Category Archives: other

Commercial Aircraft at Moffett Field

Last week, while driving into work, I saw a rather unusual sight. An AirTran airliner was taxiing at Moffett. It looked like it had just landed. Why was it there? Did NASA buy the aircraft, and it simply wasn’t repainted yet? Was it an emergency landing, and if so, why not just land at Mineta which is just like five minutes further south? Was it some sort of bizzare mistake?

Googling around, I found the flight: AirTran 8141 from Halsey Field San Diego to Moffett. Halsey is NAS North Island, so it was flight from one government airport to another, but still seems a bit unusual for it be a commercial flight.

Giant Eye

A Florida man was taking a stroll on a beach when he stumbled across something out of the ordinary: a giant blue eyeball, just sitting there in the sand.

Slate reports that a giant eyeball washed ashore in Florida, and that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission needed help identifying it. Early money was on that it was the eye of a swordfish due to its color and the bones around the ball, and genetic testing confirmed the hypothesis. As for how the eye came to be disembodied / disarticulated, that’s a bit harder to figure out. The leading theory on that front is that it was tossed overboard from a fisherman.

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Hanger One Still On the Chopping Block

NASA’s inspector general is still gunning for Hanger One. Essentially, the IG and NASA HQ are upset with Ames Research Center’s leasing of property to private groups such as Singularity University, Airship Ventures, and the Google Triumvirate, and insist that future leases correspond to “current or future mission[s]”, and to sell any properties that can’t be leased. I believe the IG is referring in particular to the airfield itself.

Not having any particular knowledge beyond what I find in the local papers, but that seems a bit strange. I thought NASA Ames was one of the centers that was researching heavy lift airships for cargo transport to remote areas, and that Hanger One was intended to be used for these airships.

Same As It Ever Was

1981

As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. […] You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Lee Atwater, former Republican strategist and national chairman

2012

I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine. Let’s be fair and reasonable.

Doug Preisse, chairman of the Franklin county or Ohio Republican Party

The voter suppression tactics to disenfranchise minorities and the elderly across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida is just so goddamn transparent it’s not even funny.

Zoe “Pablo” Smith Takes on the Internet

British olympian Zoe “Pablo” Smith takes on the Internet:

As Hannah pointed out earlier, we don’t lift weights in order to look hot, especially for the likes of men like that. What makes them think that we even WANT them to find us attractive? If you do, thanks very much, we’re flattered. But if you don’t, why do you really need to voice this opinion in the first place, and what makes you think we actually give a toss that you, personally, do not find us attractive? What do you want us to do? Shall we stop weightlifting, amend our diet in order to completely get rid of our ‘manly’ muscles, and become housewives in the sheer hope that one day you will look more favourably upon us and we might actually have a shot with you?! Cause you are clearly the kindest, most attractive type of man to grace the earth with your presence.

No Really. We suck.


From CNN:

Eight female badminton players were disqualified from the Olympics on Wednesday for trying to lose matches the day before, the Badminton World Federation announced after a disciplinary hearing.

The players from China, South Korea and Indonesia were accused of playing to lose in order to face easier opponents in future matches, drawing boos from spectators and warnings from match officials Tuesday night.

All four pairs of players were charged with not doing their best to win a match and abusing or demeaning the sport.

The Indonesian and South Korean pairs appealed the decision, the BWF said, and a decision on their appeals is expected later Wednesday.

According to reports, the players were intentionally hitting the shuttlecock into the net.

South Korea’s a appeal was rejected, and Indonesia later withdrew theirs.

Competitively Priced With Ketchup

In the new book, Marijuana Legalization What Everyone Needs to Know – operations research(!) and public policy professors from CMU, Pepperdine, and UCLA – attempt to determine what the price of marijuana if production was legalized. Using Canada’s industrial hemp industry as a guide, they estimate a price of about $5 per pound for mid-grade ganja, and a price of about $20 for good stuff. That’s 800 joints for a quarter. (But then again, who smokes joints when you can smoke a bowl?) As Matt Yglesias points out, this puts in the ketchup and sugar packet territory.

Of course, I don’t believe that the price would ever actually go that low. First, cannabis would taxed quite aggressively. Sin taxes and all that. Also there’s such a huge disconnect between the potential $3 per ounce price and the $300 per ounce price that consumers are conditioned to expect. While prices will no doubt fall, I wonder to what the profit margin would end up being? 10x? 50x?

