Primate Brow Flash

Techdirt has details of how some statistics experts determined that a company called R2K was faking their polls for the Daily Kos

The first thing they noticed was that when R2K did polls that tested how men and women viewed certain politicians or political parties (favorable/unfavorable) there was an odd pattern: if the percentage of men that rated a particular politician favorable or unfavorable was an even number, so was the the percentage of female raters. It seemed like these two points always matched up. If the male percentage was even the female percentage was even. If the male percentage was odd, the female percentage was odd. Yet, as you should know, these are independent variables, not influenced by each other. That 34% of men find a particular politician favorable should have no bearing on why an even percentage of women find that politician favorable. In fact, this happened in almost every such poll that R2K did, to such a level as to suggest it being as close to impossible as you can imagine.

I love stories of detecting information inside of information. I think that is why I liked the Lisbeth Salander books so much.

Great comic about Homeopathy

from the comments at that site:

If you show me that, say,
Homeopathy works,
I will change my mind,
I will spin on a fucking dime.
I’ll be as embarrassed as hell,
Yet I will run through the streets yelling,
It’s a MIRACLE!
Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And whilst its memory
Of a long lost drop of onion juice is infinite,
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/07/05/100705sh_shouts_ephron

She tried to get the umlaut to work. No luck. She pinged Plague and explained the problem. Plague was fat, but he would know what to do, and he would tell her, in Courier typeface.
<Where are you?> Plague wrote.

<Stockholm>.

<There’s an Apple Store at the intersection of Kungsgatan and Sveavägen. Or you could try a Q-tip.>.
She went to the bathroom and got a Q-tip and gently cleaned the area around the Alt key. It popped into place. Then she pressed “U.” An umlaut danced before her eyes.

Finally, she spoke.

“It’s fixed,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said.

She thought about smiling, but she’d smiled three hundred pages earlier, and once was enough.

Everyone in the house bounced out of bed at about 5:00 this morning and sat in the living room blinking at one another, wondering who the hell everyone else thought they were, invading this personal time.

I got out of the house earlier than usual and rode an extra long route to work. 14 miles according the odo. It felt like more than that. According to Google, it is 17.5. Kind of a big difference. Time to recalibrate. Anyway, nice and cool today.

help! I came to work without shoes. Without shoes I can stand to be in the same room with, that is. Renounce and enjoy, I guess.

The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Neat little spy story. It gets off to a slow start as we go with our main character on the Warsaw social circuit, cultivating his contacts. It picks up and suddenly you find yourself with a book you don’t want to put down. Really great how he ties in carefully with history. There are appearances of real historical characters. The action parts were tight and get your heart racing.I got this book after I asked the guy at Micawber’s books for something to replace the Lisbeth Salander series. This was nothing like the Salander books, but I’m interested in reading more of this guy’s books.

View all my reviews >>

What a great teacher
This even beats the trick my math teacher played: gluing a quarter to the floor

The google street view guy is holding a vuvuzela if you drop him in South Africa. LINK

I’m trying this diet where I avoid sugar and most grains, especially wheat and corn.

Things I’ve noticed:

• dropped about 10 pounds right out of the gate. This is after cycling and swimming like a madman all spring and not losing an ounce. Don’t know how to explain this.
• The diet is surprisingly easy. One reason is that you don’t need to restrict your portions.
• A good name for this diet might be “Fuck-ton o’cheese”
• No more sleepiness after meals or in the mid-afternoon. I mean none, no matter how little sleep I’ve had.
• No more suddenly scouring the environment for snacks. My appetite is like, tamed
• Non-sweetened food tastes surprisingly sweet. Almonds, carrots, raisins, plain yogurt.
• No particular desire for sweets. of course, if a plate of chocolate cake passes under my face, all bets are off.
• Became very sensitive to sugar. On Sunday, I had a glass of Kefir. I had a profound reaction to all that sugar. My heart started racing. I drank the rest of the bottle and then fell asleep in my chair. When I woke up, I went into this zomboid Ambien state and just started eating Cheetos.
• Diet can get a little boring without pizza and pasta and toast. This requires experimenting with recipes. Yesterday, I cooked a bunch of chicken and nuts in peanut oil. Nobody could eat more than one McNugget-sized piece. It absolutely killed my appetite.
• Find myself hiding my diet so I don’t get mistaken for an Atkins idiot.
• Cobb salad is the greatest human invention. Bacon and avocados. Who knew?
• Full of judgment towards others. Those who are obese, those who require fucking pneumatic lifts to get around, those who are on the wrong diets, those who still believe in the food pyramid
• On the other hand, this mysterious, intermittent force we call “will-power” is such a crock. Our biology has to be tricked and/or reprogrammed to really change

This might be the best blog post ever.
It starts with a great quote.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
–Richard Hofstadter

( Hofstadter is the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics)

I’ve heard of that title before but never read the essay. It is a great read. I’ve been trying to come up with something like this for 20 years:

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

The post applies Hofstadter’s ideas to the tendency to blame oil companies or other, more obscure actors for high oil prices. He argues that instead of some conspiracy to make money, there is actually less and less oil readily available.

I will add a seventh element of my own. Oil conspiracy theorists can only think in terms of the social world, not the natural world. In this regard they are cornucopians. Therefore, agency must come from the social world. Someone is responsible for what is happening, not something. It is simply not possible that the world is really nearing a peak in oil production. Someone is only making it appear so.

standing in a crowd of teenagers in front of their school on the last day, another adult explained to me that we were watching a “sound like a wookie” contest.

a budding geekwad overheard and turned to me to ask, “Do you know what a wookie is?”

And I said, “They’re the cute little guys on the forest moon of Endor, right?”

He and his friends sniggerd at my cluelessness and corrected me. “uhhh.. those are Ewoks?” They did not realized that I WON in so many ways, the most important of which is that I look like someone who doesn’t know what a wookie is.