http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa017&articleID=79C583A1-E7F2-99DF-3BE62D88C9C352E0

In online dating:

For men, the major areas of deception are educational level, income, height, age and marital status; at least 13 percent of online male suitors are thought to be married. For women, the major areas of deception are weight, physical appearance and age.

You can see what people care about, by what is lied about to get dates. Men are supposed to be:

• College educated
• Rich
• Tall
• Young
• Unmarried

And women should be:

• Thin
• Pretty
• Young

What's striking about this? Well, it's important for men to be unmarried. What? I guess a lot of the men on online dating services are married, or formerly married. For women, that's less of a problem. Why might that be? At a guess, maybe its because men have to pay child support, so it means less income.

Of course there is the obvious: personality goes unmentioned while appearance is critical.

What's perhaps even more striking is that, for girls, the entire list is physical characteristics. That's it. Period. Nothing else matters enough to bother lying about.

And you couldn't pick a much worse thing to lie about: the instant you meet someone, they will see the truth with pretty reasonable accuracy. It'd be much easier to lie about your personality and maintain the deception through a number of dates.

By the way, can you picture falling in love with someone if you haven't yet seen their picture? I didn't think so:

According to one recent survey, men's profiles without photos draw one fourth the response of those with photos, and women's profiles without photos draw only one sixth the response of those with photos.

Why do people lie so much online? Someone believes:

their ramblings are anonymous and hence not subject to social norms. There are also no physical cues or consequences--no visible communication gestures, raised eyebrows, grimaces, and so on--to keep people's behavior in check.

What interests me about this is that it says (admits) how large a role non-verbal cues play in suppressing unusual behavior. Those raised eyebrows and frowns are noticed, important, and capable of preventing a lot of "undesirable" behavior. And they are done by people who talk about how great diversity is.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/WalMart_pays_itself_rent_get_large_0201.html

I sometimes talk about how fighting with other people is bad and wasteful, and this is a reason not to steal. And working with other people -- cooperating -- is much more productive.

Here is a good example of what happens when humans use creativity against each other. New York wants to increase their state budget by tinkering with laws to take more money from Walmart. They are going to do work not to create anything but just to take more from Walmart.

And Walmart for its part spends a huge amount of effort not on making nice stores, but on finding flaws in the tax code. It spends creativity on the issue of how much it will give to the Government instead of what to make.

I don't blame Walmart. The government is the thieves here, not them. They are just protecting themselves. It's a shame that they have to. And it's a shame the tax code is so complex -- it contains so much work to take very exact amounts from many different groups and categories of people. Well if you do that, of course people will go well out of there way to be in a different category. The whole thing is stupid.

One day we will move beyond this. Our government will stop spending its effort to fight with its citizens. And it will stop using massive discrimination to make people change their lifestyle to receive better treatment. I look forward to it.

muslim advocacy groups find this offensive. why do we ever listen to them at all?

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,21147174-401,00.html

btw they say the town is playing into stereotypes. their complaint is stereotyped!

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~mlindsey/asimov/question.htm

This short story is stupid. It goes to great lengths to give a grand sense of perspective, and focusses the whole story on one repeating theme: a question about reversing entropy. A super computer tries to answer the question. Just when all the stars burn out and humanity ends, it figures out the answer. It says "Let there be light!"

That's it? That's fucking it? The story builds up to a content-free religious answer? What a waste of time. It misled me. I thought it was a science fiction story, not some acclamation for an old myth. I thought it was about forward thinking, not excusing an idea that presently epitomizes backwards thinking.

Most of the people described in the story are supposed to be very advanced. But then the story ends with religion. And not just any form of religion, but unbearably parochial and silly Creationist mythology.

That isn't, by the way, the only parochial error in the story. At one point they invent immortality and the population doubles every ten years. That means one child per person per decade. Every decade. A bit more to make up for young people not having any. That's just insane, even by present standards. What couple today wants two kids per ten years all their lives?

When we invent immortality, we will put more effort into making each existing life very nice, and we won't want to make new ones at a very high rate. Wanting lots of kids is parochial. It's partly even just tied up in people wanting sex and not yet adjusting to birth control (including abortions).

