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Mitt Romney’s record of losing elections is now being compared to the “Mendoza line”, which baseball fans define as .210 or .200 (pathetic in either case). The insult derives from the career of infielder Mario Mendoza. Painfully enough, about the only thing most baseball fans remember about Mendoza is that he was one of the [...]
Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category
August 24th, 2011
Category: Economics, Psychology
Right after New Year’s Day, I posted here about my inability to get rid of my old comic book collection. Actually, it’s not just comics, there are other curios such as this sketch on the left by Bob Brown, from a larger portfolio that used to come out annually in the early 1970s from the [...]
August 21st, 2011
Category: Political Science, Psychology
By any objective analysis, Colonel Gaddafi is toast, but his official statements still forecast victory, as they have throughout each defeat of his troops over the past 6 months. One can’t help recalling Saddam Hussein’s Information Minister who relayed his boss’s increasingly ludicrous reports of success as the regime was rapidly being crushed. There is [...]
July 14th, 2011
Category: Psychology, Spirituality and Religion
Last month’s report on a Johns Hopkins study of psilocybin and spirituality, of which I’m a co-author, has drawn numerous comments on blogs and on-line news articles. A fraction of those comments have raised questions or criticisms which I’d like to try to address. (On the RBC, see Mark’s posts and Andy’s critique.) For those [...]
June 5th, 2011
Category: Psychology, Urbanism
KQED aired a nice reflection on our dog park. It’s very hard to spend time there without smiling a lot. Some dogs, like pugs and X-doodles, just have a direct line to the human smile reflex, but all the dogs are in heaven and show it. Dogs are made to run, so being off-leash causes [...]
May 22nd, 2011
Category: Airline Industry and Travel, Psychology
I fly enough that it became sensible about a decade ago to buy an ongoing membership in my preferred airline’s “club”, which offers peace, quiet and free coffee away from the crush in the terminal. At one of the airline’s hubs, the club was remodelled a few years ago, bringing in very nice furniture, more [...]
May 2nd, 2011
The Babylonian Talmud gets us part of the way there: Certain brigands were in Rabbi Meir’s neighborhood used to trouble him greatly, and he prayed that they would die. Beruriah his wife said to him, “What is your opinion?” [i.e. on what text do you base your prayer]?” [He replied,] “because it is written [Psalms [...]
April 30th, 2011
Homeostasis and regression to the mean trump Freud and Larkin.
April 16th, 2011
Category: Crime Control, Psychology
That indispensible newspaper, the Economist, includes an amazing and disturbing article this week on judicial decision-making. The article profiles exhaustive research on parole decisions made by Israeli judges. The good news is that neither the sex nor ethnicity of offenders influenced parole decisions. The less good news is that the rate of denying parole was [...]
April 4th, 2011
When most people hear the word “trauma” they understandably think about combat veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. But traumatic events are not confined to the battle field. They include being involved in an accident, being the victim of crime, surviving an earthquake or other disaster, or even witnessing others go through terrible things (e.g., some [...]
