So why wouldn’t Christians vote in favor of policies that aid the poor?

A few years ago, I learned of a cognitive bias known as the Just World Hypothesis, and the more I learn about it, the more it explains the odd partnership of Christians and the rich. The Just World Hypothesis can be summarized with those common trite remarks:

• What goes around comes around.
• You reap what you sow.
• He got what was coming to him.

It’s the fallacy that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. It’s the ideal result of the Golden Rule that we all naively wish was always the case.

How does this hypothesis help to solve our conservatism conundrum? Well, logically it follows directly that, if you grant that there is an omnipotent deity that is looking out for our best interests, then everyone deserves exactly what they get. The poor are poor for a reason; the rich are rich for a reason; you deserve that membership to the country club, and that other guy deserves to have cancer. Pat Robertson gets press every so often for proclaiming that Haiti or Japan deserves its natural disaster for not obeying the Lord, and he gets written off by moderate Christians as a whacky radical, but to me, the Problem of Evil really is one of the strongest nails in the coffin of theism. If God is omnipotent and just, then we all deserve what we get.

Once you’ve bought into the Just World worldview, the conservative “don’t tax the rich” and “don’t help the poor” is an obvious corollary. Even if you’re poor. Another thing that has vexed me for years is how the poor could vote Republican, when it’s obviously not in their best economic interests. If you think that you deserve to be poor, for a reason not comprehendible by a mere mortal such as yourself, and the wealthy 1% deserve what they enjoy, then it makes perfect – yet twisted and fallacious – sense to vote for the party who will institute conservative policies.

I want to stress that the arrow of causation is not clearly defined here. I suspect that both the religious and political viewpoints stem from an underlying tendency to prefer the idea that the universe is ordered fairly. Personally, understanding this makes me feel better about people that vote conservative. They aren’t total jerks lacking any sense of empathy; they’re just reasoning sensibly from a different, albeit fallacious, starting premise.

The irony is that believing the the world is just only makes it less so.

For one, I was in a country in which everyone over the age of five spoke perfect English, but they chose to speak a different language to each other. You mean my mother tongue isn’t the inherently superior human language? It sounds stupid in retrospect, but I remember thinking that.

Look again at those two ideas. They are both inherently Liberal ideas.

Over the years, I have noticed that I am almost always in political agreement with other expatriates that I meet. We generally hold similar values on the left-right political spectrum, both in financial and social issues. I always attributed this to the unavoidable epiphany brought on by immersion in a foreign culture. It necessarily shakes any conservative patriotism you have to the core.

Just recently, in the past couple years, I’ve been reading about the psychology of decision making and politics, and I think I may be mistaken about why expats tend to be more liberal. The positive correlation between voluntary emigration and Liberal values is still very strong, but I think I may have the causation backwards. It’s not that living abroad makes you liberal; it’s that having a liberal mindset makes you want to live abroad. People on the left end of the political and moral spectrum are much more open to having new experiences and hearing new, possibly conflicting, points of view. Conservatives are much happier with what they know. It’s even right there in the meaning of the two words: Liberals are for change and rocking the boat, and Conservatives are for maintaining the status quo.

Here’s a TED Talk on the subject:

I just sent off an absentee ballot today for a state primary. Just as it’s in the Conservatives’ interest to make same-day voter registration difficult, which tends to disenfranchise poor and minority voters (who will always vote Liberal), it would also be in their interest to stymy the ballots from non-military expats, although I suspect there aren’t enough of us for them to care…yet.

One thing I love about going plastic-only in the US is that it gets around that horrible sales tax that causes purchases to be higher than the price listed on the items in the store. I hate that! In Spain, the VAT (or IVA, in Spanish) is included on all the prices, so if you’ve got one item that’s 0.95€ and another that’s 2.25€, you can go ahead and count out your 3.20€ while you’re waiting in the checkout line and hand over the exact amount to the cashier. That sort of calculation is all but impossible in the States.

The second thing I love about using only a debit or credit card in the US is that it allows for more accurate tipping. Several times I’ve noticed items priced on bar and restaurant menus such that, if you don’t want to deal with coins (who does?), you’ve got to give a 30% tip. For instance, say your bar bill comes to $3.05. If you drop four $1 bills on the bar and walk out, you’ve left a 31% tip. But when you are given the blank space to write in any value you choose, and you won’t have to deal with change in return, exact percentages are more accessible.

