Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Paul

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The general welcome post
Hi! Welcome to my LiveJournal. Please note that:

* Most of my posts are friends-locked. Some of what I write is personal, some of it isn't, but I just like knowing who my potential readers are, unless the topic is *very* general and impersonal. If you're a friend of mine who's reading, and you don't have an LJ account, *get* one already. :-)

* I use LiveJournal mostly (1) as a journal to myself and (2) as a way to keep in touch with people I already know. I don't really use LJ as a way to meet *new* people, so please don't be offended if we've never met, you add me to your friendslist, and I don't friend you back.

* I have a terrible memory for RealName / LJ name pairings, and I don't really like trying to puzzle out new ones. So, if you friend me, please leave a reply to this post, telling me who you are. Or else send me email at HAPPYFUNPAUL AT LIVEJOURNAL DOT COM.
Thanks!

Before I forget, Happy Birthday...
... to my fellow firecracker filkers, "big sister"

figmo and

it_aint_easy! (One of these years I'll make it to Westercon so we can form our band "Born on the Fourth of July".)

... and to

wixenstyx (Jul 5th)!

It's only a COMPLETE waste of time watching when my team LOSES
Red Sox lost to the Angels.
Celtics lost to the Magic (series goes to a Game Seven).
Bruins just lost in overtime of Game Seven to the Hurricanes.

Bleah.

[links] various political and economic
I'm keeping track of these mostly for my own benefit, but feel free to watch/read/listen:

A half-hour speech by Andrew Napolitano covering the history of abuses against the Fourth Amendment, given October 2007. (The video is at the bottom and I can't figure out how to link to it separately. The rest of the page is a Nick Gillespie overwrought screed.)

Supreme Court limits warrantless vehicle searches (an actual small bit of good news)

Court Debates Strip Search of Student, in which the Supremes supposedly attempt to balance privacy vs. safety of the students. Sounds semi-reasonable until you get the details:
The (school) officials were acting on a tip from another student and were looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen, a painkiller. They made Ms. Redding strip to her underwear, shake her bra and pull aside her panties. The officials, both female, found no pills.
What has it come to, that anyone takes those school officials' case seriously?

How the Crash Will Reshape America by Richard Florida, from The Atlantic. It's a nice piece that combines speculation about the long-term effects of the economic crash with an analysis of government's role in causing it (in particular, the long-time fetishization of homeownership). The article ends oddly, though-- having just explained all the ways in which government messed up by warping the economy, the author then proceeds to suggest new and different ways for the government to mess up by warping the economy.

Richard Posner on the New Depression

More of a science link, but with political overtones: NY Times book review of "Intelligence and How to Get It" by Richard E. Nisbett (a prominent cognitive and social psychologist, and one of my mentors back at U. Michigan), which is essentially a well-researched reply to Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's “The Bell Curve” (1994) and Arthur R. Jensen's “The g Factor” (1998). In a sense, I got a preview of the book back in 1994 just talking to Dick after we listened to Charles Murray give a talk at U. Toledo, so I'll definitely be getting this one.

5 psychological experiments that prove humanity is doomed, a snarky review of some major social psych studies.

Which church? (priceless student dialogue)
(As I'm packing up my stuff and leaving the classroom, the next class, taught by a different teacher, starts coming in. Two ninth-grade girls enter together and exchange the following dialogue:)

Girl #1: Can you quick help me with some questions before the test?

Girl #2: Sure.

Girl #1: OK... um, first, what are the two churches again?

Girl #2: The Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

Girl #1: OK, and... which one was right?

Girl #2: [*pause*] Uh... um... which one was... right?? I don't... get what you mean... I mean, it depends on...
( Read more... )

Lessons of history?
So, let's see, off the top of my head I've got:

Never start a land war in Asia. (Obviously.)

Never invade Russia in winter. (Special case of #1.)

Never hire the Turks as your mercenaries; eventually, they realize that they're the ones with the weapons, and take over. (Abbasid Empire, Egypt, China with the Uighurs, arguably the Byzantines)

Never sign on to a British expedition to the Arctic or Antarctic.

If you see a berzerker who's painted blue, run away, run away now.

Africa is a continent, not a country. And it's big, really big.

If the Mongols send an ambassador to your court, give him proper protocol. Do not cut off his head and send it back to the Khan in an attempt to intimidate the barbarians.

Don't try to intimidate the Vikings, either.

Do not have "celibacy" as a central tenet that all members of your religion must follow.

Dividing up your kingdom equally among your three sons may be "fair", but your empire won't last long that way. Stick to primogeniture.

Stone beats flesh. Bronze beats stone. Iron beats bronze.

Stirrups. Definitely stirrups.

Also, a writing system? Definitely a good idea. But limit education.

No, they aren't really retreating. It's a trap. (Mongols, Iroquois, etc.)

Make sure to pay the army.

The hungrier your people are, the less likely they are to revolt.

A really good story is a powerful thing.

Don't make a martyr out of your enemy.

What are some other "lessons of history"? (Yes, I'm writing another song and I need your help. Also, I don't have anything from U.S. history yet, so feel free to change that.)

[links] health/psych: migraines, anorexia death rts, broken hearts, magenta, antidepressant cartoons
NYT article on migraines
"Everything you thought you knew about migraine headaches — except that they are among the worst nonfatal afflictions of humankind — may be wrong. At least that’s what headache researchers now maintain. From long-maligned dietary triggers to the underlying cause of the headaches themselves, longstanding beliefs have been brought into question by recent studies.
As if that were not enough dogma to overturn, there is growing evidence that almost all so-called sinus headaches are really migraines."

megmuck links to research on Anorexia death rates.
"The researchers studied the records of some 6,000 patients covering a 30-year period (1973 to 2003). Out of the cohort studied, 265 died during the 30-year follow-up. The most frequent causes of death were suicide (responsible for 32 percent of the deaths), anorexia (19 percent of the deaths), and cancer (11 percent of the deaths)... Altogether, anorexia patients were six times more likely to have died during the 30-year follow-up period than was the general population."

thnidu links to research on severe depression leading to heart disease
"Doctors have long known that depression is common after a heart attack or stroke, and worsens those people's outcomes. Monday, Columbia University researchers reported new evidence that depression can lead to heart disease in the first place."

Plus, some lesser bits I saved in case I might want to use them in the future:
Magenta Ain't a (Spectral) Color
cartoon "Maybe you should lay off the antidepressants"
Incidentally, can anyone figure out a way to save the preceding image as a separate file? I was going to use it in a powerpoint for class, but couldn't.
The next cartoon, on the other hand, I had no trouble with:

[links]AV: Remixing YouTube, World Builder, Carlin, Kiwi, sheep art, dancing bird, 88/44 presidents
Remixing YouTube. I can't tell if all the sound and video really came from actual YouTube clips, but regardless, the final result is outstanding! Excellent music, interesting vid clips. 7 pieces in all, plus an "about" which explains the editing process (but doesn't give much detail).

World Builder
A sweet, sad 9-minute video. "A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves. This award winning short was created by filmmaker Bruce Branit, widely known as the co-creator of '405'. World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production. Branit is the owner of Branit VFX based in Kansas City."

Kiwi! (above) is another sweet but sad video, this one about daring to dream. Sometimes, though, I prefer a happier ending someone tacked on (even if it does compromise the integrity of the original), which is here. Which do you like better?

"Modern Man" by George Carlin
"I'm an alpha male on beta blockers" (plus perhaps another few hundred modern phrases, all strung together rapid-fire. Pure poetry.)
[thanks to thnidu]

Extreme Sheep LED Art
[thanks to kitanzi]

Another dancing cockatiel, this time to Ray Charles' "Shake a Tail Feather"
[thanks to enegim]

Lyrics only: 88 Lines about 44 Presidents

(Sorry for forgetting (even more than usual) to record my sources for many of the excellent links.)

[links] economics and politics
It's time once again to clear out some tabs on Firefox. Some of these are "Ooh! See this if you haven't yet" links to share (like the first one in this batch), others (including the rest of this first batch) are primarily for my own records (though other folks might be interested too).

Median inflation-adjusted HOME PRICES in the U.S. from 1890 to 2007... converted into a roller coaster!
I got this from

xiphias here; it's originally from http://www.speculativebubble.com. Basically, it's a delightfully visceral way to see just how badly home prices were about to crash. You can also see the graph of what actually happened (including the last two years-- note that home prices are still about 15-20% above their natural level, as of the end of 2008), but really, roller coasters are more fun (and visceral) than mere graphs!

Article on Icelandic investment brokers screwing over their country from Vanity Fair
And how different is Wall Street, really?

Mickey Kaus on Ross Douthat on Obama's possible strategy
What seems most irksome/puzzling for a vaguely-libertarian like me or a vaguely-liberal like Kaus is that the expansion of government isn't being done in a way that's either (1) very well-focused (i.e. the BS gets expanded as much or more than the effective parts) or (2) in a way that's easily reversible. Even if you assume that higher spending is the foot-in-the-door to a larger government in general, there's a limit as to how much taxes can be raised, and if you're bloating government with "homelessness prevention" and increases to the budgets of everyone from the Agriculture Department to the Veterans' Administration, how are you going to get universal health care or other presumably higher-priority items?

A Reason article on the effects of past "stimulus packages"
"Every dollar’s worth of production used to satisfy the government’s demand is offset by more than a dollar’s worth of production that is no longer available to consumers and businesses."

A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism
An article in the WSJ from Michael J. Boskin

Short-selling... it's actually a good thing
Another one from Reason

[links] (request) mad scientist
Odd request, but... there was an online comic I like and thought I'd saved, but apparently didn't. The gist: Most fictional mad "scientists" don't actually do science, with a control sample and whatnot; they're actually engineers or technicians. (And now, by retelling it badly, I've totally killed the joke for any who haven't seen it yet.) Anyway, does anyone have a link to the original?

[Edit: Thanks, folks! Here's a copy, below. ~~It's kind of blurry because... well, actually I'm too tired to figure out why. I'm going to bed, now. :-)~~ Fixed now!]

Playing the USSR
Is there a game, in the vague style of Diplomacy, Axis and Allies, Civilization, etc.*, that focuses on playing the Soviet Union during the Cold War (as one option, at least)? The question came up over lunch with other teachers.

* I hasten to point out I've never actually played any of these, nor Settlers of Catan, so I may be talking out the wrong orifice when I handwave "in the vague style". Work with me here. :-)

"As long as I'm insomniac" reviews: "Watchmen"
For those who haven't seen it yet:

3 stars. Maybe 3 1/2. A much better adaptation than I ever thought possible, absolutely perfect in parts, and I definitely want to see it again. It helped that I've read the original graphic novel, but it's probably not necessary, and it's certainly not necessary to have read it recently (it's been over a decade since I have). There are some flaws, though, which hold down my overall rating.

For those who have:
( Spoilers a-plenty )
What did you think?

[links] Correlation does not imply causation (or does it?)
Just in case anyone missed it, I absolutely loved yesterday's XKCD:

I was also reminded of this fake news article written by one of my esteemed fellow grad students (probably Dan Horn, possibly Shane Mueller) over a decade ago at the Cognition and Perception Area in U. Michigan's Psychology Department. It reads in part:

NEW POLL SHOWS CORRELATION IS CAUSATION

WASHINGTON (AP) The results of a new survey conducted by pollsters
suggest that, contrary to common scientific wisdom, correlation does in
fact imply causation. The highly reputable source, Gallup Polls, Inc.,
surveyed 1009 Americans during the month of October and asked them, "Do
you believe correlation implies causation?" An overwhelming 64% of
American's answered "YES", while only 38% replied "NO". Another 8% were
undecided. This result threatens to shake the foundations of both the
scientific and mainstream community.

"It is really a mandate from the people." commented one pundit who wished
to remain anonymous.

I wish it were true. Then the fashion industry could just cause the stock market to go up merely by raising hemlines.

The scientific community is deeply divided on this matter. "It sure makes
my job a lot easier." confided neuroscientist Thad Polk. "Those who
criticize my work always point out that, although highly correlated,
cerebral blood flow is not 'thought'. Now that we know correlation IS
causal, I can solve that pesky mind-body problem and conclude that
thinking is merely the dynamic movement of blood within cerebral tissue.
This is going to make getting tenure a piece of cake!"

Incidentally, Dr. Polk has long since become tenured at U. Michigan. :-)

The rest of the Happy Hour archive is pretty good too. While a lot of the articles required specific or specialized knowledge, and some of them have in-jokes that fewer than two dozen people in the world will understand (case in point: the Psych Olympics), look for the ones marked "A" and you'll probably do fine.

[links] Loewe sound
OK, I needed a laugh. This did the trick!

