Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

At the New Yorker’s 2007 conference “2012: Stories from the near future”, the social and cultural psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about the five foundations of morality, and why liberals and conservatives tend to talk right past each other.

I found this talk very enlightening and if, like me, you have ever wondered why conservatives just “don’t get it,” have a look! (hint: they do)

Thanks to Nick for the link.

Thanks to Matt Pennig for pointing me at Wikipedia’s entry on Traffic Waves. I first started thinking about this while reading “The Goal”, a management book. There was a chapter where the author wondered why all the machines in a factory could never achieve maximum throughput no matter how carefully they were balanced. This notion of small variances causing big results is exactly behind those stop-and-go-for-no-reason jams we see on the roads.

Here’s a corroborating experiment:

Interestingly, a Seattle driver has arrived at the same conclusion, and has thoughts on how to be an un-jammer:

Breaking Up a Traffic Jam!

Ah, Wikipedia. Is there anything you don’t know?

Required viewing:

Lawrence Lessig on McCain on Technology

A little dry, but important stuff:

Communications and Technology Policy for the Next Administration:

(Via TPM.)

Is it just me, or does ARD fight with screen sharing? If I have been running ARD, screen sharing will ALWAYS fail. Quitting ARD doesn’t help. If I reboot my machine, screen sharing works well until I fire up ARD again. Anyone else seeing this behavior?

Crows can make tools? Yikes!

(Via John Hodgman.)

Let’s get to it!

I’m sure all 3 of you who monitor my blog have seen this already, but just in case, Barack Obama gave a speech yesterday — a bold, courageous, visionary speech:

We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle—as we did in the OJ trial—or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina—or as fodder for the nightly news.

We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”

I found this shocking. The incarcerated now account for 1/99th of the US adult population. Even more frightening, 1 in 9 young black men (aged 20-34) is behind bars; among hispanic men, it’s 1 in 36.

The US has passed China as the worlds leading jailer.

I guess the prosecution was wise to boot me from the jury after all.

[via NYT]

I know, why bother, right? Because — otherwise, future madmen will pull crap like this, too:

This evening Attorney General Michael Mukasey, as expected, refused to prosecute the contempt of Congress resolutions against Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers for their refusal to testify in the U.S. attorneys scandal.

[via TPM]