The third thing I love about using plastic rather than cash is that you automatically get a record of your purchases. Sometimes, in Spain, I’ll take a couple hundred euros out of the ATM and then, after what seems like a few short days, I’m out of cash again and I have to rack my brains to remember where it all went. Sure, it’s possible to keep a diary of each transaction, but it’s such a bother that I would never do it. Knowing where you’ve done business before can help the next time you have to search for car hire USA or other repeating transactions.

I’ve lived so long abroad now that when I go back to the States, the green money looks funny and fake to me, not like the colorful Euro notes and coins that are valuable enough to take the time to bend over and pick up off the ground. The US coins are so worthless I’d rather just not have a quarter than lug one around in my pocket all day.

I dare say that one could live quite comfortably in the US with a wallet only big enough to hold a drivers license and a single credit card. That’s something I miss in Spain.

Our town church doesn’t play that Big Ben tune, but it does chime once at the quarter hour, twice at the half hour, thrice at three quarters of an hour, and four times on the hour, followed by a longer note played a certain number of times to indicate what hour of the day it is (five times for 5 o’clock, etc.). There are more noisy displays when it’s time for Sunday mass.

I used to think that this was somewhat handy to be aurally reminded of the time throughout the day, sort of a service to keep the townsfolk on their schedules. I still do, but I thought that was really the only purpose the hourly chimes served. Then I watched a TED Talk…

In his talk, Atheism 2.0, Alain de Botton suggests that, by rejecting superstitious dogma, atheists have historically been throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He makes some interesting points, and I’m not sure I agree with all of it, but it did get me thinking, particularly his reference to church calendars. At various times of the year, church sermons discuss different Biblical stories, and a good priest will explain how the ancient story applies to modern life. Clearly the same could be done in a secular environment very easily, e.g. “It’s autumn again, so let’s reread The Ant and the Grasshopper.” What religion accomplishes by assigning lessons to specific dates of the calendar is that, for a regular church attendee, the memories of all the teachings are less than a year old. It’s a bit like taking the same course every single semester for your entire life. You will learn it!

Religions, in general, are experts of sociology and psychology; they must be to have survived millennia into our present-day meme pool. They are clearly providing something that humans desire. If we’re going to make it past the first verse of John Lennon’s Imagine, we’ve got to figure out how to fill those needs another way, and we still have a lot to learn about how to push those psychosocial buttons.

DING! Back to the church bells. DONG!

Historically, Christian churches have had bells to inform monks and the general townsfolk when it was time to come and worship. This was back before we all had mobile phones with push notifications, mind you. In medieval times, it’s pretty easy to imagine that the church bells telling the monks when to pray could be quite handy to remind the other residents of the time of day, e.g. when to get up, or come in from the field, or whatever. Now, however, we have more advanced technology for that purpose.

When followers of more oriental religions are meditating, they will sometimes use what is called a mindfulness bell, which will ring every so often to remind the meditator to focus. If you’ve ever attempted meditation, you’ll understand why a bell could be useful – yes, there’s an app for that.

So why do church bells chime every hour or sometimes every fifteen minutes?

Part of it is tradition and fondness of said tradition, but I’d like to propose that one of the reasons is to remind everyone, especially subconsciously, that God is there, not necessarily in a “Big Brother is watching!” sort of way, but just to remind the public of church teachings, doctrinal and otherwise, like a mindfulness bell. It’s more about piety than punctuality.

How was this discovered? The Gregorian calendar – the one we use in modern 21st century western society – repeats itself every 400 years. Therefore, to calculate how many times the thirteenth falls on each day of the week, we only have to examine 400 years, or 4800 months. A bloke by the name of B.H. Brown did this by hand in 1933, but now we have computers. The program to do this is completely trivial once you have a calendar algorithm to follow the Gregorian calendar like all modern computer languages have built-in. Trivial or not, I couldn’t resist…let’s calculate how many times the 13th falls on each day of the week, shall we?

13th Histogram Calculator

When you click “GO!”, the calculator will start from today, January 13, 2012, and count which weekdays fall on the thirteenth of the month over the next 400 years until January 13, 2412. Here’s a hint: it goes up to 688.