I haven't read Asimov, but I know he is respected and admired. It's a shame that this is his favorite story, and that he thinks his idea is brilliant.

http://firefly.yourjapan.jp/post/2/212

One of the very few people that seem to do exactly what they feel like without concern for Japanese social obligation, are the Yakuza. If you put more than one Japanese in a room, it seems to create a social expectancy - each Japanese watches the other Japanese, to make sure that they don't accidentally do something considered unbecoming for a Japanese. This effect seems to multiply the more people are around. There are only a few people who don't give a shit about this omnipotent social pressure - crazy people, foreigners, and Yakuza.

Social pressure is not as bad here in the U.S.A., but it certainly exists. This is a nice description of how powerful it can be. How much it can suppress people and make them all the same.

http://firefly.yourjapan.jp/post/2/212

Roadrage is an almost non-existent phenomenon in Japan. Japanese drivers draw upon un-natural reserves of patience as they inch through traffic jams kilometers long. I [an Australian in Japan] am unable to do this - I'm either zooming down the middle on my scooter, or banging my head on the steering wheel in frustration.

Many people here believe roadrage is natural and understandable. It's part of the human condition. It's logical. It's well and good. It can't be got rid of.

But that's all false. It's just memes giving people entrenched hangups. It's pointless, bad, and as any Japanese person can tell you, it does not have to be that way.

1. They are so stupid: they won't do what you say no matter how much sense it makes.
2. They are so smart: they cleverly find their parents' vulnerable spots.
3. They are so gullible: TV commercials can make them want anything, within seconds, no matter how stupid and boring it is.
4. They are so stubborn: parents can't make them want or do anything, no matter how wise or fun it is.
5. They don't respect boundaries: they often make messes outside their own rooms.
6. They don't let their parents intrude: they never organize their own rooms the way their parents suggest.
7. They are too noisy: especially in public (where it is illegal).
8. They are too quiet: they never tell their parents what's going on with their lives.
9. They won't eat right: they refuse to finish what's on their plate even after their father (a trained and certified accountant) announces that they will soon die of malnutrition.
10. They won't eat right: they eat too much. Childhood obesity is now an epidemic.

On the TV show Buffy, Spike has a chip in his brain. Don't worry if you haven't seen the show, it's not important for understanding this entry. The chip prevents him from hurting humans: if he does, it causes him excruciating pain.

How could a chip like that work? How does it know when to cause him pain? It can't see who he's hurting, so it must be reading his thoughts. How can it do that? Maybe it can read the state of the neurons its next to. But that won't help unless all the relevant ones are concentrated in one place. From what we know of brains, they aren't. Maybe it somehow can scan the entire brain. If so, consider that this chip would work equally well if you just placed it next to someone's head: you could read their brain. So that's some pretty advanced technology, but Buffy does not take place in the future.

So suppose this chip can scan the whole brain. Will that help? Only if it can process all that data in real time (it causes the pain immediately). To process the amount of data in a brain, in real time, I think you'd need a computer about as powerful as ... a brain. But this chip is much smaller than a brain, including its high tech brain scanner. And our best computers aren't nearly as fast as our brains: they are around 500 times slower (source).

Another issue with the chip is: how does it cause pain? It could zap Spike's brain with electricity. But that would cause brain damage, which is never mentioned. It could hook into the brain and send brain signals which say Spike is in pain. Hooking into the brain so that it can send signals is pretty high tech itself. But worse, how can it know what signals to send? And if it can only send signals to a few neurons where its located, then will it always be able to send the necessary signals? We don't know exactly what it would take to calculate how to send pain signals, but if we expect they are like other thoughts, then constructing them would require comprehension of much of Spike's brain state. It would be a bit like trying to manipulate someone: you have to understand what sort of things they are thinking and feeling, and they figure out how to take advantage of those. It sounds like a task that requires creativity. So the chip would need (artificial) intelligence software. Alternatively, maybe there is a special part of the brain that causes pain when stimulated. If so, that may solve the pain-causing issue, but at the cost of locating the chip in a worse place for the purpose of reading Spike's thoughts.

On the show, we receive contradictory information about how the chip works. In one scene, Spike tries to punch Buffy a few times, but isn't hurt. He says that he knew she would dodge, and the chip only hurts him when he intends to hurt a human. So according to this, the chip must read Spike's thoughts, and reacts entirely based on them. This is roughly what we've been assuming above.

But in another scene, they are unsure whether a person is part demon. Spike punches her to find out: the chip hurts him, and everyone agrees this proves that she is human. But how is that possible? If the chip only knows what Spike knows, and works based on his intentions, then it can't be used to find out if someone is human. If Spike doesn't know, the chip doesn't know either.