Our Brains Screw Us Up

Here's a really nice summary of various ways our brains make us irrational.  And this story claims the smarter you are, the more likely you are to fall into these traps:

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.
And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.
What explains this result? One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves.

Good thing I'm pretty dumb.

The New Fear at the Bayou Corne Sinkhole

Fire:

A Louisiana sinkhole that has sucked in trees and swamps as it spread to the size of 20 football fields is now at risk of exploding.
Residents of Bayou Corne were evacuated a year ago when the sinkhole, which is emitting natural gases, opened up.
The gas exploration company that has been blamed for causing the problem after a mine collapsed, has resorted to digging relief wells to try to disperse the gas...While no homes have yet been sucked in, officials warn that the gases being emitted could ignite, which would leave the Louisiana swamp looking like 'the gates of Hell'.
In a similar case, a crater caused by Soviet geologists drilling in Turkmenistan in the 1970s has been a fiery pit for more than 40 years after the natural gases being released were lit.
The Louisiana sinkhole, which is expected to expand to 50 acres, is currently 25 acres wide and 350ft deep in some points. Methane bubbling up from it has also escaped into an aquifer.
Experts fear that if oil and gas rising to the surface became trapped it could build up in a crevice and then explode.

Check out this picture from Turkmenistan:

 If the natural gas ignited the sinkhole could become like the Door to Hell in Turkmenistan, which has been alight for 40 years

More on the Louisiana sinkhole here.

A Real Train Wreck

Wreck in Snow Bank, Boiler Explosion, Engine No. 70

Courtesy of De Forest Douglas Diver Railroad Photographs, ca. 1870-1948/Cornell University Library

Slate:

These photos, all of which depict train wrecks on the New York Ontario & Western Railway in New York State in the 1870s, are part of a larger group of images of railroad life assembled by De Forest Douglas Diver, a railroad engineer and photographer. This collection is currently held at Cornell University, and many of the photographs are available for view on Flickr.

Some of these images are quite aesthetically pleasing, despite their subject matter. The wreck of N.Y.O. & W. Engine 140, in particular, is framed as a near-perfect pyramid, with six onlookers (including one babe in arms) decorating the pile of broken steel. Other images show the crews of laborers it took to get the rubble off the track after the violence of a crash.

Little information is available about these wrecks beyond their dates. Historian Richard Selcer writes that although 19^th-century railroad accidents were distressingly common, it’s hard to arrive at an official tally, because record-keeping was informal: “Companies were not even required to report all collisions and derailments until 1901, when the Interstate Commerce Commission assumed control over railroad safety standards.”

There are some fascinating photos included in there. One good one shows a snow plow mounted on the front of a train.

Not a Good Day

This:

I was getting over a little bit for a car when the combine started sliding down the ditch and into the worst wet hole you could imagine.  It was tipped far enough over that the front wheel was spinning and throwing some smoke about time I got the hydrostatic turned off.  We tried pulling on it with two tractors, but it was getting buried deeper.  Eventually, we got a wrecker out there, and working with a tractor and the wrecker, we got it out.  I tell you what, climbing up that ladder and then walking down a really steep slope into the cab felt really weird.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day than today.  I'd say the odds are in my favor that it will be.

Wisdom from Whitey

Grantland highlights a classic 1992 profile of Whitey Herzog for the LA Times Magazine in 1992, by Pat Jordan.  There is a lot of classic shit in the article, but this brought back some memories:

 He was born in 1931 and raised in one of those small, pinched, hardscrabble Midwestern towns so well delineated in the stories of Sherwood Anderson — a town where people tend to remember a native son's failures more than his successes. When Herzog returned to his hometown as a big-league baseball player in the '50s, people would say to him, "Your brother Herman was a better player than you." Herzog would snap back, "Why don't you ask him? He's carrying mail right here in town."
New Athens (pronounced Ay-thens), Ill., population 2,100, lies 40 miles east of St. Louis. Sixty years ago, much as it is today, New Athens was a farming and coal-mining town with two lumber mills, strip mines, a foundry, a brewery and 16 bars. Its inhabitants, mostly descendants of German immigrants, were neat, clean, orderly, punctual, hard-working and hard-drinking people who, inexplicably and proudly, referred to themselves as hard-headed Dutchmen. They saw the daily sameness of their lives as comforting, not confining. A day in the mines. Shots and beers on the way home. Checkers on Saturdays at the barbershop. The big Sunday dinner. Laundry on Monday. When Herzog passed through town with a U.S. Army baseball team in 1953, he took his teammates on a tour. He told them who would be sitting where in which bar at what time, and they were. Thirty-four years later, Herzog would write in his autobiography, "White Rat": "And unless they're dead, that's where they are right now."
Herzog is reticent about his parents. He says only that his mother worked hard in a shoe factory and was so fanatically strict about cleanliness that he preferred to stay away from home as long as possible, playing sports and working at the Mound City Brewing Co., where he learned to drink beer like his father. Edgar Herzog worked at the brewery, where he had the distinction of never having missed a day of work. Herzog remembers his father telling him: "Be there early and give them a good day's work, so when it comes time to lay someone off, it'll be the other guy."

