Slashdot Mirror

By me from 2009 (excerpts): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openmanufacturing/bNyZ6qupGFU
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. ...
    As a rough approximation, sixteen million new cars a year times US$30,000 a car (lower price through volume) would be US$480 billion a year, an amount easily found by reducing some of the about US$1 trillion defense budget (including everything) and US$2.5 trillion health care cost which is about half paid in taxes (total US$3.trillion for those two things, about US$2,25 trillion in taxes). Essentially, US$480 billion a year for free-to-the-user safe electric cars would be only about 20% of the US$2.25 trillion a year in taxes we spend on health care and defense. And in turn, we would save a big chunk of US$164 billion a year for accidents, and a big chunk of the defense budget spent to defend oil supplies, and a big chunk of other medical costs related to environmental pollution, and a big chunk of costs related to global climate change. So, overall, the US tax payer would probably save money on taxes by giving away free open-source safe luxury electric cars (or, at least plug-in hybrids to start).
    Beyond that, then there is the additional benefits that more research in auto safety (even to the cost of hundreds of billions of US dollars a year), especially in perfecting cars that drive themselves at night using radar. Such cars might eliminate virtually all driving accidents eventually, as well as let the human "driver" of such a car use the internet or sleep during the trip (about 90% of serious accidents happen at night, often related to poor visibility or tiredness). One such example of great research in this area (although it may not be FOSS yet?):
      "Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering"
        http://pave.princeton.edu/
    So, why don't we do this right now? I'd suggest it is mainly due to scarcity ideology creating artificial scarcity. For instance, the same computer technologies that can be used to design and operate safer cars are instead used to manage electronic credit or to produce fancy advertising and astroturfing related to promoting free market fundamentalism.
    Essentially, it's all ideology (or ignorance, or corruption, or vested interests, which may all be essentially the same thing), because as I show above, it is even financially cheaper to be both financially-subsidized free-as-in-beer and open source free-as-in-freedom. There are also other various freedoms that safer free-to-the-user electric cars would give us (including freedom from seeing loved ones die in car accidents, by cancer caused by gasoline additives, or by hurricanes caused by global climate change).
    So, I'd suggest, over the next ten to twenty years, this is a major change we will likely see in the USA's personal transportation system -- self-driving free-to-the-user safer electric cars (or plug-in hybrids) built using FOSS methodology. And, taxes will then go *down*, along with other direct to the user expenses for insurance, maintenance, and energy, because our transportation system will then, by adjusting for externalities (like national security, pollution, and health care costs), be cheaper overall to design, build, operate, and recycle."

So, in that sense, expensive cars are another example of market failure due to unaccounted-for externalities.

However, a pixel is square!

A pixel is not a little square.

It pretty much sounds like a dumbed down Wordnet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

terrorism, act of terrorism, terrorist act: the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear

Thanks for the link and more history. I'll have to check out the PowerPoint file when not on a ChromeBook (just trying to test out a possible future of computing). One of the best academic course I ever took was with Michael Mahoney related to the history of technology, although that was just before he was getting into the history of computing.
http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/computing.html

I implemented a software version of Memex, mentioned here in 2005:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156379&cid=13111905

Memex seems like the first version of a "Social Semantic Desktop"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop

I've worked towards that on-and-off as time permits with my Pointrel system. I see you have a long list of related publications on technology and society it would be interesting to read through.

I don't know if he is connected to any of them, but William C. Norris who championed "PLATO" for computer-based education is another great example in that area of people trying to make computer innovations to help humanity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Norris_(CEO)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_system
"PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) [1][2] was the first (ca. 1960, on ILLIAC I) generalized computer assisted instruction system, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Originally, PLATO was built by the University of Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework (elementary -- university) to UIUC students, local schools, and other universities. Several descendant systems still operate.
The PLATO project was assumed by the Control Data Corporation (CDC), who built the machines with which PLATO operated at the University. CDC President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force in the computer world; the last production PLATO system was shut down in 2006 (coincidentally, just a month after Norris died), yet it established key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games."

Alan Kay and his colleagues working on Smalltalk are yet another, somewhat as a follow on to Doug's work.

I just watched the 1950s movie "The Invisible Boy" (with Robbie the Robot") and it is interesting how it presaged so much later thinking on dangerous out-of-control AI. Human-machine symbiosis may have its own issues, but still seems more hopefull somehow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Boy

Still, I got that with the 1950s "Forbidden Planet", and I guess that shows the dark side of human-machine symbiosis, :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet

Technology is an amplifier. So what do we want it to amplify?

