Internal Monologue

I missed this when it came out two years ago:

I actually got this right. Maybe that's a clue!

If you're a US soldier in Afghanistan, and you limit yourself to 3-4 hours a day : The soldiers’ coping behaviors included a range of activities, like reading, listening to music, using Facebook and working out. But what proved to be the single most protective activity — the habit that best bolstered the soldiers’ mental resilience — was spending three to four hours a day playing videogames. A regular daily gaming habit corresponded with the overall lowest levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, suicide attempts or domestic violence. And yet — and here’s where we see too much of a good thing — for soldiers playing more than 28 hours a week, there was a steep decrease in the protective benefits of gaming. Indeed, 40 hours a week or more was predictive of significant psychological distress. This is some good news, after hearing about this depressing finding : Recreational sitting, as reflected by television/screen viewing time, is related to raised m...

The red-on-black look of the old interface was generating a lot of negative feedback, so I switched it to something more conventional.

photo by Christopher Irion Announcing a performance of Dust Storm : Art and Survival in a Time of Paranoia by Rick Foster with images by Chiura Obata. Performed by Zachary Drake by special arrangement with AEA. Tuesday evening April 12th 8pm Sonoma State University Warren Auditorium. Free and open to the public. There will only be about 50 additional seats available (the others will be taken by students). I'll post more information as I find out more.

Ezra Klein on Republican efforts to undermine the credibility of the CBO: But beneath it is something more insidious: an effort to discredit the last truly neutral, truly respected scorekeeper in Washington. The facts don't support the particular case the Republicans want to make, so they're trying to take down the people who supply the facts. But once that's done, it can't easily be undone. And the true loser will be the very thing Republicans claim to care most about: the deficit. If getting the CBO's seal of approval ceases to matter, then political parties will cease to try. That's when the "smoke and mirrors" will really begin: when bills just have to sound good rather than pencil out. When there are no skeptical budget experts sending legislation back to the authors with a note that says, "Sorry, not there yet." When policy debates are decided by who can yell the loudest rather than who can write the best bill. I am deeply ...

"[...]in the modern world productivity’s about organization as well as machines. Federal Express didn’t invent the airplane or the truck or the cardboard box, but they came up with a different way of putting it all together." - Matthew Yglesias

Turns out bloggers were much better at estimating Apple's financial numbers than analysts who were presumably paid large sums of money to get those numbers right. Of course, the bloggers have a financial stake in getting the numbers right, too. Still, rather embarrassing for the analysts. I wonder if this was an isolated incident, or if there's going to be a general trend of enthusiasts outperforming professionals in certain areas. I'm thinking of Nate Silver's recent success at election forecasting. Also, I'm recalling how when I worked in the games group at Microsoft, people in the Excel group were often better at our games than our own testers who were being paid to the best they could be at the game. Do people who are naturally enthusiastic about something have an advantage over mercenaries? Do institutional analysts have to worry about offending clients or pleasing bosses with numbers in ways that bloggers don't? Or is this just a fluke, or limited to area...

Here's one kind of printer for which I'd be particularly hesitant to buy 3rd-party cartridges from shady eBay dealers: a food printer. Gizmodo : Scientists at Cornell University 's Computational Synthesis Lab are developing a commercially-available "3D food printer" that would allow users to "print" meals using "raw food 'inks'" inside syringes. Sounds delicious ! Cooking is so hard , what with "ingredients" and "recipes" and "having to leave your house to go shopping." So thank goodness for the fab@home project [link added] an open-source collaboration on 3D printer technology that's developing a "food printer" intended for home use. The whole idea of a custom manufacturing unit in your house is awesome, and it sounds like the technology is coming together. Think of how many D&D minis I could make!!! And they'd be perfectly customized to my exact specifications, assuming the p...

"Twenty years from now, conservatives will deny they were ever anti-gay, just as they now have no memory of ever supporting discrimination against African-Americans or women." -David Boaz, as quoted by Jennifer Rubin on Right Turn

(Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty via Sullivan ) Is it just me or does Obama look much older now than he did just three years ago? Admittedly, this photo is from Tucson, so his grieved expression makes him look older. But I don't remember all that gray hair. It must be very draining.

HT: Mad Latinist In fairness to the UN, the severe limits on its powers are by design and the fact that it is an organization with severe limits is the only way a lot of nations (especially ours) are willing to participate. Still, just as the Articles of Confederation proved inadequate to deal with the challenges facing the newly independent American colonies, I suspect the UN will prove inadequate to deal with the challenges facing the world today. But making an institution powerful enough and accountable enough to deal with problems like climate change, global pandemics, genocide, and crimes against humanity is a very difficult task. It's hard enough resolving tariff disputes. I suspect nation states and smaller entities (corporations, factions, political movements) are going to be where international power resides for quite some time.

If this is authentic, then it's pretty freaky. Derren Brown - Subliminal Advertising @ Yahoo! Video

Wouldn't it be awesome if humans dealt with the problem of dividing precious resources the way bonobos do : Bonobos like apples. They like them a lot. As a matter of fact, it’s difficult to do bonobo research without a supply of green apples to motivate them to do the experiments. But they like group harmony most of all. And the sudden appearance of the apples in their midst immediately raises the threat of discord. Who will get to eat the apples? If these were chimpanzees, the strongest males would immediately claim the fruit. There would be a fair amount of shoving, and possibly some bloodshed. But bonobos are so communal that the tension produced by something so precious as an apple in their midst must be dispelled by a gesture of community. In this case, everyone gets to cool off with a little sexual comfort from their neighbor. Then, self-interest replaced by a certain yummy group feeling, they settle down to share the apple. Sometimes, I think the only pa...

Our country got uglier today. A Congresswoman was shot in the head, apparently point-blank, today, many reports said she was dead, but now apparently she isn't as of 1:11pm Pacific. Other people apparently were killed. Dish is covering it .

In addition to their other faults, the Nazis were apparently rather thin-skinned : BERLIN – Newly discovered documents have revealed a bizarre footnote to the history of the Second World War: a Finnish mutt whose imitation of the Hitler salute enraged the Nazis so deeply that they started an obsessive campaign against the dog's owner. Absurdly, a totalitarian state that dominated most of Europe was unable to do much about Jackie and his paw-raising parody of Germany's Fuehrer. In the middle of World War II — months before Hitler ordered some 4.5 million troops to invade the Soviet Union — the Foreign Office in Berlin commanded its diplomats in the Nazi-friendly Nordic country to gather evidence on the dog, and even came up with plans to destroy the pharmaceutical wholesale company of its owner. HT: Mad Latinist via Facebook . You'd think they would have had more important things to think about. But I guess that's what totalit...

Internal Monlogue has been following the " Settlers of Catan is the new Monopoly " idea for a few years now. Here's another recent blog post on mental_floss touting that idea: The boardgaming world was, however, been pretty stolid for the bulk of the 20th century, with very little innovation from within; the mainstream board gaming companies’ idea of creativity is coming up with themed versions of existing stalwart games. But in 1995, the game Wired magazine dubbed the “Monopoly killer” (although Monopoly isn’t dead … yet) entered the market, and after a long, slow incubation period, is moving into the mainstream and threatening the established order of board games.