Michael Perkins

I just spent the whole evening listening to ukulele music. If you think of Tiny Tim when you hear the word ukulele, then you need to watch this video.



See Also:
Banjoist Bela Fleck Plays Bach
PROJECT Trio Performs Bach Bourree
Trumpeter Paul Mayes Performs Bach
Blood, Sweat and Tears: God Bless the Child
Billie Holiday sings Fine and Mellow
Chris Botti & Sting perform My Funny Valentine
Renee Fleming and Bill Frisell

The “what should be” never did exist, but people keep
trying to live up to it. There is no “what should be,”
there is only what is.
--Lenny Bruce





See Also:
Chuang-tzu: The Master soars past sun and moon ...
Laugh at the Sky
Jane Hirschfield: The Adamantine Perfection of Desire
Ikkyu: A single night of love ...
The Mind's Worst Disease

This delightful animation by Louis Lefebvre illustrates the "evolution of consciousness" as understood by Advaita Vedanta.



See Also:
With Our Thoughts We Make The World
The Mind's Worst Disease
Chuang-tzu: The Master soars past sun and moon ...
Laugh at the Sky
Jane Hirschfield: The Adamantine Perfection of Desire
Ikkyu: A single night of love ...
The Buddha: Do not believe ...

This video is from a November 14, 2009 concert in Prague celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution (i.e., the 1989 non-violent overthrow of the authoritarian government in Czechoslovakia). Vaclav Havel was guest of honor. Seated next to Havel is former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

I can think of no better way to celebrate this momentous event than with Lou Reed's perfect song and Renee Fleming's perfect voice.



See Also:
Renee Fleming and Bill Frisell
PROJECT Trio Performs Bach Bourree

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely discusses the placebo effect and other examples of how our expectations shape our reality.



See Also:
The Taste of Fine Wine
With Our Thoughts We Make the World

I recently posted a couple of blog entries that included data charts. I initially created these charts in Microsoft Excel and then converted them into images for inclusion in the post. This process was labor intensive, and the result could best be described as embarrassing. Excel is a wonderful tool with a nice charting facility, but it was not intended for the creation of charts for the web. So I decided to explore alternatives. I took a close look at three free web-based data visualization tools. To get a good feel for each tool, I reworked two of my previous blog posts in each tool. Here are my thoughts. 

Tableau Public

Tableau Public is a tool for creating complex, web-based data visualizations. The tool can be used to create highly interactive, multi-chart visualizations with dynamic filtering, highlighting and drill-down capabilities. Though I rarely have use for the more powerful features of Tableau Public, I was attracted to its capabilities for customizing the look-and-feel of charts and for adding text and annotations. However, Tableau Public's powerful set of features comes with a cost in usability. Of the products I reviewed, Tableau Public is by far the most difficult to use. Effective use of the product requires a significant investment of time and effort. It is not for the casual user.

I spent several hours learning the basics of Tableau Public and was able to create some very nice visualizations. Unfortunately, for my purposes, the visualizations have unacceptably slow load times. Though I am happy with the charts I was able to create with Tableau Public, I am not willing to subject my readers to such slow page loads. Tableau Public is a great solution for applications that require sophisticated, interactive visualizations where slow load times can be tolerated. It is not appropriate, however, for the light charting I need for my blog.

To get a feel both for the power of Tableau Public and for the time it takes to load its visualizations, click here to read an old post that includes a sophisticated Tableau Public visualization. 

Many Eyes and Swivel

Many Eyes and Swivel are similar in that they trade power for ease of use. I was able to create decent charts on both of these systems in minutes. Unlike Tableau Public, however, they do not offer a lot of control over the finished product. After spending time with Tableau Public, I was reluctant to give up some its features such as the ability to add text and annotations to charts. I finally decided, however, that for my purposes, the superior productivity and performance of Many Eyes and Swivel outweigh this loss of functionality.

Many Eyes offers more chart types than Swivel, but I found the look and feel of the Swivel charts to be more appealing. The Swivel charts are simple and elegant, and they load very quickly.  They work well in a blog post. Consequently, I selected Swivel as my tool of choice. Click here to view a version of my recent federal spending post that was reworked using Swivel.

In the following TED presentation, Michael Shermer discusses the natural human tendency to see patterns where none exist. He argues that failing to see a pattern that exists is typically more costly than mistakenly seeing a pattern that does not exist. Failing to see a predator, for instance, would have much worse consequences than imagining a predator that does not exist. Consequently, the brain has evolved to err on the side of seeing too many patterns. This tendency leads humans to adopt all sorts of strange beliefs.




