Ran Prieur

December 31.

2015-12-31T12:52:41Z

December 31. Three biology links. What if obesity is nobody's fault? This is one of my favorite subjects because I've always been skinny without even trying, while other people fight hard to lose weight and are still fat. It's like the popular idea is exactly backwards, and being fit is correlated with using less willpower. Anyway, in a new study, two groups of mice ate the same, exercised the same, and even pooped the same, but a genetic difference made one group fat. They still don't know how to reconcile this with the laws of thermodynamics.

The benefits of being cold. This doesn't explain the mice, but there is evidence that "obesity is only in small part due to lack of exercise, and mostly due to a combination of chronic overnutrition and chronic warmth."

Why broken sleep is a golden time for creativity. It's about how we used to go to bed early and have two sleeps separated by doing fun stuff in the middle of the night, and electric light has tricked us into staying up late and having one big sleep which is not as good for us.

New subject: The other day there was a subreddit post arguing that homelessness and unemployment make us unhappy because of a social stigma, which is there to prop up the economy. And there are several good comments.

December 29.

2015-12-29T12:47:46Z

December 29. The last Monday of every month is Finger Pointing Day, when I bunch all the negative links so I can stay out of that mindset the rest of the month.

The Unidentified Queen of Torture. Most of the article is behind a paywall but you can get around it in many browsers by right-clicking the link and opening it in a private window. The big media will not identify her, but this wikipedia article does: Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.

A study confirms something completely obvious: A bad job is harder on your mental health than unemployment.

Toys are more divided by gender now than they were 50 years ago. Related anecdote: Leigh Ann and I were in Seattle for Thanksgiving and she was looking for a coloring book to keep her occupied on the long drive home. Almost every book was either Disney princesses or male action characters. She finally found one with animals, but they were zoo animals. Welcome to the human zoo, kids!

Because of traffic congestion, London cars move no faster than chickens, or about the same speed as horse-drawn carriages. Thanks Jack for the link, and here's something related that I've posted many times: Ivan Illich's critique of cars.

Related: a redditor bashes the libertarian dream of private roads, using his experience in the logging industry to explain why private roads on private land are a logistical nightmare.

Finally, from Cracked.com, Five creepy ways your town is designed to control your mind, including the constant feeling of surveillance, benches that don't allow relaxation or fun, how the suburbs force you to have a car, how shopping environments confuse you into buying stuff you don't need, and how urban planning segregates us by race and class.

December 26.

2015-12-26T12:57:30Z

December 26. I'm still on vacation from original thoughts, but here are three links about practical politics. Global Guerrillas has a lot of good stuff this month, including posts on how an open source insurgency can take down Uber, why the Sony hack worked, corporate disruption using Snowden style moral warfare, and drones dropping caltrops.

Earlier this month I posted two links about how modern police are unnecessary and historically strange, and here's another good one on the same subject, Origins of the police, arguing that "the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action", not to crime.

And a nice article about squatters in Detroit.

December 24.

2015-12-24T12:26:05Z

December 24. As usual for Christmas, I'm posting my favorite funny Christmas song, The Abominable O Holy Night. Also here's a video by the singer, Steve Mauldin, proving that he sang the original and then singing it again.

And my favorite serious Christmas song, Alex Chilton's Jesus Christ.

December 22.

2015-12-22T12:01:08Z

December 22. Two happy psychology links. Addiction study shows mindfulness intervention boosts brain activation for healthy pleasures. Basically, noticing and appreciating life's little pleasures is a learned skill, and learning it makes you resistant to drug addiction.

How deprogramming kids from how to do school could improve learning. It's about a teacher who made several helpful changes, including more collaboration and allowing students to keep trying until they master the material.

And this week's PostSecret has lots of good Christmas-themed stuff.

December 19.

2015-12-19T12:01:02Z

December 19. It's not uncommon for me to check email in the morning and find that two readers have sent me links. Yesterday it was the same link: The Toxoplasma Of Rage. It's about how the biggest news stories are the ones that divide us the most, and also about PETA's strategy to enrage people to get attention, and about reblogging wars on Tumblr. The author uses a metaphor of parasitic disease to talk about how people get worked up over opposing ideologies. One thing I would add is that the big goal of activists and journalists, "raising awareness", doesn't even work. We already have too much awareness and too little power, so when the nation gets perfectly divided over some police shooting, it's like two sides of a football stadium cheering for different teams, and none of us are allowed on the field.

