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rePost::Seth's Blog: Hunters and Farmers

This is an interesting perspective. Though I’ve been very wary of Evolutionary Psychology/Neurology/Anything concerning the brain, I am drawn to this idea.  I believe this is another form of the more nuanced view in the book by probably 5th most favorite TED talk speaker sir Ken Robinson (ted Talk here) . I embedded the talk at the end of this post. Hope you can read his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.
It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn’t make a lot of sense.
A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.
Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers… and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles–she’s hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago… she’s farming.
via Seth’s Blog: Hunters and Farmers.

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rePost:: Coordination Is Hard :: Overcoming Bias

Robin Hanson is really one of those people who is a joy to read for the sheer idea/word count ratio.
Subscribe to his blog Overcoming Bias. It’s tagged as Essential Reading in my Google Reader.
When people complain about Government , they seem to forget this.
That governance is hard.
That governance is like a green marine on his first training run in full 20kg packs running uphill hard.
This is why for someone to be able to govern well he has to have some of these things:

  • Natural curiosity.
  • A sense of who to trust.
  • An understanding of the Major Issues facing the Philippines.
  • A group of people he/she trust and worthy of that trust.
  • A lack of a reality distortion field or an ability to go in and out of that field.

In a sense I’ve felt that Gordon, Gibo and Noy has equal footing on everything except the last 2.

The key thing to understand is: governance is hard, especially in a democracy. Fundamentally, this is because coordination is hard.
It can be very hard for even a single owner to coordinate with a dozen subordinates that each coordinate with a dozen employees in an ordinary firm to achieve a simple clear goal like making and selling a simple product at a profit. Organizations fail at this task all the time, and for thousands of different reasons. Most new organizations attempting this fail, and most that are succeeding now will fail in a few decades. When they fail, they will fail so badly that it will not be worth trying to save them; better to throw them away and start anew.
….
Types of government activities vary both in how valuable are their possible impacts, and it how difficult is their coordination task (both relative to private coordination and to doing nothing).  If your politics were about policy, and you were reasonable, then you’d support programs with high value impacts and easy coordination, and oppose programs with low value impacts and difficult coordination.  Ideologues who oppose all government programs no matter how valuable or easy, or who support all programs with laudable goals no matter now difficult their coordination task just don’t get it.  That might signal their values and blind faith or hatred in leaders, but not their reason.
via Overcoming Bias : Coordination Is Hard.

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rePost::Natalie Portman's lesbian terror | ABS-CBN News Online Beta

Promise, I wouldn’t watch it just for the liplock. ehehe.

Natalie Portman was “terrified” when she had to kiss Mila Kunis in her new movie “Black Swan.”
The actress has a steamy same-sex scene with the “Max Payne” star in the supernatural thriller and admits she struggled to overcome her nerves before locking lips with another lady.
She said: “I was terrified. At the moment I lived in a state of inner terror.”
Portman – who previously shot a nude scene for short film 'Hotel Chevalier' – is also worried the lesbian sex sequence is overshadowing the plot of the film and worries it will make her be taken less seriously as an actress.
She added: “Nudity is something absolutely natural and I'm not prudish – but in a film it can be distracting. Doing 'Black Swan' I couldn't say no. The project is a huge opportunity for me to show a new me. I can't always play the nice mothers. My other problem is that single pictures are being taken out of context and put on the internet.”
via Natalie Portman’s lesbian terror | ABS-CBN News Online Beta.

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Quote::TheMoneyIllusion » Seeing the world in a different way (one year later)

I loved reading this, thanks to Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen for the pointer!!! (Trying his best to impersonate famous blogger’s tone)

Still, at the current pace my blog is gradually swallowing my life. Soon I won’t be able to get anything else done. And I really don’t get any support from Bentley, as far as I know the higher ups don’t even know I have a blog. So I just did 2500 hours of uncompensated labor. I hope someone got some value out of it. Right now I just want my life back.
via TheMoneyIllusion » Seeing the world in a different way (one year later).

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rePost::Liquid glass will change your life, eliminate detergent profits Boing Boing

Hope this takes of would love to spray this on my shoes.  But think what would happen to a lot of the for CSI type of evidence that is gathered?

