Alpha mike foxtrot

• We won’t have Blagojevich to kick around any more (Below the Beltway)

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out, you greasy little shitstain.

The governor said he would like to apologize, but couldn’t because he didn’t do anything wrong. The senators watched attentively. Many leaned forward in their seats. Some took notes.

“It’s painful and it’s lonely, but I want you to know I never, ever intended to commit a criminal act,” Blagojevich said.

The two-term Democratic governor spoke for 47 minutes, then smiled and winked at reporters as he passed the press box on his way out of the Senate.

Bye!

Assaulting salt in NYC

Parents, if your kids are dumb, don’t send them to university.  They might get degrees in journalism and go on to write for CBC Broadcasting, or they might get MBAs and go on to become Mayor of New York City.  Dumb kids need respectable jobs, and there are plenty of those out there.  They could be helping people, hanging drywall or writing theses on the impact of postcolonial literature on third-world sanitation systems.

They could be, in short, neither writing shit like this nor doing that about which this shit is written:

• NYC Mayor Bloomberg declares war on… salt (WCBSTV.com)

*headdesk*

So.  The short version is that Michael Bloomberg wants people to put less salt — or sodium; Marcia Kramer gets it confused in her article — in food.  Because it’s bad for you, and stuff.

I’ll give Kramer a pass on the first paragraph, because — let’s be honest here, folks — we really can’t expect a contemporary journalist to skip a chance to make even the most awkward Boomer-specific reference.  Furthermore, I’m rather pleased that she managed to stick two sentences into one paragraph, and good behaviour should be rewarded.  On, then, to the next paragraph.

It’s ironic that the war on salt began on the very day the city was spreading tons of it on the streets to fight a snow storm, but in Bloomberg’s view there is good salt … and bad salt.

Two ellipses in two paragraphs.  Oh dear.  You dot your ‘i’s and ‘j’s with hearts, don’t you.

Now let’s address the content: salt.  (Or sodium.  Regardless of what government nutritionists will try to tell you, they ain’t the same fuckin’ thing.)  Dietary sodium is unrelated to road salt.  Third-graders realize that.  Adults ought to realize that.  What’s your excuse?  You’ve just wasted two paragraphs to tell me sweet fuck-all. I’ve gained some information from this story so far: you can’t write for shit.

But what the hell, I’m in a pissy mood this evening.  Let’s continue.

City officials said that people don’t realize the salt content of the things they buy in the supermarket. For example, potato chips you would think are the saltiest thing in the store

Stop right there.  Have you ever taken a writing course?  Did you pass it?  Your prof should be shot.

but they have only 180 milligrams per serving. Turkey meatballs, on the other hand, have 660 milligrams per serving. Marble cake has 300 per serving and chicken noodle soup has nearly 1,400 milligrams of salt per serving.

“Per serving”.  Yup; according to Captain Journalism here the “serving” is a standard unit of measurement cast in platinum-iridium and placed safely in the vault beside the Standard Kilogram at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris.  A “serving” is defined as “the amount of food customarily eaten at one time”, according to the FDA.  Well, no, not really:

If one unit weighs more than 50 percent but less than 200 percent of the reference amount, the serving size is one unit. For example, the reference amount for bread is 50 g; therefore, the label of a loaf of bread in which each slice weighs more than 25 g would state a serving size of one slice.

A “serving” is anywhere between half and twice what the government thinks you’re going to eat “at one time”.  Does that strike you as vague?  Never mind — there are readers to scare and ads to be sold!

(My box of table salt claims to have 590mg of sodium “per serving”.  I guess table salt isn’t as salty as either turkey meatballs or chicken noodle soup.  That’s some fine investigative reporting, there, you fucking defective.)

But wait — where does the city come into all of this?

“Salt, when its[sic] high in the diet, increases the blood pressure and high blood pressure is a major factor for heart disease and stroke,” said Dr. Sonia Angell of NYC’s Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Program.

[...]

