Friday night was the first time in a good long while that I got to expound angrily (/drunkenly) on the subject of free will. But here! Look! I come home and Slashdot is linking to a writeup of an experiment that reconfirms and extends my all-time favorite neuroscience result (PDF). Apparently April is mechanism month.

Anyway, you should check out one or the other of those links if you aren’t already familiar with Libet’s famous work. It’s creepy, clever and morbid — a combination that I aspire to myself.

MORE, AND A REQUEST: Man, it really has been a while. But Tim has some interesting things to say here, and I left a long comment in response, which gave me occasion to remember that I had written this, and in general if you would like to shoot the shit about consciousness I’d love to take you up on it. I had kind of thrown up my hands a few years ago and decided to learn about electronics instead, but I think I’d like to be able to begin speaking meaningfully about this again.

My first question: what should I be reading? The last time I seriously checked into these issues I was thinking about buying Christof Koch’s book, but I ended up getting distracted/discouraged by its price tag and length. Has anything with a similar level of sophistication and noteworthiness come out since then, or is it time to grit my teeth and see what Prof. Koch has to say?

Via the MAKE::Blog:

Pretty totally sweet. City Veins, are you paying attention? You can skip to 0:52 if you’re strapped for time.

I remember one assembly in middle school that featured something similar. For reasons still unknown to me an administrator had us all come to the auditorium and then said, basically, “Children, this gentleman has built a laser harp. Please listen respectfully, and DO NOT GET INTO HIS VAN.”

Then the laser harp guy bounded out and said “Hi kids! I built this laser harp! If you think about it, that proves that you can do anything you set your mind to. But only if you stay off drugs! Now, who wants to hear a bad MIDI sample of an electric guitar?”

Ah, laser harp guy. You poor bastard.

UNRELATEDLY: Am I the only one who’s found every single thing he’s heard about the Newseum so far to be completely grotesque? But then, I suppose I’ve been down on the project ever since they scrapped the initial plans to build it high enough to reach into heaven.

(Yesterday, when all the network anchors interviewed Petraeus there, like high priests conducting sacred rites at their newly opened temple? Pretty bad.)

I realize I’ve already blogged about my Arduino/Fonera project far too much. But I don’t think I’ve actually explained what it does in simple terms. If you’re interested, a brief explanation of what it is and how it works is included in today’s DCist transit post. Special bonus: mean comments at my expense!

Now I’ll shut up about it. Up next: something filled with shift registers, LEDs and childhood nostalgia.

(Although this looks like a fun (and cheap) project, too.)

Please don’t take it personally when I don’t respond to your friend request. I never really used the site, but for a while I would at least accept incoming friend requests. Then, with a number of unattended-to requests already piled up, I got a request from someone who I decidedly did not want to be friends with. At that point I decided not to bother with it any more.

So you won’t be getting friended, which is no big deal since I don’t do anything on the damn site. Please rest assured that I think you’re lovely, and that the odds of you being the person who drove me entirely off Facebook are quite low — though non-zero! It’s in my best interest to keep you guessing, working hard to earn my fondness. If nothing else I figure this calculated withholding of affection is good practice for one day being a parent.

The Archdiocese of Washington is making a stink about a low-budget Metro commercial that featured a bobblehead version of the holy father, saying that area Catholics might find it offensive. I don’t get it — it’s not like Catholics have no experience with popes that are constantly shaking.

BA-DUMP

This hereby concludes this edition of “Offensive Jokes That I Reluctantly Took Out of the Morning Roundup”.

So I guess that Glenn Greenwald and Megan are having a fight over what stories the media covers. This seems a little odd, but I guess she yelled at him, so now his commenters are yelling at her. And while I don’t want to align myself with the people who comment on her site, who tend to be (for one reason if not another) some of the worst people on the planet, it’s worth remembering just how lousy the metrics data Megan refers to can be.

Consider this admittedly irritatingly-formatted conversation about the Arbitron ratings. Basically: over the last decade or so Arbitron, the one big radio ratings agency, recorded the declining popularity of rock radio, and stations like DC’s own WHFS were shuttered (boo!). Then Arbitron developed a new technology that passively monitors what people listen to instead of relying on them to accurately report their listening habits. It turned out that rock radio was considerably more popular than anyone thought — rock listeners were just unusually bad at filling out Arbitron’s surveys. With that factor removed, rock stations are now once again popping up in cities that have rolled out the new monitoring technology.