Soft humanities things like morality and aesthetics and stories we tell ourselves to make a mythology become very important in that context.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/06/26/023212/why-engineering-freshmen-should-take-humanities-courses

The 1950s story The Skills of Xanadu by Theodore Sturgeon is the most hopeful in that sense. It would be great to know whether Sturgeon was thinking about Weiner's or Bush's writings?
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=

Whatever one can say about what really went on around 1776 in North America, in theory, the whole meaning of a democratic republic is supposedly that it is "government of the people, by the people, for the people".

As John Gardner wrote in "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society", every generation must learn anew for itself the meaning of the world carved in the stone monuments.
http://books.google.com/books?id=U5hXpnwUmW4C&printsec=frontcover

Or as he wrote here:
http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/JohnGardner-RoadtoSelf-Renewal2.pdf
"We cannot dream of a Utopia in which all arrangements are ideal and everyone is flawless. Life is tumultuous -- an endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous struggle, never an assured victory. Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and refought. You may wonder if such a struggle, endless and of uncertain outcome, isn't more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world."

Or, as Edmund Burke said, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

So, the struggle against bad government , to ensure the government remains responsive and accountable and appropriately effective, is a bit like fighting mildew in a bathroom -- a never ending struggle. Still, we also need both hierarchy and meshworks in our lives, and indeed, we always have a mix of them as they keep turning into each other:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm

And if the Earth does become one big thinking war machine (like in "Colossus: The Forbin Project") then the algorithms running on its internal homogenous API interfaces become the new actors struggling for resources and democratic accountability (in a purely computational meshwork/hierarchy context).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

Of course, we "people" all may be such already. :-)
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

How many googols of years has this been going on?
"The World Was Probably Already Destroyed"
http://www.digitalcosmology.com/Blog/2012/12/06/t/
"Some people wonder if our planet will be destroyed on December 21, 2012. I have friends asking me every day whether I think the world will end in a few weeks. But it is possible that our planet was already destroyed and before that occured its scientists managed to send a capsule in space with a supercomputer running its simulation. ... Will the destruction happen again in the simulation? Probably not since the conditions that caused it were of stochastic nature. However, even if the destruction takes place in the simulation, the computer will restart it and the world will be created again in an endless fashion. ..."

Still, there is always the first time...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

Yet, each time, people (or creatures that act like people) must find anew some balance of competition and cooperation, of meshwork and hierarchy, of a middle ground between fire and ice (to ignore the n-dimensional aspects as another layer of complexity).

White man wonder why he sick and fat.

Annoyingly, it is mostly what tthey did to the corn we taught them how to plant. They destroyed that too. ;(

HFCS messes up your ability to tell when you have had enough to eat.

GMO corn has been discussed here many times related to how it does harm.

It's that other 47-58% that's the problem.
I wonder if these guys took chemistry in school.

Abstract Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at operating temperatures and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAMs become less reliable when they are not refreshed, they are not immediately erased, and their contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images. We show that this phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access. We use cold reboots to mount attacks on popular disk encryption systems — BitLocker, FileVault, dm-crypt, and TrueCrypt — using no special devices or materials. We experimentally characterize the extent and predictability of memory remanence and report that remanence times can be increased dramatically with simple techniques. We offer new algorithms for finding cryptographic keys in memory images and for correcting errors caused by bit decay. Though we discuss several strategies for partially mitigating these risks, we know of no simple remedy that would eliminate them.

Source: https://citp.princeton.edu/research/memory/

There are some very illustrative videos there to show just what is possible. Enough to know that hard drive encryption is no cryptographic silver bullet.

PS - Thanks to the hard work done by the ARRL and others, amateur radio operators worldwide* will be getting a new MF band at 630m or 472-479 kHz (just below Broadcast AM radio). It's only 7 kHz wide (enough for 2-3 simultaneous SSB voice conversations). Lots of experimentation potential - now we'll see how Joe Taylor's excellent digital modes handle the unique propagation issues in that band.

*for most values of worldwide

Since combining libertarian with "National Socialist" essentially results in a oxymoron, I'm going with it being a joke.

Libertarian National Socialist Green Party

The Libertarian National Socialist Green Party (LNSGP) is an American organization that cites the National Socialist German Workers Party as its primary ideological inspiration, while also incorporating elements of Libertarianism and the Green movement. It has not been established whether LNSGP has any activity or existence other than through the website associated with the domain name nazi.org. . .

