John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

A recent post on the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog provides an especially clear example of media bias: the New York Times uses an article recently published in Science to support the traditionally liberal view of gender differences as created by social injustices, while the Wall Street Journal uses the same research to support the traditionally conservative view that they are products of human nature.

As someone points out in the comments, the problem is quite simple: many newspapers refuse to discuss variance and only interest themselves in means.

I was delighted to find out today that Bryan Caplan thinks, just as I have for many years now, that

The Watchmen is the Best… Utilitarian Parable… Ever.¹

1. Bryan Caplan : EconLog : Why Read the Watchmen?↩

Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin.¹

1. Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr. : New York Post : Treasury’s Thieves↩

What strikes me as so absurd about the word progressive and its use when speaking of, say “progressive Denmark”, is the arrogant presumption that we know what events represent progress.

The Internet helps prosecutors argue for stricter sentences for people with no scruples.

There are two recurrent complaints about American democracy that have been on my mind lately: the inability of most Americans to name their representatives and the ever-increasingly central role of the president. Both of these strike me as the inevitable result of our government’s structure. There simply are too many representatives to keep track of. Americans may be able to keep track of some five hundred celebrities, but this store of information tends only to include primordial human information: physical appearance, one’s sense of liking the person, etc.. This is plainly not the data one needs to vote intelligently.

I see the centrality of the president as the reaction to the overwhelming number of Congress members. It is possible to focus on a single point from which one’s other opinions derive. I would assume that statistics would support the assertion that most voters choose the Congress candidates of the party of their most recent presidential pick. The existence of a monarchical president simply answers basic human needs to simplify situations and make them comparable to the ancient tribal situations for which the human mind is optimized.

Here are some more reviews of iPhone apps I’ve had a chance to use. This completes the list of apps I’ve downloaded so far, but I’m sure I’ll try more over the next two weeks before I leave for Europe for the rest of the summer.

1. Facebook: A very slick interface to Facebook. Worth using if you have a Facebook account.
2. Myspace: Also a slick interface. Similarly worth installing for Myspace users.
3. Jott: This is a really great interface to Jott, a web service I’ve been using for several months now. I consistently encouraging others to try Jott, and I think that this app should convince many more people to use Jott for a while. It’s actually much more intuitive than the Jott website itself, even when viewing the Jott website on a full screen like my iMac’s. I would suggest that any one who needs to take notes while they’re walking down the street or driving should install this app as soon as possible.
4. Where: I haven’t had much time to use this, and it seems that some of the features, notably the Starbucks location finder, don’t work because the server can’t be reached. When I start driving and using the gas station finder I’ll give an update on my opinion of this app.
5. Whrrl: Another app whose real use I think is still somewhat in the future for me. So far I don’t have any active friends who I can locate using Whrrl, so it’s a bit boring. Also, there are simply way too many places displayed at once on the map even when you select only restaurants for viewing. Somehow the list of places to show needs to be made a lot smaller (and more tailored to my taste) before the app will be really helpful to me. I am interested to see where this goes with time.
6. NettersNeuro: This application is a set of touchscreen enabled flashcards for students of neuroanatomy. It’s great if you ever find yourself wanting to review the basal ganglia on the subway. So great, in fact, that it’s worth the $40 bucks it costs.
7. Blip Solitaire: Playing Pong against yourself really isn’t very fun. This is a small step above phonesaber in the novelty category.
8. Bubble: Another novelty app. All you can do is draw and pop bubbles on your screen. Nice looking, but boring after about five seconds.
9. Epocrates Rx: A great interface to a brilliant service for anyone who deals with prescription drugs regularly. I have no idea how much is lost using this free version over a premium edition, but I find it contains enough information for my needs.
10. Aurora Feint: One of the best, if not, the best free iPhone game I’ve played so far. Very nice graphics; interesting, if not yet great, gameplay. I would probably get rid of the superfluous RPG elements if I were redoing this app, though. They don’t seem to add anything ,and they definitely end up taking away time I’d rather spend mastering my accelerometer skills.
11. Cube Runner: Surprisingly fun for such a simple game. Basically this is a very simplified version of Super Monkey Ball, that’s free and has straight up polygon graphics. It’s still fun, though. Worth trying since it’s free. Probably the smoothest accelerometer use I’ve seen in any of the free apps.
12. zintin: I probably shouldn’t comment on zintin since I’ve already deleted it. It seemed to be a conglomeration of ideas handled better by separate apps: a Twitter style “wall”, some location finding, and map use á la Whrrl or Where. Maybe others will enjoy it, but I personally don’t see it as worth having.