Now, while I certainly don’t want to imply that listening to Smash Mouth correlates with intelligence, in general I think it’s probably true that it’s harder to collect tracking metrics on the sorts of educated, sophisticated consumers that Greenwald’s commenters presumably consider themselves to be. Their time will tend to be more valuable, meaning your ratings company will be able to afford to buy less of it. And they may have less time to consume media, meaning there’s less collectible data available per capita — even if you don’t have to pay for it. They also may be quicker to notice that you’re tracking or otherwise inconveniencing them and take steps to stop you. Show of hands — how many people are reading this with Adblock Plus installed?

From listening to Emily talk about her work it’s clear that avoiding sampling error is hard enough when the attempt is made in a rigorous, well-funded academic setting. And of course the situation here is considerably worse. Ratings companies like Nielsen, Arbitron and the like have a financial incentive to sample poorly (or as poorly as they can get away with). And, from my cursory understanding of their industry (I read DCRTV! I tell clients which web analytic reports to buy!), it doesn’t seem as though the firms sell themselves with their highly scientific methods so much as they sell themselves by being the only game in town.

So it doesn’t seem totally outrageous to me to suggest that metrics-driven editorial decisions may favor idiotic stories even more than the economists’ magical intersecting lines say they should. I think the internet has helped reverse this trend, but America is still probably being fed stupider content than it ought to be. And, lest you think I’m just creating elaborate justifications for my own tastes’ supremacy, keep in mind that I say all this as a guy who ordered a pay-per-view wrestling event less than a month ago.

This is what happens when Florida makes a determined effort to avoid looking unsophisticated.

And yes, I am posting this partly because the Marlins insisted on beating the Nats last night, despite presumably knowing that those of us at the ballpark were very cold and deserved to see the home team win.

I have just returned from the dentist. The news is not good.

This was my first visit to Dr. Mills, but it was immediately obvious that she is a good-natured woman of immense cheer — I saw her give a fellow patient a butt-bump in the lobby to congratulate her recent weight loss. She and her hygienist daughter are both gentle and reassuring. But even Dr. Mills couldn’t stop an “Oh boy” from escaping her lips as she stared at my teeth. Nor did she lie to me when I looked up and said, “I’m in big trouble, aren’t I?”

It’s my own fault, of course. To begin with, I haven’t been to the Dentist since the Kerry campaign. But my culpability is worse than just that.

The last time I visited a dentist occurred in the waning days of my brain’s susceptibility to maternal nagging. I drove over to Dr. W’s office near Central Library on one of the Saturday mornings he favored for my family’s appointments. Dr. W was a kind, effeminate man who always smelled like Vaseline. His magazine selection was terrible, but he was content to listen to patients’ wishes and drill as little as possible. He was very accommodating. Too accommodating.

It had been obvious to me for some time that dental technology would continue — must continue! — to evolve. Caps? Fillings? Invisalign? These baroque appeals to vanity won’t stand the test of time. How much more maintainable, elegant, even, to mount a simple feed impeller and set of crushing pins. If you’ve ever watched Modern Marvels you understand what I mean. History will vindicate me.

I knew, of course, that the adoption of ore-crushing technology by the dental arts was still some years away. But such were the remedies I was considering: my formerly perfect teeth had shown their first signs of weakness over the year preceding this visit, and I was keen to halt the downward trend.

So I hatched a plan, and proposed it to Dr. W: what about sealants? A slowly-degrading plastic film over my molars like the one I had been given in childhood. It would keep decay out, like the bubble dome surrounding a post-zombie-apocalypse city. Dr. W considered this proposal. He couldn’t see why not.

Dr. W closed that office soon after, though whether out of shame or fear of criminal liability, I couldn’t say. When I explained the situation to Dr. Mills she asked me where I had gotten the procedure done and was surprised to hear me say Arlington. Clearly she had been expecting to hear the phrase “crime alley”, or perhaps “Soviet prison”. My teeth are fine, you see — except for the area around the sealants, where grey veins snake outward, like contagion seeping from newly-landed meteors of mysterious origin.

Soon I will be more dental amalgam than man. The question now is simply whether it will take two more visits or three to complete the transformation. It is too late for me… but perhaps others can be saved. So heed my words:

Don’t go to the dentist. Wait for the crushing pins.

No sooner had I finished writing a long post for Techdirt about Comcast seeing the light on Bittorrent than I stumble across two links (via Slashdot) showing just how miserably the company treats its digital cable customers. Comcast recompresses their channels so that they can squeeze more over the network without making infrastructure improvements. The result is substantially worse than FiOS or over-the-air broadcasts. Go ahead: click the links and check out the pictures.

1. The City Veins! Tonight! Here! Come for the music; stay to be a part of Kyle’s growing media empire. Remember: it starts strangely early. I’ll see you there.
2. Don’t miss Spencer putting on an IM clinic at Jezebel. Have you been listening to his radio appearances? You should be. The man has got some mic skills.