Thomas Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, said he wants manufacturers and restaurants to join the war on salt voluntarily. If they don’t, the city could pass legislation making it the law.

Salt.  Salt!  It’s killin’ people!  War on salt!  WAR!

(Yeah, I know; I just love that image)

This is where the municipal stupid joins our party.  As I mentioned earlier, “salt” and “sodium” are not the same beast.  Sodium — really, we’re talking about Na⁺ ions, here — is a primary electrolyte, and vital to nerve function.  As ever, the poison is in the dose, and too much (or too little) will make you acutely unhappy, or dead if you take it too far.

Table salt — the poor innocent compound under threat of regulation here — is NaCl.  It dissociates into Na⁺ and Cl^- ions in solution.  Its dietary effect is often represented (by the ignorant) simply by concentration of sodium.  It follows that anything that dissociates into Na⁺ ions will thereby increase your “salt” intake.  (Look out, lutefisk gourmands.)

It also seems reasonable to expect that the health problems attributed here to “too much salt” are in fact (if not in easily-digested* propaganda) attributable to electrolyte imbalances.  In this case the obvious work-around to NaCl regulation — salt substitutes — is just as likely to cause different electrolyte imbalances if it becomes sufficiently popular.  Should we expect that Mayor Bloomberg has done the bio and figured out that a 50% reduction in Na⁺ and Cl^- consumption** in the general population would reduce sodium consumption without adversely affecting other electrolytes?

Or should we perhaps guess that this is mere grandstanding from the centre of grass in North America?

——

* Sorry ’bout that

** Well, assuming that the food industry substitutes KCl for NaCl at a known rate… which is of course a fantastically foolish thing to assume

“Strong free-market principles”, my ass

Since the TARP and auto-industry corporate fellations forcible wealth-redistribution programmes bailouts, I’ve been hearing a lot about Bush 43’s purported “strong free-market principles” and “fiscal conservatism”.  I suppose the principle behind this bare-faced idiocy is that his legacy isn’t based on what he did, but rather what people think they remember of what he did, and the actors behind it are simply channeling Göbbels* and the Big Lie theory, but I can’t imagine that anyone with even a grade-school education could actually fall for this happy-assed bullshit fantasy.  Of course, my optimism is legendary.

There is one bright side to the “strong free-market principles” lie: a whole fuckload of left-progressive bloggers have picked it up, mixed it with Obama 44’s cult of personality, and come up with a Great Depression analogy.  “Bush == Hoover”, they proclaim, pleased with themselves, thinking they’ve scored a cutting point.

Well, actually, yes.  Bush 43 and Hoover 31 have quite a bit in common when it comes to economics — but not what you might expect if your only brush with history was in a public school.

• Five myths about the Great Depression (Wall Street Journal)

Myth: Herbert Hoover, elected president in 1928, was a doctrinaire, laissez-faire, look-the-other way Republican who clung to the idea that markets were basically self-correcting.

Far from a free-market idealist, Hoover was an ardent believer in government intervention to support incomes and employment. This is critical to understanding the origins of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t reverse course upon moving into the White House in 1933; he went further down the path that Hoover had blazed over the previous four years. That was the path to disaster.

Hoover, a one-time business whiz and a would-be all-purpose social problem-solver in the Lee Iacocca mold, was a bowling ball looking for pins to scatter. He was a government activist fixated on the idea of running the country as an energetic CEO might run a giant corporation. It was Hoover, not Roosevelt, who initiated the practice of piling up big deficits to support huge public-works projects. After declining or holding steady through most of the 1920s, federal spending soared between 1929 and 1932 — increasing by more than 50%, the biggest increase in federal spending ever recorded during peacetime.

Sound familiar?

