Yet more keen links one might want to share

[Gravdigr]

Well, at least they have their sights set on something realistic...

[xoxoxoBruce]

Ever wonder what a certain bird sounds like? The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library claims they have for your listening (and viewing) pleasure, the world's largest archive of wildlife sounds and videos. Go wild!

[Gravdigr]

The Spruce Goose - some assembly required.

[Gravdigr]

Weirdest Laws From Each State

[xoxoxoBruce]

Some of those laws don't seem that weird, like salvaging road kill.

[Gravdigr]

Why The Wingdings Font Exists

[xoxoxoBruce]

Thanks, I wondered what that was about.

[glatt]

http://micro-universe.tumblr.com/

bunch of cool scanning electron microscope images

[xoxoxoBruce]

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for 2015.
The winner is Dr Joel Phillips of West Trenton, New Jersey. An Alabama native, Joel teaches music theory and composition at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey.

This is the winning entry, but the others are well worth reading.

[xoxoxoBruce]

VOX has an article entitled, "Tech nerds are smart. But they can't seem to get their heads around politics". The first part sings the praises of Tim Urban's WAIT BUT WHY, for digging deep into, and explaining in plain English, subjects many people are fuzzy about.

In the majority of the article, David Roberts, explains why he thinks Urban, like many tech nerds, get politics wrong, when not shunning it in disgust. He goes on with his explanation of why Congress is gridlocked, and his reasoning is far beyond money. He explains how the roots, trunk, and branches of American politics, grew to the tangle it is today.

It sound logical, reaffirms things I knew, dispels some misconceptions I had, and clarified a lot of fuzzy WTFs. You may like it, or not, but I think you'll come away with a clearer picture.

First, independents are not independent. In fact, "independent" may be the second most myth-encrusted, poorly understood phenomenon in US politics. The key thing to understand about independents is that they generally vote like partisans. As political scientist John Sides says:

"They tend to be loyal to their party’s candidate in elections. They tend to have favorable views of many political figures in their party. They are not much more likely to identify as ideologically moderate. To be sure, independent leaners are not as partisan as the strongest partisans. But they resemble weaker partisans much more than they do real independents. In actuality, real independents make up just over 10 percent of Americans, and a small fraction of Americans who actually vote."

Second, the most myth-encrusted phenomenon in US politics is the "moderate." The popular conception of moderates is that they gravitate toward the political center, splitting the difference between the mainstream positions of the two parties.

If that's a moderate, then America doesn't have many of those either. In fact, the relative prevalence of moderates in popular polling is almost certainly a statistical artifact. A voter with one extreme conservative opinion (round up and expel all illegal immigrants immediately) and one extreme liberal opinion (institute a 100 percent tax on wealth over a million dollars) will be marked, for the purposes of polling, as a moderate. What's really being measured is heterogeneity of opinion, not centrism. In fact, most moderates have at least one opinion that is well outside the mainstream of either party.

[Happy Monkey]

How would someone be classified if they don't care about the candidate's positions at all? ie, just vote against the incumbent; just vote to split congress/president; just vote on personality? Is that independent or moderate?

[xoxoxoBruce]

He addresses that.

[Happy Monkey]

Sort of; I guess they would be "independent"; but the relevant paragraph was about super-rational voting, by people who pick without regard to party. I read that as caring only about issues, and how the issues happened to lay out at the time (as in, right now I consider issue X is most important, I agree most with candidate Y on issue X, so I vote for Y). It doesn't quite line up with people who are apathetic about issues, but they probably would fall into the "independent" bucket anyway.

[Lamplighter]

Quite a few GOP voters have drunk the purple Koolade

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...rn-us-cruz-was

[Undertoad]

The notion that every concept has to be on a left-right line, with everyone falling exactly one place on the line and all reasoning being a debate between one side or the other... is some serious bullshit once you stop and think about it

Our educational system, our media, our entire society wants to push every single goddamn thing under the sun into this continuum. Except that almost no actual issue works that way; and people's ideas don't even work this way. The only thing this represents now is a rough divide of some forms of schools of thought. Not even philosophies, just groups of people who use mob behavior and group-think to decide how they should describe the world and its problems, that's our continuum.

Should we use that to decide on anything in the world?

I fail to buy into the author's worship of this continuum, and as a result I just want to kick him squarely in the nuts. Yawn, another Vox article that "explains" how if you are very smart you will agree with the author.