Karl Gallagher

Any of y'all successfully implemented a New Year's resolution like "not ranting", and have advice on how to do it? Make a bunch of bets with people? Put up a big "NO RANTING" sign by my computer (or that XKCD, which is already up on my wall)? Taper by ranting into private journal entries, or text files? Every time I want to rant, think about that time I cracked my windshield by bouncing a postman off it?

This is probably 100% obvious to most of you, but just in case there are a few of you who like my rants, the reason to not rant is that it is very unproductive. It's like folk activism - it feels like "fighting the war of ideas", but really, ranting rarely convinces anyone of anything, and even if you do convince a few people, that isn't how popular opinion gets changed. Doing studies, or writing really good really popular books assembling the evidence - that's how minds get changed. I guess nowadays I would add blogs like GNXP and Climate Audit - but the blogs have to be really popular and really good to make a difference. And that takes expertise and a serious time commitment.

I just don't think this is an area where a little work makes a little difference.

Also, there is the whole issue of "pulling on the ends of a rope vs. pulling it sideways", which I got from Robin Hanson. The idea is: for very emotional topics, with lots of people on both sides, you have a very taut rope, and it is very hard to move it. It's the opposite of a point of leverage. The place you can make the most difference is on ropes that aren't being pulled. Or if you do focus on a major issue, find a way to pull the rope sideways.

Seasteading is an example, instead of advocating for any policy or political system (that would be pulling on a very taut rope), we advocate for the more diverse, innovative government industry that would come from a competitive market for government. My personal goal and passion for seasteading is the same as my personal goal and passion for arguing libertarianism (because I want to live in a society which shares my morals), and so the drive feels the same. Yet as methods of implementation, seasteading and libertarian ranting are vastly different in their likely effectiveness.

My rants here are, in my opinion, pulling on a taut rope. Or trying to move a big object without a lever. There are places where I have levers. They don't feel different emotionally (if anything, they are less satisfying and less cathartic, because they are less emotional!), but they can actually make a difference.

I haven't read past the first few comments to the rant yet, but a couple things popped into my head overnight:

1) I think IQ's heritability is 0.8, not 0.6, so I understated the case.

2) As a commenter mentioned, the proportion of the variance explained by the correlation is the square, so 0.8 heritability explains 64% of the variance.

3) The SAT test is highly g-loaded, especially the math half. Something like 0.6, I seem to recall? So "doing well on the SAT" is not identical to "have a high IQ", but it's pretty close.

4) A crucial important add-on fact for why "my parents read big books to me when I was little" is preposterous as an explanation for intelligence/doing well on the SATs is: what is the source of the non-genetic variance in IQ? After all, even if you buy that a big chunk of the variation is genetic, if the rest is due to how kids are raised, then the statement is perfectly sensible.

It turns out that there are two main sources: a) shared prenatal environment, b) non-shared environment. There is little to no variation detectible from c) shared family environment.

What (a) means is that fraternal twins have a higher IQ correlation than siblings, even siblings separated by only a year in age. I'm not sure if there are other angles on this effect - none come to mind quickly. (This could be further confirmed by studies using surrogates, though, which would offer a great source of variation in prenatal environments, but AFAIK such studies haven't been done).

What (b) means is something like "It's random", or "We don't know, but we know it isn't the family", because (b) is what is left over after taking out (a) and (c). We take out (c) through comparisons like: how does the IQ correlation of identical twins raised together differ from identical twins raised apart? How about adopted kids raised together vs. adopted kids raised apart? Siblings raised together vs. siblings raised apart? "raised together" vs. "raised apart" isolates whatever it is that the family does uniquely - like read to kids. The results, very surprisingly, are that none of the variation in IQ outcome comes from the shared family environment.

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Not only am I posting from the new fancy windows live writer thingie, I am posting from my darling little dell inspiron mini netbook. Jeff decided I needed additional giftmas prezzies, apparently.

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He likes that we can now ‘geek’ side by side on the couch. I am grateful. And amused. I got the pretty green swirl design on the cover. She’s such a cute little baby laptop!

Who really doesn't care about seeing Avatar?

 The thing about the exercises I don't like to do is that it is hard to get started.  Once I start with that first set I don't have any trouble getting up for the rest of the sets.  Then I feel really good the next day and want to work those same muscles again.  I don't do it because rest is an important part of the process.  This leads to a difficulty getting started again.

I don't have any trouble getting going on the exercises I love to do.  The problem with those is that I keep doing more until my arms, shoulders, or whatever just won't.

I also am having some problems with my knees, specifically my petellar tendons.  They don't hurt, but I am limited in what I can do if I want to be able to work back from this and avoid long term painful rehab of those tendons.  I really wish I could do my squats and lunges, they make my muscles feel so good.

So most of my leg work is the very short movement of things like dead lifts and dumbbell cleans combined with a little stretching and the occasional shallow squat.  Since I spend most of my time in the basement risking a more serious knee problem is not something I want to do.  I'm just glad that I know what the tearing in the petellar tendon feels like so I cut back before it got worse.  I wish it would heal faster, but I'm doing this on my own since I would have to pay for professional help.

My wife owns a cockatoo.  We bought a cage advertised as 'escape proof' and 'your cockatoo will not get out of this cage - ever'.

Within a few hours of installing him in the new cage he'd chewed a bar off.  Months later the cage is looking very ghetto, what with a bars missing here, and missing there.  And he's opened two spaces in the cage large enough to squeeze out.

What we need is an actually good cage for a 'too, one that he can't tear apart.  Suggestions?

 Allow me to rec one full-length story I missed, and only found through someone else's rec post:

 Sorrows Bring Heaven (Anne of Green Gables) - This is a missing scene type deal for Anne's House of Dreams, after baby Joyce is born and dies.  It's very powerful, and very real, and sadness giving way to hope, and it has one moment that I felt was actually missing from the book, but would spoil you if I told.  Just go read it.

 Yuletide Madness recs are:

 1. The Long Wait (Vorkosigan Saga) - a small look in Duv Galeni's head while he's sitting in the cell in Memory.  Short but good.

 2. This Script Called for Liars; You Played The Lead (Honor Harrington series) - Some missing scene stuff with Scotty Tremaine and Harkness after Harkness' fake defection in In Enemy Hands.  As I said in my comment to the story, it did a good job with the human element that Weber so often gives us tantalizing hints of, and then leaves to write a 300-page battle scene where thousands die. 

 3. Full of Yearning and Need (Anne of Green Gables) - A short look in Walter's head when it comes to Una.  Very worth reading.

 4. The Walled Garden (Heyer/Venetia) - A nicely romantic and sensual short featuring a married-with-children Venetia and Damerel, and their walled garden where privacy is very strictly enforced.  Very nice and real.

 And last but not least, a Madness gift fic for me, based on my Heyer prompt!

 5. On The Road to London (Heyer/A Civil Contract) - A short look inside the Deveril coach as they head to London for the oldest daughter's season.  So glad we don't live in the Regency and travel by coach.  Nice and snappy.

 DV

Story so far: Guy straps a bomb to his leg, detonates it.  Passenger jumps him, beats the snot out of him.  At some point the bomb malfed, because of inept engineering, or the efforts of the citizen or both.


This is the bit that I have not seen anyone else talking about:

A Predator did not blow him up.  Delta Force did not kick down his door.  A US Marshal did not put the cuffs on him.

The government could not stop this guy.

A citizen did, or did his best to do so.

 

To wait for the government to be your savior is to be a bystander in your own life.

Update: What do you say about a 'system' that allowed a known-terrorist to fly with a bomb in his crotch?

What we are focused on is making sure that the air environment remains safe, that people are confident when they travel. And one thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked.