Now we come to the issue that pissed me off in the first place, a parting shot from Bush 43 that’d make Hoover grin and nod enthusiastically, FDR rub his hands together with undisguised glee, and — if this was a just or fair world — would send the spirit of Adam Smith into such a rage that he’d claw his way out of his grave and beat Dubya to death with his crumbling zombie fists:

• Bush war on Roquefort raises a stink in France (Washington Post)

(Hat tip: Marginal Revolution)

In its final days, the Bush administration imposed a 300 percent duty on Roquefort, in effect closing off the U.S. market. Americans, it declared, will no longer get to taste the creamy concoction that, in its authentic, most glorious form, comes with an odor of wet sheep and veins of blue mold that go perfectly with rye bread and coarse red wine.

The measure, announced Jan. 13 by U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab as she headed out the door, was designed as retaliation for a European Union ban on imports of U.S. beef containing hormones. Tit for tat, and all perfectly legal under World Trade Organization rules, U.S. officials explained.

Import tariffs.  Yeah, that worked out really well last time.

Fucker.

Update: Of course, if Bush 43 is another Hoover, Obama 44 must be another FDR, no?  He’s certainly trying:

• Trade Wars IV: The Democrats Strike Back (Megan McArdle)

McArdle offers this analysis of the “buy American” provisions in the stimulus plan:

By the standards of Smoot-Hawley, this is paltry stuff.  And by the standards of setting yourself on fire, sawing off your own leg with a nail file isn’t so bad.

(Link is mine.)

Facile populist bullshit in precisely the same mould as the previous government’s facile populist bullshit.  Tell me the story about the two-party system again, will you Nanny?

——

* Yeah, I went there

Mid-week misanthropy, vol. 28

Let’s start with a cheap shot — hey, it fits the economy, right?

• Does anyone actually know what’s in the stimulus bill? (Real Debate Wisconsin)

According to that list, Obama’s stimulus package includes

$200 million to pay Americorps volunteers

Excuse the fuck me?  (Emphasis added.)  I suppose “volunteerism” has become sufficiently trendy — a “meaningful concept” that has lost its actual meaning and serves only for ego-gratification — that we’re calling employees volunteers just because it sounds better.

(Hat tip: TJIC)

——

While we’re on the subject of language-related imbecility:

• Teacher suggests renaming Fort Pierce streets may help cut crime (TCpalm.com)

A middle school teacher thinks drug dealers and gang members might take their illegal activities elsewhere if the city renames major streets in the black community after tulips, daffodils and birds.

[...]

“I do have major concerns regarding ‘Alphabet City,’¥” [Phys. Ed. teacher Bryce] Archer wrote in an e-mail to the city manager’s office. “Get rid of the 13th Street Gang, as I’m sure they won’t feel as ‘hard’ being named Tulip Street Gang.”

Uh huh.  I guess when you change the street’s name, it forces the gang to change their name as well.  They won’t be able to simply keep calling themselves the “13th Street Gang” any more when 13th becomes Tulip.  What the fuck kind of happy-assed bullshit is this?  And why was this dipshit was allowed to graduate with a B.Ed.?

In any case, you’d better keep the members of the Tulip (spoiler warning) Street Gang from reading Preacher.

——

Next, we have this piece of retard brain-shit:

• New law will require camera phones to ‘click’ (Tech Fragments)

You guessed it, it’s for the children.  Pædophiles and all that.

A new bill is being introduced called, Camera Phone Predator Alert Act, which would require any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera’s phone. It would also prohibit such a phone from being equipped with a means of disabling or silencing the tone.

This is so fucking ludicrous I don’t know where to start.  Oh wait, yes I do:

Old camera phones?  Movies from phones?  (What, are you going to have the phone sound a tone while recording the whole movie?  That’ll never fly.)  Honest-to-balls cameras? Did anyone even begin to think this through?

(Hat tip: The Liberty Papers)

——

Next we have a surprising case of a B.C. politician looking into his trousers and discovering that he does in fact have testicles:

• New Democrat MLA proposes ban on body armour (CBC.ca)

New Democrat MLA Mike Farnworth plans to introduce a private member’s bill in February that regulates and restricts the wearing of Kevlar body armour.