Stroop Effects

Recently a group of us were laughing about how we could mess with children by teaching them the wrong names for colors. Just buy a Stroop Effect novelty poster, and pretend that nothing is wrong. Since the effect is because the language center of the brain is being stimulated in a way that is incongruent with the visual stimulus it takes longer correctly name the color shown.

I then started to think about what would happen if you carried out the test with a bilingual person. Specifically, with people that are literate in languages that have completely different characters. I would think that if for example a monolingual speaker of language that used the Latin alphabet saw a word that was written with a completely different writing system, say Chinese, then the language center wouldn’t trigger since the character has no meaning to monolingual person. If the words were written in language that was sufficiently similar to the native language of the subject then the I would suspect that the language center would trigger and cause the effect, albeit at perhaps a lower intensity. Similarly, I suspect that the effect would have different intensities for someone that was bilingual, with the secondary language being less intense than the native language.

Sufficiently curious, I set out test my hypothesis. I quickly coded up a bilingual Stroop Effect viewer and grabbed the most convenient monolingual person and the most convenient bilingual person I have access to and tried it out. While my test wasn’t very rigorous, it did satisfy my curiosity for the evening.

The test was constructed so that the the subject was presented with eight colors (black, white, red, orange, yellow, green, purple, blue) in a random order in two rows of four. The color displayed were written in one of three different texts: language neutral squares, English, and simplified Chinese. The text was pulled from the name of the colors displayed. The text displayed in a random order and was guaranteed to not correctly correspond to the color it was written in. (e.g. The word “black” would never appear in the color black.) The subject advanced through each of the languages and as quickly and correctly as possible while saying aloud the color of the text each word appears in. Vocalization was to match the language the text was displayed in, or any language for the language neural text. Evaluation was conducted by comparing time to complete the task in each language, and expressing how difficult the task was in each language.

While I do know some words in Mandarin, and can read some Characters including those for the colors red and white, I used myself for the monolingual-monoscript subject. The language-free shapes and the Chinese characters were by far the easiest and were about equal in difficulty. Since I was going quickly, I didn’t really have time to determine whether or not each character was one that I might know, and if so what its meaning was.

I drafted Ming to serve as the bilingual-biscript subject. We both agreed that that there was an ordering in her time to complete and she said there was a definite ordering to the difficulty of the task. Again language neutral was the easiest, but for her English was the second easiest, and Chinese was the hardest. This makes sense because while she is literate in English and is very proficient in spoken English, her English is not at an equal level to her native Mandarin.

Looking online, I found two references to bilingual Stroop effect tests, but neither were exactly like the one I tried. Reading only the abstracts, it appears that Ardila et al. 2002 looked at the effect in English/Spanish bilingual and monolingual persons. They found that bilingual persons were slower at identifying colors than monolingual users. Okuniewska 2007 seems to contradict in the previous study by saying that there was “a bilingual advantage”, but that bilingual persons didn’t perform equally well in both languages. Both of these studies were bilingual-monoscript subjects, what changing the writing between languages does is isolate the shape-to-language path in the brain.

Personally, I find this experiment interesting, and it doesn’t seem like that it would take much to make this a proper experiment, but I wonder if anyone has actually done this test in psycholinguistics. I guess I need to ask around.

UPDATE: Sat Jul 14 11:20:15 PDT 2012:
I found a paper that closely mimics what I was trying to test, but not exactly. In 1978, Biederman and Tsao compared monolingual English speakers to bilingual Chinese speakers. They found that Chinese characters were harder to process than than Latin characters. The did not look at difference in textual representation, but rather simply referred to previous bilingual tests that used the Latin alphabet for both languages. They speculate that Chinese is harder to process for even native literate speakers since the characters do not carry any pronunciation information in them. While that is true, it seems like repeating this two alphabets would be needed to confirm.

Al-Ghatani et al. in 2010 created an Arabic Stroop test and applied it to bilingual subjects. Ten bilingual participants were given both an English and an Arabic version in order to measure the how similar the Arabic test is to the English test.

Ingraham et al. in 1988 created a Hebrew version of the Stroop test, but appears to have tested Hebrew.

Other related work: