Last night I had a startling revelation apropos to Christmas… Santa Claus is a woman! In Spanish, male Saints are “San” (e.g. San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose) and female saints are “Santa” (Santa Ana, Santa Maria, Santa Anita). Santa Claus therefore is labelled as a female saint.
I’m still not sure why she’s [...]

I feel like I’ve not been keeping Leftfielder as up to date as I would like, and for that I apologize. It feels like the last couple months have been just one emergency after another. And, to add to the delays, Christmas is almost here, and so there likely won’t be a lot [...]

New York city is implementing a polygraph program to try and monitor sex offenders. The sad thing is that if they had spent 10 minutes looking up the psychological literature on polygraphs, they would realize that it doesn’t actually detect lies very well. Polygraphs both false alarm and fail to detect lies with [...]

“All politics is local.”  It’s a classic political dictum, but one that we often choose to ignore, especially with regards to autocratic regimes.  The idea is simple: politicians want, more than anything, to stay in power, and virtually everything that they do while in office is geared toward that end.  Makes perfect sense–except that, when [...]

New York City has decided to ban trans-fat from restaurants. It’s one thing to ban cigarettes - smokers pollute the air around them and force other restaurant patrons and employees to take on health risks and the nasty stench. (Although I have qualms about the government enforcing smoking bans too). But to [...]

As I’ve mentioned before, my alarm clock is set to a talk radio show that’s extremely annoying - it helps me get out of bed quickly. This morning, in the brief time between when the alarm went off and when I managed to hit the ’snooze’ button, I realized that the discussion of the [...]

Scary, scary stuff…

One of the challenges in increasing security is that there is a cost in privacy for doing so. Since both are valuable, it’s tricky to figure out when the cost of privacy is too high for a given security measure. It is my belief that the current proposal of x-rays at aiports crosses [...]