“Gangsters and thugs shouldn’t be wearing body armour; police should,” said Farnworth, the MLA for Port Coquitlam Burke-Mountain in a statement released on Thursday.

No, I’m not talking about Farnworth, who is apparently unaware that “gangsters and thugs” are plenty likely to buy body armour even if it is made illegal.  I’m talking about this guy:

But B.C. Solicitor General John van Dongen says gangsters who ignore gun laws aren’t any more likely to obey body armour laws.

Ya think?

If the idea is simply to increase the number of offences with which these “gangsters” can be charged, it would be just as effective and far less intrusive to forbid people from wearing body armour in the course of committing a felony.  Neither law would stop anyone, but the latter would fuck with far fewer people.  …Nah, it’d never catch on.

——

And speaking of laws in B.C.:

• B.C. police mistakenly issue tickets to hundreds of ID theft victims (CBC.ca)

You know that part of the traffic stop where the cop asks for your license and checks to make sure you own the car?  Eh… not so much around here.

Hundreds of B.C. drivers are being denied vehicle insurance every year after thieves steal their identities and rack up fines and police fail to check the impersonators’ driver’s licences carefully when issuing tickets.

[...]

The government-owned Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) told CBC News that 1,300 B.C. drivers apply each year to get the improperly issued tickets cancelled. In B.C., drivers with outstanding fines are not allowed to renew vehicle insurance or driver’s licences until those debts are cleared.

And now it’s time for the heart-rending example:

Records show that last March 2, a Vancouver police officer issued a $121 traffic ticket to a woman who produced [wallet-theft victim Katrina] Wutke’s expired driver’s licence and was driving a rental car that had been reported stolen. The police officer issued a citation for failing to obey a traffic sign and allowed her to drive away.

Wutke has since obtained a copy of the ticket, which shows the officer failed to tick off the boxes indicating he had checked the licence’s issue date and expiry date, which are clearly marked on the front of every B.C. licence.

“My driver’s licence wasn’t run. Had they run it, they would have realized that there is a more recently issued driver’s licence and that the one that he obtained from her should be void and you know — red flags,” Wutke said.

And the money shot:

“Funny how public embarrassment can have people accountable for their errors,” Wutke responded.

It’s worth reading the whole article.

Fair ultimata

Suppose I give you five bucks.

You’d probably be pretty happy — maybe not ecstatic, but it’d leave you with a bit of a smile on your face.  Five bucks is a pint of decent beer on tap — or maybe a bottle of Ruination IPA, depending on where you find it.  It’s the better part of a truly good cheeseburger.  It’s worth fifteen minutes of browsing the stacks in a well-stocked used book store.  It is — at the moment — five and a half litres of gasoline in suburban Vancouver, or about one and a half shares of General Motors stock.  Five bucks may not be a lot of money, but out of the blue it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Let’s change the game a little.  I’m still giving you five bucks, only this time you know that someone — God, say, or my Fairy Godmother, or Helicopter Ben — gave me fifty bucks just a few minutes ago… for about the same ineffable reason I’m giving you five.  Now you’re likely to be less sanguine about the whole deal.  Who am I that I’m getting fifty bucks out of nowhere, and who do I think I am that I’m giving you only five? Why not ten?  Why not twenty-five — wouldn’t that be more fair?  How is it at all fair that I get fifty — well forty-five, but still — bucks through the whimsy of fate, and you only get five?

I mean, shit, this is starting to suck.  Fifty bucks — okay, forty-five, shut up! — is a nice meal out, or a bottle of Laphroaig 10-year*, or a case of beer.  It’s more than enough to get you free shipping on Amazon, which means three or four of the books on your wish list.  It’s a tank of gas with money left over.  It’s a hell of a lot better than five bucks.

Why should I get all that when you can’t even find a Terry Pratchett novel in your local used book store?  Five bucks is starting to seem trivial — insulting, even, like I’m rubbing my good fortune in your face.