The LNSGP at present has no intention of gaining ballot access or fielding political candidates, and it has been suggested that it is a joke, e.g. in its entry at politics1.com,[1].

Could dark matter be super low-energy neutrinos?

Nope.

Or at least, they could still only account for a small fraction of observed dark-matter.

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~dns/MAP/Bahcall/node6.html

We've got poor direct limits on muon neutrino mass from muon neutrino experiments; however, there are other sources of much stronger constraints on neutrino masses. See the "summed mass" limits a few pages down in your reference.
From a Borexino neutrino experiment page at Princeton:

The current limits from cosmological considerations are less than about 0.5 eV (one millionth of the electron mass!) for the sum of the masses of all three neutrino types. The known values of the mass-squared differences imply that the heaviest neutrino type cannot be less massive than about 0.05 eV.

Sure, the roles do require "math literacy" which is a lower standard than "sufficient mathematical and comptuational capability to independently produce results for a research journal."

I'd argue that if "sufficient mathematical and comptuational capability to independently produce results for a research journal" includes such things as botching an Excel spreadsheet of a dataset that was lousy to begin with, and in spite of this you still get published and win various awards and gold medals, then the "not-so-low" standard isn't something to be proud of either.

Bon Appetit:

http://citp.princeton.edu/research/memory/

If you don't like "nearly infinite", it might be better to avoid saying things like "a billionth of a billionth of infinite", and even "infinity minus seven", without giving some sort of definition of what you're talking about. If you mean cardinals, then the values you appear to be talking about are trivially the same as the infinite cardinal you started with. If you mean ordinals, it doesn't look like there's any well-defined thing that corresponds to the phrases you're using.

Your best bet might be to read up on hyperreals, because in that system expressions like r - 7 and r * 10^-18 do actually make some non-trivial sense where r is infinite, and your intuition is correct that there's no sensible definition of a "nearly infinite" hyperreal. But until you have some understanding of the transfer principle, or at least are familiar with the basic properties of the hyperreals, you'd be well advised to avoid such expressions, especially if you're math-naziing against everyday expressions like "nearly infinite" whose intended meaning is entirely clear. Take a look at this (or at this if you're more mathematically trained).

Not trolling -- you're obviously interested in mathematics -- just pointing your enthusiasm in a useful direction :-)

I just checked the definition of Rural - a rural area is a geographic area that is located outside the cities and towns. Rural Definition

As all that 'remote' area is located outside the cities and towns, it is technically also 'rural'. So Australia by definition does have an enormous rural area. (And quite a lot of it is used for raising sheep, cattle and wheat etc).

I follow this closely. It's true. It's unfortunate because natural gas has the potential to be key player in reducing CO2 emissions. See this for how we can leverage today's, existing technology into an effective response to global warming.

http://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/

We need to speak with ONE voice- "fracking" needs to be the most tightly regulated industry in the history of humankind- all but nationalized in fact. No secret formulas. No fracking without studies on everything from earth quakes to CO2 emissions to groundwater contamination and constant detail monitoring. The companies will make their profit, but there is NO room for laissez-faire jack shit.

If you're into exciting unregulated industries with 1000% profit margins, fuck you, go invest in next year's Xmas toy fad. This industry needs to have all the excitement of a yearly WD-40 shareholder stock dividend event.

There's some good, even essential, baby in that bathwater - don't throw it out; regulate the holy fuck out of the entire industry.

So what is it, exactly, that you follow closely? Cuz so far you've demonstrated very little knowledge of the O&G industry. Well, beyond environmentalist boilerplate. So is that what you follow closely?

I follow this closely. It's true. It's unfortunate because natural gas has the potential to be key player in reducing CO2 emissions. See this for how we can leverage today's, existing technology into an effective response to global warming.

http://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/

We need to speak with ONE voice- "fracking" needs to be the most tightly regulated industry in the history of humankind- all but nationalized in fact. No secret formulas. No fracking without studies on everything from earth quakes to CO2 emissions to groundwater contamination and constant detail monitoring. The companies will make their profit, but there is NO room for laissez-faire jack shit.

If you're into exciting unregulated industries with 1000% profit margins, fuck you, go invest in next year's Xmas toy fad. This industry needs to have all the excitement of a yearly WD-40 shareholder stock dividend event.

There's some good, even essential, baby in that bathwater - don't throw it out; regulate the holy fuck out of the entire industry.

If you are interested in early software, consider FLINT. FLINT was a floating-point package for the IAS computer, which was designed by John von Neumann in the early 1950s. FLINT was intended to be a high-level language which could be implemented on other computers.

