste" online reading or writing. It's my observation that, compared to my youth, Kids These Days read and write a *lot* more on average, because so much of their entertainment comes embedded in text and so many of their social interactions are text-based.
• What Filesharing Studies Really Say - Conclusions and Links; by Drew Wilson at ZeroPaid. Wilson did an exhaustive, exhausting look at scientific research on file-sharing:

  Based on all the scientific reasoning, scientific predictions and models and a whole lot more that we got from this series, we shouldn’t even be anywhere near the kinds of debates we are having now with respect to copyright enforcement (yes, not even close). Instead, we should, at minimum, be seriously considering things like an ISP levy or creating a framework for legal file-sharing or trying to think of services that imitate the file-sharing structure to help artists and the industry make money. It’s like we’ve shunned all science and economics and headed down the road of trying to constrain, restrict and, in some ways, shut down the Internet instead. It really puts into perspective just how shocking idea’s like the “graduated response” or three strikes laws and censoring websites really are.

• Marriage Compromise and a Counteroffer They're doing it again: driving up my blood pressure by saying, as Bob Hyatt does,

  The State needs to get out of the “marriage” business. It should recognize that as long as it uses that term, and continues to privilege certain types of relationships over others this issue is going to divide us as a nation, and is only going to become more and more contentious. We need to move towards the system used in many European countries where the State issues nothing but civil unions to anyone who wants them, and then those who desire it may seek a marriage from the Church.

  vorjack at Unreasonable Faith comes around to noticing the problem:

  exactly what claim does Hyatt think Christianity has over a civil institution that predates the religion, and which the religion resisted for centuries? So here’s a counteroffer for Hyatt: let’s leave "marriage" as a civil institution. It has an extremely long history of being a civil institution, and for most of its history the Christian church was happy to leave it as such. Perhaps the Church could use a more theologically loaded word like "covenant," since that already has some legitimacy among conservatives.

• Paul Krugman on Newsnight, 30 May 2012 - YouTube: from Krugman's UK tour. A particularly clear demonstration of what the K-Man is up against, because we can see people, more coherent than most of their US counterparts and not carrying the baggage of US political familiarity, stating clearly what they believe: that the government throwing people out of work will give business "confidence", which will lead to more hiring. Because virtue (which is money) must be rewarded, and vice (which is debt and poverty) punished.

  

  The fact that he doesn't do this is one of the things I most respect about The Shrill One. At Digg; I don't know the original source.
• It turns out that newspapers are still good for something, and here are two shining, Pulitzer-worthy examples:
  • Stand your ground law, Trayvon Martin and a shocking legacy | Tampa Bay Times:

    Florida's "stand your ground" law is being used in ways never imagined — to free gang members involved in shootouts, drug dealers beefing with clients and people who shot their victims in the back.

    Defendants have invoked the law to excuse all manner of mischief, from minor fistfights to drug possession to killing an endangered species.

    And who goes free can sometimes depend as much on where a case is heard as its merits.

    Includes a *searchable database* of cases, so you can check their work or take it further.
  • Louisianna Incarcerated: How We Built the World's Prison Capital by Cindy Chang, Scott Threlkeld, and Ryan Smith at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, linked from Charles Blow.

    A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.
    ...
    Locking up as many people as possible for as long as possible has enriched a few while making everyone else poorer. Public safety comes second to profits.



• While at Princeton Reunions, I nipped into the Art Museum and saw the Constable Exhibit. Among the great things:

  

  Elm trees in Old Hall Park, East Bergholt.

  I had never before appreciated how great a draughtsman Constable was.

  The plaque surprised me, because it mentioned that the man is in the picture to give an idea of the trees' "enormous size". I measured, and if the man (including top hat) is 6 feet tall, then the largest tree is about 60 feet: large, true, but not what I'd call *enormous*.

  Just outside the museum, for instance, was a scene rather like this:

  

  By Joe Shlabotnik, on Flickr

  The building is Nassau Hall, and it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 feet tall to the top of the spire. Some of the White Ash trees are as tall or taller than the spire; they were probably planted around 1825 -- which is pretty old for America, but not a big deal in England. I guess I expected planted English trees to be taller -- but maybe they aren't planted as close to each other as American trees often are, so that they force each other to be tall and thin.

Your musical woodworking open Friday thread

by liberal japonicus

The video below the fold is for a japanese mobile phone and is quite neat. Obviously, woodworking and music are the two suggestions for the thread, but anything that moves you is fine.

Memorial Day and mourning

by liberal japonicus

While the main action probably centers around the observations of Chris Hayes, (google news here), I was in the wikipedia page about Memorial Day and thinking about some questions of national culture, which are below the fold

Mister Ed open thread

by Doctor Science

Pursuant to a dinner-table discussion, I found myself at a Yahoo!Answers discussion of "What is the most intelligent horse breed?". The consensus of the horsey people answering was (a) it depends, but stereotypically (b) Arabians. The discussion was very interesting, and included some good stories:

budrock1: I've got an Arab mare and a Morgan gelding and I'd say it's a toss-up. My Arab picks up things very quickly and you really only have to show her anything once. However, my Morgan learned how to open the automatic fly sprayer in his stall, pull out the spray can and close the door again so that I didn't know he had removed the can [emphasis mine]

I've known dogs and cats who were pretty smart, but none who thought to close the door behind them.

katdncswthdog: Shetland ponies are the only horses I know with a good sense of humor...we had one that would sneak up behind you then gallop in place. When you jumped & ran I swear he'd laugh at you.