Let’s change the game again.  This time, Helicopter Ben’s watching over my shoulder.  I’m offering you five bucks — but as I proffer the bill, Ben grabs my wrist and tells you that you can take it or leave it.  If you leave it, he continues, neither of us gets any money: Ben’s going to take his fifty bucks and go flush it down the toilet give it to General Motors or something.

Oho!  Now you have power.  Now you can punish me for making a contemptuous, condescending, unfair offer of five dollars.  Maybe you’d change your mind if I gave you ten — or twenty-five.  Hey, fuck all that, you have the power now: maybe you want forty-five dollars; how would I like it if you could afford the single malt and I had to settle for beer?  That’ll show me! I should’ve offered you more free money; now you’ll punish me for my insolence.

The one thing that stays constant in each scenario is that I’m giving you five bucks.  The biggest thing that changes across each scenario is your perception of how “fair” that offer is… assuming this guy’s research is anything to go by.

• Fair’s fair (Bart Wilson)

(Hat tip: Cafe Hayek)

See, the “here’s five bucks — oh wait, I got fifty” scenario is a thinly-disguised version of the ultimatum game.  It works pretty much as per my third description, except the dollar values are smaller and instead of Helicopter Ben you get a computer program (or perhaps a bored Econ grad student).  It’s interesting in that computer simulations of what ought to produce the best result — the sort of thing that works reasonably well for the prisoner’s dilemma game — are vastly at odds with what tends to happen in studies with squishy fleshling bipeds like us.

Simulated rational agents don’t give two digital shits about “fairness” — they operate on the output of utility functions.  The utility-functional version of the ultimatum game is pretty simple: if the other guy offers $x and I accept, I get $x; if I reject, I get $sweet-fuck-all.  Doesn’t matter what x might be, if I’m a rational simulated agent I’m always going to accept.

Humans, fuck us all sideways, don’t think that way.  We tend to get trapped in this sort of circular logic (from the article):

“Why did the proposer offer $5 to the responder?”
“Because that’s fair.”
“What is a fair outcome in the ultimatum game?”
“The proposer offers $5 to the responder.”

But “fair” is a maddeningly slippery word.  A “fair coin” is one that’s perfectly random — definitely not what we’re after!**  A “fair complexion” is — well, politically incorrect in this context; maybe that’s what Jesse Jackson’s after, but the rest of us want to get some work done.  A “fair tax” depends entirely upon your audience.  English-language precedent isn’t going to help much.

Neither is any other language.  From the article:

Did you know that fair is one-to-one untranslatable into any other language–that it is distinctly Anglo in origin? And a relatively new word at that? (Late 18th century, actually–the industrial revolution apparently also vastly enhanced our capacity to complain.) But the twisted history of “fair” is even more interesting than that. For the original antonym of fair is not, as most modern Americans would probably expect, unfair. If you want to understand the roots of fairness, look not to ethicists, but to baseball, which still uses the original dichotomy.  If a ball is hit outside the bounds of fair play, it’s not unfair–it’s foul. That’s an important clue.  As Columbia law professor George Fletcher had noted in his 1996 book Basic Concepts of Legal Thought, the Anglo-American notion of fairness is firmly rooted in the rules of a game.

Okay, see, you got these two white lines….

No, we can do better than that.

Wierzbicka’s research indicated that there are two key contextual elements that make fair precisely the right word for the situation. First, the circumstances entail a tradeoff in welfare between individuals:  some action benefits one person at the expense of another. The second element is that other people in the community think that there are limits to how much people are allowed to cost others in order to benefit themselves.

Okay, pay attention to that first element.  In the ultimatum game, we have a fixed quantity of wealth: fifty bucks in my hypothetical example, ten bucks in the grant-funded studies experimental economists perform.  This is, as I’ve mentioned, how people have evolved to think about wealth.  But modern commerce doesn’t work that way, and it hasn’t — to varying degrees — since we began to recognize property rights.  This is where the second element comes in: no matter what I offer you in the ultimatum game, I’m not actually costing you anything.  If I offer you nothing at all… well, you might as well accept anyway: you don’t lose out, and you might gain some of my goodwill.

