Rich and Strange Aeons

Is Tesla overvalued? Argues Tesla either can't cause disruption, or can't monopolize it. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/26/15872468/tesla-gm-ford-valuation-justifying-disruption

did Seattle's minimum wage lower employment? two studies, two reports
and two summaries, differing about which sucked
http://www.eoionline.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies/
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/27/15879346/study-high-minimum-wage-job-killer-seattle

Internet addiction and ethical web design https://aeon.co/amp/essays/if-the-internet-is-addictive-why-don-t-we-regulate-it

Asian anthem authoritarianism http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/28/asia/philippines-anthem-bill/index.html

Air pollution still kills thousands. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/28/534594373/u-s-air-pollution-still-kills-thousands-every-year-study-concludes

Intravenous vitamin C as cure for sepsis? http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/could-deadly-infections-be-cured-vitamin-c-180963843/

origin of Ashkenazi? https://theconversation.com/uncovering-ancient-ashkenaz-the-birthplace-of-yiddish-speakers-58355?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=facebookbutton

slow progress in parking reform: http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/06/27/american-cities-are-chipping-away-at-the-burden-of-parking-mandates/

Sea Trek https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?805937-Star-Trek-Alternate-Trek-settings&p=21196309#post21196309

plate tectonics and evolution https://theconversation.com/plate-tectonics-may-have-driven-the-evolution-of-life-on-earth-44571

right to carry increases violent crime, maybe? It uses a fairly new statistical technique to make synthetic controls. The result sounds robust. But the abstract says "elevates violent crime rates, but seems to have no impact on property crime and murder rates". Isn't murder a violent crime?
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/06/21/violent-crime-increases-right-carry-states/
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23510

expert view on reducing gun deaths https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/10/upshot/How-to-Prevent-Gun-Deaths-The-Views-of-Experts-and-the-Public.html?_r=0

oil eating bacteria https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170626155740.htm
Neanderthal dentistry https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170628131510.htm
host specific enemies and tropical biodiversity https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170629142949.htm

Vancouver sea wolves http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/sea-oceans-wolves-animals-science/

So we have these things called artificial neural networks, that learn in a supposedly neurologically-inspired manner. But AIUI, they typically take many repetitions to really learn something. Many many. And sometimes human learning seems like that, like rote memorization.

But other times, we learn with single-instance burn in. And not always because of some great emotional association, or repeated reflection. I had two instances of that yesterday.

First, I was up in Lowell for a job interview, and took the train. Now, I did that a few years ago, when a bunch of us went together to museums there. So as I emerged from the station this time, and looked across the street, suddenly I remembered exploring the park last time, before I'd gone to meet the others (who biked up). It's not like it's a particularly exciting or distinctive park, and I doubt I've thought of it since... but the impressions were there to be recalled.

As were the memories of being daunted and confued by crossing the nigh-freeway streets to get downtown, but that actually was mildly traumatic.

Second, I've been reading someone's Where I Read thread of the Robotech novels, based on the Robotech animated series, much of which I saw as a child. Last night the reader described a late scene where Minmei is seated outside somewhere, and her douchebag cousin-lover-manager Kyle is chugging a liquor bottle, before he finishes it and smashes it in mid air with a dropkick.

And I remember all that! Not well enough to guess who was on which side of the screen, but all of that suddenly seemed vividly familiar, in a way that other described scenes recently haven't. And unlike other remembered scenes -- the firing of the main gun, Roy dying, Max and Miriya fighting/courting, the SDF-1 punching a Zentraedi ship in Operation Daedalus -- I don't think I've thought about or reflected on this scene in the intervening nigh thirty years; it doesn't seem that iconic (though true, raging alcoholics are rare on Saturday morning cartoons, along with many other things distinctive about Robotech.) It's just some scene... that suddenly feels very fresh, after all this time.

I can't prove it's not some false memory constructed in response to the text. But I see no reason it has to be.

I accidentally (reading Spanish or Chilean news) learned today that Chile had won their first World Cup match. Despite my not caring about sports in general, thinking that the World Cup is a corrupt menace to developing democracies, and that this World Cup has been a disaster for Brazil (and why are we playing soccer in a malaria zone?), I felt some joy for them, if not pride, due to my tenuous connections. Goooo monkeysphere! Oook ook woo!

I belatedly thought of the US. I doubt I would actually care either way -- the Chile thing is as much having close friends there who'd care, I think -- but they, I mean 'we', haven't played yet.

I think my friends get to root for the US, Chile, and Germany. Three chances at victory!

Long but interesting article alleging that the conservative movement is deeply entangled with outright cons. As in, sign up for a newsletter, get snake oil investment tips in the mail.
http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_long_con/print
In the interest of skepticism, I'll note it's hard to trivially verify his claims -- though I checked, and Mitt Romney did indeed say _Battlefield Earth_ was his favorite novel.