Liquid glass will change your life, eliminate detergent profits
A Turko-German consortium has announced a liquid glass product “that will revolutionize everything” (it's a “new kind of glass,” as Mr Wolfram might put it). Seriously, it sounds like the applications for this stuff are endless, and yes, that's what everyone said about aerogel and the Segway, but maybe this time… They're shipping to the UK soon, but “many supermarkets, may be unwilling to stock the products because they make enormous profits from cleaning products that need to be replaced regularly, and liquid glass would make virtually all of them obsolete.”
Goddammit, Big Detergent is screwing up my future again!
Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.
via Liquid glass will change your life, eliminate detergent profits Boing Boing.

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rePost:Better Politicians :: Better Press Corp :: Better Celebrities :: Better Philippines :Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News : NPR

We need something like this in the Philippines. I think this should start with trying to organize all recorded interviews we have of candidates. These interviews we tag with their positions and the context. We could do this for everything a politician/journalist/business people/celebrity  etc. says. Then whenever a new video is entered into our database we can automatically query flip-flopping, bad policy advice etc! This can be done by us the citizens of the Philippines. I hope someone does this.
PS: The cynic in me keeps remembering Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s “I lied!!!”
PS1: Listen to the npr audio in the linked post.
Ps2: One of the things I’d miss from my current job is the US IP address. No more full episodes of The Daily Show. Colbert Report and

For decades, young reporters would ask themselves, “What would Walter think?” Nowadays, it’s not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters — it’s more often the fear that the stories they put out today might get picked apart by Jon Stewart tomorrow.
Prominent among the wary: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently explained in a magazine essay that The Daily Show host “has gone from optional to indispensable” in just a few short years.
And Williams tells NPR’s Guy Raz that on occasion, when he feels his broadcast tap-dancing toward the precipice — tossing around a story idea for “what I call Margaret Mead journalism — where we ‘discover Twitter,’ ” for instance, or entertaining some other unfortunate editorial possibility — “I will, and have, said that, ‘You know, maybe we can just give a heads-up to Jon to set aside some time for that tonight.’
“I should quickly add, we have another set of standards we put our stories through,” Williams cautions. “But Jon’s always in the back of my mind. … When you make The Daily Show, it’s usually not for a laurel, it’s for a dart.”
None of this, the NBC anchor says, is to claim that Stewart and his crew have had some wholesale transformative effect on the news media.
But “a lot of the work that Jon and his staff do is serious,” Williams says. “They hold people to account, for errors and sloppiness. … It’s usually delivered with a smile — sometimes not. It’s not who we do it for, it’s not our only check and balance, but it’s healthy — and it helps us that he’s out there.”
via Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News : NPR.

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rePost::Same-sex marriage is bad, but Prop 8 lawyers don't know why Boing Boing

Download the pdf in the linked blog post!!!

I’ve always been puzzled by the strong opposition to same-sex marriage. I just don’t see what’s so bad about it. I have no idea what the harm is. I’ve talked to many supporters of CA Prop 8 but they haven’t been able to tell me either.
Last night I was reading an October 14 transcript from Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case that’s deciding the constitutionality of CA Prop 8. I was surprised to discover that apparently *nobody* knows what the problem is with same-sex marriage. Not the plaintiffs, not the defendants, and not the judge, who seems more than a little surprised by this.
via Same-sex marriage is bad, but Prop 8 lawyers don’t know why Boing Boing.

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Learned Today :: Why does the gunslinger who draws first always get shot? : Not Exactly Rocket Science

Why does the gunslinger who draws first always get shot?
Posted on: February 2, 2010 7:00 PM, by Ed Yong
In Western films, the gunslinger that draws first always gets shot. This seems like a standard Hollywood trope but it diverted the attention of no less a scientist that Niels Bohr, one of history's greatest physicists. Taking time off from solving the structure of the atom, Bohr suggested that it takes more time to initiate a movement than to react to the same movement. Perversely, the second gunslinger wins because they're responding to their opponent's draw.
Now, Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham has found that there's something to Bohr's explanation. People do indeed have a “reactive advantage”, where they execute a movement about 10% more quickly if they're reacting to an opponent. Of course, ethics committees might frown on scientists duelling with the pistols in the name of discovery, even if the people in question were graduate students. So Welchman designed a laboratory gunfight, played out using buttons rather than guns.
via Why does the gunslinger who draws first always get shot? : Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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