FLINT, "which, as far as its user is concerned, transforms our machine into a slower, less sophisticated instrument for which coding is much simpler," insulated the end user from having to communicate directly with the machine. "The planned general external language should be influenced as little as possible by the peculiarities of the machine; in other words, it should be as close as possible to the thinking of the programmer" it was explained. The user "need not know machine language at all, even, and in particular, while debugging his program."

The above paragraph is from Turing's Cathedral: the origins of the digital universe by George Dyson, 2012, ISBN 987-1-4000-7599-7, page 318. The quotations are from "Institute for Advanced Study Electronic Computer Project Monthly Progress Report, January 1957", page 3. See also http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2012/04/04/pages/1670/index.xml?page=7&.

The US may be farther from 1984 than NK (debatable given what US credit card information and internet communications reveals), but the USA sure is a lot closer to "Brave New World":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
"Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the *rgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.""

BTW, "How to escape The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Overall, what you say is true and reflects what the point I am trying to make. That said, I also think most people, even in the USA, have little understanding of what most political thinking is like outside major US-Left-leaning US urban areas. GW Bush was re-selected after launching a ruinous illegal war. What does that say about the country? Of course, the UK went along with it... And even within "progressive" areas of the USA, there is another sort of totalitarianism the US Right is correct in pointing out (expanding government intervention in all areas of life). So, the deeper point is that there are similar social forces at work both in the US and NK (or most any country for that matter), they just play out differently based on history and circumstances. Egypt had "god kings" for thousands of years and did very well -- but it was on much more fertile ground than North Korea with an easier climate, and also it was not surrounded by vastly more technologically advanced countries for much of that time with radically different political forms. But no doubt thousands of years of culture in Egypt may have selected for a sort of personality receptive to the god king idea -- or cult of personality which is a lesser manifestation of it.

So much of our day-to-day reality is socially constructed base on group norms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(social)

See also:
"Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets" by Roland Benabou
http://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/Groupthink%20IOM%202012_07_02%20paper.pdf
"This paper investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations and markets. Agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret and recall public signals about future prospects. Wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is shown to be contagious when it is harmful to others, and self-limiting when it is beneficial. Similarly, with Kreps-Porteus preferences, willful blindness (information avoidance) spreads when it increases the risks borne by others. This general mechanism can generate multiple social cognitions of reality, and in hierarchies it implies that realism and delu

...it could be fertile ground for experimentation...

It is a fertile ground for experimentation! You need look no farther than the recent influx of extremely spectrum-efficient modes developed by K1JT. He's developed modes tailored for most any propagation mode/band including meteor scatter, moonbounce, etc.

The newest of the lot, the JT9 modes, are capable of decoding signals as far as 42dB into the noise!. The fastest JT9 mode takes 1 minute per transmission but can decode at a S/N of -27dB - that's noise with 500x the power of the signal.

Take a look at the WSPR page - on it you can access a database of WSPR transmissions, some of them at amazingly high km/Watt ratios.

...it could be fertile ground for experimentation...

It is a fertile ground for experimentation! You need look no farther than the recent influx of extremely spectrum-efficient modes developed by K1JT. He's developed modes tailored for most any propagation mode/band including meteor scatter, moonbounce, etc.

The newest of the lot, the JT9 modes, are capable of decoding signals as far as 42dB into the noise!. The fastest JT9 mode takes 1 minute per transmission but can decode at a S/N of -27dB - that's noise with 500x the power of the signal.

Take a look at the WSPR page - on it you can access a database of WSPR transmissions, some of them at amazingly high km/Watt ratios.

Here is essay I wrote four years ago about helping Princeton trancend to post-scarcity values: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

From two of the beginning sections on it that relate to this issue:

One motivation for writing (or reading) this essay

I have written on these post-scarcity topics before. The biggest single motivation for the organization of this specific essay is the PAW article on "Jumping From the Ivory Tower".
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/features_phd.html

Is that title going to bring up echoes of this controversy?
"Automaker agrees to changes after meeting with suicide prevention group that objected to spot showing fired robot jumping off bridge."
http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/09/news/companies/gm_robotad/

The robot is shown forced to take a number of menial jobs, including holding a speaker at a fast-food drive through and becoming upset enough [by repeated failure at them] to throw itself off a bridge.

(I won't link to the video, which contains a graphic image of leaping from a bridge.)

