Down a rabbit hole...

So I'm thinking I'd start my new blog translating a Korean comic book, get some good study done and improve my Korean, cherry-pick some choice inaccuracies and mine them for laughs. I wish it were that simple. It turns out an entire chapter of this book is essentially a reiteration of the classic anti-Semitic story about the wicked Jews controlling every bad thing that ever happened through finance and then essentially getting caught up in their own game by the holocaust. Now the blog is on hold (while the translation project goes on) while I explore my rights, so I don't get sued when I make this horrendous historical distortion public. I'm right to worry. Korea has a long history of the old 'Lock up Al Capone on tax evasion charges' technique, and I certainly don't seen to be sued for copyright infringement or anything like that.
But it's coming. It makes me sick when I think of all the innocent kids whose parents buy these books because they think they're educational, and they end up reading things like this (direct quote from the book):

We Koreans, who are hard-working and diligent and are sad to come in second, can amass great victories in America with our competitive spirit. But in the end each and every time we hit a barrier, and that barrier is the Jews. We Koreans, who don't know how to lose to any other race, can never surpass the wall of Jews in American society. This is not only true of Koreans: Every other race and ethnicity has this in common.

The Brights

What have you heard about the brights? According to their website

• A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
• A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
• The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

You may be a bright and not even know it. The brights movement is an effort to put a positive spin on atheism (or at least agnosticism), rationalism and science. The movement faces an uphill battle. These things are, unfortunately, not nearly as positively viewed or consistently connected as many people (myself included) would like. There are many who believe in science and reason but their rational world-view and critical faculties aren't applied to their religion. This means scientists who tie themselves in knots trying to explain why science and religion are in fact compatible. The other major stumbling block for the movement is the name. It's supposed to be light, fun, and positive but instead it comes off as somehow more self-congratulatory than Mensa. Who would have the gall to tell someone "I'm a bright."? Another problem facing the would-be leaders of the brights movement is that the people who fit the above description of brights actually constitute a few very distinct groups. There are scientific minds who are interested in finding truth through evidence, there are angry atheist former believers with a chip on their shoulders about God and their childhood, and there are debunkers who orient themselves against flimflammers, con-artists and true believers. These three groups have different constituencies, different attitudes towards the world, and different goals, but they all share the space in this broad tent, at times comfortably, at times less so.
The one thing they all have in common, and also the greatest threat to the brights movement and any similar movement likely to appear, is that they are the kinds of people who don't cotton to joining big groups. They are individualists who have formed their personalities being smart enough to see through the lies that everyone else believes. They are the absolute worst possible people to try to assemble into any kind of cohesive group. And that is the greatest challenge to taking the skeptical/rationalist/naturalist movement to the inevitable next level of organization that all putative movements tend unswervingly toward.

Look at this joker

You'd think he never saw snow before. Or maybe he's afraid it'll be the last time.

My New Project

I've begun an ambitious new project. I have taken it upon myself to read the popular (in Korea) educational comic book series Monnara Iunnara (Far Country, Neighbor Country), starting with the volume dealing with the American people, and blog about it, sharing the most interesting, accurate, inaccurate, biased and dead-on parts with you. I am keeping an open mind, neither expecting it to be too biased and ridiculous nor too accurate. The illustrations are lively and funny, and the book seems to deal with America's somewhat bumpy history in a well-intentioned manner, but I'll have to read to know for sure. You can check out the new blog here.

Man the Jury-rigged

or man the jerry-rigged. When I chose the title of this post I had no idea how interesting the jury/jerry rigged thing would be, but in determining which one was correct I came across this fascinating article at World-Wide Words. The jury-jerry complex has got WW2-era Germans, tall sailing ships, biblical references and medieval Liverpudlian building practices all wrapped up in it, and is certainly worth a look.
Anyway, the actual point of the post is this abstract of a research project about human decision making. The project is based on the well-known fact that human decision making is not perfectly rational. Specifically, people are more averse to risk involving loss than risk involving gain. Typically the chance and scale of gain must be much higher than the corresponding chance and scale of loss, all of which is not, strictly speaking, rational. The really interesting thing about this project is that they both affected a change in the degree of subjects' loss aversion as well as predicting levels of loss aversion by observing the brain.
It immediately reminded me of the excellent Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, by Max Bazerman, in which Bazerman lays out the various ways in which human behavior defy rationality and represent a liability to personal and organizational success. Certainly worth a look, although at $50, if you don't have to buy the book I'm sure you could find the information, perhaps a touch less eloquently stated, for free somewhere on the web.
Not having done the reserarch that I'm about to do, there are two obvious possible reasons for this lack of rationality in humans (and presumably other animals) that immediately spring to mind. One, the risk in many cases (death or loss of reproductive opportunity) is so high that few possible gains warrant it. If a contest was run in which contestants had a 50-50 chance of dying or winning $10,000,000, how many people would enter? How about for $100,000,000? That's a toughy. The other possibility that springs to mind, the one that sent me off searching for jerry-rigged and finding jury-rigged, is that the limitations inherent in our senses and our thought processes present limits to rational thought, because we are just as good as we have to be in order to survive and defeat our similarly adequate rivals, and nothing more. Anything above and beyond that baseline capability is a windfall. Although I suspect the first one is true, and that in biological organisms pure rationality is a bad strategy, the second one is both more intellectually satisfying and more interesting, and I'm quite sure would cause the former situation to some extent.

MLK, Pimps and Hos

Here's a dumb fella. And here's a bad thing, A racial stereotype party. I knew this would eventually leak into the media. I went to a 'Pimps and Hos' party in my BU days in an unsuccessful search for alcohol and oblivion. I was shocked and disgusted at the time, and I wondered aloud how so many students in ostensibly liberal Boston could go in for this kind of thing. It was unclear to me whether or not the costumed partygoers were innocent morons or mere racists airing their usually well-concealed darker sides. What they clearly weren't were deep thinkers about the whole concept. I wonder a little bit about the titling of the party in the article as an MLK party. Doesn't the whole thing speak to the parallel devolution that has taken place in America since MLK died? The degenerate white college students parodying degenerate black stereotypes, it's all very oniony (layers within layers, so to speak).

Nanowheels!!

Scientists have invented the molecular wheel. It is on now, nanotechnologically speaking. According to the article, this is one of many breakthroughs that will lead to the development of nanogears, which means a whole world of pre-industrial technology on a nanoscale. I'm talking nanocuckooclocks, nanoastrolabes, and nanopepper-mills. Get ready to never be the same again.