This is what we have the Internets for:

Scylla: I waterboard!
So much talk of waterboarding, so much controversy. But what is it really? How bad? I wanted to write the definitive thread on waterboarding, settle the issue. Torture, or not?

To determine the answer, I knew I had to try it. I looked at my two small children. Surely, in the interests of science?…..

(via Brad DeLong)

Interesting:

The dangers of living in a zero-sum world economy
By Martin Wolf

We live in a positive-sum world economy and have done so for about two centuries. This, I believe, is why democracy has become a political norm, empires have largely vanished, legal slavery and serfdom have disappeared and measures of well-being have risen almost everywhere. What then do I mean by a positive-sum economy? It is one in which everybody can become better off. It is one in which real incomes per head are able to rise indefinitely.

The (filtered, and thus really good) comments have all kinds of views on the issue, from outright doomsayers to optimists who don’t see the current situation as all that different from past environmental crises. Personally, the idea scares me because it sounds plausible. Of course, there are plenty of open questions. I’d like to have a model that gives democracy as the optimal form of organization in the alleged positive-sum world and a different result in a negative sum world, for starters. Then, I’m not convinced that an energy shortage is actually enough to push our current equilibrium into a zero/negative-sum state. I wish I was an economics grad student with time to waste.

A while back, I heard about Hulu, which looked like a kind of commercial content YouTube, offering lots of TV content in a hassle-free way via a flash-based player. I signed up for the private beta, and got my access code yesterday. Once registered, I spent ten minutes trying to find a single video that didn’t lead to the “Unfortunately, this video is not currently accessible in your country or region.” Doesn’t look like the future of television to me, then. Cue repetitive rant: I WANT to pay for content. I don’t want to pay for content that’s overly restricted, months behind release and unusable.

Cringely thinks so. I already feel its dark attraction.

Via MR:

Scientific American: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

Hint: Don’t tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life

Well, yes. This appears to be a good strategy since working hard will mostly improve your outcomes, whatever your innate abilities are (but note that the article doesn’t consider the existence or relative importance of innate abilities).

Me? I’m pretty much a fixed mindset person. I wouldn’t blame my parents (though I was told that I’m smart a lot), but rather the entire system of education that I’ve been slaving in for most of my life – it’s geared towards perfectly doing easy things instead of honorable failure on hard things, probably because it’s much easier to measure correctness of results than quality of effort. This breeds the habit that every problem is solvable, and if it seems hard, you’re doing something wrong (which is threatening, because failure on one of the semi-trivial school problems is a good indicator you’ll never amount to anything in real life).

Also, I’m wary of glorifying effort – stupidly slaving away on a tedious path to a solution is definitely not more praiseworthy than lazily inventing a brillant shortcut. An environment that rewards effort may well encourage pointless displays of busywork instead of much-needed contemplation. I’d feel stupid congratulating my (hypothetical) smart child for the hard work that both of us know wasn’t necessary to earn their grades in school. To actually keep them from falling into smug superiority, I’d try to expose them to enough of the past human greatness to emphasize the point that merely being the smartest kid in your class doesn’t amount to much.

On a related note, here’s David Friedman on home unschooling his kids, which sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Deutsche Grammophon have a newly opened web shop that I like a lot. It serves good, clean 320kbps MP3s, they have a re-download service, and their catalogue is full of amazing music. Downsides? Well, the pricing is a bit steeper than what I’m used to from eMusic or iTunes, but that is at least in part due to the added value of performance by top league artists. Their web site could also use some improvement, but it’s not utterly unusable.

Now, I hope I can subdue my Christmas spirit long enough to refrain from shelling out another 21.99 for a disc of Bach cantatas…