RAND Corporation: How Terrorist Groups End

I wish someone in power were paying attention to this.

What the hell is going on over there at the Washington Post?

Today's editorial is just damn loopy.

While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves.

Fascinating.

More on this at TPM.

Highway dreams

Preface: Yeah, I'm making a blog post about a dream I had last night, and that's a little silly.

I rented some videos (tapes!) at a store near Owen's house, and I needed to take them back, but I couldn't remember how to get back to his house. So I was trying phone numbers at random hoping I'd get either him or the video store, and I kept calling the police by accident and I had to hang up before they traced my location. Finally, I was in this warehouse on a computer looking up the address, and Owen walked into the warehouse heading to a bookstore inside. He was with this dude who was installing a new door here at DF yesterday (no idea why). And I was like, "Hey! I need directions to that video store!" And Owen just rolled his eyes, like he knew I'd been having all this trouble with this simple thing, which would have been easy if I'd just remembered where he lived.

So here's the hopefully-more-interesting part: It took place in a specific location, and I've had other dreams in this same setting.

There are two cities connected by a complex array of highways. The two cities are physically separated by something huge and impassable -- a river, or a giant wall, or something similar. There are lots of one-way on- and off-ramps. The signs are unclear, and there are plenty of roads that radiate outward, away from both cities. Those are the navigation worst-cases, because once you're on one of those outbound roads, you're on it for good. (I don't know why that is; it's dream logic.)

The dreams set in this location are always about navigation and confusion. There are hundreds of potential on- and off-ramps, and there's only one correct sequence. Sometimes I've made the trip before and I'm trying to remember the path; other times I'm going some place I've never been before and I'm trying to navigate on the fly using signs.

The important properties of this setting as you move it into metaphor-space:

*You can't get from one city to the other on foot, on the ground -- you can't brute-force the problem of travel by simply walking the distance. The only way to travel between them is in a car, on the highways.

*You can almost always see your destination. You can see one city from the other; if you could fly, you'd be set. Thus, you get the essential frustration of seeing your goal and being unable to easily reach it.

*Highways are one-way, and there's a minimum speed. This imposes time pressure. You can't stop at signs or off-ramps to evaluate the situation.

*There's a cold indifference to this world; you're part of a system that's running because it must, and the world can't afford to let you hold it up.

All that said, in last night's dream, I actually broke the rules. I found a place to pull off, a small patch of earth along the side of a looping skyway. There was an old man asleep in his car there, and just enough room for me to stop and figure things out. That's when I located the warehouse which would eventually provide the solution to my problem.

That seems to happen often in my dreams -- I'm following a certain set of rules for the bulk of the dream, only to realize near the end that I'd been needlessly constraining myself, and that the rules were intended for someone else, or that they were never intended to be taken as seriously as I'd been taking them.

Trust on my mind...

...and an interesting article over at Scientific American.

Participants who were given a placebo prior to playing the game decreased their rate of trust (that is, how much money they were willing to invest) after they discovered their trust had been violated. Participants who received oxytocin, however, continued to invest at similar rates regardless of whether or not their trusting behavior had been taken advantage of. These behavioral group differences were accompanied by differences in neural responses, as participants in the oxytocin group showed decreases in responses in the amygdala and caudate nucleus. The amygdala is a region of the brain involved in emotion and fear learning, and is rich in oxytocin receptors, whereas the caudate nucleus has been previously linked to reward-related responses and learning to trust . Thus, the authors hypothesized that oxytocin decreases both fear mechanisms associated with a potential aversion of betrayals (via the amygdala) and our reliance on positive feedback that can influence future decisions (via the caudate). This in turn facilitates the expression of trust even after breaches of trust have occurred. Notably, the behavioral and neural results observed were only apparent when participants played the trust game, but not the risk game, suggesting that oxytocin’s effects on trust are exclusive to interactions with real people.

Cool

A little blog post about my Dad's annual home show.

FDIC at work

In light of IndyMac's collapse, here's an interesting article about how the FDIC steps in and prevents disasters from becoming disasters.

Zack Kim plays the theme from "The Piano"...

...also known as "The Promise"... on two guitars at once.

The Shining... sort of

This is very cool. (About 65 seconds, and worth it.)

This just in!

"Being slightly evil ensures a prolific sex life".

We rugged loners who play by our own rules have known this for years. Personally, I like to manifest my slight evil by using kindness to lull people into a false sense of security.

And... that's pretty much it. Just kindness. But I might turn on you at any moment! Very dangerous. Well, slightly dangerous.

I learned something today

I'm deuteranomalous. That means I am "poor at discriminating small differences in hues in the red, orange, yellow, green region of the spectrum." I'm likely to make errors in the naming of hues in this region because they appear somewhat shifted toward red.

So basically, mild red-green colorblindness. You'd think that might've come up before last Winter, when I was arguing with Claire about the colors in a painting and we realized that I was missing some of the subtleties. I mean... wouldn't you expect that to come up at some point during 4.5 years of art school or 2 years of grad school?

Strange animals: Stubble?

"Women prefer men with stubble for love, sex and marriage"

At the same time, it's not unusual for women to prefer a smooth shave when it comes to intimate physical contact, so there's a hidden core to this question -- if you prefer stubble visually but smooth tactilely, which wins out?