Month: May 2012

Jeremy Feist reflects on his early romances:

In sixth grade, I started dating Cassandra Palangavich. Cassandra was pretty, sweet, funny, and had one of those last names that looked like it was spelled by eating a can of alphabet soup and then wiping your ass with a birth certificate. Cassandra was one of my best friends, and we did absolutely everything together. During prom, I once again scrunched up my face and smooshed my puckered mouth against hers. Lo and behold, I felt nothing. The experiment had been repeated, and I ended up with the same results. After the "kiss," we both promised to keep in touch with each other. Neither of us did, but at least we had fun while the time lasted.

Lesson Learned: I was gay.

I'm in that same category. I tried so hard to fall in love with a woman. I was young and sex was not a problem. I could have screwed a tree at that point and gotten off. But there was a moment during sex with my only real girlfriend that I closed my eyes and visualized the hot dude I had showered next to in the gym that day. It was then that I knew it was wrong to do this. This was the real sin: to lie, deceive another person in such an intimate moment. She deserved so much better. If natural law is our guide, it seemed to me unnatural for me to violate how God had made me. Eventually, I told my girlfriend that I was bisexual. She replied with such grace and love I recall it today: "Well, that makes twice as many people for me to be jealous of." We hugged. It ended soon after.

And when she invited me to her wedding years later, I RSVPed yes. And then, on the day, I couldn't do it. I felt the weight of my deception and was ashamed. For me, heterosexual sex felt like an unforgivable betrayal. Gay love, in contrast, felt like love. It eluded me for years, because, I now understand, of the shame that lingered within. But with therapy and prayer, I eventually surrendered to God's will:

In everyone there sleeps   

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make   

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.   

That nothing cures.

I escaped that fate. I thank God every day for it.

Last month, Amir Mizroch profiled Idan Yahya, an Israeli soldier who honed his skills of shooting down missiles by playing the computer game Warcraft III. Kelsey D. Atherton sees the future of war:

In Warcraft III, the player commands an army of AIs, mostly designed for combat, and maneuvers them while protecting his base and attempting to destroy his opponents base.  Games can involve upwards of 90 combatants per player, span large battlefields, feature fog of war, and frequently contain hostile, unaffiliated fighters that provide an additional difficulty.  It’s a radically different thought process than most games, with their focus on guiding a single character, allow.  The intensity of playing [real-time strategy games like Warcraft] can be likened to operating at the speed of the pilots fighting Midway while making the decisions of the Admirals directing it.  Except, of course, that in a game there are no lives on the line. Or at least, that was the case.  What the profile of Idan Yahya demonstrates, and what other writing about UAV pilots hint at, is that we are now approaching an era where that kind of fast-paced thinking directing multiple AIs is part of war.

(Warcraft III screenshot from Blizzard)

Probably not:

The mind is best understood, not as software, but rather as an emergent property of the physical brain. So building an artificial intelligence with the same level of complexity as that of a human intelligence isn’t a matter of  just finding the right algorithms and putting it together. The brain is much more complicated than that, and is very likely simply not amenable to that kind of mathematical reductionism, any more than economic systems are.

Hargeisa, Somaliland, 5.40 am

It's still unclear: 

It’s unclear exactly why [parrots] evolved this capability [for vocal learning], but research suggests they use it to tell members of their group apart from members of rival groups. … According to this theory, birds that are raised in captivity might mimic their human owners as a way of gaining acceptance as a member of the family. If they hear “pretty bird” a lot, they’ll interpret that as a call distinct to their flock, and try making it themselves. If the parrot gets no response when she squawks, but gets lots of attention or treats when she makes humanlike noises, she has an extra incentive to practice forming words and phrases. 

Whether parrots can ever understand what they’re saying is a matter of debate. Researcher Irene Pepperberg trained an African Grey Parrot named Alex to speak with a vocabulary of some 100 human words. Over time, he learned numbers and phrases as well, and when shown a toy, he could correctly identify its name, color, and shape. Skeptics have suggested that Alex’s abilities might have been a product of the “Clever Hans” effect, in which an animal gives correct responses based on its trainer’s body language, as opposed to genuinely understanding the question. 

Krugman tallies it:

If you add up the lost value since the slump began, it comes to some $3 trillion. Given the economy's continuing weakness, that number is set to get a lot bigger. At this point we'll be very lucky if we get away with a cumulative output loss of "only" $5 trillion. These aren't paper losses like the wealth lost when the dot-com or housing bubble collapsed, wealth that was never real in the first place. We're talking here about valuable products that could and should have been manufactured but weren't, wages and profits that could and should have been earned but never materialized. And that's $5 trillion, or $7 trillion, or maybe even more that we'll never get back. The economy will eventually recover, one hopes–but that will, at best, mean getting back to its old trend line, not making up for all the years it spent below that trend line.

I say "at best" advisedly, because there are good reasons to believe that the prolonged weakness of the economy will take a toll on its long-run potential.

Today on the Dish, Andrew reflected further on the evolution of the president (yesterday's NPR segment here, third round of blogger reax here), while gay GOP activists somehow reverted to partisanship and disdain. We sorted through the politics of Obama's historic shift, Andrew owned up to a Von Hoffman nomination, and Bristol Palin stood by traditional marriage. The president sent a signal to the courts and to the Democratic leadership, readers could relate to his "evolution," and the fight for marriage equality is deeply-rooted. It turns out that the pre-election announcement was probably predetermined, and North Carolina was worse than we thought. 

We checked in on the civil unions bill in Colorado, were confronted by sunflowers, and remembered those who didn't live to see the day. Romney exuded caution in response, and his actual position became increasingly unclear. As a high school bully, the presumptive Republican nominee targeted the weak and marginalized, he had a hard time apologizing, and a clear choice emerged between the future or the past. Those on the wrong side of history huddled around an NRO symposium, marriage has been "redefined" before, and in reality marriage equality strengthens marriage. 

Meanwhile, the shrinking of the public sector dampened the recovery, ordinary Americans were fine with deep cuts to defense, the UN mission in Syria didn't stand a chance, and Islamism lost steam in Egypt. It might be a good time for house-hunting, silents are wondrously demanding, occupational licenses are unnecessary, and the obesity epidemic is going to make us pay. 

Ad War Update here, Ask Maggie Anything here, VFYW here, FOTD here, and MHB here. 

— M.A. 

(Photo: Two unidentified men kiss outside the White House gates during a gay pride march on April 25, 1993. Getty Images.)

Matthew Dowd claims not: 

Today, the myth is repeated over and over that Bush beat Kerry in Ohio in part because of the gay marriage initiative on the ballot. The facts and data simply do not support that conclusion. Yes, conservative turnout was up in Ohio by five percentage points. It was also up five percentage points nationally. And if you look at the conservative turnout increase in the 11 states verses the other 39 states that didn’t have gay marriage on the ballot,  the conservative turnout was up exactly the same. Further, if you look at white evangelical and conservative turnout in swing states with gay marriage initiatives versus swing states without them (like Florida, Pennsylvania and Nevada), again, there is no statistical difference in turnout increases among these groups. Yes, that is right, increase in turnout among key conservative groups did not vary between swing states with and without these initiatives on the ballot.