Interesting Links for 15-06-2014

• HBO exec: “Belfast is not the most cosmopolitan of cities to spend half of the year.” (For once, read the comments)
  (tags: hbo Belfast cities vianwhyte )
• Edinburgh Tram extension may well become a financial necessity
  (tags: Edinburgh trams )
• US Navy: Converting Seawater Into Fuel a 'Game-Changer'
  (tags: water fuel navy USA )
• On political positioning and the ever-decreasing trust in politicians
  (tags: politics UK )
• Animated Mean Centers of Population: 1790 to 2010
  (tags: visualisation usa history census )

I am more popular than George R R Martin

pic via james_nicoll, and preseved for my grandchildren :->

(It's the daily figure, so presumably GRRM got less than 1500 views and 501 visitors yesterday. Mostly I float around 300 visitors, so yesterday was high enough to get me over a day when George hadn't posted anything for four days.)

Yesterday's Football post - an apology for lack of clarity

Lessons I have learned #75336: Either give multiple examples, or none at all.

Yesterday I wrote this post, decrying people who were mean about football.

I used the most recent example I'd seen, but wasn't clear about the context, or that this was just one example, and this led to a bunch of people, quite rightly, saying that this wasn't a great example.

What I hadn't made clear was that this was the tip of the iceberg. That I'd laughed at that episode, in context, at the time. That I agree that football can feel oppressive when it washes over the whole country/world at once. And that my unhappiness wasn't with the people who had posted this because it highlighted how they felt, or the people who had just retweeted this one thing, but the waves of anger I was seeing towards the sheer existence of football, and the people who love it.

Over one Twitter here someone else said it well:

To the: 'I hope England lose so you'll all eff off' brigade...
If I came here screaming: 'I hope game of thrones gets cancelled so you'd all shut up,' you'd all think I was nasty ad needlessly vitriolic.
And most of you saying these things are the kind of people who'd hate having it said to them. Why do you do it? Why do you get a kick out of lampooning your friends' passion. That's the worst thing. There's nothing redeeming about it. It's lame, embarrassing, and mean.
You get that people passionate about a thing, stood next to you who's passionate about making them feel bad, you look like the arse, right?

Because _that_ is what I've seen a lot of - far more than I've seen posts about Football, I'd seen people upset at the sheer existence of football. People making blanket statements about all football players, and about all football fans. General hostility to the fact that football is so popular, and that this meant that something was wrong with the world. And I really don't like that. I think it's unhealthy, and I think it breeds a lack of respect that makes things worse for all of us.

But I chose a bad example, I didn't make that clear, and I should have done. I'll try harder next time!

On personality differences between different political groupings

More for my own interests, so I can find it later when I want it:

We found that libertarians tend to look more like liberals than like conservaatives on most measures of personality. For example, both groups score higher than conservatives on openness to experience, and lower on disgust sensitivity and conscientiousness. Where libertarians diverge from liberals most sharply is on … the Care foundation, where they score very low (even lower than conservatives).

From The Righteous Mind, quote via, which has much more.

Anyone read it? I'm tempted to pick up a copy.