That PAW article title was selected only a little over a year after this statement by a recent Princeton University alumna on behalf of her family:
"Cho family statement"
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/04/20/shooting.family.statement/index.html

On behalf of our family, we are so deeply sorry for the devastation my brother has caused. No words can express our sadness that 32 innocent people lost their lives this week in such a terrible, senseless tragedy. We are heartbroken. We grieve alongside the families, the Virginia Tech community, our State of Virginia, and the rest of the nation. And, the world. ... We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person. ... There is much justified anger and disbelief at what my brother did, and a lot of questions are left unanswered. Our family will continue to cooperate fully and do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well.

With Princeton-praising articles titled "Jumping From the Ivory Tower", it seems like PAW is not helping answer these deep questions. If anything, PAW is helping bury them under inappropriate humor. This essay is not intended in any way to condone violence or the abdication of personal responsibility. But it is intended to help understand some of these issues of suicide and alienation in a university context, and to make suggestions for improvements to the social part of these issues. It even tries to use humor in relation to suicide and morbid themes a bit more appropriately (satirically about PU in this case, discussing options like its voluntary peaceful self-dissolution to help a billion poor children get an education, or its metaphorical death and rebirth as an agent of global economic transcendence to a post-scarcity society of abundance for all). It is always easier to destroy than to create, so this essay includes some specific suggestions for improving the situation at Princeton University, which is a mythologically troubled institution (even as it is filled with many wonderful and caring people).

Like how the Cho family describes Virginia Tech, PU also is filled with people with "so much love, talent and gifts to offer". Even the brother of Sun-Kyung Cho '04, Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech,

Look here. I've used WSPR to send a small message from Richmond, VA to New Zealand using a 0.1 Watts on 30m (about 10.1 MHz). Dr. Taylor is a weak signal nut, and has done an amazing job of creating modulation schemes that work well for a lot of very weak signal scenarios. Want to bounce signals off of the ion trails left by meteors that are so small you can't even see them? Done - it's called FSK441.

His newest JT9-x schemes can detect signals 40 dB _below_ the noise floor - that's 1/10,000th the noise power. Amazing, really, and all it takes is a radio and a PC with a soundcard.

Look here. I've used WSPR to send a small message from Richmond, VA to New Zealand using a 0.1 Watts on 30m (about 10.1 MHz). Dr. Taylor is a weak signal nut, and has done an amazing job of creating modulation schemes that work well for a lot of very weak signal scenarios. Want to bounce signals off of the ion trails left by meteors that are so small you can't even see them? Done - it's called FSK441.

His newest JT9-x schemes can detect signals 40 dB _below_ the noise floor - that's 1/10,000th the noise power. Amazing, really, and all it takes is a radio and a PC with a soundcard.

Look here. I've used WSPR to send a small message from Richmond, VA to New Zealand using a 0.1 Watts on 30m (about 10.1 MHz). Dr. Taylor is a weak signal nut, and has done an amazing job of creating modulation schemes that work well for a lot of very weak signal scenarios. Want to bounce signals off of the ion trails left by meteors that are so small you can't even see them? Done - it's called FSK441.

His newest JT9-x schemes can detect signals 40 dB _below_ the noise floor - that's 1/10,000th the noise power. Amazing, really, and all it takes is a radio and a PC with a soundcard.

No, the Mexican government would have prevented this. In Mexico the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, elects 3/5th of its members by district and 2/5th by proportional representation. Proportional representation puts a wrench in the gerrymandering machine. By contrast, in the US we would have to have a 5% greater Democratic vote than Republican vote just to get parity in the House due to a phenomenal level of gerrymandering (which the Supreme Court says is perfectly legal even outside of the census as long as there is no obvious attempt to define districts to disenfranchise people based on race). Unfortunately, the people only voted for Democrats by 0.5% more than Republicans, resulting in the Republicans having 33 more seats than the Democrats.

That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin.

Actually, there wasn't all *that* much math... and in fact (given most of his raw data was just the polls) - the polls that mattered did *not* have them neck and neck. His key insight was just to use polling information by state, find the bias in some polls (like Rasmussen, which had Romney by 2%, hah!) and then weigh and average those polls to get predicted electoral votes. I bet it's simple enough computations Univac could chug through it in a reasonable time :)

It's basically a given now that future presidential race predictions will be based on those same ideas... in fact, the Princeton predictions use a similar model and came up with pretty much the same results:

ELECTORAL PREDICTION (mode): Barack Obama 303 EV, Mitt Romney 235 EV. The mode is the single most frequent value on the EV histogram. It corresponds to the map below, and has a 22% chance of being exactly correct. The next-most-likely outcome is Obama 332, Romney 206 EV.

