Regruntled.com

Evil Mad Scientist has everything you wanted to know about toast art, from Hello Kitty toasters to freehand art with a “hot air brush”.

According to a recent study, half of all doctors routinely prescribe placebos, and half don’t.  The placebo effect is well-known.  Placebos work, and they work well enough that trials for new drugs have to be designed  with great care.

I am a consumer of medical services.  Since placebos work, I’m better off with a doctor who will prescribe placebos than with a doctor who won’t.  I can’t come right out and ask for a placebo, because then it’s not a placebo any more, it’s just a sugar pill.

Can I shop around for a doctor who prescribes placebos?  But then I know that whatever he prescribes might be a placebo.  Doesn’t this undermine the effect of real drugs as well as placebos?

How about if I find a doctor who is a really good liar?  Someone I can trust to lie to me convincingly, with my best interests in mind.

It’s an interesting puzzle.  I have to be well-informed to make sure I get the placebo, but the effectiveness of the placebo depends on a certain cluelessness.

Where is PETA when we really need them?  CNN Money has the story.

Reader jde sends this image.  It occurs to me that it represents a blurring of traditional gender roles, which is probably a good thing.  It is at once a doll house and a construction set.

Imagine, if you will, a movie that doesn’t end when it should.  The hero gets the girl, wins the big game, triumphs over his adversary…  and the movie won’t stop.  The audience is uneasy, suspecting a False Ending.  Maybe the villain isn’t really dead, and will pop up out of the bathwater with a big knife like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

And so it is with the Presidential election.  The contest is effectively over, but the ending is eleven days away.  Note that everyone has a vested interest in prolonging the suspense as long as possible:

• McCain: We still have a chance to win, so get out and vote!
• Obama: We could still lose, so get out and vote!
• Media: This could go either way, so keep watching!

All of this suggests a systematic bias towards believing that the contest is closer than it really is.  We’re starting to hear rationalizations to support the bias: polls are inaccurate, Truman vs. Dewey, the Bradley Effect, underpolling of cell phone users, young people won’t turn out, voter fraud, yada yada yada.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.  The systematic bias should show up in McCain’s Intrade odds.  McCain is currently at 13% or so.  Some of that is the delusion of true believers, some is the gambler’s tendency to overpay for long shots, and some is the dramatic bias.  The idea is not to try to separate these, but to point out that the biases are all in the same direction.  Some of the 13% is a realistic estimate of a Black Swan event, but that probability should decline as time runs out, while the psychological and dramatic biases should remain constant.

Step-by-step instructions for making a tetrahedron Halloween costume for your cat.  Seriously.  I would have thought that “crazy cat lady” and “math nerd” were mutually exclusive categories, but apparently not.  This cat is an awfully good sport.

If you look very carefully, there are tiny green faces in the broccoli!  I suppose that makes it off-limits for vegetarians who “won’t eat anything with a face.”  From the bread & honey blog.