Rich and Strange Aeons

Fantasy flow charts, one female-biased: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/879zov/intro_to_femaleauthored_fantasy_flowchart/

Statistical tests for cause and effect. https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/cause-and-effect-the-revolutionary-new-statistical-test-that-can-tease-them-apart-ed84a988e
I'm told _Causality_ by Judea Pearl is also relevant.

Ancient walled cities, to crude scale. https://alexander.co.tz/experiments/walledcityscale/
And Kowloon. http://mapfrappe.com/?show=52710

From last year: how zoning laws cripple the US economy. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulations-us-economy.html

Urbanists react to the Wakanda of Black Panther: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/the-real-life-possibilities-of-black-panthers-wakanda-according-to-urbanists-and-city-planners

RPGs: fantasy localism or microclimates: https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2017/11/localism-adventure-as-microclimate.html

Aladdin's mother was Chinese in old pantomimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widow_Twankey

Guns and "self-defense": police are trained to run from attackers with knives within 21-30 feet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill
https://www.policeone.com/edged-weapons/articles/102828-Edged-Weapon-Defense-Is-or-was-the-21-foot-rule-valid-Part-1/

2015 article on early fountains. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/electricity-free-fountains.html

Rise and fall of the American SRO https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-sro/553946/

2015 Mother Jones article: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america/

'Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion. Direct costs account for $8.6 billion—including long-term prison costs for people who commit assault and homicide using guns, which at $5.2 billion a year is the largest direct expense. Even before accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence, in other words, the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.

Indirect costs amount to at least $221 billion, about $169 billion of which comes from what researchers consider to be the impact on victims’ quality of life.'

By contrast, the gun industry is $13.5 billion/year.
If we estimated the positive utility of gun ownership at $1000/year for each of 100 million gun owners, that would be $100 billion... still a huge social cost.'

(Also, social cost of motor vehicle crashes is estimated at $871 billion.)


Gun industry revenues are a whopping $13.5 billion/year. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/san-bernardino-shooting/americas-gun-business-numbers-n437566

Assuming 100 million gun owners, the utility to each of gun ownership would have to be $2300/year for society to be breaking even.

The Met makes 400,000 art images free for download and use http://www.openculture.com/2014/05/the-met-puts-400000-high-res-images-online.html

( Read more... )

The science of food comas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postprandial_somnolence

I've been trying to reset my sleep schedule to something more in tune with society. So far I'm just massively jet lagged without the fun of having gone anywhere.

Snooze buttons are bad for you or at least can be, especially if you actually fall asleep you again; sleep has phases, and you can fall into a deeper phase than you were initially. This might also explain something I found during my orals prep: for two weeks my body refused to sleep more than 3 hours a night, and I was tired all the time, but trundled through my studied. The day of my exam I set my alarm, got woken up after three hours, and felt like nauseous crap. There's a difference between three hours because stupid body wakes up and three hours because alarm.

Another column on how teens naturally sleep at 11pm for 9 hours despite US insanity of having high schooler start earlier than elementary school.

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NY Times takes on the Senate, the least democratic legislature in the developed world. 66:1 ratio in power between WY and CA. Why do the 500,000 people of Wyoming deserve more power (and federal money) than the 500,000 people of Fresno?

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Cosmic ray bit flips a growing problem?

Cracked on gun myths or weird facts: gun ads are weird, there's no typical mass shooter, making suicide harder does work to reduce suicides, there's weird gun/god association, violence is down, guns get collected like expensive Barbie dolls, maybe all the gun porn and violent games reduce overall violence while increasing mass shootings. Maybe.

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social mobility of food services, and contribution of liquor to urban vitality
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/03/27/food_service_sector_should_be_taken_seriously.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/small_business/2013/03/liquor_license_moratoriums_nimby_idiots_are_strangling_great_neighborhoods.html

Las Vegas female bartenders. Another profession gets sexualized and off-limited for the non-young.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/03/las_vegas_bartender_went_from_a_male_to_a_female_job.html

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Transit has big benefits. Even if a small %age of trips is via transit, those will be disproportionately trips that otherwise would have been on congested roads, so the benefit is larger than one might expect. I always said drivers should welcome transit subsidies as reducing the competition for road and parking...

Productivity minimum wage would be $22/hour. Inflation-linked would be over $10.50

Prologue: my own position on guns continues to be mostly neutral and 'meh'. Well, nervous around actual guns. But I tend to react to arguments I see, and the current result of that is:

I've seen people ask why people need "military" weapons like the AR-15. Or semi-autos in general; in a more anti-gun phase myself, I'd proposed slashing handguns and semi-autos, leaving bolt-action rifles and such. But I've seen some spirited defenses.