Back to the article:

How does this free us from that circular reasoning we saw in the ultimatum game? Instead of looking inwards for some inherent sense of the word, we look outward, towards the community standards that externally ground the interaction. When two subjects are randomly assigned to the roles of proposer and responder, it is not some pure platonic ideal of fairness that causes a proposer to offer $5. Rather,  the proposer knows that other people would think offering less than $5 is below the socially acceptable limit in this situation, and so the proposer obeys those tacit rules.

Ah.  Now we notice another word here: random.  Here’s where the cruel twist of fate from my first set of scenarios moves into the foreground.  If you’re convinced that I was arbitrarily chosen to receive $50, you’ll be pissed if I offer you only $5.  After all, it could just as easily have been you, right?  (See a Just World Hypothesis in here?  I do, albeit a back-handed one: since you’re likely not convinced that I’m any better than you are, you’re also likely to be convinced that we deserve an equal share of this windfall.  If I take $45 and offer you $5, it’s an indication that I really am better than you… but only if you accept it.)

Things, as you’d expect, change when I’m known to have earned my fifty bucks:

[P]roposers who have earned the right be the proposer, say by doing well on a quiz, offer much less to responders than those who are randomly chosen. What is truly amazing is how accurately proposers ascertain the limits of what they can offer. The rate at which their responders reject their offers doesn’t change when proposers who have earned their position offer them a smaller portion of the pie.  We (most of us) implicitly agree that earning an advantaged position calls for the application of different rules than does randomly endowing someone with a windfall. Moreover, we all have a pretty good sense of what those rules are; most offers are accepted.

At this point, some of you may be wondering just how universal these “fairness” traits are — crudely put, are they “nature” or “nurture”?  Well, if I spoil everything you won’t have to read the article, so I’ll leave that question to the original author.  What I will say is that this isn’t purely an invention of human introspective storytelling consciousness: dogs are known to behave similarly (which is a “researchers discover that sky can be blue during daylight hours” moment for all of you who’ve met a dog).

In any case, this sort of economics research sheds some light on why we react the way we do to things that are “unfair”.  Actual insight into the way those other guys think sure beats hell out of Presidential declamation for resolving “petty grievances”, doesn’t it?

——

* Not in Vancouver, of course; I’m thinking of places with less-inflated Scotch prices

** You might complain that a “fair coin” is simply one that gives equal weight to both sides — but that’s only true in the limit, after an infinite number of flips.  A fair coin is just as likely to flip heads ten times as it is to flip any other ten-element sequence, and the ultimatum game is about a single trial rather than limit behaviour.  Don’t make me break out the calculus.

zOMG teh gamerz!

(Pardon the illiterate title — it’s intended as sarcasm.)

I am sick to fuckin’ death of  well-intentioned Caring People blaming society’s ills — particularly aggressive criminal violence — upon things.  Things do not commit violent crimes: people do.  We should’ve left animism behind a good five hundred years ago, but apparently we’re still handcuffed by the notion that, holy shit, that weird thing’s haunted! It’s a much more palatable — superficially more frightening, but deep-down less troubling — alternative than the idea that some people might be fundamentally prone to violence.  Fixing a thing-problem is easy: take the thing away.  Fixing a people-problem is far more difficult and far messier.

Thing of the moment: violent video games.  First, have a graph:

(Hat tip: GamePolitics.com.  No, crime did not drop to zero when Postal 2 was released in 2003 — this graph is just fucking annoying in that it doesn’t have a full y-axis.)

So the next time you walk home after dark and don’t get mugged, thank John Carmack and the rest of the fine folks who worked at iD Software in 1993.  Clearly, the release of ur-shooter Doom heralded a spectacular drop in the crime rate.

What?  You don’t believe the graph?  “Correlation is not causation”, you cry, “and besides — this is horrendously simplistic.”  Well, I don’t call myself a social scientist — I prefer to hang out with the algebra and stay as far away from user studies as possible.  But Christopher Ferguson does call himself a social scientist, and he has a survey paper out where he examines the link between violence in games and violence in people.*  Here’s a survey of the survey:

• Paper: “moral panic” behind attempts to link games, violence (Ars Technica)

In general, [Dr. Ferguson has] argued that most of the studies that link violence with violent behavior use nonstandard experimental measures of violent tendencies and don’t correlate those with actual violent actions. Further, the fact that youth violence has dropped as violent games have proliferated suggests we’re looking for causation when the correlation doesn’t even exist.

He makes those points again in this new paper, which is a literature review and focused argument rather than a research paper. But Ferguson continues with an examination of whether the overall trends—declining violence in an era of rising violence in content—might mask the existence of a population that’s distinctly at risk from this content. He draws an analogy to food allergies, writing that violent games “could be arguably synonymous to peanut butter: a perfectly harmless indulgence for the vast majority, but potentially harmful to a tiny minority.”

Huh.  So even what seems to be a thing-problem turns out to be, when you focus on the thing connection, a people-problem.  Who would’ve thought.

Ferguson moves on to consider why it seems that the public fixates on it as a cause in the aftermath of violent events. He concludes that it is an example of a “moral panic.” Although he doesn’t define the term himself (instead, he refers readers to the literature on the matter), most definitions of moral panic suggest it occurs when large segments of society uncritically blame a phenomenon for undermining their society’s order. If he’s right, then gaming has joined everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Elvis in that category.

Not to mention heliocentrism and classical liberalism.  Here’s a link to the article, on the off-chance that you (a) care and (b) have access to the journal:

• The school shooting/violent video game link: causal relationship or moral panic? (Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling)

——

* He also doesn’t have a web page that I could find before my patience expired.  My supervisor would gut me like a fish if my academic website was that obscure… and no, I don’t believe he plays violent video games.

Miscellaneous Monday motorsports mumblings, vol. 4

Well, holy shit.  The 2009 24 Hours of Daytona Rolex 24 at Daytona was one hell of a good race.  I’m amazed by the pace of the Daytona Prototypes throughout the race — people who ought to know are calling it a sprint race that lasted 24 hours — and by the fact that, for the last 45 minutes or so under green, the top four — then three — then two cars were less than a second apart after a full day of racing.  This one might’ve been the closest 24-hour endurance race ever.  Seriously, if you didn’t watch it live, find a torrent or something of the last hour.

I started off on Friday cheering for the #16, mostly out of habit — hey, Timo Bernhard driving a Penske Porsche prototype… it’s like ALMS all over again — but they dropped out overnight with gearbox trouble.  After that, I really had no choice but to transfer my enthusiasm to the #58 Brumos Porsche, what with David Donohue driving the last stint 40 years after his father won the race.  Donohue and Juan-Pablo Montoya had a great battle for the last 45 minutes, picking their way through traffic and never getting any sort of separation, driving hard but keeping it clean, and Donohue eventually took the win with something like a 0.2-second margin of victory.

(image courtesy of Rolex Grand-Am Sports Car Series)

——

Yes, the 24 Hours of Daytona was spectacular enough to bump last week’s Formula One launch down to second place.  This time, it’s BMW-Sauber’s F1.09:

Again, we see interesting front-end development (if not quite as æsthetically glorious as the Ferrari F60) with lots of fences to keep air out from under the nose.  Since the centre section of the front wing is prohibited from generating downforce this year, they’re presumably trying to recoup as much as possible from the nose geometry itself — and keeping the air from the rest of the front wing out of there would help maintain low pressures and therefore downforce.  The front suspension is also much more aggressively faired-in than we’ve seen on any car but the Williams (and that only in renders).

Like Ferrari and Toyota, BMW-Sauber are playing a bit fast and loose with the new regulations.  Instead of putting up sidepod fences mirror mounts, they’re adding louvers everywhere they can get away with it:

• BMW-Sauber implement tiny louvers on sidepod (F1 Technical)
• Even more louvers on the F1.09 (F1 Technical)

I imagine we’ll either see a rules change to deal with this sort of thing or similar louvers on almost every car by mid-season.

