And if the tune of the title doesn't immediately come to you, give it a few reads aloud. It's a little ditty my wife has put together. I'm officially a homeowner now, to the extent that you own something the bank owns 95% of. It's nice, but it's taking forever for various reasons to put everything together. For instance, it was very nice of Mother Nature to cover my new driveway in eight inches of snow the day after the move.

I've loosely defined the value function (link) to only compare two "things", without further specifying what "things" it can take, because some things we put in there (like CloseToFamily) are fundamentally non-numeric properties. But some people have their own specializations of this value function. One that almost nobody will admit to using, but a lot of people live by, is the Money value function. This function takes just one argument and returns a single concrete number with the unit "Dollars" (or relevant local currency).

Following up on Scientific Federalism: Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed [Malawi] to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

One of the milestones I've been watching for is the first entirely DVD-based TV-style series. It's going to happen sooner or later, and will mark a major shift in how TV is produced, once it becomes possible to make it without advertising or subsidy, the only two models that currently work. I've been looking forward to this because I think quirky niche content will benefit the most, and who doesn't think more quirky niche content is a good thing?

There's a million important things going on in the world and in our lives, but we're really only aware of seven of them. This means that we all have a very narrow and limited understanding of the world and our own lives. The seven things on our mind all seem very important, while everything else is just kind of forgotten.... This seven register limitation also makes people very subject to manipulation.

There are three great political issue categories: Economic, Social, and Foreign Policy. Today I wish to speak on the Economic issues. Up to quite recently, I've been describing myself as a little-l libertarian on economic issues. I've considered it a good and proper function of government to internalize externalities and to perform some monopoly busting, but to otherwise let the invisible hand do its efficient thing. But that opinion is effect, not cause.

...experiment has shown that the more detailed subjects' visualization, the more optimistic (and less accurate) they become.... A similar finding is that experienced outsiders, who know less of the details, but who have relevant memory to draw upon, are often much less optimistic and much more accurate than the actual planners and implementers. So there is a fairly reliable way to fix the planning fallacy, if you're doing something broadly similar to a reference class of previous projects.

This is why the studious ignorance of economics by self-proclaimed "environmentalists" is not cute and harmless, but a major threat. Almost everything in that story says one thing: "Market distortion". That's what a market distortion is; not a harmless game played with abstract points called "money", but shortages of vital commodities and overproduction of others. The artificial demand for biofuels bumps off food production. If normal economic processes were in place, instead of subsidies both monetary and emotional, and if biofuels could only sell in direct proportion to their actual effectiveness, the food displacement problem would be much smaller, and much easier to manage.

Quantum consciousness has attracted a lot of total quacks, running 10 steps ahead of science and using "quantum word salad" to justify whatever beliefs they already had. For so many people, "quantum" reads as "magic", and flick the critical thinking is turned off, and off we go on an adventure of telepathy, auras, out-of-body adventures, and the whole litany of New Age-isms that might as well come from the late 19th century. Only this time with the word quantum in it, for that extra helping of plausibility. That's never a valid use of science.

But that's unfair of me to use that as justification to dismiss the entire idea. There is no idea so right that idiots can't misuse it. "Quantum" itself is the canonical case. Quantum mechanics is now over a hundred years old, but you'd never know it from the public perception. It remains counterintuitive, but it's not fair to call it a mystery any more. A mystery to you and I, perhaps, but it has long ceased to be an anything-box in physics.

If consciousness research has proved anything, it is that all our simple models are inadequate, and the final answer, whatever it may be, is going to be complicated.

A New Marriage of Brain and Computer recently went by on the Google TechTalk feed, and while there's still a little bit of the quantum = magic in there, there is also interesting material to chew over regarding the simple question of "How does the brain really work?" You can consider the consciousness discussion an irrelevancy and still learn some interesting things. The rest of this post assumes you've watched that video. (Google's video interface is superior to the embed version, so I give you the link.)

And the Spartans Spartan it up. They appear to be asymptotically approaching the ability to reliably lose every game by a single score in overtime, after holding a significant lead for maximum pathos. Still working out some of the kinks, no overtime today, for instance, but I'm sure they'll get better.