Over the past few decades, psychology has taken great strides towards becoming a real, hard science instead of an "observational science" like history. Cognitive psychology has helped lead the way, since it has been lucky enough to be able to measure things like response times to stimuli for a long time now, but it has proven more difficult to test theories of how minds work on the lowest level.

Enter computer science and the field of machine learning, able to implement certain theories of mind and see how they perform under controlled conditions. As you've probably noticed, they have not created a completely artificial human intelligence. But they have been able to learn a lot of things, and equally important, unlearn a lot of things, and disprove a number of theories.

It was about this time last year that I was finally getting tired of the election.

Observation: Maybe it's just my connection to the weblog world, but the intensity of the election coverage doesn't seem to have gone up much. Which is to say, we've been going full-bore on this issue for over a year now.

If Bush wins this year, are Democrats and the media going to start holding the primaries for 2008, oh, say, February of next year?

So far, barring major changes in policy by Kerry, I still plan to vote Bush on the grounds that the problems I have with Bush are just totally unaddressed by Kerry.

Here's an example: Russia has slid back to a dictatorship and Bush doesn't much care. We aren't looking at a repeat of the Cold War (the USSR lost economically and the gap has only widened), but this is a big deal, because they have nukes.

RSS Bandwidth is coming up again, as I said it would almost exactly a year ago. As I laid out in that post, and to review today, there are(/were) two basic problems:

1. The entire RSS file is transferred on every request.
2. There is only on source for an RSS file, and no matter how svelte you make a request for an RSS file on the network, eventually you will take down the server and eat through tons of bandwidth in a world where millions of people may ask for a file every hour.

People are cautiously dancing around declaring the new Bush documents forgeries. I feel no such compulsion. This is absolute, positive proof. No question. It is utterly inconceivable that anything in 1973 would match the default Microsoft Word document of 2004, letter for letter, automatic superscript for automatic superscript, kern for kern (particularly impossible). The probabilities boggle the mind. The minor discrepencies are clearly artefacts of the aging process or deliberate smudging.

Reading this article somewhat indirectly prompts me to wonder how far the protesters are going to go in New York.

It makes me think some of the "radical" protesting ideas, like splitting everybody into groups of ten and taking as many street corners as possible may be the only sane thing for the protesters to do, because I think "mob mentality" is going to be the greatest danger to the protesters there is.

I've got a lot of big writing projects going on right now, and that is sapping my desire to post here.

But I did want to share one interesting link I found while working on one of them: Reflections on Relativity. It is a free, online book covering relativity (not just Einsteinian but also pre-Einstein conceptions), in a highly mathematical fashion that manages not to be so drenched in equations as to be incomprehensible without serious study, an extremely delicate balance.

Slashdot points to a CNN article that has been justly taken apart for falling prey to a biased sample fallacy; we are currently only capable of detecting planets in close solar systems such that the planets we can detect preclude the formation of planets conducive to life as we know it. (The gas giants we can detect are too close to their respective stars to even have a habitable moon, as I understand it.) Ergo, of all the solar systems we have detected planets in, 100% of them are unsuitable for life.

Just a quick note; if you want to compare bloggers to journalism fairly, you must measure the best of the bloggers against the best of formal journalism.

Because if you insist on defining blogging as "millions of people doodling in their journals, with rare people who sometimes make an interesting point", then I'm going to define journalism as "hundreds of thousands of parochial local rags designed to get as many local names as possible in print, and the rare international journalist that has something moderately interesting to say".

Hopefully you've heard about the genocide in Darfur by now.

I am considering this a yardstick to measure the sincerity and validity of all of those international organizations so quick to condemn the US and so slow to do, well, anything else.

So to the UN, and everybody else who wants to claim the moral high ground on the international stage, I have something to say, if you'll pardon the language: