Oh, Jeez, Don't Do This to Me!

This would seriously scare me, maybe to the heart-attack-is-imminent level:


But it's kind of fun watching it happen to someone else!

Conservatives, Liberals – They Really Are Different...

An excerpt from this ScienceDaily article:

In a prior experiment, participants had their brain activity measured as they played a simple gambling game. Dr. Schreiber and his UC San Diego collaborators were able to look up the political party registration of the participants in public records. Using this new analysis of 82 people who performed the gambling task, the academics showed that Republicans and Democrats do not differ in the risks they take. However, there were striking differences in the participants' brain activity during the risk-taking task.

Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, a region associated with social and self-awareness. Meanwhile Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala, a region involved in the body's fight-or-flight system. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk.

In fact, brain activity in these two regions alone can be used to predict whether a person is a Democrat or Republican with 82.9% accuracy. By comparison, the longstanding traditional model in political science, which uses the party affiliation of a person's mother and father to predict the child's affiliation, is only accurate about 69.5% of the time. And another model based on the differences in brain structure distinguishes liberals from conservatives with only 71.6% accuracy.

I wonder how libertarians and other politically independent people measure up in this regard?

And am I the only one who finds this sort of investigation reminiscent of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or Asimov's psychohistory?

Scary...

These days when we have a candidate for a position at work, it's pretty much routine to a search on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as just a general web search.  Reasonably often something quite, er, compromising will show up – anything from diatribes about their current employer to NSFW photos.  You have to wonder what on earth was going on in the candidate's mind when they put that sort of stuff out there for public scrutiny.

This is a very logical extrapolation of what might be possible with such info:

Making Change...

I've blogged (months ago) about an experience much like this one.  Scary...

A Little Too Close for Comfort...

Years ago, my friend Jim B. and I climbed up the side of an active vent (Pu'u O'o) of the Kilauea Volcano on the Big Island of Hawai'i.  It was a cinder cone about 800' high, with a bubbling lake of lava in the crater at its peak.  Standing on the edge of that cinder cone, looking down at the lake perhaps 300' below us was a very memorable – and crazy scary – experience.  I'm glad to have done it, but I don't think I'd do it again.

The scientist in this video is in a whole 'nother category of crazy: