Sometimes (some people would say often) I feel the need to flag some study in an area I am completely unqualified to comment on the substance. I am, however, really good at pulling apart logic, generalizations and over-broad journalistic pronouncements, however, so I feel completely at ease in doing that. What else is the internet for? WARNING: Long read. Cambridge University researchers just came out with a study entitled The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach with a rather astounding claim in the abstract: “[W]e uncovered the specific psychological signatures of political, nationalistic, religious and dogmatic beliefs.

I mentioned William James when talking about all the different personas that exist in personal interactions I think William James Undercounted. I think I should mention his On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings. You can find an abridged version here. If I was to summarize as concisely as possible, he says that there is a lot more of life and the universe to appreciate than any of us, encased in our own experiences and training, realize.

Shirley pointed me towards an interesting article entitled Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric. I’ll change the terminology slightly to “Definition Oriented People” and “Culture Oriented People”. Think of the word “red” as in the color. A physicist or a graphic designer may have an exact definition of what that word means. I can point to something and say it is red and something else is not red (examples), but I wouldn’t be able to actually define “red”.

One of many quotes attributed to William James is “Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.” Interestingly, no collection of quotes actually provides a cite to when or where he said it. A similar concept was raised by Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table”.

Britain has taken the lead in shellfish conservation and restoration! By accident. EU health and safety rules have long required shellfish to be purified and processed and any shellfish brought into the EU must have been purified and processed before entry. While Britain has a shellfish industry, all the purification and processing has been done on the continent. Can you see where this is going? Yeah. Until Britain builds a shellfish purification and processing plant, the entire British shellfish industry is practically shutdown because almost all their sales were to the continent.

Groundhog Carols by Gail Pilgrim. Click the title to get to them.

It has been known for a long time that wombats produce cubical poo. Zoologist Eric Guiler noted it in 1960, but I think it is a safe bet that Tasmanian inhabitants knew a long time before that. Finally scientists have figured out how they do it. Historically scientists have said “that’s weird” but never looked into how a round tube could create cubes. As so often happens in science, the discovery of “how” was accidental.

Microsoft was just granted a patent on creating a conversational chat bot of a specific person. The chat bot’s personality would apparently be based on images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages and more personal information. The Independent claims Microsoft Patent Shows Plans to Revive Dead Loved Ones as Chat bots. Seances would take on new life, but it could also prevent someone from moving on. I leave it to the psychologists as to whether this would be a good thing or bad thing.

I like the daily comic strip Frazz. The main character is a young man who is a janitor at the elementary school that he went to as a child. He gets along with teachers and kids talk to him about questions they don’t want to ask an authority figure. There are also lots of strips involving kids talking to their teachers. It is a bit of homage to Calvin and Hobbes, with a little less snark.

As far as I can tell, Ghana is getting hammered by Brexit. Huh? What? Yes, 40% of Ghana’s banana crop is sold to the UK. Now that the UK is no longer part of the EU and therefore the trade agreement which would have applied no longer exists, Ghana’s bananas are subject to tariffs on import. One UK importer indicated it was 20k pounds a week in increased tariffs, not counting the additional red tape.

I thought I would just put Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Poem “The Hill We Climb” here. I have no idea where line breaks should be. Note to self - there are poetry readings on Youtube, but check out the ones by the poet, not by actors reading the poetry. Do poets do poetry readings on Zoom? “Mr President, Dr Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr Emhoff, Americans and the world: when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

Someone on Reddit made a comment about fear driving the extreme ends of the political spectrum and that the media drives that fear because it creates addiction and keeps their viewers/listeners and enables their market. That leads me to the question of whether the media (at least at the extremes) could be viewed as emotionally abusing their viewers or listeners. Thoughts? As usual, feel free to disagree using this contact link.

Have you ever really thought about the business plan for space pirates or smugglers as portrayed in science fiction? Upfront investment, maintenance, and expected revenue and variability of the expected revenue are the first things that come to mind. We have to assume really high value, small size items that can be transported. Let’s call it unobtainium. We also have to assume technology is not only discovered, but becomes relatively inexpensive and can be handled by small groups.