Years ago I read Paul Ekman's Emotions Revealed on emotions and facial expressions. He identifies seven major emotions:

major emotions: my adaptive annotations

fear: don't eat me
anger: don't eat my child/food
sadness: someone ate my child
surprise: what's that?
disgust: that wasn't food!
contempt: you're beneath me
happiness: i ate/i had sex/my child done me proud/etc

Later he breaks happiness down:
16 possible positive emotions: 5 for pleasure from each of the 5 senses.
Amusement, excitement, contentment, ecstasy, wonderment, relief, fiero,
naches, elevation, gratitude, schadenfreude. He's not sure the last three are
emotions as opposed to other emotional states.

elevation -- feeling uplift from seeing surprising moral acts.
fiero -- From Italian. Pleasure-pride in a difficult accomplishment.
naches -- From Yiddish. Pleasure-pride in the accomplishment of your child or student.


There's an odd pleasure I experience a lot, which I don't know a name for. I guess it's closest to fiero, though sometimes secondhand or like elevation (pleasure from someone else's difficult accomplishment.) It's like solving puzzles, but these aren't deliberate puzzles, more like using a set of tools someone else provided in a surprising way, or making sense out of nonsense. I guess it's related to hacking, like building an operating system out of elisp, or a one-line program that generates cool graphical patterns. I should just give examples:

Firefly: eventually we realize that the show isn't just being coy about FTL or not, that there is no FTL, and that there's dozens of habitable and terraformed worlds in one system. At first this seems like bullshit, even with the humility proper to current planetary science. Then they say "multiple" stars and you're still skeptical. But then you learn that Castor is a real sextuple system in like the orbit of Pluto (two binary stars, themselves in a binary setup, and with another binary star revolving around the other four), and that there's another known sextuple (two triple stars), and you go huh. And gas giants can hold lots of large moons in a small space. And then you read some semi-canon explanation with artificial gravity and sent-ahead terraforming probes, and moons and dwarf planets being compressed for a more Earthlike surface gravity, and you remember Paul Birch's ideas for mass stream momentum transfer to change orbits and rotations with tech we could do today, and you go "huh. Unlikely, but more possible than FTL."

Or (lots of RPG examples now), you known Dungeons and Dragons, and the magical spells and items and item creation rules provided, all meant to model vaguely medieval fantasy, but someone figures out how to make a post-scarcity society with wall of iron spells and decanters of endless water and you feel proud of them for building something surprising. (But if they notice that a ladder costs less than two ten foot poles, that's just exploiting an obvious bug and stupid.)

Or there's D&D's Great Wheel cosmology, based on a two axis moral alignment system that has never made sense, with planes of existence that have their intrinsic cool elements, and someone preserves most of those elements while using order/violence axes that make a lot more sense, and in fact making many of the elements even more sensible and attractive as variant afterlives, and you vow to use it should you ever run Great Wheel D&D.

Or there's Exalted, with a semi-standard fantasy trope of gods powered by prayer and worship built in, but later someone publishes a goddess who's found a niche as a voice mail service, taking messages in the form of prayer and passing them on in dreams, and you go "cool, yeah, that makes sense", and then you remember that the gods are in a Celestial Bureaucracy, and imagine underlings who run the equivalent of mailing lists...

Or looking at the Blue Rose magic system, and realizing that if I dropped the Shaping Arcana, the rest could emulate a lot of Tolkien magic, including the corrupting sorcery, pretty well, even to building the Rings of Power. But Blue Rose was designed for romantic fantasy, not epic! Go me!

Or again in Exalted, my combining some obscure Charms and rituals to create a society of enlightened mortals with a Sidereal patron and integrated afterlife and Wyld polders, and I'm proud of having built this out of the provided elements, even if I haven't properly written it up yet... but if I try to imagine a fantasy society on my own, free of any constraints or strong influences, my mind blanks out at the sheer openness of it all. Magic can do anything, until you pick constraints, but picking my own? Feels artificial, I should go do something useful...

So yeah, partly it's hacking RPGs. But also married to that "making sense out of incoherence" a la Firefly and the Great Wheel, which also applied to reading Mere Christianity and seeing Lewis give a metaphor for the Holy Trinity that almost made sense. Doesn't quite seem like hacking. A joy in rationalization? Mystery-solving? I don't know. Maybe it's entirely unrelated emotions that I happen to associate because RPGs are often both hackable and nonsensical, whereas computer programs and (theology or sloppy SF) tend to be separate.

A friend calls it lateral thinking, which certainly applies to some of the 'hacking' "make it do something unexpected" stuff.

The Big Five personality traits and US states, correlated -- also with things like liberalness and mortality, in later tables.

If I weren't 40 minutes overdue for bed I'd try reading it properly and analyzing it, but maybe someone can beat me to it.