cortex | November 10, 2006As loyal readers of this blog know by now (I'm talking about you, Mom), I've got a soft spot for gas taxes. In fact, I'm pretty convinced that America needs a higher gas tax, phased in over several years (so the working poor can adjust their driving habits). Over the past few weeks, I've noted that various conservative Republicans have also endorsed this plan (although none of them are actual politicians, just pundits). Now others are noticing the trend as well:
N. Gregory Mankiw, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Bush White House, suggested raising energy taxes in an…
cortex | November 9, 2006GM has already killed off one electric car - the EV1 was a product tragically ahead of its time - but the company is now committed to building an improved version:
The new car, to be unveiled as a prototype early next year, would use an onboard internal-combustion engine as a generator to produce electricity to extend the range of the vehicle's rechargeable batteries.
The idea was greeted enthusiastically by Chris Paine, director of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" The recent documentary took GM to task for creating and then abandoning the first production electric vehicle since the early 1900s…
cortex | November 9, 2006I know too much schadenfreude isn't good for you, but I just couldn't resist posting this little excerpt of Rovian braggadocio from NPR last week:
SIEGEL: We're in the home stretch, though, and many would consider you on the optimistic end of realism about -
ROVE: Not that you would be exhibiting a bias ...
SIEGEL: I'm looking at all the same polls that you're looking at every day.
ROVE: No, you're not. No, you're not.
SIEGEL: No, I'm not.
ROVE: No, you're not. You're not. I'm looking at 68 polls a week. You may be looking at four or five public polls a week that talk about attitudes…
cortex | November 9, 2006Adaptation is a well known principle of psychology, and yet political strategists have always ignored it. Simply put, sensory adaptation is why you don't notice your underpants: your mind has adapted to their presence. It's a way taking certain constants for granted, and focusing instead on the sensations that are actually changing. My hunch is that negative ads failed this year because there were simply too many of them. Our TV's were saturated with the same cliched allegations, tired montages, and ominous warnings, and so we just tuned it all out. The nasty ads became as noticeable as our…
cortex | November 8, 2006Here's an odd factoid:
If Virginia and Montana go Democratic, the prediction markets called every race correctly.
It's also worth noting that Tradesports currently gives George Allen a 4 percent chance of retaining his Senate seat.
cortex | November 8, 2006I'm skeptical of these sorts of psychological models - an important part of the terrorist strategy is to not have a coherent strategy - but it's certainly a noble effort:
Imagine that we had a mathematical formula that could be applied to Israel's enemies to predict their course of action?
Prof. Alex Mintz of Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya claims to have created just that. Mintz has developed a formula to map how terrorist organizations make their decisions. His theory can be applied to any leader in the world, whether heads of state or terror masterminds.
Is the next round of fighting…
cortex | November 8, 2006Abraham Lincoln summarizes the election:
"You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time."
That, right there, is the genius of the democracy.
cortex | November 7, 2006I'd never heard of this disorder before. It's like the awful flipside of fatal familial insomnia:
Every four months or so, Spencer Spearin climbs into bed and sleeps for days or longer.
"I might not be with you for a couple weeks," Spearin said. "I missed my birthday. I missed my graduation. I can't remember what I ate yesterday. I can't remember what I did yesterday."
Many times, the disorder appears after a flu-like illness.
Dr. Emanuel Mignot said patients suffer from periodic episodes of extreme sleepiness and abnormal, child-like behavior.
"They feel like they are in a fog," Mignot said…
cortex | November 7, 2006This is great news. As an animal lover, I can certainly see how the Humane Society has tremendous political potential. From the WSJ:
For the first time in its 50-year history, the Humane Society is trying to elect candidates to Congress who support its animal-welfare agenda. After a series of mergers with other animal-welfare groups, the Humane Society counts 10 million Americans as members, an average of 23,000 in each of the 435 House districts. That's more than twice the membership of the National Rifle Association, which is considered one of the most effective single-issue campaign…
cortex | November 7, 2006Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore, has an op-ed in today's Times on the psychology of voters. I'm a big fan of Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice is a fantastic book, and will explain why those expensive jeans you're wearing are less satisfying than your old pair of Levis - but I'm not convinced by his editorial:
When you go into the voting booth, you're trying to decide whom to accept or whom to reject. Are you judging who the good candidate is or who the less bad candidate is?
