Alaska Public Media reports that Alaska Senator and Republican Lisa Murkowski, while speaking at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention, broke with the anti-Science Trump/Republican position on climate change. Specifically, she said: Continue reading Man Bites Dog: Republican Senator Admits Climate Change is Real
Found some deals for you (all in Kindle format).
Continue reading Interesting Science Books On Sale for Two or Three Bucks
I am not from Boston, but I moved there and lived in Dorchester for about six months.
From Dorchester, I moved to Cambridge, then Somerville, then somewhere else in Somerville, then Lexington, then Cambridge, then Somerville then Somerville then …. and so on. The entire time I either worked for, was a student at, or taught at Harvard, which is in Cambridge.
Boston, Somerville, Cambridge, Medford, Alltson, etc. are all mushed together as one big urban zone around and including Boston. And, historically, the smaller cities around Boston have been absorbed into the Beantown Borg over time. Charlestown, where the Battle of Bunker Hill happened (on nearby Breed’s Hill) used to be separate. South Boston was created out of neighboring communities in 1804. East Boston was annexed in 1855, Roxbury in 1867. Then Dorchester, West Roxbury, Brighton, Charleston, and Hyde Park by 1913. Over historical time, a lot of people grew up outside of Boston in a community that, by the time they died, was in Boston. Continue reading Fox News Lies, Dawchestah Rules!
Voting is not party involvement.
We hear a lot of talk these days about “voters” being repressed in their attempt to be involved in the Democratic primary process. There may be something to that, and it might be nice to make it easier for people to wake up on some (usually) Tuesday morning and go and vote in a Democratic or Republican primary or visit a caucus. But there is a difference between a desire for a reform and the meaningful understanding of that reform — why we want it, how to do it, and what it will get us — that makes it important to do what we Anthropologists sometimes call “problemetizing the concept.”
We can start with the statement that in the primary system, “Voters should not be kept from involvement by rules that make it impossible for them to engage in the democratic (small “d”) process.” That sentence seems reasonable, even important, and is essentially a call for open, instead of closed, primaries, or in some cases, for replacing a caucus with a primary. Continue reading Falsehood: “Voters are kept from political involvement by the rules”
Just a few books that are mostly very current and have been widely recommended. I like about 80% of them. You will too. Probably a different 80%, though. Continue reading Reading Into Trump and the Republican Regime
It is generally thought that life expectancy in the past was less that it is today for our species as a whole and in the case of industrialized countries in particular. However, this belief counts as a falsehood not because it is untrue (it is, in fact, true) but because many people get this idea wrong in a few different ways. People often:
1) confuse life expectancy with lifespan;
2) underestimate the life expectancy of many past populations; and
3) think of the past compared to the present as a dichotomy, the present being one way, the past being the other way, failing to recognize diversity and variation in life history variables across our species and across time … life expectancy is seen as a measure of quality of life (which it may well be) that has tracked the one way progress of the human condition from a widespread past condition of short-lived misery to the present and much improved condition of living long and prospering.
Continue reading Falsehood: “If this was the Stone Age, I’d be dead by now”
Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change
Continue reading Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, Must Read Book
You have cops everywhere doing cop things. Every now and then a cop does something really bad and someone gets killed. That is not going to show up as a statistical effect when looking at the overall behavior of the cops, unless you do some very specialized Bayesian statistics, which no one is going to do on that sort of data.
So, the just released study, summarized here by NPR, is not a surprise.
Having police officers wear little cameras seems to have no discernible impact on citizen complaints or officers’ use of force, at least in the nation’s capital.
That’s the conclusion of a study performed as Washington, D.C., rolled out its huge camera program. The city has one of the largest forces in the country, with some 2,600 officers now wearing cameras on their collars or shirts.
“We found essentially that we could not detect any statistically significant effect of the body-worn cameras,” says Anita Ravishankar, a researcher with the Metropolitan Police Department and a group in the city government called the Lab @ DC.
“I think we’re surprised by the result. I think a lot of people were suggesting that the body-worn cameras would change behavior,” says Chief of Police Peter Newsham. “There was no indication that the cameras changed behavior at all.”