And something fun for the weekend. Existential Comics is an internet comic strip about philosophical subjects, and last week's strip, Candyland and the Nature of the Absurd, is really good. By the way, the guy who sent me the link is named Aristotle.

Finally, my favorite song disappeared from YouTube when the submitter had her account revoked, so I made a new video out of some footage, shot by someone else, that looks like the song sounds to me: Big Blood - Song for Baltimore. I also found out that Big Blood released a new album, Unlikely Mothers, last spring. It does not yet appear on their free music archive page, but here's a soundcloud stream, and one of the best tracks is on YouTube: Leviathan Song Pt. II.

Update: I've made two more Big Blood videos, their prettiest song, Oh Country, and my favorite from the new album, Away Pt III.

December 17.

2015-12-17T12:45:29Z

December 17. I seem to be taking a break from heavy thinking. Here's a new article, Policing is a dirty job, but nobody's gotta do it: 6 ideas for a cop-free world. And a 2001 article that goes into much more detail on the invention of modern police, Are cops constitutional?

New subject: Future cities lit by beautiful bioluminescent trees. I found this on Hacker News and here's the comment thread. It reminds me of one solution to Fermi's Paradox: we haven't noticed aliens because their technology is so advanced that it's indistinguishable from nature.

December 15.

2015-12-15T12:21:08Z

December 15. Stray links. The vagabond subreddit is "the internet home for hitchhikers, hobos, vagabonds, and backpackers".

Related: Wild things: More 9-5'ers undoing domestication.

Shimer College: the worst school in America? It's actually a really good school with a radical teaching method that challenges students and leads to a lower graduation rate than conventional colleges. I don't like the whole "great books" thing because I don't trust the cultural process that decided which books are "great", but everything else sounds fascinating and it's a smart article.

And something for the season, an excellent article about how Christmas lights are wired and how to troubleshoot them.

December 11.

2015-12-11T12:40:42Z

December 11. Some personal stuff for the weekend. Leigh Ann moved to Spokane about 14 months ago, and she didn't find any work until last spring, when she got hired as a subcontractor for dog walks and pet sits. A lot of these are in remote suburbs where the buses don't go, and even in the city the buses don't run that often, and their policy on transfers is not as nice as Seattle's. So I ended up driving her around a lot.

I hate driving. In normal life I'm always bumping into things and knocking things over, and maybe I'll break something that costs ten bucks, so it's no big deal. But clumsiness in a car can easily cost thousands of dollars, so I have to fight my nature and really focus my attention to drive without crashing. I can do this, but it takes a lot out of me -- the more I drive, the more I feel generally tired, the more sleep I need, and the harder it is to motivate myself to do anything else. I've only been able to keep up the blog this year by doing it in the morning before the driving. Also, the hectic stop-and-go motion of driving is a nightmare compared to the relaxed and elegant motion of almost everything else in the universe, for example this famous video of San Francisco traffic in 1906.

So I finally did what I should have done six months ago and threw money at the problem. Leigh Ann has a car now that she enjoys driving, her name is on the title so I don't get stressed by the rsponsibility, we're going to split the cost of insurance and registration, and I'm going to sell my truck in the spring. And she's eventually going to pay me back. We learned a lot of stuff buying the car:

1) Everyone knows that the sweet spot for a used car is around $3000. It's almost finished depreciating, there's probably nothing seriously wrong with it, and you have a great chance to drive it for a few years and sell it for good money if you take care of it. So cars in this range are rare, while they're plentiful under $1500 and over $6000.

2) Toyota and Honda, because of their reputation, are more expensive by a wider margin than they're more reliable. Just like when I bought my truck, we started off looking at Toyotas and ended up looking at Fords.

3) We really wanted a late 90's Geo Metro, but good ones are rarely sold. We almost bought one with a stalling problem that seemed like a cheap fix, until I found this forum thread explaining how the exact model we were looking at had a basically unfixable problem, because GM patched a different problem with a strange part and then stopped making it.

4) If you transfer a title in Washington state, and there is anything crossed out or whited out anywhere on the paperwork, even on something trivial, they make you go back to the seller, fill out a new bill of sale, an odometer disclosure statement, and a document explaining the alteration which has to be signed and notarized.

5) Spokane Teachers Credit Union doesn't really offer free notary services for members, unless it's the member's signature on a document related to their own financial services. They wouldn't even let us pay for it, and we had to go to the seller's bank, Mountain West Bank, which is more generous with their notary services. I wonder if credit unions are on their way to being worse than banks, precisely because everyone assumes they're better.