Secretary Napolitano, this was not a system 'working'.  This is what people out here in the real world call 'failed'.

Secret critique amusements: when someone says you didn't foreshadow something enough for their liking, and then you discover that in their suggested edits they've actually cut out every bit of foreshadowing that you put in.

Good to know this is a group of people who can prioritize. Skanks after your hair rock man: call the cops. Your boyfriend is raping and killing homeless women? What could you have done?

It was a good Christmas. I didn't really need or want much. Got a wonderfully soft fuzzy black cowl neck sweater (I helped pick it, so no surprise), a burgundy wool turtleneck from my sister, a navy crew neck sweater from my mother-in-law and a really pretty navy damask/jacquard (?) shirt from my mother. She had shown me a shirt she'd gotten for Dad, and I said I'd love one like it. So she called the store and got them to put one on hold for her, men's medium since they didn't have any smalls. It is a bit big but looks great. Got a book from her and two books of SF short stories from Andrew. Got a 1000 piece jigsaw with a musical score on it (no idea what music). Also a really pretty scarf from my younger son. Teas (as requested) from my elder son.

We had a quiet Christmas Day. Mum, Dad and my youngest sister, Anne, arrived late evening Christmas Eve, just in time for Dad to join me and my elder son at the late church service. Dad and elder son went to pick up my mother-in-law Christmas morning, and when she arrived and tea had been poured, we distributed and opened presents. Casual lunch of soup and toast and then watched the Queen's message and A Christmas Story. Turkey dinner around 5, and relaxed after that. Andrew took his mum home.

Boxing Day, Mum, Dad, Anne and the 4 of us went to the annual pantomime in Toronto. This year it was Robin Hood. The story line was rather weak, even more so than usual, but it was a lot of fun. Came home for turkey sandwiches for dinner, yum, and then my parents and sister headed back down to Niagara on the Lake.

Today, Andrew and I went to visit friends in Guelph, who have an annual open house over the holidays. Was a fun afternoon. Nothing planned for this evening, or for the rest of the week before New Year's Eve.

For a day or two, love to curl up with a warm blanket and a good book or some cross stitching. If not too cold or blustery, don't mind bundling up and going for a walk.

I had a moment of synchronicity today.

I have been reading Conversations on Consciousness, and I've found that I can only read a few of the interviews at a time before I have to switch to something else. Why? The interviewees are some of the most prominent people involved in researching the nature of consciousness: "what does it mean to say, 'I perceive'" and the like. I have noticed a profound hubris in the thinking of the interviewees - a belief that the map for this research has been laid out, and in fact that this map has notations reading "here be NO dragons" on it. Sadly, not one of the essays I've read so far so much as nods to the idea that consciousness/self-awareness could be the result of having a soul. And so I must intersperse other books, to avoid collapsing under the crushing reductionism of these great minds. Sarah asked how the book was, and my response was "depressing."

And then today Mike Flynn pointed out an essay I had not previously read: Is Google Making us Stupid? This essay talks about the changing style of reading and comprehension - that attention more flitters than lingers, and lovingly describes the nature of contemplation.

Yes. That's it - as has been attributed to Debussy (although I've heard it attributed to many more modern folks as well), "music is the space between the notes."

The room for contemplation is what creates perspective, and what allows such things as beauty to exist - it also is what allows us to actually synthesize and harmonize the various sensuous and other inputs such that we can have independent judgement, regardless of the topic. Douglas Hofstadter was famously surprised when he conducted a prisoner's dilemma experiment using twenty logicians (recorded in Metamagical Themas, which is an excellent book) - he believed before the experiement that the logicians should all use the same logic and come to very similar answers. He was of course spectacularly wrong: there was a majority concurrance, but there were a dozen recorded approaches (coming to different conclusions as well). Truly logic showed its particularism rather than its universality that day, and Carr's essay brought that back to my memory.