GO!Reset

Exciting, huh? There was only one Friday the 13th in 2011, in May, so I've been waiting months to post this.

- CUT -

Now it’s the daytime with our protagonist, who is clearly a veteran skydiver, is giddy as he walks to an airplane with his girlfriend who is excited, but a bit timid, about doing her first solo jump. She murmurs something to this effect and he comforts her. The best friend cameraman whips the camera around on himself and gives a grin and a wink as they all three climb into the plane.

- CUT -

It’s noisy now in the plane up at jumping altitude. Our threesome are pumping themselves up with excitement and anticipation. The pilot says, something cliched like “Okay, bombs away!” and they open the door, and jump simultaneously, with the couple holding hands. Some excited screaming, and then the protagonist waves to his girlfriend and points down at the ground. The camera shakily pans down and we can see what they had been up to the night before. In the corn field below is written “WILL YOU MARRY ME, SUSAN?” The girlfriend squeals with delight and gives the thumbs up, and they hug, causing them to somersault a bit.

The cameraman shouts a barely audible “Okay, guys, that’s enough!” and the couple push apart and prepare to pull their chutes. The girl pulls her cord, but nothing happens. She freaks out a little bit, but her more experienced fiancé reminds her about her secondary cord. She pulls that, and nothing happens. We hear the camera man utter an “Oh my god!” Our protagonist goes to his fiancé’s pack and tries to pull loose the chute. The camera man pulls his cord and we briefly lose sight of the free falling couple. The camera is lowered and we see them plummet to the ground, landing with a puff of dust right in the flattened dot of the question mark.

The video continues shakily, to let the audience marinate in their horror, as the cameraman lands in the corn sobbing. We get a brief shot of his face before he reaches behind the camera and it cuts to black.

After a second, we see the text with the sponsor’s name, and some message like,

You handle the romance.

Let ErikRas Insurance keep you safe.

Is that a complete non sequitur? Yes. Does anyone care? No.

What’s Needed?

The budget for making such a video could be kept pretty low. You need three skilled skydivers and maybe two or three jumps worth of takes. You need a field where you can film the initial scene of corn flattening. And the rest is computer effects. Any halfway descent Hollywood effects studio could generate the 3D model of the message written in the corn and sync it to the motion of the camera, probably with some sort of grid of bright dots on the ground that would later be edited out. And then you just need a 3D model of two humans with parachute packs on to fall to the ground.

Why It Will Work

The best viral videos are the ones that get forwarded both by those who love them and by those who hate them. You’ll have plenty of haters, people annoyed a corporation for tugging at their emotions or who simply think it’s distasteful. And it is distasteful…but it’s also sensational and shocking. Searching the internet for “skydiving marriage proposal” turns up several people who have thought of popping the question at terminal velocity, even some that have written it on the ground. The whole point of viral video marketing is to get your company name out there and into people’s heads. A video like this, if done well, would definitely get passed around. Neither confirming nor denying that the video was faked will only add to the publicity.

After realizing that M was a showstopper, imagine my surprise when I figured out that I could write my last name, too! Radium-Samarium-Uranium-Sulfur-Selenium-Nitrogen!

At this point, I had come too far not to make little periodic table boxes with the atomic number and weight of each element to line up like Scrabble pieces. But what format to use? Periodic table boxes vary wildly, with different fonts, text alignment, and which values are included. ptable.com has a very impressive dynamic HTML periodic table, with various facts as you hover. periodictable.com went with pictures of each element. Pure substances are shiny!

Eventually I found this list of periodic table PDFs available for downloading and printing. The first one on that page is the standard one for the California Standardized Test. As soon as I saw it, I was immediately thrust back to my lab bench in Chemistry class calculating moles and reaction yields. I had my format!

So here we go…

And finally, in her highly radioactive two element glory…

I might have to make some t-shirts of my own…

To the geometrymobile!

This is the composite photo, taken by Letian Wang in Beijing, China, on December 10, 2011, that originally sparked my interest. You can see that the radius of the Earth’s shadow is slightly greater than the Moon’s diameter.

First of all we need to define what we mean by “shadow”.

