Isegoria

In Why my mom didn’t buy me a slot car track for Christmas in 1978, even though I told her that’s what I wanted, Dave Munger looks at a study of couples and how they predict each other’s taste:

Lerouge and Warlop recruited 35 couples to participate in the study. Each partner was placed in a separate cubicle for the duration of the study, and had no contact with his or her mate. They then were shown pictures of 30 different sets of bedroom furniture and asked to indicate their impression of it (positive or negative). The next part was the key to the study:

Each partner was shown 30 new furniture sets — the sets the other partner had already rated. In each case, they were asked to predict how another person would feel about the furniture. Half the participants were told they were predicting their own partner’s preference, and the other half were led to believe they were choosing for a stranger. In fact, all participants were predicting their own partner’s preferences. After each prediction, the partner’s actual preference was revealed, so as the study progressed, presumably each participant would better understand his or her partner’s preference, and gradually make better predictions.

Overall, participants were better at predicting their partners’ tastes when they believed they were predicting the tastes of a stranger. When they knew they were predicting their own partners’ tastes, the accuracy of predictions depended on how similar their own tastes were to that of their partners.

Here’s the key finding: When partners’ tastes were different from their own, then they were better at predicting each others’ tastes if they believed they were predicting the tastes of a stranger.
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When you know someone well, it appears, you begin to assume they have the same tastes as you do.

This seems like something that should happen on a popular sitcom during sweeps week. World’s tallest man saves ailing dolphins:

Bao Xishun, the world’s tallest man, reaches in to retrieve objects from the stomach of a sick dolphin at an aquarium in Fushun, in China’s northern Liaoning province, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2006. Bao, whose arms measure more than a meter in length, was called in by the aquarium after experts failed to surgically remove unidentified objects from the stomachs of two dolphins. Bao was able to reach in and retrieve the objects, which turned out to be pieces of plastic from their pool surround. Despite a few remaining small pieces of plastic in their stomachs, local experts expect the dolphins to recover soon. The 2.36 meter-tall Bao was confirmed as the world’s tallest man by the Guinness Book of Records in 2005.

A new documentary, Relentless Enemies, tells the story of superlions marooned on an island:

“We discovered this tiny sandy island in the Okavango,” says Dereck. “It is extraordinary because it became totally isolated from the mainland 15 years ago when the course of the river changed, and a huge herd of buffalo and lions were trapped on a piece of land measuring 200 square kilometres.”

Through this twist of geographical fate, these two ancient species are now engaged in a desperate battle of survival — watched by six bemused refugee wildebeest and a handful of similarly outnumbered warthogs.

Thus, the island has become a unique, ecological experiment. In order to exist without the customary spectrum of weaker African prey like zebra, giraffe and impala, the Duba lions have had to develop distinct strategies in order to trap the single available food source.

They have adapted to this challenge by hunting during the day under the baking African sun, swimming through deep rivers in the hunt for buffalo. This water-based training programme combined with a diet of protein-rich buffalo meat has led to the development of huge muscles, and these super-cats now dwarf other lions.

The island lions also use highly advanced psychology in their quest for food, predicting the course of the buffaloes’ daily trek by anticipating their need for water — then lying in wait at the precise spot along the river where the herd will eventually stop for refreshment.

In turn, the buffalo have responded to the threat by merging into a vast mega-herd of 1,200 beasts — five times the size of a normal group. They have also, at times, turned on the lions, killing isolated cubs.
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A subspecies is emerging which the experts have named the Duba swamp lion — as opposed to the jungle lion, the desert lion, or the lion of the mainland African plain. It is distinctive in appearance, with a bigger, thicker neck and an extra-strong chest. The lionesses are almost the same size as the male lions on the Botswana mainland.

I can’t believe this exists: an animation test of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are rendered via computer graphics — from 1983. It’s surprisingly good.

David Kirby and David Boaz have been Examining the Libertarian Vote in Depth:

In our study, “The Libertarian Vote,” we analyzed 16 years of polling data and found that libertarians constituted 13 percent of the electorate in 2004. Because libertarians are better educated and more likely to vote, they were 15 percent of actual voters.

Libertarians are broadly defined as people who favor less government in both economic and personal issues. They might be summed up as “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” voters.

In the past, our research shows, most libertarians voted Republican — 72 percent for George W. Bush in 2000, for instance, with only 20 percent for Al Gore, and 70 percent for Republican congressional candidates in 2002. But in 2004, presumably turned off by war, wiretapping, and welfare-state spending sprees, they shifted sharply toward the Democrats. John F. Kerry got 38 percent of the libertarian vote. That was a dramatic swing that Republican strategists should have noticed. But somehow the libertarian vote has remained hidden in plain sight.

This year we commissioned a nationwide post-election survey of 1013 voters from Zogby International. We again found that 15 percent of the voters held libertarian views. We also found a further swing of libertarians away from Republican candidates. In 2006, libertarians voted 59-36 for Republican congressional candidates — a 24-point swing from the 2002 mid-term election. To put this in perspective, front-page stories since the election have reported the dramatic 7-point shift of white conservative evangelicals away from the Republicans. The libertarian vote is about the same size as the religious right vote measured in exit polls, and it is subject to swings more than three times as large.

Based on the turnout in 2004, Bush’s margin over Kerry dropped by 4.8 million votes among libertarians. Had he held his libertarian supporters, he would have won a smashing reelection rather than squeaking by in Ohio.

President Bush and the congressional Republicans left no libertarian button unpushed in the past six years: soaring spending, expansion of entitlements, federalization of education, cracking down on state medical marijuana initiatives, Sarbanes-Oxley, gay marriage bans, stem cell research restrictions, wiretapping, incarcerating U.S. citizens without a lawyer, unprecedented executive powers, and of course an unnecessary and apparently futile war. The striking thing may be that after all that, Democrats still looked worse to a majority of libertarians.

Because libertarians tend to be younger and better educated than the average voter, they’re not going away.

Another interesting stat:

One more bit from our post-election Zogby poll: We asked voters if they considered themselves “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” A whopping 59 percent said they did. When we added to the question “also known as libertarian,” 44 percent still claimed that description. That’s too many voters for any party to ignore.

This footage of a C-130 Deploying It’s “Angel Decoy” seems like something out of the latest X-Men flick.

(That means it’s pretty cool looking.)