voluntaryXchange

Mormons and Porn

My co-author, Marc Dotson, and I made a presentation today on the internet habits of Utahns.

The method is simple: get a list of popular search terms, run them through Google Trends, and see how often Salt Lake City comes up for different terms.

We're really concerned about porn: is it more likely or less likely to be viewed in Utah. Moralists would say the latter, while sociologists would be inclined to the former (since internet porn could be an outlet for other suppressed behaviors in a heavily religious culture).

We used searches for female celebrities as a proxy for porn searches. This is probably a reasonable instrument, since the top female celebrities market accessible sexuality as part of their celebrity.

It will probably come as a surprise to people outside of Utah that Salt Lake City comes up as very, very normal. Internet users in SLC search for things in just about the same proportions as national averages. As a matter of fact, SLC was one of a handful of really normal cities, along with Minneapolis, Providence, and a few others.

So yeah ... Mormons look at porn ...  and your neighbors probably do to.

Of course, y'all probably want to know who the horn-dogs are. Here goes: New York (Newark too), southern California (LA, Irvine and SD) and big city Texas (Richardson, and Houston).

The venue was SUU's FASSST Conference (Faculty and Students and Support Services Together). This is a two week conference for freshman - and anyone else who is interested - about all the stuff that goes on around a college campus. We were one of a handful presenting research that is done jointly with undergraduates.

3rd Quarter Growth Grade

The advance estimate of real GDP growth for the third quarter was 1.6%.

On my preferred scale, this is the minimum to get a C. A bottom of the barrel C isn't great, but it isn't failing either.

On my scale that corresponds to grades given in colleges these days, last quarter's growth comes up as a B. I think it says a lot about the self-esteem of people these days that the people who complain the loudest about the "poor" performance of the economy are the beneficiaries of the selective applications of easy grading scales to their coursework rather than to the economy around them.

Coolest Picture Ever, Honorable Mention Section

How about a total eclipse of the sun taken by Cassini as it orbits Saturn?

Via TechRepublic and APOD.

Funny Search Engine

What if the girl from the perfume counter at the department store did your searches?

Check out Ms. Dewey.

Skip the intro, but do leave her on for a few minutes. Also, ask normal questions like you're using Ask Jeeves.

Via Langalist.

Are Your Shoes Untied?

A few years ago I had a pair of new sneakers that would not stay tied.

So, I went out and searched the internet for solutions. I came upon Ian's Shoelace Site. I just rediscovered it through DonationCoder.com - a great site for utilities.

If you don't believe the internet has changed the world in a million little ways, then you need to visit Ian's site.

If you don't believe the insight of Romer that nonrivalrous technological improvement is what is making us rich, then you need to visit Ian's site.

OK, I'm done.

Anyway, tunnel down into the site and Ian has a page on why many people have shoes that come untied frequently - they think their bows are square knots when in fact they have tied a granny knot.

He offers a simple check for this problem, and a solution, if you scroll down the page: reverse the order of your laces when you start to tie them.

From age 5 to 38, I tied my shoes by grabbing the two ends of the lace, pulling the left end towards me and slipping it over and around the right end to make a hitch (or crossover).

WRONG!

For me, this was inconsistent with how I tied the rest of the bow. The result was a granny, and shoes that came untied more than those of other folks.

There are many ways to tie knots, and many cool sites with directions, videos and animations of proper technique.

But Ian's site is cooler. He gets the big picture.

Ian's suggestion was that if you're not absolutely sure that you are tying a square knot, then you should reverse the order of the laces on the first step to check. I was damn close to absolutely sure - as a veteran of the boy scouts - but I experimented anyway.

What I found was that, by forcing myself to push the left end of the lace away from me, and looping the right lace over and around it, my shoes stayed tied. I had been tying grannys for decades.

My recommendation is to try out tying one shoe your normal way, and the other shoe with the first step reversed. Keep track of which one works better, and then act to improve your life.

PowerPoint Strikethrough Tips

Did you know that you can't strikethrough text in PowerPoint?

Neither did I until I thought it would be particularly useful for a slide about a month ago. I didn't have time to figure out a workaround.

The Office Letter has now, serendipitously, posted a set of readers tips on how to do a strikethrough in PowerPoint. They're not hard, but they amount to either:

• Do the strikethrough in Word (or Excel) and cut and paste it as a graphic into PowerPoint.
• Use the line drawing tool in PowerPoint to squiggle through the text by hand.
• If your purpose for the strikethrough is to pass on an edit to someone else, use the "track changes" reviewing feature.
• Get the beta of Office 2007, where this feature has been added.

The Problem with Incumbency

I am a reformed politics-nut.

I am not completely on the wagon. I follow politics, and I know the personalities.

As a university employee, I've been getting spam from our Democratic candidate for Senate  - Pete Ashdown - since about 1485. Well maybe not that long, but for over a year, to be sure.

I'm also a Republican for the most part, but I'm not freaky about it. I think Orrin Hatch is pretty good for a Republican, and our quieter Senator - Bob Bennett - I'd go so far as to rate as above average. It helps to know for sure that he was not Deep Throat.

It really shouldn't be surprising if they get re-elected, particularly in Utah.

But, here's the problem. They've got the seats sewn up so tight that until about 10 days ago I didn't know who Ashdown was running against.

Now ... I want to be perfectly clear that maybe I was just being clueless. But I don't think so. It isn't in my nature to be underinformed or unobservant of politics.

Further, when it dawned on me that I didn't know which of our senators was running for re-election, I did start to look around. What I found was that it took me about 3 days of casual looking to find out that the answer to the one question two choice exam was Orrin Hatch.

So, a Republican in a Republican state doesn't know that a Republican Senator is running for re-election less than a month before the big day. That's pretty good evidence that maybe they just shouldn't bother; and that's the problem with incumbency in the U.S. in a nutshell.

FWIW: those who are sure that this is some sort of whacky conspiracy to keep a non-LDS candidate out of office should note that Ashdown is a pretty common Mormon surname.

Pyongyang Is Deterring Us, Not the Other Way Around

Bret Stephens continues to be - IMHO - the most underrated columnist around.

His October 17 piece entitled "Paging Dr. Strangelove" in The Wall Street Journal points out that:

Deterrence loses its force if your adversary believes you will not or cannot respond to his aggression. Several thousand nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal become a military nullity if the political leadership is under no circumstances willing to use them, or at least is perceived to be unwilling. ... By contrast, North Korea's possession of a single deliverable nuclear bomb -- combined with its perceived willingness to use it, even at the risk of national suicide -- means that it is Pyongyang, not Washington, that is exercising deterrence.

Of course, someone already knew that deterrence bred distorted perceptions:

"In spite of our reliance on the idea that deterrence will work, we usually do not analyze carefully the basic concepts behind such a policy," ... "This somewhat lackadaisical interest in bedrock concepts is probably related to a subconscious fear that our foundations cannot stand close examination."

[Herman] Kahn wrote that in 1959 ...

That doesn't matter much when your lazy thinking is something like run first to open up the passing game, but it matters a great deal when someone who willingly starves the people closest to him starts threatening to incinerate those further away.

Read the whole thing.

More SUU Kudos

They weren't even trying, but the admissions website of Southern Utah University was ranked as one of the top 10 in the country.

Spanglish Quote

We watched Spanglish over the weekend. It's not great, but I liked it. If you like having your buttons pushed, you probably will too. Also, Paz Vega was a revelation in the starring role. The film has a few great lines, but this one is going to come in really useful sometime:

Your low self-esteem is just good common sense.

Now I need a good logical inverse of that quote to drop on the occasional student.