The political philosophy of the Bandar-Log
| “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true.” |
| –Rudyard Kipling |
Deus Machinarum
This is just strange. I have no idea if it’s actually serious; it involves building giant mechanical animals which walk down the beach powered only by the wind. The pictures and film clips are pretty interesting.
Reading material
[Edited: Link fixed]
I’ve been reading this article, and it’s quite interesting: Peter S. Bearman, James Moody and Katherine Stovel, Chains of Affection: The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, among many other things, did detailed surveys of behavior. This paper takes the data for a single large (~1000 people) high school, in which every student was surveyed and information about their romantic and sexual partnerships was acquired, and analyzes it in depth. The major conclusion is that the network structure of sexual relationships in high school is qualitatively different from the structure of such relationships in the world as a whole.
Specifically, other studies (I wish I had the reference next to me – will update if I find it) have shown that the sexual relationship networks of the general public are preferential-attachment networks, in which a new connection is most likely to form to someone who already has a lot of preexisting connections. (Not a big surprise, really…) This leads to a network of connected hubs, somewhat like American air routes. High school networks, OTOH, have a much more tree-like structure, with long branches and less clumping. The authors of this paper conjecture that this is due to a social norm against cycles of length 4 – i.e., against dating your ex’s current’s ex. They show that adding this assumption to ordinary models produces trees that look a lot like the ones they found experimentally. (Not too surprising, again – in a predominantly heterosexual network, if 4-cycles are excluded the smallest possible cycle is of length 6, which is already getting too big for real clumps to form)
Why is this interesting? Well, first of all there’s our usual prurient interest in who everyone else is shtupping. (cf. also this ScienceBlog entry, Monkeys will pay to look at porn) But the network of sexual connections is also the network along which STDs propagate, and so network interruption theory takes on serious public-policy implications. For example: In a preferential-attachment network, it turns out that the network is disproportionately vulnerable to interruption of its highest-linkage nodes. This means that sexual health programs aimed at the most active people will have a larger than expected effect, while broadly-aimed programs will be ineffective. In a less clumped network like the high school network, though, removing a random node is enough to disconnect major graph chunks, so a broadly aimed education program may be a lot more effective.
There are other interesting features of this, too, and for those I recommend you read this article.
Some links:
From stonemirror: Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld, as performed by Barbies.
From bradhicks: A Jack Chick tract for Zeus.
Just two things to make your day a bit more surreal.
Quickie: Torture, the Congress and the White House
The House dropped provisions from the Intelligence bill restricting torture at the urging of the White House. These provisions had passed the Senate on a 96-2 vote, but apparently Condi Rice (who represented the White House in this matter) opposed it on the grounds that it “provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy.”
Sigh…
You know it’s going to be a long day when you get in and get pulled off an emergency project to work on another emergency.
Three important news stories.
This is probably one of the most important stories that has shown up in the news in the past year or so. It’s important for two reasons: (1) It’s systematically documented, and I’d be willing to give 90% or better odds that the underlying claims are factually true; and (2) the victim in this case was a German citizen. (Why is this important? Because, not to put too fine a point on it, most of America doesn’t really care if this is done to an Afghan or a Pakistani. Doing it to a West European citizen is important because it means that the people responsible feel that they can do this somewhere where it will be noticed, and without punishment or compunction. The significance – apart from the usual issues of torture, kidnapping, holding of people incommunicado, and complete suspension of any pretense of legal legitimacy – is that it was brazen.)
In other news, Mahmoud Abbas has claimed a fairly sound victory in the Palestinian elections. This is good in that he seems like (along with more or less everyone living in that area outside of Hamas and their moral kin) he is genuinely interested in solving the problems of the area and building peace. The one issue is that voter turnout was low in areas, indicating that the Hamas boycott had an impact and they’ll be able to claim that Abbas has a weak mandate, and thus continue to kill people in the streets. But hopefully he’ll be able to assert control fairly quickly, and hopefully (and I’m sincerely hopeful on this!) Sharon will realize that there’s the chance for a real negotiating partner here.
Finallly, this one was pointed out by : The Pentagon is considering a strategy which it calls the Salvador option for dealing with insurgency in Iraq. It’s good to know that things are going so well that we can safely copy a strategy which has already failed disastrously elsewhere. Much less important than the other students, but I foresee this leading to no end of trouble in coming years…
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 