So I was in Whitey's old neighborhood visiting a friend from college right after we graduated.  It so happened that we were hanging out on Saturday evening at a campground with his friend from high school, his folks and a bunch of people he grew up around.  We had a good time drinking and shooting the shit.  Finally, at 11:00, he loaded his friend and I in his car to go to the liquor store in town and meet up with his girlfriend.  She left work and we drove for a couple of blocks, then my friend got out of his car, went up and talked to her, then came back and told me to have his friend give me directions to his grandma's house where I could crash out until he got done "visiting' with his girlfriend.

I took the wheel of his car, and followed his friend's directions to my roommate's grandma's house.  When I got there, I parked the car and started to the door, his friend asked if I wanted to head back to the campground for a while.  I figured I had nothing to lose, so I went back out there with him.  After way too many beers, I was arguing politics and sports with one of the boss men from the campground (and I was hitting on his wife).  He found out I was a Reds fan, and made some snide remark about Pete Rose.

That was game on.  I told him that Pete was the best player ever, and when the guy kept giving me shit, I looked at him, and told him that Whitey Herzog was a homosexual.    Now most likely, that wasn't the thing to say about Whitey.  But somehow, I was able to keep the guy from punching me, and then hanging out with him for a while before my roommate's friend and I had to head back to town.  Needless to say, when my roommate and I were sober again, we had a few good stories to tell.

What's That Name Again?

This made me laugh:

 
CBS:

The Holy See has recalled thousands of commemorative papal medals after the word "Jesus" was misspelled as "Lesus."
According to the Vatican Information Service, more than 6,000 of the medals were produced by the Italian State Mint to commemorate the beginning of Francis' papacy.
The medal features a portrait of Francis on one side and on the other, a Latin phrase that the future pontiff says inspired him as a teenager to pursue the priesthood: "Vidit ergo Jesus publicanum et quia miserando antque eligendo vidit, ait illi sequere me." (Translation: "Jesus, therefore, saw the publican, and because he saw by having mercy and by choosing, He said to him, 'Follow me'").
However, the letter "J" in Jesus was mistakenly replaced with the letter "L."

Now this is a spokesman:

 ‘‘Everybody makes mistakes,’’ the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said on Friday. ‘‘Even people who make coins.’’

Not infallible.

Nice Work, Hollywood

For my friend with the spinal meningitis/stiff neck:

A Little Too Business Friendly?

The Texas Observer:

In late 2010, Dr. Christopher Duntsch came to Dallas to start a neurosurgery practice. By the time the Texas Medical Board revoked his license in June 2013, Duntsch had left two patients dead and four paralyzed in a series of botched surgeries.
Physicians who complained about Duntsch to the Texas Medical Board and to the hospitals he worked at described his practice in superlative terms. They used phrases like “the worst surgeon I’ve ever seen.” One doctor I spoke with, brought in to repair one of Duntsch’s spinal fusion cases, remarked that it seemed Duntsch had learned everything perfectly just so he could do the opposite. Another doctor compared Duntsch to Hannibal Lecter three times in eight minutes.
When the Medical Board suspended Duntsch’s license, the agency’s spokespeople too seemed shocked.
“It’s a completely egregious case,’’ Leigh Hopper, then head of communications for the Texas Medical Board, told The Dallas Morning News in June. “We’ve seen neurosurgeons get in trouble but not one such as this, in terms of the number of medical errors in such a short time.”
But the real tragedy of the Christopher Duntsch story is how preventable it was. Over the course of 2012 and 2013, even as the Texas Medical Board and the hospitals he worked with received repeated complaints from a half-dozen doctors and lawyers begging them to take action, Duntsch continued to practice medicine. Doctors brought in to clean up his surgeries decried his “surgical misadventures,” according to hospital records. His mistakes were obvious and well-documented. And still it took the Texas Medical Board more than a year to stop Duntsch—a year in which he kept bringing into the operating room patients who ended up seriously injured or dead.

Read the whole thing.  It may not be good for his patients, but it is definitely good for him, and especially, his malpractice insurance company, that Texas limited medical malpractice pain and suffering awards to $250,000.  Consider that next time you hear Republican solutions to make health care more affordable.