One problem with the Vulcan emphasis on logic above all is that it is not clear what motivates Vulcans. Logic helps us to see what is true, but it cannot tell us what we ought to do. Indeed, although Vulcans in the stories are successful within the quasi-military structure of Star Fleet, where orders come from above and give them straightforward guidance as to what their goals should be, they seem to be at something of a loss if thrown into an ambiguous situation, separated from authority and forced to set their own goals.

From Overcoming Bias.

Oh how I have nerded myself by posting that, but at least I didn’t write it.

Categories: Ephemera, Science
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To kick off the Winter of Dave Read-a-thon, I just finished the latest Pirates! adventure and a Philip Roth short story. Your after action reports:

Pirates! in Adventures with Communists by Gideon Defoe

In the third volume of the Pirates! series, the Pirate Captain is confused with Karl Marx, the hairy philosopher behind the growing communist party in Europe. The Adventure seeking pirates end up tasked with ferrying the wanted Marx to France, where he continues to be threatened by large blonde women intent on framing the communists for crimes they didn’t commit. Naturally, chases, battles, and the Pirates brilliant wit and wisdom all come out. While I was disappointed to see the libertarian Pirates! helping the Communists, rather than fighting them, I did like the way the Pirate Captain handled growing proletariat dissent among his crew - play stick swords in the agitator. I rate this the best Pirates! adventure since Pirates! in Adventures with Scientists, certainly better than their Adventure with Ahab, and a definite must read.

Special thanks to my dad, who bought the book for me as a Chanukkah present before I even knew it existed.

The Conversion of the Jews by Philip Roth

While sitting around my apartment, I picked up my roommate’s copy of Goodbye Columbus and began reading one of the short stories. “The Conversion of the Jews” follows Ozzie Freedman, a Jewish pre-teen who asks too many questions in Hebrew School. Ozzie resists hypocrisy and inconsistencies in the Rabbi’s answers to his questions, ultimately leading to an altercation where he escapes to the roof and forces the conversion of all those around him to Christianity. A quick read, and still insightful nearly a half-century after it was originally published. The Jewish Community is still grappling with the same issues Roth attacked, now as Roth’s generation struggles to pass its ties to Jewish tradition onto the next. You can find the story in Goodbye Columbus or in a number of short fiction collections.

Categories: Books, Winter of Dave
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For my friends who plan to marry a rich man to spoil them (and I have far more than you’d imagine), Forbes offers a Special Report on How to Land a Rich Man:

Of course, finding that big-time breadwinner is not as easy as it sounds. It’s all about knowing how and where to search. Enter the gurus with their sage advice.

“You’ll need to upgrade where you go,” advises Sayles.

“Hang out where the wealthy do,” echoes Johnson. That means drinking at their bars (think five-star hotels), dining at their restaurants (super high-end, of course) and playing their sports (golf, anyone?).

Another sure bet for Anna Nicole Smith-wannabes: charity events. Johnson says there’s no need to donate the big bucks. Just sign up as a volunteer–you’ll get a sneak peek at the guest list, an invite to the party and a free pass to mingle with the moneyed.

After that last paragraph, dare I categorize this under “philanthropy?” If seeking rich men gets attractive women to volunteer more, I am 100% in favor of it. After all, when they solicit they raise a full standard deviation more money, and I’m not convinced that anyone else at that party is there for fully selfless reasons.

Categories: Careers, Community, Dating, Matching Mechanisms, Philanthropy
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Wired’s Bodyhack is taking votes for this year’s sexiest geek of 2006, with SI’s own network superstar Lada Adamic as one of the 10 finalists! Head over to the BodyHack blog to vote, and help score one for the home team. Maybe a victory here will make SI a new powerhouse in geek sexy.
Full Disclosure: I was a student of Lada’s last year for her Special Topics course on Networks: Theory and Application.

Categories: Ephemera, Graduate School
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Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias looks into how much “helping professions,” actually help:

You may really want a helping job so that you can feel and look morally superior to those in non-helping professions. If so, you gain value at the expense of others who look worse; shame on you again.

That’s his #6. I’ve often said that the reason politicians and non-profits can get away with paying employees so little (see here), especially at the entry level, is because they compensate them with self-righteousness. In the end, it ends up attracting a certain type of individual, and requiring costly signaling mechanisms (think Masters Degree) later on to sort out the riff-raff. Doctors go through the signaling early, and don’t seem to take the same financial hit.
I came to the conclusion a few years ago that nearly everyone participating in the economy is helping somebody else in some way. The engineer who designs screws for farm equipment is contributing to helping people get food, and the purchasing representative at the farm equipment company is helping them get it cheaper. And don’t forget all the times people help others outside their job without getting paid for it.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Community, Education, Graduate School, Philanthropy, Politics
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Wired News is reporting that Mexican drug cartels use YouTube to send warnings to their enemies before killing them.

Categories: Law, Politics, Social Software
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My friend Katie recently pointed me to two sites with tons of data on money and politics.

http://www.opensecrets.org tracks political donations by industry, PACs, candidates, and issues.

And on the less well financed side of the hill, http://www.legistorm.com/ tells you the salary of every employee in the house/senate.  I was shocked at how much some, and little others, were making (remember that most of the data is either quarterly or semi-annual).

Categories: America, Governance, Information Asymmetries, Politics
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I finally broke the 100,000 point mark (made it to the key level!) at Pac Man on my Google Homepage. Now I can actually do work.

