WW IV

World War IV has already started.  Wait-- what happened to WW III?  That was the Cold War.  It ended the day the Berlin Wall came down.  Not many shots were fired, but the threat of nuclear exchange haunted everyone.
WW IV is the conflict between religious militants and normal people.  Think of the militants who bombed abortion clinics.  Think of the militants who crashed into the World Trade towers.  It's a Total War in which children and other innocent non-combatants are as much at risk as anyone else, if not actually chosen targets.
I suppose I got into this frame of mind by thinking that WW IV started on 11-9-2001, but before that, militants set off bombs in a great many countries, so when did it all start?  Hmm, the Inquisition counts as a series of attacks by religious militants.  Hmm, there were attacks on Ahkenaten around 1338 B.C.  I guess this is really WW 0, since it goes back so many thousands of years.
Will it ever end?  Since humans are unhappy with explanations of the unknown that do not involve human-like agents, probably not until a successor to homo sapiens has populated the planet.

Ornate, en route

Every time I go to Italy, or any country with a 3000-year heritage, I am blown away by the intricate and exquisite beauty of the frescos, mosaics, carvings, sculptures, etc.,  It does occur to me that a 3D printer can provide such adornments for anyone's home these days.  How long before we are all swimming in baroque?

Icons are not significant

I have recently realized that most religious symbols have little or no significance.  When one travels around the USA, one sees pictures of George Washington everywhere, the Lord of America’s civic religion.  In England, one sees the Queen everywhere.  In Myanmar, Buddha.  In Italy, the Madonna.  As a youngster, you assume these icons are significant.  As you mature, you begin to understand that people merely want a familiar icon.  A familiar icon marks a part of the world as being safe, or at least less disturbing.  A picture of the Queen does not signify that the owner is a monarchist.  A statue of Buddha does not signify that the owner is Buddhist.  An image of the Madonna does not signify that the owner is Catholic.

I used to think that these icons were an obstacle to peace: threatening signs of us versus them conflicts that could escalate to war.  Now I know they are no more significant than a photo of one’s cousins, easily overlooked when a strange neighbor comes offering friendship.

Why you should read Kahneman

Nicholas Epley

Professor of Behavioral Science, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business

Essential Ingredients
Kahneman's influence was to provide the essential ingredients for all of my work: a problem, and possible solutions. The problem was that people's beliefs, judgments, and choices are routinely "wrong." They may wrong because they disagree with a statistical principle, a rational principle, reality, or some combination of all three. The solution is that people beliefs, judgments, and choices are not guided simply by statistics, rationality, or reality, but instead are guided by generally intelligent, but imperfect, psychological processes that take hard problems and convert them to easy problems that normal human beings can solve. If you understand these processes that guide intuitive judgment, then you can understand why perception and reality diverge.
By extending Kahneman's problem as well as his ideas about its solution, I have built a career trying to understand how otherwise brilliant human beings can be so routinely "wrong" in their beliefs and judgments about each other. Why do people overestimate how often others agree with them? Why are people sometimes less accurate predicting their own future behavior than predicting others' behavior? Why do people overestimate how harshly they will be judged for an embarrassing blunder? Why do liberals think conservatives have more extreme views than conservatives actually do? The list of such cases where our social thinking goes wrong is long, but it is Kahneman's influence that runs through its entire length.
Asking how Kahneman's work has influenced my own is a bit like asking a doctor how oxygen influences life. My work wouldn't exist without him.

Worth reading: about Kahneman

http://edge.org/conversation/on-kahneman

Driver = a machine that controls a vehicle

Just as the word "computer" was used for 200 years to mean "a person who computes" and now refers to a machine that computes, we can soon expect the word "driver" to refer to a machine that drives, and in another 100 years, people will have trouble believing that people used to drive.

The beauty of zipper merging, or why you should drive ruder

by Sam Machkovech - July 24 2014

Of all of the reasons for traffic snarls, impending lane closures bring out a particularly brutal combination of road rage and etiquette confusion. Most drivers know the pain of approaching two lanes in this situation; the left one is backed up much further because the right one will close in less than a mile thanks to, say, construction.
Which lane should a driver pick in this scenario? Steer to the left as soon as you see a closure notice and you'll almost certainly go slower; stay in the right and you'll catch stink-eye, honks, and even swerving drivers. Everyone is upset that you're about to essentially cut in line—an act that will require a tense, last-minute merge of your own.
Most driving schools and transportation departments in the United States don't instruct drivers on how to handle this situation or whether they must merge within a certain mileage, leaving this kind of merge up to the grace of your fellow, angry commuters. This week, however, Washington state joined Minnesota in sending a clear message to drivers: merge rudely. It's actually faster and safer.