——

Moving on to a different category of racing: the entry list for this year’s American Le Mans Series is taking shape over at Planet Le Mans.

• The American Le Mans Series entry list (so far…)

LMP2 looks kinda silly without those RS Spyders, doesn’t it?  Oh well.

LMP1 should be able to compensate.  We get a new Audi prototype, the new Acura LMP1 car, and the new gasoline-electric hybrid Zytek LMP1 car.

GT1 is going away in mid-season, since only Corvette Racing wants to play and they’re getting bored.

But again, GT2 should be able to compensate.  Generally the category has been dominated — numerically, at least — by Porsches, but this year we’re looking at some serious variety.  We’ll get C6.R GT2s, eventually.  There are quite a few Ferrari F430s on the entry list so far.  We get to see a couple of BMW M3 GTRs.  And for extra style points — a Dodge Viper, a Ford GT, a Panoz Esperante, and an Aston Martin Vantage.

I like the idea of a single prototype class and a single GT class, honestly.  LMP2 (and, I think, GT2) was (were) designed as a smaller, cheaper class for privateers and independent teams to get involved in ALMS without needing big-budget aero, chassis, and engine development to compete.  GT2 still fills that niche, but LMP2 — particularly with the Porsche and Acura prototypes — just ain’t there.  I’d much rather see a single LMP class for works-backed all-out automotive awesomeness and a GT class populated by factory racers like the F430 GT2.

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Or, say, like the 2009 Porsche 997 GT3 RSR.

Porsche may not have things all their way this year, but I’d still expect to see a lot of this car.  Which is fine, ’cause it’s pretty.  The image link goes to Planet Le Mans’s analysis of the new car, but I’m just as happy to sit and stare at the photo.

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Sorry for the lack of posts, folks; my muse has been AWOL since Friday.

Incentives in journalism

Earlier I wrote about bad science reporting, and from there mentioned that journalists don’t have much incentive to be accurate and complete in their writing — they’re primarily in the business of selling advertising, and only incidentally in the business of accurately reporting the news.  Megan McArdle has a post on the same subject, with a heck of a lot more nuance.

• Whither the New York Times?  Whither journalism?

She quotes Felix Salmon’s analysis of the NYT’s plan to not die:

If you don’t have the “click data”, fear for your job! If you snark about the president, or how to analyze your husband “the way a trainer considers an exotic animal”, then you’re probably fine. If you’re an investigative reporter who spends months at a time uncovering secrets, not so much. And if you’re a war correspondent putting your life on the line to cover important conflicts around the world, well, remember to include lots of pictures of kittens to boost that all-important click data.

For a paper like the Times, selling ads is largely about appealing to a broad swathe of the populace — and puffy “clever” opinion pieces have a pretty good track record at doing just that.  (Consider, for example, just about every blog ever.)  On the other hand, there are more specialized publications out there where accurate reporting is much more important than simply catching someone’s eye over coffee:

The Wall Street Journal is different from the New York Times in two important ways.  First, there’s less competition in business journalism than general political news, in part because journalists would rather cover the government than boring old companies.  And second, many–maybe most–of the people who pay for the Wall Street Journal have to read it for work.

On the extreme end of the scale, you find academic journals publishing research papers.  The big journals in my field — ACM Transactions on Graphics and EG’s Computer Graphics Forum — depend critically upon publishing the best research in the field.  (If you click on those links, you’ll quickly discover that they don’t need much in the way of flashy web design.)  Of course, their content is generated by actual researchers rather than science reporters: as you get further to this extreme, I’d bet you’ll find that the journalists involved have more and more actual expertise.  (As a thought experiment, imagine the sorts of people who’d write for your local paper’s once-a-week automotive section, Car and Driver magazine, and Race Tech magazine.)