6) Emissions testing has little or nothing to do with smoke belching out the tailpipe. It's almost entirely about the "evap system" around the gas tank, and these days the test is usually done purely by reading the car computer. If the "check engine" light is on it's an automatic fail, and a clean-running car can fail just because the gas cap isn't tight enough. Even if you replace the gas cap, you don't know if you fixed the problem because the car computer requires an unknown combination of cold starts and driving before it notices that the problem is fixed. In our case it took about a day.

7) If a Washington State title says "not actual miles", and you sell it to Idaho, their title will not tell you this, but if it's sold back to Washington, they find it in their records and put it back on. Idaho might be the reasonable state here, because Washington's regulations are so draconian that a title can easily get tagged "not actual miles" for purely bureaucratic reasons. That's probably what happened with our car but it will still lower the price if we sell it.

Anyway, it's a red 4-door 2007 Ford Focus, like the one in this photo.

December 8.

2015-12-08T12:22:46Z

December 8. Today, some psychology links. When power goes to your head, it may shut out your heart. A study adds some brain science to something completely obvious: that when people feel powerful, they become less able to see the other person's perspective.

Going into more depth on the same subject, Extreme wealth is bad for everyone - especially the wealthy. This book review starts out talking about a tennis camp for rich kids where they were shamed into being less greedy, and it ends with more evidence that wealth changes people's brains so that they are "more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift, and to be tightfisted." In the middle it makes a surprising argument that extreme wealth doesn't even give people much influence. I would add that it is the structure of our political and economic system that holds all the influence, that wealthy individuals are more like its puppets than its masters, and that this structure is not evil, just a very big mistake.

How do we change a whole system that makes us do bad things? This article gives us some hints, with evidence that nice people are more likely to make harmful choices. More precisely, in a new variation of Stanley Milgram's famous electrocution experiments, people who refused to deliver the shocks had "more contrarian, less agreeable personalities", and they also tended to have left-wing politics, or a history of activism that gave them practice in not following orders.

I don't like the end of the article where he tries to apply this lesson with examples of consumer choices. I've been saying since this 2007 post that lifestyle puritanism is tactically much weaker than passing regulations -- and also green consumerism is so expensive (in time if not money) that more and more of us just can't afford it.

But here's an example of a courageous contrarian making an effective move: Hoping to change the industry, a factory farmer opens his barn doors. And then, Chicken farmer who spoke out about factory farm abuses immediately audited by Perdue, which wants to blame systemic flaws on the individual who reveals them. I expect this guy to lose his farm and write a book, and in a few decades we'll have better animal welfare laws.

Also some loose ends on Saturday's post. Here's a subreddit post with more thoughts on gender roles in cave men and modern humans. And Anne mentions two books by James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State and The Art of Not Being Governed, with a lot more stuff about commodity production that works with or against control systems.

December 6.

2015-12-06T12:31:30Z

December 6. I'm busy and running a day behind posting. Today I'm just going to purge some of my long backlog of unrelated links.

Only developed societies prefer highly masculine men and feminine women. This is another blow to the popular pseudoscience about modern gender roles having roots in caveman behavior. And I think this is related: Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong, describing how the "alpha wolf" only exists in captivity.

Why I Am Teaching a Course Called "Wasting Time on the Internet". This must be exactly the kind of thing William Blake had in mind when he said "If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise."

Thanksgiving and gratitude: the science of happier holidays. This is one of many articles lately on the psychological value of practicing gratitude, and I think they're right but they're missing something important. Our culture has a lot of messages about what we're supposed to be grateful for, but to get the full value of gratitude, you have to take an unflinching and private look at what you're really grateful for, like "I'm so happy that Margaret Thatcher died" or "Thanks for all the porn."

Finally, three comments by my favorite reddit commenter, Erinaceous. First, an easy but not 100% reliable method for home-grown oyster mushrooms.

In the context of how to feed yourself in a hard crash, how grain agriculture goes hand in hand with empire, because grains are easier than other food to collect as tribute. It follows that horticultural societies need to be converted to agricultural societies for the empire to expand.

And how economic inequality drives collapse: normally if something becomes scarce, people consume it less. But if there are very rich people, they want to consume scarce stuff for social status, and poor people want to harvest scarce stuff to get high prices from the rich.

