WEIRD Americans

On cultural differences in human psychology
http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135
58 page research paper PDF: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf

Americans are most susceptible to the Muller-Lyer optical illusion (the one with the double 'arrows' that look different lengths), perhaps from growing up most in boxy rooms, and least susceptible to the Asch conformity result. Worse at noticing background details of an aquarium, better at judging the verticality of a line despite confounding context.

"Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood." “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”

'People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home. Those trying to use economic incentives to encourage sustainable land use will similarly need to understand local notions of fairness to have any chance of influencing behavior in predictable ways.'

'Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places. Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners. Research published late last year suggested psychological differences at the city level too. Compared to San Franciscans, Bostonians’ internal sense of self-worth is more dependent on community status and financial and educational achievement.'

HCoFP: parking math

(Not direct book material, but inspired by it.)

So, say a city mandates such and such space for parking; what does this do to land capacity? Let's say it's 1:1, 3 parking spaces for every 1000 sqft. If you have a 12,000 sqft lot, the easy solution is to use half of it. 6000 parking, 6000 building and floor space. How much better can you do? 4000 building lets you have two stories, for 8000 sqft floor space, and 12,000-4000=8000 parking space. Three stories can give 9000 floor space on 3000 building.

To go for the asymptotic limit, 999 stories could fit on 12 sqft of ground, giving 12*999 floor space and leaving 12*999 ground for parking. So 12,000 is the asymptotic limit we'll never reach. 1:1 means you'll never have as much floor space as the actual lot size.

How about 3:2? One story can take 40% of the land, leaving 60% for parking. More... math is helpful:
12,000-building = 1.5*n*building, where n=number of stories, and 12,000 can be A for ground area or lot size.
A=(1.5*n+1)*building; building = A/(1.5*n+1). So for n=2, A/4. 3000 sqft building, 6000 floor, parking is 12,000-3000=9000 or 3/2 the floor space.
n=3 -> A/5.5 -> 6545 sqft floor. Not much increase for the expense.

n=1000, A/1501, say A=1501 for convenience, building is 1, floor is 1000, and the floor space is almost 2/3 of the lot size.

Algebra time! A-building = p/f*n*building, p=parking fraction and f = floor fraction.
building = A/(n*p/f + 1) and we can see that the limit with large n is A*f/p. 1:1 -> A, 3:2 -> 2/3*A.

floor space = n*A/(n*p/f+1)

What about a modest requirement, like one lot per 2BR apartment? 330 sqft parking, 660 sqft apartment, p/f=1/2, can get 2A. For bigger apartments, like 1000 sqft, p/f=1/3, could get 3A, three times the lot size. But you have to build a tall narrow building to get that. 3 stories is floor space of 3A/2, only halfway to the limit, and still has parking taking half the land.

In the more likely extreme, say 9 spaces per 1000 sqft, that's p/f of 3/1, and your max usable area is A/3. Good news is that you don't have to do much to approach it; even one story gives you A/4. Two stories gives 2A/7, or 29% instead of 25%. Helps explain why there's so much one-story building; no point to doing any more given the cost of multiple stories.

By contrast, a building without parking can just pile on stories. 12,000 lot and 3 stories = 36,000 sqft, 4-12 times the floor area that real world parking requirements allow, and 3 stories is far from the limit. 4 to 12 times, just for a cheap 3 story building, never mine 20+ story skyscrapers. (12 from 3:1, 3000 sqft; 4 from 1:1 at 3 stories, 9000 sqft vs. 36,000). I think that sums up how badly parking requirements gut cities, slashing density hugely while turning half or more of the land into ugly hostile parking lots.

Reaction! and other links

"Scott Alexander" is more or less liberal/progressive but likes to "steelman" (the opposite of strawman) opposing ideas; also to try to pass the Ideological Turing Test, of describing such ideas in terms their proponents would recognize. (A task frequently failed by conservatives or libertarians talking about liberals, or liberals talking about libertarians. And probably about conservatives, but I don't have an insider view.) Recently he made a post about Reactionary ideas:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/

It's interesting, and many of the comments are interesting. Many of the *other* comments are unreconstructed reactionaries of a sort you probably haven't seen in one place before or at all, types who'd make much of the modern Republican party blanch and squirm, at least in public. For my money, Scott did a better job of portraying their ideas attractively than they do; one can read his words and think "wow, there might be something to this, but" and then read their words and go "wow, you're a bunch of morons in denial."

He then did a "rebuttal" http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
except it isn't at all a point by point takedown of the ideas he presented first. Instead it's a model where conservative values are adapted to surviving under duress, progressive ones to thriving in safety, and he basically says, though not explicitly enough for some to grasp, "so conservative values might have value somewhere but not in the society we actually live in or the direction we're going in." There's some debate about his definitions and presentation, which you can see in the comments, stuff like "if Athens was more democratic and nicer to slaves but Sparta treated its women much better and was egalitarian among the Spartan male adults, which is more left?"

From the same author, elsewhere, a signaling theory idea of why lots of middle class people seem to vote against their economic interests. Poor peopel vote for benefits, lower middle class opposes them to not be like poor people, upper middle class (who'll never be mistaken for poor) support benefits to be nice or to not be like lower middle class people...
http://lesswrong.com/lw/83b/a_signaling_theory_of_class_x_politics_interaction/

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Liberals should be proud of "sewer liberalism", the belief that some things could be provided by markets but are better off as public or regulated utilities. With borderline examples of not just healthcare but basic finance.
http://www.salon.com/2010/07/20/lind_right_left_divide/

"That fault line involves the very nature of the economy itself. If we set aside the nonprofit and household realms, then it is a crude but fair generalization to say that conservatives believe in an economy with two sectors — the market and the government — while liberals believe in an economy with three sectors — the market, the government and the utility sector."

"Liberals, as I have noted, acknowledge the value of competitive markets in addition to the government sector and the utility sector. But the reverse is not true. Free-market conservatives usually do not acknowledge the need for a public utility sector in addition to competitive markets and government. Instead, they tend to equate the very idea of a publicly regulated utility sector of the economy with “socialism.”"

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Swiss vote to curb executive pay and banker bonuses, largely by mandating that shareholders actually get to vote. Shows how empty corporate democracy usually is.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/03/swiss-referendum-executive-pay

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Nazi aviatrix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna_Reitsch

http://www.theonion.com/articles/pretty-cute-watching-boston-residents-play-daily-g,31554/

Oldest written down music http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph

"Feminists" who hate prostitutes:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/05/hatred-prostitutes-feminists-brutality
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/alex-bryce/sex-workers_b_2192575.html
"Indeed, when asked about her justification for the collateral damage
her legislative changes would cause, she suggested that damage to
individual sex workers was a price worth paying for the settlement to be
established."

Luke's life sucked: everyone he'd known for more than a few days was dead. Well, apart from that friend in the Academy and any other Tatooine friends. But 'parents' and Obi-wan? Dead.
http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0852.html