Perhaps, he says, that’s because his officers “were doing the right thing in the first place.”
The purpose of the body cam is to find out what happened in this or that extreme event, when there is a death, or a plausible accusation of wrong doing. Another likely effect of the body cam is to cause bad behavior to be more rare, just because the cameras are there. But bad behavior is often the result of out of control emotions, or of bad training, or some other thing that the presence of a cam is unlikely to detect. I would not be surprised if body cams did have this effect on some police forces, but not most.
There are statistical ways to see if the body cams are having an effect on behavior but they have to assume that the behavior is a) really there already and b) of a certain specific form. Then you can subset your data down to the sensitive parts of it, and see if, say, before or after body cams you get a difference. But really, the best way to do that is to pair up the cops (statistically) so you have one set of cops match, with respect to relevant characteristics, another equal size set (on the same police force) where one set is wearing the cams, the other not (there are some added difficulties in doing this, like matching patterns so neither or both have the cams, etc). This sort of approach could identify an effect. But the methods that would normally be used won’t unless it is dramatic.
Yes, yes they do. And right now you can get Philip Dick’s influential novel, the novel on which Blade Runner was based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I refer, of course, to Allison Janney! There are some other people in the film as well.
It is an interesting idea, that the Kerrigan-Harding situation, and Tonya herself, were different from what we came to understand at the time. It will take a bit of a shove to get me to not think Harding was an utter asshole, but that is what the movie apparently purports.
Have a look at this discussion: Continue reading I didn’t think I cared about “I, Tonya” until I heard who was staring in it
Donald Trump does not support, or even understand, his presidential responsibilities vis-a-vis the troops in our military. That is an obvious fact. Yesterday, Trump’s chief of staff, Marine General John F. Kelly, stood before the American People and defended Trump’s recent appalling treatment of an aggrieved Marine widow, and told the country to whom he swore an oath of Allegiance that everything is fine in the white house.
The oath taken by all Marines is the same as that taken by all military personnel. So, General Kelly has uttered the following words, now and then: Continue reading How General Kelly Disgraced The Marines and Damaged Our Country
Stranger Things Season 2 will be available on October 27th, just in time for Halloween.
I expect there will be widespread disappointment, because there is always a lot of disappointment from the usual suspects when something loved is extended, redone, or done again. Part of the charm of the first season was discovering the 1980s retro allegory, and there is more of that in the new Stranger Things, but since it is the second time around … well, we’ll see. Also, Eleven was one of the great science fiction characters ever written, directed, and acted, and I understand that Eleven’s character is different this time around. So that will be a blow to civilization itself. Continue reading Netflix gets Stranger
Will the Second Season of Stranger Things be as good as, or better than, the first?
I suspect not, but I don’t say this because I don’t trust the actors, the director, the writers, or the producers, to do an excellent job. I say this simply because Stranger Things 1 was a) so very good and b) good in part because of its refreshing uniqueness.
What did that refreshing uniqueness come from? It is anti-uniqueness. Stranger Things Season One turned uniqueness upside down. Or, more exactly, it turned plagiarism upside down in a kind of alternate universe of unique familiarity. Continue reading Can Stranger Things 2 be as good as Stranger Things 1?
The other day I was engaged in a conversation among people one might assume to have been entirely liberal or progressive (essentially interchangeable terms), but one of the individuals in the conversation kept making suggestions that would likely damage causes or candidates clearly on the left. The reasons given were weak, and over time, they began to remind me a lot of the anti Hillary Clinton rhetoric we see all the time from the Republicans, but dressed up in faux progressive terms.
Then, suddenly, it dawned on me. Continue reading Is someone you know a Russian agent?
As a science blogger, I hear a lot of interesting questions, and this is one of the more interesting questions I’ve heard in a while. It is, I’m sure, rather disconcerting to notice that your feces are the color of a corroded penny, and not know why. Or, if your feces are the usual brown color that our species tends to produce, perhaps you’d like to know how to make your poop green for Saint Patrick’s day. Either way, read on:
Continue reading Why is my poop green?