[and unlike Silver, their blog goes into all of the gory details of their model, which is pretty cool...]

It's not like calculating the probability of a dice roll. There are a lot of empirical assumptions in Silver's model. He adjusts for economic conditions, he normalizes polls for historical bias, etc. He has to decide what distributions to use for his Monte-Carlo simulations. So there's plenty of room for him to refine his methodology based on performance. Sam Wang using a simpler median-based method achieved similar accuracy and he argues that Silver's confidence limits are too wide.

Do I have data? No. But since Nate (and Sam Wang) both have a good track record, my guess is that the Republican big shots are very worried about their base becoming discouraged and staying home. That's why Rove and company are say so many bad things about Nate.

In other words, if the far right stays home, that jeopardizes the Republican party's hold on the House of Representatives, as well as many other races.

http://www.princeton.edu/neuroscience/people/display_person.xml?netid=sswang&display=All

Sam Wang isn't a stats professor. He's a molecular biology/comp. neuroscience/biophysics guy. The election stuff is a hobby.

Krugman's Theory of Interstellar Trade
http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf

It's pretty obvious from reading old Greek or Roman texts that people are pretty much the same now as they've always been. Shakespeare shows that nothing much has changed in England for over 400 years.

There are two serious issues with this claim. First, most (although not all) of the Flynn effect has occurred on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum. That means that the smartest people may not be that much smarter, but the average intelligence has still gone up by a lot. See for example http://synapse.princeton.edu/~brained/chapter15/colom_andres-pueyo05_intelligence_Spanish-schoolchildren-nutrition-hypothesis.pdf. Second, people today seem to be in some ways smarter than many of the smart people a few thousand years ago. For example, it used to be a big deal that someone was able to read so well that they didn't need to murmur to themselves or move their lips, whereas now we consider reading out loud a sign of stupidity http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html. It is possible that part of this difference was simply cultural, and that silent reading was purely a matter of education and norms. But the fact that some old sources considered silent reading a sign of intelligence suggests otherwise.

Many researchers disagree with Flynn about the cause of the Flynn effect. Two other common hypotheses are that lower parasite load in children leads to better functioning brains and older people will have bodies under less stress. Better nutrition does essentially the same thing. There's a fair bit of evidence for these hypotheses. For example, if nutrition levels matter then one would expect a lot more movement on the low end of IQ than on the high end and that's exactly what we see. http://synapse.princeton.edu/~brained/chapter15/colom_andres-pueyo05_intelligence_Spanish-schoolchildren-nutrition-hypothesis.pdf. Meanwhile, a good case for the parasite load hypothesis can be found http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611000286.

* straw man, strawman (a weak or sham argument set up to be easily refuted)

* straw man: a fabricated or conveniently weak or innocuous person, object, matter, etc., used as a seeming adversary or argument: The issue she railed about was no more than a straw man.

* A straw man, also known in the UK as an Aunt Sally,[1][2] is a type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[3] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

You were attacking a superficially similar yet unequivalent comment that I didn't make, creating the illusion of a successful refutation. Remeber this the next time you hear the term "straw man".

You can say that Romney's plan is vague, but I don't think you can claim that's it's the "dead-on-arrival" plan that Democrats would like people to believe. Consider another reading that takes into account other factors: http://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/228rosen.pdf

In any case, a calculated vagueness is the part of the essence of challengers, and were you to scrutinize past candidates with the same lens with which you scrutinize Romney you'd find that same frustrating vagueness.

so-called: (adj) alleged, supposed (doubtful or suspect) "these so-called experts are no help"

It's amazing how few people have actually addressed your question.

You're right to point out that many high-income (and thanks for not conflating "high-income" with "wealthy") taxpayers earn most of their income from capital gains (and interest and dividends). But Romney's plan does not propose eliminating capital gains tax for high-income individuals -- that's only for taxpayers with AGI below $200,000 (citation here). It does keep in place the lower capital gains tax rates that were part of the 2001-2003 Bush tax cuts -- the rationale being that lower rates on money earned from investment *should* lead to more investment and growth in the overall economy.

