Fascinating Facts and Trivia.

Should We Require Americans To Vote?

Norman Ornstein argues that American political life would be improved if every American was required to vote:

Indeed, there is a case to be made that the sharp polarization and tribalism that has come to dominate Washington has metastasized to the American public, and that the center of the electorate–nearly invisible in Congress–will soon be hard to find in the rest of the country. But our best hope for changing the damaging culture which enhances the tribal wars and elects people who disdain compromise and embrace rigid and extreme ideas is to create more opportunities for more Americans to exert some influence in all elections.

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A Uniquely American Way to Honor the Dead?

A company in Alabama will take the cremated remains of a loved one and load them in shotgun shells. No, really.

When your loved one dies, how would you like to dispose of their ashes? You could scatter them somewhere sentimental. You could keep them in your house. Or you could load them into shotgun cartridges and go hunting. Happily, an Alabama-based company, Holy Smoke, is on hand if you prefer the latter option.”

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The Law of Averageness

Why does it seem like everything is the same these days (cue old man voice)?

Why do Burger King and McDonald’s offer indistinguishable chicken salads—often right across the street from each other? Why do Home Depot and Lowe’s outlets huddle near each other like lovelorn teenagers? Why is Coke so much like Pepsi?
They’re just obeying Hotelling’s Law. Stanford University economist Harold Hotelling posited back in 1929 that rival sellers tend to gravitate toward each other—in location, price, and product offerings—because otherwise they risk losing some of the broad mainstream of customers. In other words, if your competitor has found something that sells or a way to sell it, the easiest way to horn in on their market share is to sell the same thing in the same way.
His insight, also known as the “principle of minimum differentiation,” is still widely used by economists and often applied to politics: candidates leaning too far left or right risk losing the essential moderate vote, so both Republicans and Democrats are pulled to centrist positions.

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Rat Brains!

Scientists at Duke University have wired the brains of two rats together, with fascinating results:7780097-silhouette-of-the-rat-on-white-background

It’s not exactly a Vulcan mind meld, but it’s not far off. Scientists have wired the brains of two rats together and shown that signals from one rat’s brain can help the second rat solve a problem it would otherwise have no clue how to solve.

The rats were in different cages with no way to communicate other than through the electrodes implanted in their brains. The transfer of information from brain to brain even worked with two rats separated by thousands of kilometers, one in a lab in North Carolina and another in a lab in Brazil.

“We basically created a computational unit out of two brains,” says neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University, who led the study.

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The Fight Against Online Bullying

The Atlantic’s Emily Bazelon took a look into the effort by organizations as diverse as Facebook and the hacker collective Anonymous to battle online harassment and bullying, an experience that over 800,000 people under the age of eighteen experienced last year.

One of the things she learned was that Facebook spends as little time as possible reviewing the complaints:

To demonstrate how the harassment team members do their jobs, Willner introduced me to an affable young guy named Nick Sullivan, who had on his desk a sword-carrying Grim Reaper figurine. Sullivan opened the program that he uses for sorting and resolving reports, which is known as the Common Review Tool (a precursor to the tool had a better name: the Wall of Shame).

Sullivan cycled through the complaints with striking speed, deciding with very little deliberation which posts and pictures came down, which stayed up, and what other action, if any, to take. I asked him whether he would ever spend, say, 10 minutes on a particularly vexing report, and Willner raised his eyebrows. “We optimize for half a second,” he said. “Your average decision time is a second or two, so 30 seconds would be a really long time.”

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