[via Andrew Sullivan]

BTW, the venue looks a lot like Symphony Hall in Boston, but it's probably just that Boston's was modeled after symphony halls in Europe. The ad agency and company are German, so that'd fit.

[links] Bush's legacy
This is one of the better summations of the Bush Administration I've seen, from The Economist. (Thanks to

twoeleven for the link.) It's almost completely negative but not particularly partisan. Particularly scary, and not something I've seen highlighted elsewhere, is the graph showing the growth of unfunded liabilities in entitlement programs. "The long-term unfunded cost of America’s programmes for the elderly had last year reached a stratospheric $43 trillion... compared with $13 trillion... in 2000."

However, the article focuses mainly on economic issues, foreign-policy issues, and methods-of-operation. That's what I'd expect from The Economist, but still, I wish they would say more decrying the Bush Administration attacks on civil liberties protections and checks-and-balances government-- y'know, those pesky "Constitutional" issues. Maybe, being Brits, they don't notice. :-) I'm sure other people are mad at Bush for their own pet reasons (environmentalism, e.g.) too, but that was the main omission for me.

ANSWER to that (unintentionally) tricky geometry problem
Oh right, I never got around to posting the answer to that geometry problem. In honor of just having entered the finished math grades into a file (though they were done back on Saturday, plus one student on Monday), I'll show it now. :-)

Choice "(d) BC and plane ADC" is correct; since segment BC is perpendicular to both AC and CD, it's perpendicular to plane ADC.

Choice "(b) AD and plane E" is incorrect (though for some reason, a lot of students chose it) because, since DH is perpendicular to AC, AD meets AC at an acute angle, which means it must meet plane E at an acute angle.

Choice "(c) AB and plane ADC" is incorrect. Since BC is perpendicular to AC, triangle ACB is a right triangle with the right angle at C, so angle BAC is acute, so AB meets plane ADC at an acute angle.

Choice "(a) DH and plane E" is the tricky one...

My first thought was: It's incorrect because you don't have enough information. DH is perpendicular to AC, so it might be that D is directly "over" H and DH meets the entire plane E at a right angle... or it might be the case that D is a little "further away" from us, in which case DH does not meet plane E perpendicularly.

My second thought was: It is correct, because, given the answer to (d), there's nowhere for D to be except directly "over" H. If you draw an "above view" of the diagram correctly with ACB being a right angle, it's clear.

My third thought, thanks to

ultimatepsi, was: But it's also given that AD is perpendicular to AB! There is no way to put "D" to make that true! "BC perp. to CD" (in conjunction with "BC perp. to AC") forces D to be above H, but "AB perp. to AD" implies D is "further" from us than CD. It can't be both! So the problem describes an impossible figure! Therefore, choice (a) can be neither "true" nor 'false"!

In the end, I marked choices (b) and (c) wrong, (a) with "ok" (no points taken off), and (d) correct with a half-point bonus.

The whole thing reminded me of a semi-famous SAT math problem. It appeared as a problem #6 on the old pencil-and-paper version of the SAT (implying that it must be easy, to appear so early on). It went something like this:

Given two pyramids: One is a tetrahedron with the four faces being equilateral triangles. The other has a square base but the other four faces are equilateral triangles of the same size as in the tetrahedron. Now, stick the two pyramids together, one triangular face to another, so that both faces are covered up "inside" the resulting polyhedron. How many (external) faces does the new polyhedron have?
(a) 4
(b) 5
(c) 6
(d) 7
( the answer )

that (unintentionally) tricky geometry problem
(I can't show you the diagram, alas, but I can describe it well enough that you can probably draw it yourself:)
There is a plane E (lying flat).
In the plane are points A, B, and C.
A, B, and C form a triangle, with B "closest" to us, A at back left, and C at back right. In the diagram, the triangle appears approximately equilateral (but don't trust those apparent dimensions or angles).
Draw line segments AB, BC, and (dotted 'cause it's in back) AC.
Point H lies on segment AC.
Point D is not in plane E, it's "above" it, directly (?) over point H.
Draw (dotted) line segment DH.
Draw line segments AD, BD, and CD to complete a picture of a tetrahedral pyramid.