Broadening the base means things like capping or eliminating the number of deductions that people can claim on their tax returns. High-income people would pay taxes on a greater portion of their overall income. Romney has refused to commit to a specific proposal on this part, so we're left to speculate. Harvey Rosen has an interesting analysis of how it *could* be mathematically possible to "broaden the base" enough to offset the lower rates -- even with very little additional growth generated via the lower rates. In a nutshell:

• 1. Tax employer-provided health insurance as income -- could result in a lot of new tax revenue.
• 2. Tax "inside buildup" -- a type of tax-sheltered life-insurance income.
• 3. Keep the home mortgage deduction only for lower/middle-income earners. People in the top tax bracket might not get any of the usual deductions for medical expenses, charitable donations, or state and local taxes paid.

You can argue that a Romney administration would never go that far in eliminating deductions and loopholes, but that's different from "mathematically impossible". The Rosen paper puts all of this in a chart so you can compare the effects of different assumptions.

There's a pretty comprehensive round-up of people making the case that Romney plan could work here. (Yes, it's from a libertarian perspective. No, I'm not an economist or a libertarian myself.)

Romney has stated that he plans to slash income taxes by 20% and eliminate the estate tax -- a huge giveaway to the old rich that will cost $4.8T over ten years. He insists he'll pay for it all by closing loopholes, but that's mathematically impossible. Either he's going to raise taxes on the middle class, or run up the deficit, or he's just flat out lying.

Except of course that several sources show that it is mathematically possible. Princeton economics professor Harvey S. Rosen has a paper that shows how it is possible for Romney's tax cuts to be both revenue neutral and to not reduce the amount of tax paid by high earners. Does that mean that that is what Romney is going to do? No, but it does mean that it is mathematically possible to do what he says he is going to do.

Google Dic via context menu tells me it means " Nonproliferation Center." Curiously enough writing about this may make some posters MAD.

That's unfair, it's not a "non-issue". There is some hysteria as usual, but there are valid reasons for avoiding HFCS. It's not just another sugar, but it does depend on who you listen to. I'm by no means a fanatic, but I have read my fair share of research on the subject. According to research from one the world's most prestigious Universities, Princeton;

"A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same. "

"These rats aren't just getting fat; they're demonstrating characteristics of obesity, including substantial increases in abdominal fat and circulating triglycerides," said Princeton graduate student Miriam Bocarsly."

"Rats on a diet rich in high-fructose corn syrup showed characteristic signs of a dangerous condition known in humans as the metabolic syndrome, including abnormal weight gain, significant increases in circulating triglycerides and augmented fat deposition, especially visceral fat around the belly.

The central issue being the amount of adipose tissue (fat around the belly).

Adipose tissue or body fat is loose connective tissue composed of adipocytes. It is technically composed of roughly only 80% fat; fat in its solitary state exists in the liver and muscles. Adipose tissue is derived from lipoblasts. Its main role is to store energy in the form of lipids, although it also cushions and insulates the body.

Far from hormonally inert, adipose tissue has in recent years been recognized as a major endocrine organ, as it produces hormones such as leptin, estrogen, resistin, and the cytokine TNF. Moreover, adipose tissue can affect other organ systems of the body and may lead to disease. Obesity or being overweight in humans and most animals does not depend on body weight, but on the amount of body fat—to be specific, adipose tissue.

However I did read a recent report from Harvard (2012) that stated there was no difference in how the human body digested sugars (HFCS or not). The case is certainly not clear, but I do not want to be a "guinea pig" to increase some corporation's profit.

Sources:

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/scientists-conclude-high-fructose-corn-syrup-should-not-be-blamed-for-obesity-170179136.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipose_tissue

Dafuq? I went browsing for this stabilization wedge thingy and they are espousing increasing ethanol production.

I was under the impression this was generally not such a great idea. Does anyone have any sources with info including economic analysis on run-on effects (as much as they can be predicted/analysed from past instances) like amount of fuel spent on moving more crops due to prices going up (and total energy use incl fertilizers/farm machinery/processing etc) that shows crop ethanol being a net win?

If not, should I put my conspiracist hat on (it is sponsored by BP who would have a financial incentive for encouraging liquid hydrocarbon fuels).

HFCS is the culprit. See http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/ and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22152650 Of course the corn lobby threatens researchers funding who pursue this research!

It spontaneously combines with oxygen, but at STP it usually doesn't do so at a rate that qualifies as combustion. That said, when you're working with high pressure hydrogen, sometimes it does combust, and sometimes it does so with no obvious catalyst or ignition source. Sources:

• http://conference.ing.unipi.it/ichs2005/Papers/100098.pdf
• http://www.princeton.edu/mae/people/faculty/dryer/homepage/research/hydrogen-fire-safety/movies/Dryer_et_al_CST_179_2007.pdf

Perhaps more curiously, nobody is really sure why, as far as I can tell. Either way, the point remains that you don't have to have an ignition source.