Categories: Ephemera, Video Games
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Contrary to the rhetoric of bored cosmopolites, most cities don’t exist primarily to please tourists. The children toddling through the Chandler mall hugging their soft Build-A-Bear animals are no less delighted because kids can also build a bear in Memphis or St. Louis. For them, this isn’t tourism; it’s life—the experiences that create the memories from which the meaning of a place arises over time. Among Chandler’s most charming sights are the business-casual dads joining their wives and kids for lunch in the mall food court. The food isn’t the point, let alone whether it’s from Subway or Dairy Queen. The restaurants merely provide the props and setting for the family time.

In Praise of Chain Stores, in this month’s Atlantic. The whole time reading it, I was thinking “this is exactly how I feel around people in Ann Arbor,” and then I get to the last paragraph:

In the name of urbanism, officials and activists in cities like Ann Arbor and Fort Collins, Colorado, are driving business to the suburbs. “If people like shopping at the Banana Republic or the Gap, if that’s your market—or Payless Shoes—why not?” says an exasperated Gibbs. “Why not sell the goods and services people want?”

via Arts and Letters Daily

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Community, Funny
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On Malcolm in the Middle today, Malcolm joins the Boosters. I wish this conversation didn’t remind me of so many real philanthropic groups I’ve worked for:

Philip: First, let’s review our food for the homeless program. Wayne…

Wayne: Good news Boosters, we raised $428 on our rad bowling for hobos event. Unfortunately, the decorating budget got away from us. We spent $425 on the balloons. But, I think we might be able to salvage this by taking that $3 and buying the homeless a really nice card.

Philip: Good save Wayne. Alright, Stephanie, what about our pancake breakfast for the abused children’s counseling center?

Stephanie: It’s gonna be awesome, we have tons of decorations, and hundreds of balloons.

Malcolm: Maybe if you eased up on the balloons, you’d have some more money for the counseling center.

Stephanie: I don’t think abused children want to eat in some gloomy undecorated room. I mean, after what they’ve been through, lets not abuse their sense of taste.

*Spoiler Alert (but do you really care about a Malcolm in the Middle spolier?)*

At the end of the episode, Malcolm auctions off embarrassing items from the Booster club members - raising tons of money, and thinking he’s going to expose their hypocrisy. Instead, the Boosters get excited about how much money they’re raising and offer more items for auction. The whole time they cared about helping people, they just had no idea how to do it effectively.

Categories: Community, Funny, Governance, Metrics, Philanthropy
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“Consent,” a short film featuring lawyers negotiating a hook up.  Sadly, even the best lawyers I know, DworinLaw, still don’t offer that service.

Via BoingBoing, who found it via LawGeek

Categories: Dating, Funny, Governance, Law
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The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world’s first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. A team of British, Greek and American researchers was able to decipher many inscriptions and reconstruct the gear functions, revealing, they said, “an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period.”

This thing is super cool - a 2000 year old computer 1000 years ahead of its time. A Special David Dworin Online Internet Honor goes to the first person to build one out of Lego, and a Double Bonus Honor if it uses Lego Mindstorms to improve on the original.

After reading the NYTimes article and a recent visit to the field museum, Stephen Dubner at the Freakonomics Blog is wondering about technology that’s ahead of its time, noting how often major scientific discoveries were found centuries apart. I think there are two explanations for why science has such gaps. First, it wasn’t really until the enlightenment that there was a general consensus around the scientific method, which means for millenia, scientists weren’t even all speaking the same language, and didn’t have the same set of standards. Once the rules of the game became standardized, things started moving quicker.

Beyond that, though, it wasn’t even until recently that communication technology was amenable to the wide scale dissemination of ideas. The writings of the Greek Philosophers survived in hand copied volumes, mostly in the Arab World (because they were destroyed in the west), meaning few had access to them. Since communication over time and distance was expensive, the notion that large groups of scientists would collaborate, as they do now, was out of the question. Science has progressed so rapidly in the modern era because it is so easy for scientists to communicate, collaborate, and document their findings, increasing the number of brilliant minds that can tackle the same problem.

Categories: Science
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“There is not one measurably significant way I have ever found in which religious people are not more charitable than nonreligious people,” Mr. Brooks says. “The fact is, if it weren’t for religious people in your community, the PTA would shut down.”

Arthur C. Brooks, discussing the findings in his new book “Who Really Cares.”  The blogosphere is abuzz with his findings, that conservatives are more charitable than those on the left.  One way I’ve heard this put is that conservatives want to help less people with their money, while liberals want to help more with someone else’s money.  My sister, who is active in liberal causes, was surprised by the findings about volunteering.

I’m more surprised that people are so shocked by this.  The General Social Survey has had questions about charitable giving for the past few years, and it seemed to show the same thing.  Brooks takes it a step further by analyzing nearly every relevant data set out there.  A number of other news outlets, besides the Chronicle of Philanthropy article, have interviews up with Brooks as well.

Categories: America, Community, Philanthropy, Politics
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Tums, my favorite feel-good candy, is mentioned in Fox Trot!  Check it out:

http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2006/12/01/

Categories: Ephemera, Funny
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PNC Wealth Management has their latest Christmas Price Index out, and this year’s CPI grew by around 3.0%.  This year’s rise was driven again by rising skilled labor costs, which are also weighted the heaviest in the index.

The Christmas Price Index measures the change in price for the items the True Love gives in the 12 Days of Christmas, weighted by how many the True Love purchased (5 Golden Rings, 11 Pipers Piping, etc…).

Categories: Business and Economics, Metrics
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