Link Banana

It’ll only prove that America is too racist to elect a black man. So says Slate’s Jacob Weisberg:

If it makes you feel better, you can rationalize Obama’s missing 10-point lead on the basis of Clintonite sulkiness, his slowness in responding to attacks, or the concern that Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected. But let’s be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin.

The weirdest — or perhaps most sensible — rumor you’re likely to hear today is this one:

According to Zach Klein and his valley sources, the Mormon Church’s Family History Department has made a bid to acquire Facebook:

I heard from an employee close to the deal that the Mormon church’s genealogy business made an unsolicited bid to acquire Facebook.

The Mormon Church maintains the largest genealogical database in the United States and apparently has the cash reserves necessary to make an offer of the magnitude necessary to acquire Facebook.

(via Mike Rundle)

Tyler Colman says that we need to get over the stigma about wine that comes from a box. One reason:

A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.

Specifically: Why does India have so few Olympic medals? Tyler Cowen and others speculate. I do believe that cricket remains my favorite explanation.

Not quite sure why — perhaps because the topics been on my mind recently — but I feel compelled to link to Gary Bass’s passable summary of the concept of humanitarian intervention.

Hidden in a rather good mental_floss post called “3 Controversial Maps” is an interesting idea:

If George Etzel Pearcy had his way, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s famous song would have been called “Sweet Home Talladego.” In 1973, the California State University geography professor suggested that the U.S. should redraw its antiquated state boundaries and narrow the overall number of states to a mere thirty-eight.

Pearcy’s proposed state lines were drawn in less-populated areas, isolating large cities and reducing their number within each state. He argued that if there were fewer cities vying for a state’s tax dollars, more money would be available for projects that would benefit all citizens.

Though there are a substantial number of reasons to immediately reject this proposal, I think I could get used to this new map.

It’s worth considering the fact that Paul Krugman is wrong. But it’s also worth considering his point that the Georgia-Russia conflict may be the dawn of a new era:

But as I was reading the latest bad news, I found myself wondering whether this war is an omen — a sign that the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first.

When considering the under-noticed anniversary of Burma’s 1988 uprising, The Economist’s Asia.view column hits a sensible point I’d never considered:

No, the reason the revolution failed was simple: the army was prepared to kill as many people as it took to thwart it.

So long as a state apparatus is strong and remains cohesive, it’s hard to imagine how any citizen uprising can end authoritarianism.

Farhed Manjoo says that the future of gadgets is constant improvement. There’s certainly good basis for the argument.

But because music players, cell phones, cameras, GPS navigators, video game consoles, and nearly everything else now runs on Internet-updatable software, our gadgets’ functions are no longer static. It’s still true that a gizmo you buy today will eventually be superseded by something that comes along later. But just like Meryl Streep, your devices will now dazzle you as they age. They’ll gain new functions and become easier to use, giving you fewer reasons to jump to whatever hot new thing is just hitting the market.

It turns out everyone sees themselves as an above-average driver because we naturally consider individuals as more impressive than groups.

…we find it easier to consider the favourable evidence for a single person than we do for a whole group. Consistent with this is the finding that people tend to be biased when comparing any single individual, not just themselves, against a group of others.

(via Marginal Revolution)

Shira Springer captures my hesitance to regard any sport as fair and clean, any athlete as above suspicion:

Instead of fully independent investigations, random drug tests, and cleansing of the record books, sports leagues and their stars are offering tightly controlled exercises in disclosure in which league executives, lawyers, and public-relations personnel still carefully dictate what becomes public and when. The seeming glut of available information - test results, reports, and press conferences - functions as part preemptive strike and part smokescreen, distracting fans from the growing concern that they can no longer trust what they see in competition or in record books.

Some Australian scientists think they’re a natural replacement for beef. Patrick Fitzgerald explains:

Unlike sheep and cattle, kangaroos emit little methane, which accounts for 11 percent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. The study suggests that increasing the kangaroo population to 175 million while simultaneously decreasing the the number of other livestock would lower emissions by 3 percent over the next 12 years. The plan would have added benefits for soil conservation, drought response, and water quality as a result of reducing the number of hard-hoofed livestock.

I can’t ignore the sweetness of the latest XKCD.