Here are some very brief reviews of the iPhone 2.0 apps I’ve downloaded and used since getting the leaked firmware last night:

1. Advent: As terrible as Adventure ever has been. Truly a monument to incompetent game design. Also one of the greatest pieces of evidence in human history that constraints on your possible choices at any given moment make life more interesting rather than less interesting. In fairness, though, everything wrong with this game was wrong with it for the last quarter of a century: there is no new awfulness that should be blamed on the porters.
2. AIM: Very usable, but I have not yet had a chance to leave myself logged in while I walk away from the phone to see how (or even if) it handles incoming messages when running in the background.
3. LifeGame: Every programmable system needs a version of Conway’s Game of Life. This implementation is quite good, but has one serious flaw: the dots are so small that you cannot systematically control their placement using the touchscreen. There should probably be an option to zoom in on the screen while adding dots so that you can get fine-grained placement. Otherwise, this app deserves a lot of praise.
4. Phonesaber: Fun, but like everything using the accelerometer, it is difficult to control at first. I, for one, tend to be surprised when the placement of the phone doesn’t translate into meaningful acceleration and therefore produces no sound. It’s just a novelty item, though, so I can’t complain.
5. Remote: Absolutely brilliant. A wonderful interface for controlling iTunes, which is particularly great if, like me, you’ve set up iTunes to use remote speakers through an Airport Express.
6. SuperMonkeyBall: A great game, but very difficult to get used to because the controls are purely implemented using the accelerometer. There are very impressive graphics, and the game as a whole is a true testament to the sophistication of the iPhone 2.0 firmware as a platform for applications.
7. TapTheBeat: Minimally functional, intolerably ugly graphics and accompanied by a naïvely audacious advert wondering if people would be willing to pay for an upgraded version. Unimpressive, though still somewhat useful. A real beat calculator program should include a metronome that clicks out the tempo you’ve just input and absolutely needs to be less brutal on the eyes.
8. Trism: A game as brilliantly thought out as the original Tetris. It makes truly inventive and intelligent use of the accelerometer and is amazingly addictive. I can see this setting the standard for accelerometer use in games.
9. Twitterific Incredibly useful and well-designed. Probably the best example I’ve used (relative to the Facebook and Myspace apps) of a web service turned into an application.

On Amateur Economists, I just read the following words:

McCain chastises “speculators” and says he wishes interest rates could be 0%.¹

Is this claim true? Has McCain really said something like this? I was aware that McCain likes to emphasize traditional Christian values, but this is a throwback to the most ancient sort of Christian sentiment — as ancient as, for example, the First Council of Carthage.

1. Amateur Economists : Where the “Other” Candidates Stand on Economic Issues↩

As evidence against the claims of every person who insists that the opinions of all people in our society need to be respected, I submit the following evidence from the recent prosecution of Hans Reiser for uxoricide:

• Exhibit A — The comments posted on the Wired article that reported Reiser’s conviction.
• Exhibit B — A recent article from the SF Gate reporting that Reiser has given police his dead wife’s body in exchange for a reduced sentence.

Let the criterion of reasonable doubt stand, and let us conclude not that our courts are unjust, but rather that many of Reiser’s defenders are too irrational to understand when justice has been done. Perhaps Aristotle would have commented on the whole ordeal, “hoi polloi alogoi.”

In closing, I cite the comment left at 3:50:20 P.M. on April 28th, 2008 on the Wired article featured as Exhibit A. It is, I think, a remarkable sample of the perversions of the human mind.

the last sentences sum up the American justice system.

“*You are rude,* he said. *You are arrogant. There are not enough words in the English language to describe the way you are.*

But the jurors found a word on Monday: guilty.”

The man was convicted for murder, not because he was guilty, but because he was “rude and arrogant”.

The man knows for sure he is more intelligent than most of those apes around him. And he has some disdain for them. And it shows - not openly, but enough for them to understand. And they choose to stick it to him.

This is not justice. This is mob rule. It is sick and perverted. Anmerica, the land of the lynch mob.

If you have so much disdain for your fellow men, it is reasonable to wonder if you might consider murdering one of them without regret. This by itself makes your case hard to sustain, and so much more so when other evidence also suggests that you murdered your own children’s mother.