In this figure, points A, B, C, and H are in plane E.
AD is perpendicular to AB.
BC is perpendicular to CD.
DH is perpendicular to AC.
AC is perpendicular to CB.
Which segment and which plane are perpendicular?
(a) DH and plane E
(b) AD and plane E
(c) AB and plane ADC
(d) BC and plane ADC

(Keep in mind the theorem that "If a line is perpendicular to two distinct lines (or line segments) that lie in a plane and that pass through its foot (the point of intersection between the line and the plane), then the line is perpendicular to the plane." Also, any three noncollinear points determine a plane.)

Now, I took this problem from a set (with no answer key) in which it was possible to have more than one choice correct. However, I didn't tell the students that, because when I made the test on Thursday night, I was sure there was only one correct answer. Indeed, there is one definitely correct answer and two that are definitely wrong. But the other choice? Well, that got complicated...

(Solution tomorrow. I'll let y'all have fun with it for now. :-)
(

ultimatepsi was able to figure it out over the phone while at a party, because she's full of awesome.)

[links] Ellen & Gladys, Obama, drug war, StarWars?, slow-mo, James Burke, Bill James, Lovecraft, etc

"I love Jesus but I drink a little"
This cheered me up just now... Ellen Degeneres makes a call to 88-year-old Gladys in Austin and gets more than she bargained for (link from Andrew Sullivan):

While I'm at it, here are some links to other interesting stuff I've seen in the past few weeks:

44 Presidents face-morph into each other in succession

Barack Obama's inauguration speech, annotated. Funny!
America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.
(Said “founding documents” were pulled out of Cheney’s shredder just in time)
So it has been.
(No, really - they were there, stuck in the blades!)

I'm happy so far with Obama's action on restoring constitutional liberties (closing Gitmo, creating greater transparency) but I don't know how much his administration will restore the Constitution, though I do expect them not to be as actively bad as Bush/Cheney. For example, I have little hope that the Obama Administration will do much to restore the Fourth Amendment (indeed, Obama's reversal on FISA and telecom immunity lost him my vote) or reverse decades of the wrongheaded unconstitutional War on Drugs. About the latter:
An essay on the cumulative collateral damage done by the Drug War, by Radley Balko of Reason Magazine.

On to lighter stuff...

Star Wars... as retold by someone who's never seen it!

fantastic montage of slow-motion camera videos

Knowledge Web, a project of the James Burke Institute. (James Burke was the host of "Connections", one of my favorite documentary shows ever.)

Bill James takes on the BCS, an interesting article by baseball's sabermetrics mastermind about college football's non-playoff mess. Linked from this post on Football Outsiders. I think he gets the situation mostly right but misses one other aspect: that there is a fundamental distinction between "strongest team" and "most deserving team" that leads to some of the "errors" in the BCS. (I'm pretty sure I've written about this online at some point, but I can't find a link now.)

Lovecraft is Missing (online comic)

The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe, article by Mark Liberman on Language Log, that I probably got from

thnidu

[links] Watch "Lie to Me" (my cousin's TV show!)
"Have you had any specialized deception training?"
"I've dated a lot of men."

Well, I was so busy last week that I totally forgot to watch the premiere of "Lie to Me" last Wednesday night at 9 (Eastern). Fortunately, these days everything's online, so B-Lady and I watched the pilot episode on Friday night.

"Lie to Me" is interesting in that:

(1) The show relies heavily on the psychological research of Paul Ekman concerning facial expressions and nonverbal communication, which has long fascinated me. In fact, I'm going to use clips from the show in one of my Psych classes tomorrow.

(2) My cousin Monica Raymund has a big role in the series-- as "Ria Torres", she's third- or fourth-billed, after Tim Roth ("The Incredible Hulk", "Pulp Fiction", "Reservoir Dogs") and Kelli Williams (Lindsay on "The Practice"). Monica's first scene as Ria appears about 14:30 into the pilot.

(3) The premise is pretty good and Tim Roth in particular is snarky fun, in the "House" mold.

However, as a procedural, with particular similarities to "The Mentalist", the show needs better writing to distinguish itself; the actual "mysteries" on the pilot were somewhat dull and predictable, and (excepting the quote at the top of this post) the dialogue was so-so. So, here's hoping matters improve, because there's definite potential there. "Lie to Me" is probably safe for at least a half-season (it's on after "American Idol"), but I'm rooting for it to go further for my cousin's sake. :-)

Watch the pilot here.
Series website
Paul Ekman's blog about the show, with clips
Paul Ekman's site on learning to read microexpressions