Interesting stuff:

A large group of people were given a “human values” test which seeks to measure fifty six different values (loyalty, ambition, social order, etc.) Then, the subjects were asked to rate a variety of sausages. People who scored high on “social authority” - they believed it was important to support people in power - tended to label the “vegetarian” sausage as inferior, even when the vegetarian sausage was actually from a cow. Likewise, people who scored low on “social power values” tended to score the vegan sausage much higher than the beef sausage, even when they were actually eating meat. Instead of judging the food product on its merits, they ended up preferring the product that more closely conformed to their value system. The scientists also conducted a similar experiment with Pepsi. Sure enough, people who fit the Pepsi demographic - they think having an “exciting life” is very important - always preferred Pepsi, even when they were actually drinking a generic cola.

(via Matt Yglesias)

An interesting look at the reality of the much heralded and fretted over Tata Nano:

Malhotra is having second thoughts. He’s done the math and realized that once taxes and insurance costs are added, the price of the entry-level Nano rises to just over $3,000. For an extra $500, he says, he could buy a decent used car with a more powerful engine and air conditioning, which the Nano won’t have.

(via Passport)

Ten things the New York Times think you’re worrying about, but shouldn’t be:

1. Killer hot dogs.
2. Planet-destroying A/C. (This is only vehicular.)
3. The carbon footprint of exotic fruits.
4. Cellphones giving you brain cancer.
5. Evil plastic bags.
6. Bisphenol-A.
7. Killer sharks!
8. Declining Arctic Ice. (With this caveat: “You can still fret about long-term trends in the Arctic.”)
9. The unverse’s missing mass. (This boys and girls, is what is known as padding.)
10. Unmarked wormholes. (This boys and girls, is what is known as padding.)

At Snarkmarket, Matt offers some advice I find both intriquing and scary:

If you’re like most people, you purchase Benadryl. A slightly smaller and savvier subset of you will always reach for the drugstore’s “generic” counterpart, e.g. Waldryl. Stop this madness, all of you.

As you might know, Benadryl (available at Walgreens.com for $5.29 for a box of 24 capsules) and Wal-dryl ($3.99 / 24 capsules) are otherwise known as “25 mg. of diphenhydramine HCI.” Compare. Yes, that is 400 tablets containing 25 mg. of diphenhydramine HCI, for about $10 when you factor in shipping. Once more with feeling:

Benadryl - 22¢ / pill
Wal-dryl - 16¢ / pill
True generic - 2.5¢ / pill

While the price is amazingly good, I’m (perhaps erroneously) worried that quality assurance must be much less rigorous.

William Saletan sees the impersonality of killing with aerial drones — now made more videogame-like by Raytheon — as a bad thing:

Is the “synthetic environment” real? That depends on which end of the missile you’re looking at. In the targeted car, it’s as real as death. But from the console, it looks more like virtual reality. If the drone goes down, you’re not in it. The environment you actually inhabit is pretty nice. To enhance “operator comfort,” Raytheon offers “ergonomic, memory seating,” “ergonomically-correct displays,” and “adjustable hand and foot positions.” According to the Associated Press, “The leather chair is adaptable to individual users, who can also control a heating and cooling duct above their head at the touch of a switch.”

If you’ve seen combat in the flesh, you know what the fireball on the screen means to the people in the car. But to a teenager raised on Doom and Halo, it looks like just another score. He can’t feel or smell the explosion. He isn’t even there. The eeriest thing in the demo video is the total silence that accompanies the car’s destruction. The only sound that follows is the pilot’s triumphant verdict: “Excellent job.” It’s like something you’d read on the screen after getting a high score at an arcade.

…by barring them from popular culture(?!). Maybe it’s just me, but this thesis seems a little absurd:

And many of those who imagined chimpanzees to be safe reported that they based their thinking on the prevalence of chimps in advertisements, on television and in the movies.

Having said that, I also didn’t know that chimpanzees are endangered. But I attribute it to insuffient publicity for that fact, not their presence popular culture.

I’m not sure why, but this bit of idle technological speculation caught my eye. Jonathan Hedley wants to know why all modern mice seem to use a clearly inferior design.

Matrix found that the best place for the ball was up front as far as possible between the users thumb and forefinger. The forefinger can be controlled very precisely — much more so than the wrist and forearm. Matrix found that users would move their wrist and arm to move the cursor are large distance, but for fine control relied on the thumb and forefinger.

.. It simply seems that designers and manufacturers have, over the years, forgotten about the benefit of putting the sensor up front, or have placed precision and control further down their list of priorities. I hope that this isn’t the case: that newer research has shown that the current placement is the correct placement, or that something else has changed over time. But if that’s not the case, then I hope that some design team will rediscover either the principle, or the findings — so that we can continue to strengthen the connection between the user and the computer.

(via Big Contrarian)