I suspect that modern approaches are more inclined to cement one's previous biases rather than actually challenge one's assumptions and change one's opinions. Of course, I have no proof for this suspicion, but it bears the mark of plausibility.

There's an old man who comes to the gym in the mornings. He has a walker with an oxygen bottle, and bears visible scars from open heart surgery and a pacemaker implant. Monday morning I loosened up in the hot tub, and the two of us talked.

I learned that he had his first surgery in early December of 1999. I was reminded of my bout with myocarditis that same month, and how, as I lay in the Intensive Care Unit at UVRMC, the rooms around me were full of what I have come to call "gray people." Their skin was literally deathly pale, and I assumed that the majority of them were going to die there.

I asked where this man had gone for treatment back in '99, and he told me he was at UVRMC, and spent most of December in the Intensive Care Unit.

One of those gray people not only survived, but did so for a full decade at current count.

The last decade has been huge for me. I started a new job, rose to prominence, and then quit to do the same thing again. I created Schlock Mercenary, and Sandra and I had two more kids.

All of this in a decade.

I don't know what my elderly friend at the gym has done with the ten years the doctors, God, and/or the Fates gave back to him, but I'm sure they are precious.

Whine about the "aughts" if you must, but as we begin the second decade of the twenty-first century, know that at least two of us are really thankful for the last ten years.

Time to start planning for Christmas 2010. This is the first attempt at the pattern for the 2010 snowflake (it came from a book, not my brain). I did it, starched it and blocked it yesterday. I can see that this one will require very close attention to the tension -- the lower right point is much larger than its fellows, probably because I was crocheting more loosely. I'm not sure I like it.

I also ordered cards from the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- they're half price after Christmas.

Now to finish wrapping the almost-last of the 2009 gifties, for my sister, her husband and the niblings. I have things for my other daughter-in-law, too, but they'll be extremely late, owing to my having forgotten to click the "send" button on my Amazon order.

Sister etc should be here in a few hours.

Time also to turn my attention to my various hippeastrum experiments. I believe that my current ones may all have the dreaded red blotch. Rather than throwing them all away, I think I'll wait till the younglings have bloomed, choose a couple to save, put them and their parents in a heat bath that is supposed to zap the fungus, and...and then what? Heat-bathe and re-pot the rest, if I know myself.

They were too dark and wet in the place I put them last year. This year I will keep them all in one room so they can't contaminate the youngsters up here on my office windowsill.

Do I start the pansies, or not? I can't decide.

Just a shot to show you my hair squee, made for me by the ever lovely Amalia.  Also, this gives you an idea of my hair color.  It's been red before, but never when it's been quite this long.

I spent about four hours yesterday playing DJ Hero, scratching and mixing, just enjoying the hell out of great mash-up songs and fun gameplay. And in playing it, I understood completely why DJ Hero tanked.

On the surface, DJ Hero has everything you'd want in a rhythm game: great songs, an iconic culture (everyone knows to scratch the records, man), entertaining game play backed by absolutely killer reviews. Yet it sold about half of what people thought it would, and it's largely considered a flop.

So what happened? A lot of things.

First off, there's the obvious point: as people dissecting the failure of DJ Hero have repeatedly mentioned, mash-ups of songs sound good on the surface, but you don't know what you're getting. Sure, Daft Punk remixing Queen sounds potentially awesome, but do you want to drop $120 on things that might be good? Whereas Rock Band and Guitar Hero may have less exciting tracks - certainly the repeto-stomp of "We Will Rock You" isn't going to be fun to play more than once or twice - but there's no question as to what song you'll be playing.

It didn't help that the two songs featured in the Best Buy kiosks were the weakest songs in the game. As it turns out, the Queen/Daft Punk is insanely good, and the Jackson Five/Jay-Z is even better. But what did they choose? Some easy, but really boring mid-tempo tracks lacking iconic sounds. If you want to sell it to the mainstream crowd, then when they see it you need to give them Rihanna, give them Queen, give them your biggest names - not the antiquated boredom of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" weakly mixed with Gorillaz.