See Also:
Seeing Faces
The Whole Problem with the World
Believing Things Which We Know to Be Untrue
Do Not Believe ...
Denialism

In a controversy, the instant we feel anger
we have already ceased striving for the truth
and have begun striving for ourselves.
--The Buddha











See Also:
The Whole Problem with the World
Believing Things Which We Know to Be Untrue
Do Not Believe ...
Denialism

The "explosion" of federal government spending is a hot topic in recent political debate, so I decided to take a close look at the Office of Management and Budget data to get a better understanding of the issue. The chart below shows federal fiscal year outlays from 1940 to 2009. Move your cursor over the line to see the exact numbers for any year.



First, note that the dramatic increase in 2009, relative to the increases in previous years, is due to roughly $345 billion in TARP and stimulus bill expenditures. If we remove these one-time expenses, we get something closer to George W. Bush's original $3.1 trillion 2009 budget. While this is a large number by any measure, it is certainly more in line with the spending increases of previous years.

Even if we look at 2009 as an anomaly, the chart still seems to show explosive growth over the last 40 years. What the chart fails to show, however, is that the U.S. economy has grown at roughly the same rate as federal spending. If we plot federal spending as a percentage of GDP, we get the chart below.



With the exception of the anomalous jump in 2009, federal spending has hovered around 20% of GDP since the early 1950s. Though it went as high as 23.5% during the Reagan years, it fell back below 20% during the Clinton administration. While we can have a legitimate debate about how much of GDP we should invest in the federal government, it is clear that the growth in federal spending as a percentage of our economy as a whole has been relatively flat for the last 60 years.

What has not been flat for the last 60 years is our unwillingness to fund this spending through taxes. The following chart, which plots both outlays and receipts since 1940, shows that with the exception of four years during the Clinton administration, we have been unwilling to properly fund our expenditures. Of course, this is the source of the current $13 trillion U.S. debt.



This table below shows which administration was responsible for each fiscal year budget. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to sort out how well the data conform to the political rhetoric from each side.

President	Fiscal Year Budgets
Franklin Roosevelt (D)	1934 - 1946
Harry Truman (D)	1947 - 1953
Dwight Eisenhower (R)	1954 - 1961
John Kennedy (D)	1962 - 1963
Lyndon Johnson (D)	1964 - 1969
Richard Nixon (R)	1970 - 1974
Gerald Ford (R)	1975 - 1977
Jimmy Carter (D)	1978 - 1981
Ronald Reagan (R)	1982 - 1989
George H. W. Bush (R)	1990 - 1993
Bill Clinton (D)	1994 - 2001
George W. Bush (R)	2002 - 2009

See Also:
Taxes at Lowest Level in 59 Years

Brilliant diva Joss Stone and legendary British guitarist Jeff Beck perform I Put a Spell on You.



See Also:
Blood, Sweat and Tears: God Bless the Child
Billie Holiday sings Fine and Mellow
Chris Botti & Sting perform My Funny Valentine
Renee Fleming and Bill Frisell

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.  Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
--George Orwell (1946)


See Also:
Denialism
Global Warming and Cognitive Dissonance
The Whole Problem with the World
Bertrand Russell

In the following video, Peter Sinclair provides a nice high-level overview of what we know about global warming:



Click here for additional videos and other information about global warming.

See Also:
Global Warming and Cognitive Dissonance
Denialism
Scientists Create First Synthetic Life Form
Beautiful Hubble Images

According to a recent Gallup poll, 74% of liberals but only 30% of conservatives believe that "the effects of global warming are already occurring." This is an interesting statistic because we would not normally expect disagreements of fact to divide along ideological lines. Facts are neither liberal nor conservative. The methods of science are independent of ideology, and the same data are available to both liberals and conservatives.

Note that disagreement about the facts is a different thing altogether from disagreement about what to do about the facts. It is not surprising that liberals and conservatives disagree about what would be an appropriate response to global warming. Liberals are more likely to advocate the regulation of industrial greenhouse gas emissions than conservatives since conservatives are generally opposed to government regulation of business.

So what are we to make of the data that shows an apparent relationship between beliefs about the facts of global warming and political affiliation? Perhaps the best explanation appeals to the notion of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds conflicting beliefs or attitudes. A smoker, for instance, might experience cognitive dissonance that arises from the conflict between his belief that smoking will kill him and his desire to smoke cigarettes. In Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describe this case as follows:

Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn't really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways.

Similarly, a conservative might experience cognitive dissonance arising from the conflict between her belief in global warming and her aversion to regulating business. Just as a smoker can relieve her dissonance by denying that smoking is harmful, a conservative can relieve her dissonance by denying that global warming is happening. Thus, the theory of cognitive dissonance would predict that people's beliefs about global warming would divide along ideological lines.

In general, cognitive dissonance is a universal and powerful motivator. All of us are prone to various forms of self-delusion when our beliefs and attitudes come into conflict. We should all take special note when groups disagree about the facts along ideological lines. In such cases, there is a good chance that one side or the other is motivated more by cognitive dissonance than by good science.

See Also:
Denialism
Scientists Create First Synthetic Life Form
Beautiful Hubble Images