For the purposes of this post and subsequent calculations, we will only be dealing with the umbra, the dark bit where no direct sunlight hits the moon. We will be ignoring the indirect sunlight that is refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere during an eclipse, bathing the lunar surface in reddish hue.

Okay, let’s do some math!

Here we can see the relationship between the radius of the umbra to all the distances involved. Do I even have to mention that the diagram is not to scale?

If we draw two more lines, we get two congruent right triangles.

Since we know they are congruent, we know their sides are proportional and can write the following equation:

…which we can solve for the radius of the umbra:

When we plug in the values for the radii of the sun and Earth, we get:

Over time, with the two elliptical orbits involved, both the numerator and the denominator of our distance ratio vary. The ratio of the distance from the Earth to the Moon (d_moon) to the distance from the sun to the Earth (d_earth) is at its maximum when the Moon is at its apogee and the Earth is at its perigee (we are ignoring the likelihood of these two extremes coinciding, of course).

The ratio is at its minimum when the Moon is at its perigee and the Earth is at its apogee.

When we plug these back into our bigger equation, we discover that the radius of the Earth’s shadow at the distance of the moon varies from 4479 km to 4735 km, or from 2.578 to 2.725 moon radii.

To visualize this, let’s look at the minimum and maximum shadow sizes compared to the Moon.

Not a very big difference, I think you’ll agree. We did, however, answer our question.

At least now astrophotographer and artist Laurent Laveder will know the range of sizes for his hoops for his incredible lunar eclipse photography.

Recently I read an article by Washington Post columnist, Ezra Klein, about some research into the forces acting on this political pendulum. He cites a paper written by Larry M. Bartels, of Vanderbilt University, entitled Ideology and Retrospection in Electoral Responses to the Great Recession. Here’s a bit of the abstract, although the entire paper is worth reading:

My analyses suggest that voters consistently punished incumbent governments for bad economic conditions, with little apparent regard for the ideology of the government or global economic conditions at the time of the election. I find no evidence of consistent ideological shifts in response to the crisis, either to the left or to the right, but some evidence of electoral responses to specific fiscal policy choices—most notably, a boost in incumbent governments’ electoral support associated with spending on economic stimulus programs.

I have long since been irked that voters don’t vote based on issues, and now this paper has made me even more cynical about the knee-jerk thoughtlessness of the electorate. Apparently, when we are all averaged out, we tend to vote with the simplest of algorithms:

And what is the best indicator of whether or not the average voter’s life sucks? That’s right! The Economy! Check out these depressing charts from Bartels’ paper…

You can think of the x-axis as being how well the economy is doing, and the y-axis is how well the incumbent governing party did in the election.

What the incumbent government does during the crisis can have some effect, however. For instance, if there is some stimulus spending, they can soften their inevitable decline a little bit. But the absolute worst thing a government that wants to stay in power can do during an economic crisis is to cut spending. Behold:

Surprise, surprise! What do the Republicans in the US Congress – who have, on more than one occasion, mentioned that their primary goal is not to better the nation, but to defeat Obama in 2012 – want more than anything? To cut discretionary stimulus spending! Republicans are such political geniuses. Of course, they have to be, since their ideology tends to screw the majority.

I really wish, more than anything, that, as I get older and incrementally wiser, I could find reasons to be less cynical about politics, but that just isn’t happening. Can anyone see anything to be optimistic about in this data? This strong correlation between the economy and government turnover is, of course, terrible news for Obama. If such a charismatic leader can’t buck this trend, then it really is a law of human governance.

WTF is a cookie?

A cookie is a tidbit of information that a website gives your computer so that your computer can identify itself the next time it talks to the website. You see, the way web browsing works is that your computer (the client) requests a certain page from a certain computer (the server), and the server returns the page to the client. That’s it. The connection is closed and there is no agreement that any more communication will take place. Each page request is discrete.

This worked fine when the World Wide Web first began back in the 90s, when it was just pages of information linking to other pages of information, much like Wikipedia is now (but much uglier). But then people wanted to start making web pages do more than display a simple page of text. To make a web application, the web server must know who the client is from request to request. The only way to do this is for the web server to give the client a special “key”, a unique number or series of characters, on the first request, so that the client can give the key back with the next request to identify itself.