There's a big class of people with hedonic reasons to favor the AR-15, which is veterans and reservists and Guardsmen and such. The AR-15 is the civilian (semi-auto) version of the M-16, and it makes sense to me that you'd want to continue using a gun like the one you trained on, or even continuing training on a gun similar to the one you'd use if called up. You know how to clean it, it feels and shoots similarly, etc.

Also, the AR-15/M-16 sound like good guns, in many ways. Highly modular, so in effect you have the option for many 'guns' by swapping in pieces. Designed for infantry, so lightweight and using light ammo, so easier to carry around -- even for hunting. Accurate despite its light weight, so good for target and varmint shooting. So, various features attractive even to legitimate civilians.

And despite what you might think at first, 'military' doesn't necessarily mean "all that great at killing people". Military tends to want lots of bullets in the air, to strafe crowds of troops or make them keep their heads down, which means being able to carry lots of ammo, which means light-weight bullets and low powder charges. There's apparently some debate about whether the M-16 has enough stopping power. If you really want to put someone down with one shot, get a large game hunting rifle with big cartridges...

Not that the AR-15 is *bad* at killing people, but it's 'military' aspects don't necessarily make it better, because the military also cares about "can our troops march with this all day". The most relevant aspect to (very rare) spree shootings would be the large magazines (and I'm told magazines can be swapped quickly anyway, and the really large -- 100 -- magazines often jam, which in fact happened to some of this year's shooters.) The most relevant aspect to everyday crime would be, uh, none? Which is why most US murders are done with handguns.

As for semi-automatics, I've read that they have less recoil than manual equivalents. I'm not sure why; some say heavier guns, or spreading the impulse over a longer time. I'd have guessed that it's because some of the energy and momentum is diverted into automatically ejecting the spent cartridge; it flies back instead of the gun. Anyway, this makes semi-autos more pleasant to fire, especially for the small or weak.

None of which is to say that guns are awesome and we should all have one, but it does mean I'm unsympathetic at the moment to "only crazy gun nuts would want military style rifles and semi-auto guns" statements that are so common among liberals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster Deadliest US incident after 9/11 and Oklahoma City. 45 dead via bombs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre 3 dead by car, 7 by knife.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre 8 schoolchildren killed by a knife.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_attack_on_the_Dutch_Royal_Family 8 dead by car.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isla_Vista_massacre 4 dead by car.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/07/aurora_shooting_how_did_people_commit_mass_murder_before_automatic_weapons_.html mentions an case where 6 were killed and 15 wounded with a pair of knives. (The article has confused automatic and semi-automatic weapons, BTW. No automatics in Aurora, or any of the other shootings AFAIK.)

"Guns aren’t even the most lethal mass murder weapon. According to data compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guns killed an average of 4.92 victims per mass murder in the United States during the 20th century, just edging out knives, blunt objects, and bare hands, which killed 4.52 people per incident. Fire killed 6.82 people per mass murder, while explosives far outpaced the other options at 20.82. Of the 25 deadliest mass murders in the 20th century, only 52 percent involved guns."

And of course http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin_gas_attack_on_the_Tokyo_subway though with 10 people involved and only 13 deaths they underperformed by a lot, compared to 4-8 per culprit with knives or cars. 6000 injured though. A previous Aum sarin attack killed 8 and injured 144.

Elsewhere it's noted that mass killings tend to be well planned. Reducing the number of guns carried could plausibly reduce the number of shootings in the heat of the moment, but you'd have to eliminate guns to eliminate mass shootings; if guns are available at all then killers could get them. And you're not going to eliminate guns in a country that hasn't made all large non-human animals go extinct. And even if you did, mass killers could turn to other means. Killing 27 with just a car might be hard but most of the other shootings have been much smaller scale.

And US mass shooting deaths tend to total under one hundred per year, vs. the 11,000 murdered with guns in general, or the 35,000 killed in traffic accidents.

Note: I could actually be friendly to gun control! But mass shootings are a terrible justification for it. TSA-level terrible, as in harassing 100 million gun owners and likely not even saving any lives. The 8000 handgun murders every year would be much more apropos, though it's also true that the US non-gun homicide rate is higher than most rich countries' total homicide rate. (http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html gives 1.38/100,000 for non-gun. 1.0 or less is typical for peaceful countries' total homicide.)

Also, if you insist on talking about guns, it's helpful to remember they're not all equal. Handguns make up the vast majority of gun murders (and half of all murders) and even the majority of mass shootings, I think, though semi-auto "assault" rifles do play a bigger (but still overall tiny) role in those. Hunting rifles are almost pristine at the moment... though I suspect you could easily kill 4-8 with a bolt action rifle if you wanted. Let alone a shotgun.