soapbox

Following up on a previous discussion/post on people’s perceptions of right, wrong, and shades of gray, I point you to this Balloon Juice commentary on an absurd editorial in the National Review. The NRO’s argument, in essence, is that the oppression of an undesirable minority (gays in this case) is a perfectly legitimate expression of free speech, while any dissenting opinion or effort to combat this oppression is a trampling of the First Amendment.

Or, put more artistically:

The logic, according to our repressed wingnuts, is that the first amendment struggle goes something like this:

Wingnut- “Homosexuals are filthy sodomites who should not have access to marriage.”

Evil gay person- “Nonsense. I demand the same rights as you and will fight for them.”

Wingnut- “Why won’t you respect my right to free speech?”

And there you have the wingnut understanding of the Constitution.

Look, I don’t like name-calling and divisive language. I think that the electoral college system results in the illusion of a deeply-divided nation, of a irreparably damaged union of two warring factions – and this perception leads to further escalation of the name-calling and intolerance. I don’t like this. But sometimes it’s okay to call a spade a spade, and or in this case calling a crazy a crazy. I truly don’t understand how these people can think this way, I don’t think there’s any way to change their mind, and so I can only hope that they become further marginalized and disenfranchised… which is exactly how they feel about me, a straight white guy who has sold his soul to that great demon, rational thought liberalism.

  

In keeping with tradition, I propose this Wednesday evening.  I’m happy to host, if people can make it, but I don’t have DVR so we might want to go with G-Money’s setup.

  

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I have always wanted to do a better job of music labeling and tagging, but with a many-gig library it’s just too daunting… maybe if I had another summer of being an REU student at a linear accelerator it might get done, but that’s about it. But I do enjoy my “4- or 5-star music” playlist, and it would be nice if magically all my songs could be rated. I’m sure that it’s an applescript waiting to be written, but I’m lazy, so instead I did a google and found AutoRate. This little app is assigns each song in your library a rating R given by:
R = 100 (
where is the main play frequency, is standard deviations, S is the number of skips per month, and is the skip penalty coefficient.

In practice, however, this results in many of my favorite songs receiving ratings in the 0.5 to 1.5 stars range, I think as a result of excessively punishing ’skips’ ( too large, I think the program defaults to . So, back to Applescript I suppose. The question really is what algorithm to use? The older and simpler iRate just used something along the lines of (play count/days in library) * user rating, but I also don’t want to overly penalize those gems that I’ve had forever. Any suggestions on a formula to use?

  

I mentioned the interview of John Ziegler by Nate Silver (of BP and FiveThirtyEight.com fame) in my previous neuropsych post, but it really deserves more attention.

First, the interview itself : It is because of men like this that Bush got re-elected, and it is because of men like this that the GOP got crushed two short weeks ago. Living in San Diego, I now live among more Republicans than ever (even when I lived in rural Indiana) and many of them are very troubled by the way in which “their” party has been hijacked by crazies – either rabid partisans with a “for us or against us mentality” or far-right religious crazies. When the GOP is in the hands of rational conservatives then the country will be in a better place, but in the mean-time the Democrats are our only hope.

sorry for that tangent. Here’s Nate’s follow-up post, and also check out Carl Bialik’s assessment of the Zogby poll – very informative, and what I would call an un-biased observer.

  

It is difficult to raise this subject without seeming to take sides or assign value, but a new paper in Journal of Political Psychology has a pretty interesting take on the idea of hard-wired philosophical inclination. Studying the rooms of 76 college students and 94 professionals, the authors noted significant correlation between neatness/room decoration style and political leaning. The idea is that distinct cognitive inclinations of liberals towards ambiguity and intellectualism, and conservatives toward order, “drive the way one leads one’s life and displays one’s life in their living and work spaces,” co-author Dana Carney, an assistant professor of management at Columbia University’s Business School in New York City. These various room elements are “behavioral residue,” says co-author Sam Gosling, associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and notes that these findings are just the latest of several recent attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA. Brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and even genetic tests are turning up possible clues to our political origins and behaviors.

“It’s pleasurable for liberals to think more. They gravitate toward art, to things that are not as concrete,” says Carney. “Conservatives have a need for order, for there not to be ambiguity. There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one’s environment is predictable and therefore safe.”

Clearly the line isn’t as clear-cut as that, though, and it’s not surprising that people get defensive about labeled with such a broad brush. More importantly, the Carney & Gosling study isn’t the focus of this post; I present their results in light of a recent Nate Silver interview of John Ziegler, author of the Zogby poll/interview of Obama voters attempting to argue that Obama won only because the “liberal media” (don’t get me started) wanted him to win.

Short version: Ziegler is a talk-show host and as such it’s hard to tell what is an act and what is real. You have to assume that the interview is legit, though, and it’s honestly pretty shocking how rude and uncooperative Ziegler is. However, it makes more sense when (a) you read a 2004 article on him and (b) you consider that he falls into the “neat room” crowd: the world is black and white, that absolutes do exist, and that ambiguity and uncertainty are weaknesses. When Nate asks him detailed or non-stimulating questions, Ziegler becomes rude and belligerent – he doesn’t know how to handle this kind of low-ratings discussion.

The Atlantic article is very long, but good, and I recommend it highly. If nothing else it helped me make sense of the creature that is “talk radio”. To wit, talk radio is not conservative because of some big Clear Channel/Fox News conspiracy (though that doesn’t help) but because talk radio is all about profit, and what is profitable is “shock jocks” and emotional extremes. Rational discourse and moral gray areas don’t inflame passions or draw big numbers, and thus don’t produce sufficient advertising revenue … we have NPR for that. That’s not to say that a lot of “stimulating” talk radio isn’t socially destructive and inflammatory, but at least it helped me understand where it’s coming from.

  

Except for the minor detail of being a huge security risk, there are a lot of advantages to having the same username and password for all your online services – easier to remember, friends can find you, etc. However, if you can’t remember what login you set up, or if you can’t even remember what sites you’ve patronized, then usernamecheck.com is a perhaps useful little resource.

There are a lot of advantages to using the same username for all your online services. It’s easier to remember, and friends can find you more easily. If you’re someone who’s in this habit, you might want to take a look at Usernamecheck, a site that tells you at which sites your favorite username is registered – it scans ~ 60 “most popular” networks for a given username, returning “available” or “taken”. They say that it

The sites on the list are some of the best, most useful places to have an account, so it might remind you of something you’ve been meaning to sign up for, or it might remind you of sites you signed up for and forgot about.

What I find interesting is that apparently somebody else out there is using my usernames at sites I’d never heard of. hmmm.

Nerdy side note on security: I have a couple core password kernels, which are then permuted at regular intervals, and with varying degrees of complexity depending on the sensitivity of the site. So, all my social-networking sites have a 6-9 character password, while my banking/brokerage passwords are generally 12-14 characters.

  

Obviously, that’s a working title… but with the release of Apple TV Software Update 2.3 it’s as good a time as any to complain about what Apple *isn’t* doing, which is to create a piece of entertainment hardware that provides exactly what I want.

What I want:
a combination Roku/TiVo/Apple TV-without-needing-to-be-hacked/Blu-Ray player, without any DRM or HDCP nonsense, able to navigate to myp2p.eu and play those streams smoothly without chatter or hiccups.

What is HDCP you ask? Well, if you plan on getting a new Macbook and want to use an external display, read this first:

Just got a new MacBook last week and finally found a mini Display Port -> VGA adapter so i could use my 19” external display. I rented a movie from the iTunes store yesterday and when I tried to play it on my external display, it gave me a warning/error that the display was ‘not an authorized HDCP display’ and it would not play. Plays fine on the small MacBook screen, just nothing external. To make it even worse, i tried all the movies that I have purchased from the iTunes store with the same result… NONE of them will play on anything but the MacBook’s small 13” screen. This is crazy unacceptable.