On the Soapbox

"Dark Matter" in Economics

As mentioned in the latest issue of The Economist, there is a recently-published economic theory about something called economic "dark matter", which tries to explain why, despite having a huge negative account balance (i.e., our debt to the rest of the world), the US has a net positive flow of capital returns, which suggests a positive account balance. The idea here is that we are underestimating our true foreign account balance, much like how "dark matter" in physics serves as a fudge to account for what appears to be an underestimation of the amount of matter in the universe.

In depth: http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/setser/113810

Ignoring the Facts

There's an interesting article about how people, once they have made up their minds on an issue, will tune out things that contradict that view, hampering rational judgment and discourse. This comes as no surprise. For example, I've noticed this in the debate about abortion, and even in personal interactions (i.e., how one's perceptions of others' actions are very strongly colored by how one already views other people). It's just interesting to see a scientific confirmation of this.

On that note, I wonder if this is how religions work: there are some who tend to attribute positive things that happen to them to God while glossing over the many neutral or negative events. And to be fair, I've also spent quite a bit of time wondering how much of this "filtering" colors the views of atheists.

Google Reader

There's a shocking lack of good RSS readers for Windows. Sage is nice, except that the interface is a bit awkward (probably because it's a Firefox extension). Thunderbird displays the whole page instead of just the content from the feed (plus, I don't use Thunderbird anyway). Opera's reader was okay, except that I don't use Opera. And all the other readers are either bloated, slow, .NET-based (eewww), and/or clumsy in implementation. I was so tempted to just write my own. But I thought that it might be worthwhile to try some web-based readers, so I first tried Bloglines, but the interface was clumsy at best. And then, I discovered Google Reader, and I'm impressed. A well-written software reader would still be better, but this comes close enough.

Google Sitemaps

Although the Google Sitemaps tool has been around for some months now, I didn't know that it existed until today. I'm going to try it out tonight; it looks like it could be pretty useful.