BTW, even if you did need an ignition source, I think it's safe to say that the temperatures inside or near a fusion reactor of any significant scale would probably qualify as an ignition source....

"That's certainly a different way of looking at it. Primitive people had it good because they were unaware of how bad they had it."

Well, aspects of that are true. A Forrest Gump or "Being There" sort of happiness?

"To them it was natural to bear four children in hopes that one might mature to adulthood - although a fifth child was unlikely, as the mother's chances of surviving that many childbirths were not high."

Since just to maintain the human population requires two children per woman on average, that statement be correct as it. But yes, its been said that hunter/gather societies have higher infant mortality, but it is still nowhere near as bad as you say; see:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/life-expectancy-hunter-gatherer/
"On average, 57%, 64%, and 67% of children make it to 15 years among "untouched" hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, respectively. ... Of folks who hit age 15, the percentage of hunter-gatherers who make it to age 45 is higher than the percentage of forager-horticulturalists who make it to age 45, but not by much -- 64% to 61%. Acculturated hunter-gatherers excel here; 79% of their 15 year-olds make it to age 45. You might even say the study's acculturated hunter-gatherers were essentially Primal, eating and moving traditionally while enjoying access to modern medicine. From age 45, the mean number of expected remaining years of life is 20.7, 19.8, and 24.6 for hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, respectively. Give or take a few years, they could all "expect" to live about two decades if they were still alive by age 45 â" a far cry from a "nasty, short, and brutish" existence."

Just because people living in 1800s era crowded cities in England full of disease and starvation died young, and things have improved since then, that does not mean if you go back 20,000 years that it just stays the same or keeps getting worse. Consider:
"Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology" by Clark Spencer Larsen
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."

"People didn't die from the nasty age-related diseases like cancer or heart disease because they died much earlier due to injury, hardship, or violence"

It is true that many did die of injury, hardship and violence. But, our best science now tells us that cancer and heart disease are diet and lifestyle related (e.g. The China Study and others). Cancer and heart disease are not for the most part age-related (well, cancer a little). Kids are not getting cancer in the USA because they are old; they are getting cancer because of diet, lack of vitamin D, lack of iodine, and exposure to toxins. Old hunter/gathers essentially do not have these diseases (well, maybe some cancer but not like in the USA). Only people who start eating a Western diet get these diseases in appreciable numbers.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/HeartDisease.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx

"So no, I don't buy th

Standard Headlinese (don't look at me that way - click the link). Awkward, but in no way a /. schtick. I assumed that every regular reader of news in English is used to decoding it without even thinking about it.

In this case, they saved exactly four characters compared to "Shuttle Endeavour will embark to a Los Angeles Museum", eight if you wanted an article too.

Nearly every kind of childhood snack (soda, corn chips, candy) contains corn syrup in one form or another. I'd suspect that long before anti-biotics.

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
http://www.naturalnews.com/036886_cattle_feed_candy_corn_syrup.html

I am talking about this:
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=federalism
S: (n) federalism (the idea of a federal organization of more or less self-governing units)

Notice the "self-governing units" part.

Regarding the Civil War, at least Lincoln had the motive of ending anti-black cruelty. Historians tell us that black slavery was degrading and cruel. It was a gross violation of human rights, and no government has the right to do such a thing.

But nowadays, the central government forces its opinions about drugs and alcohol (such as the 21-year drinking age) on the states, which is absurd.

I am a strong advocate of power decentralization.

Okay, wait.

This guy has evidence which your model doesn't account for. You're saying that the evidence can't be right because it isn't accounted for by your model?

That's not science, that's politics.

If he's got evidence, either counter with your own evidence or show that his evidence is fabricated.

Try actually being a scientist, instead of pretending to act like one.

I'm saying I am very skeptical of the "evidence" because it makes no fucking sense at all. Anybody can find statistically significant, completely spurious correlations when given a large-enough mass of data. Would you also suggest that I take these guys seriously?

I never said that the Purdue people shouldn't publish their result. Their paper simply notes a correlation. They don't claim to know why there is a correlation, and there could be many explanations. That's science. The most likely explanation is that the effect is a systematic. I say this because I know many other well-verified facts about how the world works, and this purported correlation is in conflict with all of these things. That's also science. Uncritically accepting one piece of data and therefore throwing out a century of scientific knowledge is not being a scientist. It's being a nutjob.