Cookies are a bit like those membership cards that grocery stores give you. Your card has a unique number on it, so whenever you come back to the store, they can swipe the card and know that you are the same you that bought milk at the other franchise across town last week. That’s all cookies do.

If You’re Not Paying For It, You Are The Product

This business trick was probably originally conceived by the newspaper industry, but it was perfected by the radio and television industry. It really is a win-win-win situation for all three parties: the content producers, the advertisers, and the audience. The best internet example of using free products to get an audience to sell to advertisers has to be Google. They wrote the best search engine, the best online email platform, and the best online RSS reader…and they gave it all away for free. Why were they successful? Because people found their products useful and their ads non-intrusive. That’s what’s so great about this system: it uses the free market of internet users to reward excellence and punish mediocrity.

Why track users?

I work at a company that makes e-commerce websites, and we use cookies to track users for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is to remember where visitors that buy products came from, in other words, how they heard about us, or what they clicked on to get to us. Most visitors find us by doing an internet search on a certain type of product they are interested in buying. Why do we want to know this? Well, it helps us better target our advertising, i.e. not waste money on advertising that does not work. If we spend money on ads with the words “jet powered tricycles” and no one makes a purchase after searching for that phrase, then we can stop marketing that phrase. If, however, we sell lots of products to people searching for “speedy trikes”, then we know to focus on those words.

It’s not “tracking” in the sense of a private detective who knows where you were and who you were with last night. It’s just anonymous “79 people saw ad X, 32 of them clicked on it, and 2 placed an order” kind of data. The corporations don’t care who you are; they just want you to give them your money.

Where can you be tracked?

Assuming you haven’t installed some sort of browser plugin by an advertising agency, a website can only track you when your computer is making requests to that company’s servers. So why are everyone’s panties in a bunch about Facebook? In making such an excellent sharing platform, Facebook has also created an incentive for me, as a content provider, to make it as easy for visitors to share my content as possible, such as placing a Facebook “like” button right on my website. And what does the “like” button do? It makes your computer contact Facebook’s servers every time you view a page on my website, thereby enabling them to – dum! dum! DUM!! – know you are visiting my website!

So what can you do about it? Well, there are several browser features and plugins that allow control over “third party cookies” (cookies not coming from or being read by the website you are actually on). There are many, but one that I’ve recently discovered and like is Ghostery. It gives fine control over which tracking services you will allow to track you and which not. Why would you want to allow some services? Mainly so that the social sharing buttons – which are useful sometimes – will actually work.

The other option is to use a “private browsing” feature of your web browser to open up an anonymous browser window. Safari, Firefox and Chrome will all do this. Of course then you’ll be logged out of all internet services and you won’t have any of the benefits that cookies have been providing you. Go try out private browsing mode and notice how the internet works differently, and you’ll understand what cookies help do.

Targeted Ads

As I mentioned earlier, Facebook is an expert in targeting ads. But here’s an offline example to compare online ad targeting to.

Today in the mail, we received a coupon for some wet wipes designed for kids learning to use the toilet and wipe themselves. As far as targeted marketing goes, that was a hit right on the bullseye! The advertising agency probably got our address because my wife signed up for a store membership card when we bought a changing table almost three years ago. Has my privacy been breached? Hardly.

All Facebook or Google might learn from you visiting this page is that perhaps you like Spain, and they can infer to offer you some all inclusive deals for a Spanish vacation or something. Not such a bad thing.

Conclusion

Yes, companies like Google and Facebook can track you in the same way that a credit card or a store membership card can track you. If you’re an undercover spy or terrorist or something, then you probably already know not to use any of these internet services with your real name anyway. If you’re planning on murdering your spouse with cyanide, then you might want to consider taking some steps to protect your anonymity before Googling how to get your hands on the stuff. But for the rest of us, the tracking that cookies provide is actually a good thing, in that it tailors ads to stuff you might actually be interested in. I don’t need to see ads for rifle scopes or parakeet cages because I’m never going to buy one. Why not choose see stuff you are interested in?

I’m aware that the “privacy doesn’t matter if you have nothing to hide” argument is totally vacuous, but I don’t think a hardline stance against all cookies and social networking is a reasonable extreme, either.