That isn't the biggest problem, though. The biggest problem is that Activision's habit of catering to the hardcore gamers finally bit them in the ass.

See, for Rock Band, the instrument itself doesn't take too much for a newbie to understand. You know how guitarists play, and the mechanics are the similar: finger these buttons here where you'd play chords, and flick this plastic switch where you'd strum. Sure, there are other things you can do - whammy bars, star power, hammer-ons - but all of those are purely optional elements that merely enhance the game play. You aren't punished if you don't get it.

Furthermore, the two core mechanics are simple: fret and strum. That's instinctive.

DJ Hero, on the other hand? Well, what does the average Joe know about DJing aside from the fact that they wear headphones and scratch and do... something... with tracks? The mechanics of DJing are actually not nearly as well known, so you can't really imitate it.

So when you sit down, you have the three buttons on the turntable. And you have to press those buttons and scratch, sometimes in predetermined directions. And you have a crossfader, which has three positions (which are nearly impossible to see where it's seated upon first glance at the the screen) determines which track you're using, and if you don't then you fail terribly.

So when a novice sits down for DJ hero, they now have three separate and at-odds mechanics, none of which are instinctive. They know as a DJ that they're supposed to scratch, but the buttons? They're strange, and flip positions when you twirl the turntable. The crossfader switch? Sure, DJs use them, but how many of the unwashed masses are really aware of using them?

What you end up with is a huge disconnect between what's happening on-screen and what you're doing on the controller. I watched three people play it in Best Buy, and I still wasn't really sure how to play. It wasn't until I completed the tutorial that I really fathomed everything that was going on.

Guitar Hero has a guitar to be played. DJ Hero has an interface to be learned.

That's great... for die-hard gamers like me. I like mastering new control systems, and get satisfaction from accomplishing things that are moderately hard. But for a casual gamer, who is baffled by the two-control system of a plastic guitar? He's going to look at the buttons and the twirling and the crossfader and this twirly dial here and this flashing button and cry, "WHAT THE FUCK DO I DO?" And who wants to bother?

Activision wasn't thinking, "Wow, Guitar Hero really appeals to people who never play games. How can we do that for DJ Hero?" If they had, they would have found a way to simplify the interface, make it more apparent what control affected which part of the game. They would have watched Gramma and little kids as they scratched on experimental controllers, catalogued their reactions and really concentrated on feedback.

Instead, they said, "How can we make this a game with a lot of depth?" Which, to be fair, they did - but they paid for it in having too much of a learning curve, one that put people off when they saw it in stores. It looked like work because it was, like any hardcore game, and the people rightfully stayed away in droves.

Which is a shame. It's a fine game. I'm enjoying it as I master its control schema. But I can see Gini, bored in her chair, wondering why I'm spending hours finessing my scratching technique - and her casual gamer attitude is not only completely justifiable, but the majority of purchases these days. And so even if they did come up with a sequel to DJ Hero, it'd still use this clunky controller, then that would fail.

Boo. I love these mixes. I love this game. But I can understand why it's just for me.

First workout in weeks, at hotel gym. They had some annoying multi-use strength machine and dumbbells, so I did dumbbell hang clean / front squat / push press, ie a hang clean into a thruster. Dumbbell thrusters are my hotel gym standby, and I figure adding a clean can't hurt. Worked from 8kg up to 18kg I think, sets of 10 early down to 7 late, maybe just 5 on the last one (I was having trouble stabilizing the dumbbells).

Owww my thighs! It doesn't seem like much weight, 18 * 2 * 2.2 = 79#. Wow, that's more than I expected, actually, that is a decent amount of weight, considering I went deep and am out of shape.

I need to get a weightlifting userpic, I should get someone to take one at Tortuga sometime.