So, join in with your smart-animal stories, or whatever.

George Stubbs, pre-eminent horse painter, Two Bay Mares And a Grey Pony In a Landscape.

Scarlett Johansson in a Gorilla Suit: The Superhero Mundanes Don't See

by Doctor Science

In my previous post about reviews of "The Avengers", I said Black Widow seemed to be "The Superhero Men Don't See". I've now done some more research and am pretty sure the cognitive problem isn't with men, it's with mundanes -- non-fans or Muggles, that is. It's an instance of the Invisible Gorilla problem; sexism comes in only as the easiest way for the reviewer's brain to patch the hole in hir perceptions.

I was already thinking about the Invisible Gorilla when Porlock Junior brought it up in the comments to the previous post, because I had just finished reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is about all sorts of cognitive biases or illusions.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment is one of the best-known such illusions. The subjects were told to count the number of times the basketball is passed between black-shirted players in the following video:

YouTube link

A truly astounding number of the subjects never noticed the guy in the gorilla suit, because they were concentrating so hard on the basketball.

I'm cutting for length, and because I'm going to be spoiling the heck out of "The Avengers".

White turnout declined in (at least) some states in the 2008 election

by Doctor Science

There was a lot of coverage of the Arkansas and Kentucky Democratic primary results yesterday, because Obama was officially unopposed but only got about 60% of the vote. In following up various discussions, I ended up looking at voter turnout in 2008 as compared to 2004. To my surprise, 30% of the states had lower turnout in 2008 than in 2004 -- including Arkansas and Kentucky. Except for Arkansas, all the states where turnout declined are much whiter than the country as a whole.

This chart plots the change in turnout between 2004 and 2008 as a function of the proportion of the state's population that is non-Hispanic black. Data are up in this GoogleDocs spreadsheet.

R-squared for this relationship is .43, which is fairly significant by social science standards. For comparison, I regressed "change in turnout" to "percent of vote that went to Obama", to address the possibility that Obama voters in general were more enthusiastic and willing to turn out. That R-squared is .13 -- or what we technically call "pffffffft".

I am willing -- nay, eager, nay, begging -- for someone with more data visualization skillz to make this into an infographic map, or at least to figure out how to label the data points with the state abbreviation.

I got the idea to do this from a discussion in the comments at Ta-Nehisi Coates' post on the continued salience of racism as an explanation:

nonotford:

Why the distinction between the Upland South/Appalachia and The White South as a whole? The areas of the South in which Obama did worse than Kerry (http://www.nytimes.com/interac...), just happen to be the areas with fewer black people (http://www.censusscope.org/us/.... ). Those blue areas in the first map are essentially the same as the red/purple areas in the second. If it weren't for southern blacks, the first map would've shown the entire South as red.

Craig replied:

The implication here is that the increased turnout among the black community in the deep south swamps out the inherent racism of [white] southern Democratic Party supporters (in other words, that [white] southern Democrats are just as racist as their Appalachian counterparts, but you can't see it in the data because those [white] Democrats live near actual black people, who canceled their votes out).

[brackets are my addition] Here is the map they're talking about:

From the New York Times.

The evidence I've collected suggests that nonotford and Craig may be largely right: white racism (seen as Kerry voters who didn't vote for Obama) was a factor not only in Appalachia but in the South as a whole, but the effects were masked in the Deep South by increased turnout of a large black population.

What I'm also seeing, to my surprise, is that there may have been a drop in white turnout nationwide, not just in the South. I hadn't expected that there would be so many states (as in, *any*) with lower turnout in 2008 than in 2004. Frankly, it looks to me as though there was a really substantial number of white Democrats who'd voted for Kerry but who couldn't make themselves vote for Obama. They weren't going to vote Republican, so they just didn't cast a vote for President.

I was also surprised by the lower turnout in Oregon, with its mail-in balloting. Someone who knows more about the data may want to investigate further.

These data really make it clear why voter suppression is surging: increased turnout of black voters was a huge factor in 2008.

An Election: Canvassing for Votes, by William Hogarth. Part of his series The Humours of an Election:

This scene depicts Tory and Whig agents, both attempting to bribe a farmer to vote for them. The crowd outside the tavern is visible in the background. In a reference to the antisemitism of the crowd behind, a Jewish peddler is being employed by another agent who is offering jewels and ribbons to the wives of voters.

On the margins of the composition a soldier (left) and two old sailors (right) represent uncorrupted patriotism. The soldier peeps out from behind a now-impotently decorative figurehead depicting the British lion devouring the French fleur-de-lis. A woman sits on it looking at her bribes. The sailors on the right are re-enacting a naval victory using pieces of broken clay pipe.

2+2=?

by Doctor Science

Ever make a connection between two ideas, and now you're not sure they're *really* connected, but you can't unconnect them in your brain? And part of you thinks, "brain, you are weird and disturbing, it's just a coincidence, shut up", and another part thinks "but look at how they match! disturbingly!"

And the third part says, Let's post it to the Internet!