The effort by each side to coat the opposition in slime has made many of us cynical, giving us…
cortex | November 6, 2006Over at the National Review, David Klinghoffer tries to argue that the Haggard affair "confirms some truths of the worldview he defended." (If so, it's hard to imagine what an evangelical preacher would have to do to not confirm the truths he preaches. Murder? Rape? Incest? Apparently, buying meth from a male prostitute isn't enough.) But here's Klinghoffer:
Gay advocates reason that because a man has a temptation to homosexuality, he has little moral choice other than to obey it. This view of morality goes back to Darwin, who reduced behavior to biologically determined instincts. In The…
cortex | November 6, 2006...Has officially been released. It weighs in at a hefty 8.6 billion pixels.
[Hat Tip: Katherine]
cortex | November 6, 2006Democracy depends upon the wisdom of crowds. However, it's no secret that most people aren't particularly well informed about the issues. Furthermore, the less facts people know, the more vulnerable they are to being misled by negative political ads and grotesque push polls.
So is it a good thing that the majority of the electorate won't vote tomorrow? Some (conservative) economists think so:
Timothy Feddersen and Wolfgang Pesendorfer wrote a 1996 article in the American Economic Review that is now on the cutting edge of explaining why people don't vote.
Feddersen and Pesendorfer suggest that…
cortex | November 6, 2006According to a new study in the Journal of Marketing, foods that we think are healthy taste worse. In one experiment, subjects were offered a mango lassi, an Indian yogurt drink that has the consistency of a milkshake. Subjects that were told the lassi was "unhealthy" liked the drink significantly more than those who were told the drink was "healthy".
This shouldn't be surprising. As I noted here, many experiments have now demonstrated the omnipresence of our subjectivity. If we expect a food to taste worse, then it will taste worse, even when compared to an identical product. Our…
cortex | November 3, 2006When the going gets tough, what do the tough do? Blame somebody else. There is something deeply disturbing about the inability of anybody in power to take responsibility for their mistakes. Over at Vanity Fair, many of the neoconservative architects behind the Iraq War - the same naive folks who declared it would be a "cake-walk" - now blame the failure of the war on Bush's incompetence. While I certainly don't want to defend Bush's competence, I sincerely doubt that the current miasma we find ourselves in is simply a result of poor follow through. Rather, I think the plan itself - the…
cortex | November 3, 2006I was lucky enough to grow up just a short walk from the Griffith Observatory, the planetarium/museum that overlooks the sprawling Los Angeles Basin. (It is perhaps best known as a movie location in "Rebel Without A Cause".) For the last few years, the Observatory has undergone an extensive and expensive renovation. I have yet to see the re-do, but I can't wait. Edward Rothstein described the inside:
This reconstruction is most remarkable not for what has changed, but for what has stayed the same. And that is a radical approach in the world of science exhibitions.
The rotunda's ceiling holds…
cortex | November 3, 2006This depressing study from Science has gotten a lot of press, which is a good thing. The data really speaks for itself:
So what do we do? The scientists note that increased regulation has actually been effective, which is surprising since many environmentalists assume that fisherman don't actually obey regulations. (Boats on the open seas are hard to monitor, and international disputes can often neuter governmental regulations.)
The researchers analyzed nearly 50 areas where restrictions had been imposed to stop overfishing and found that, on average, the range of species in the water…
cortex | November 3, 2006Is that he tells the truth by accident. His joke was a Freudian slip with important policy implications. Alex Tabarrok explains:
John Kerry this week has been abjectly apologizing for his statements on Iraq and education. According to Kerry he intended to critique President Bush:
"Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."
But what he said was:
"You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well…
cortex | November 2, 2006Maureen Dowd has a cute profile/interview of the Comedy Central duo in the new Rolling Stone:
I thought Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert might be a little nervous to meet with me. I was the real news commentator, after all, and they were the mock. They threw spitballs at presidents; I interviewed presidents before throwing spitballs at them. I had crisscrossed the globe to cover news stories, while these guys just put on dark suits and threw up imported backgrounds on a green screen. No doubt they would try to impress me with some weighty discussion about world affairs or the midterm elections…
cortex | November 2, 2006From the LA Times:
Paul Theodore Del Vacchio, now 41, is a gambler. In Riverside County Superior Court, a psychologist testifies that Del Vacchio fed his impulse-control disorder with online wagering, not caring about the win or loss, just the high of the bet.
This is why he stole half a million dollars from his employer, an Indian casino, Del Vacchio tells the judge. It was a compulsion. He needed to cover his losses.
Needless to say, the addiction defense didn't work: the Judge handed Paul Del Vacchio a four year sentence. If we aren't going to show mercy for crack addicts, then we…