December 4.

2015-12-04T12:55:25Z

December 4. This Chris Rock interview might be the longest thing I've read on the internet without being even slightly bored. It helps to imagine it in his voice. You should read the whole thing, but here are a few samples:

I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they're way too conservative. Not in their political views, but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. You can't say "the black kid over there." No, it's "the guy with the red shoes." You can't even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.
...
When Obama first got elected, he should have let it all just drop. Just let the country flatline. Let the auto industry die. Don't bail anybody out. In sports, that's what any new GM does. They make sure that the catastrophe is on the old management and then they clean up. They don't try to save old management's mistakes.
...
When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

He also talks about a surprising effect of technology on comedy: that comedians have to test and test their stuff in front of an audience to make it just offensive enough to be funny. To find out where that line is on every joke, they have to be too offensive and then back off. If they can't do that, their comedy is bland, but if they do it and people are recording with their phones, then it can get out and hurt their career.

I was thinking about that when I saw this article posted to the subreddit, The Sci-Fi Future of Personalized Advertising. I went a long time not watching much TV, and now I'm watching more and the commercials are just terrible. I mean if you listen to their tone of voice, and their whole framing of reality, the bullshit is laid on so thick that it's like they're not even selling products -- they're training the public to accept that level of bullshit as normal.

But now I'm thinking, what if instant viewer feedback enables commercials to learn, like comedians learn, until every commercial is genuinely interesting? Will it lead to better mind control, or will commercials become authentic and subversive because that's what people need?

December 2.

2015-12-02T12:49:39Z

December 2. Saturday night I went out for dinner with some smart people, and one subject that came up was a company called Uber. Through a smartphone app, they "arrange rides between riders and drivers", but unlike Craigslist, Uber controls all the information and all the money. They also aggressively externalize costs: they profit from everything that goes right, while only passengers and drivers suffer from anything that goes wrong.

The promise of the internet is a rhizomatic world where anyone can connect with anyone. The reality is, if someone can route these connections through a central hub that they control, they can leverage this advantage into rapidly growing wealth and power. Google, Amazon, eBay, Paypal, and Facebook have all done this, and now Uber is taking it into the new frontier of local services. I expect them to expand from taxi rides into stuff like dog walking, yard work, haircuts, massage, tutoring, and so on, the same way Amazon expanded from books into every product.

Thanks Adam for sending me this dystopian sci-fi story about the possible future of Uber, One Day, I Will Die on Mars.

November 28.

2015-11-28T12:03:24Z

November 28. For Black Friday, a smart article on a bizarre phenomenon in human psychology, A mother's journey through the unnerving universe of 'unboxing' videos. Apparently there are YouTube videos with tens of millions of views, of nothing but a pair of hands taking cheap items out of their packaging. I suppose this isn't much different from the appeal of simple video games, and the author mentions a Tumblr blog called "Things fitting perfectly into other things". I wonder how much of human behavior, even at high and supposedly rational levels, is based on similar deep subconscious urges.

November 26.

2015-11-26T12:56:30Z

November 26. As usual, for Thanksgiving, here are my recipes for pumpkin pie, gravy, and stuffing. And here's our recipe for homemade eggnog: 6 eggs (separate, whip whites and add at end), ½ cup sugar, 3 cups whole milk, 2 cups heavy cream, 1½ cups spiced rum, and a bit of vanilla and nutmeg.

Also here's a surprisingly good food-related article, How did toast become the latest artisanal food craze? You might expect the author to make fun of hipsters paying $4 for a slice of toast, but he brushes right past that and seeks the origin of the trend, and most of the article is a fascinating character study of coffee shop owner Giulietta Carrelli.

November 24.

2015-11-24T12:27:45Z

November 24. Right now there are full-scale riots after a grand jury did not indict police officer Darren Wilson on any charges for shooting and killing Michael Brown. To me this is only tangentially about race, and more deeply it's about troubling rules for the behavior of police. If I had been in the position of the cop, and I had shot the guy one time, I think I would be tried and acquitted. But if I had chased him and shot him five more times, I would be correctly convicted of second degree murder. In an acceptable society, police would be held to the same standards as ordinary citizens -- or stricter standards. If Wilson is cleared because he did what he was trained to do, then the American police are a legally murderous institution. Black people can see this because they are more likely to be victims of the police, but those guns are potentially pointed at all of us. Here's a great article from The Nation on this subject, Why it's impossible to indict a cop.