There's a name for it: late merging, though advocates prefer the term "zipper merging" because it doesn't have a negative connotation. According to Ken Johnson, a Minnesota State Work Zone, Pavement Marking, and Traffic Devices engineer, "We want people to merge at the point we’re asking them to, so it’s not 'late,' per se."It works as follows: in the event of an impending lane closure, drivers should fill in both lanes in equal measure. Within a few car lengths of a lane ending, both lanes' cars should take turns filling in the open lane and resuming full speed.
If roads are clear enough that everyone is already driving close to the speed limit, zipper merging isn't as effective, but in the case of congestion, Johnson said that this method reduces backups by a whopping 40 percent on average, since both lanes approach the merge with equal stake in maintaining speed. "When the queue backup is reduced, the access points behind a work zone, like signals or ways to get on and off the freeway, those aren’t blocked," Johnson pointed out. "People have a better opportunity to get off or on the system at that point.
"I’ve been amazed at how consistent the flow is," Johnson added. "You don’t have to put your foot on the brake at all. You just coast ahead and take turns at the merge point."
The state of Minnesota began openly advertising the zipper merge in the early 2000s, even including its description in the state's driver's manual, but the measure didn't begin to widely catch on until a few years ago, thanks to a state-wide advertising campaign in both traditional and online platforms. Now Washington state has followed suit to encourage zipper merging as the result of highly publicized construction zones, particularly on bridges that connect Seattle to many tech offices (including Microsoft's campuses) in Bellevue and Redmond.
"There can be a weird idea going through people's heads of, like, 'Oh, these people are cheating, cutting in line!'" Washington State Department of Transportation representative Travis Phelps said to public radio station KUOW on Tuesday. "Well, it actually lets traffic flow if you can let folks in. Play nice. Treat traffic like a team sport. You gotta play the assist role. It's gonna help lessen the backups."
Washington state has a ways to go to catch up to Minnesota's efforts, however. In particular, the Minnesota Department of Transportation has added sensors to key roads; when they recognize pile-ups and congestions, electronic signs turn on and tell drivers to fill both lanes and merge at a later point.
Johnson said that electronic, conditional signs have proven more effective than static ones, and he pointed to a study from 2010 which revealed that 80 percent of Minnesota drivers still considered themselves "early mergers." An advertising and public outreach campaign followed, and a follow-up study in 2012 showed a massive turnaround in thinking in which 73 percent of respondents thought zipper merging was a good idea after all. ("When we were starting the campaign," Johnson added, "we worked with an east coast advertising firm who said, 'Wait, you have people who voluntarily leave a lane?'")
The zipper's catch, of course, is that every driver on the road has to be aware of, and believe in, the style of merging before it reaches maximum efficiency. So long as enough drivers don't fill both lanes or intentionally block the soon-to-end lane in the form of vigilante car justice, the concept still has to contend with confusion, whether from out-of-town travelers or oblivious commuters.
"People have learned that it's polite to move over sooner," Johnson said, and that fact means his research and tweaking will continue for years to come to get his state—and hopefully others, as he's been consulted by other transportation departments—into a zipper-merging mindset. He encouraged other states to join in and advised them to try things like updated driver's manuals, public outreach campaigns, and partnerships with local law enforcement to stop lane-blockers.
This early on, at least, the results are clear enough for other states to take notice. The state's congestion reduction is easily measurable, and while crash reports can't be easily pinned to zipper-merging zones, Johnson is confident that "when both lanes travel at the same speed, we have fewer crashes across the board."

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An online comment:
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Snark218Wise, Aged Ars Veteran 2 days ago 
I've driven a lot of places - the US, western Europe, India and Nepal, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil. And every place has its oddities. But the very oddest part of driving in the US is how personal Americans make driving. The shitstorm of anger, jealousy, indignation, impatience, naked aggression, and fuming rage that I see being acted out on the roads here daily is remarkable. And it's because everybody thinks it's all about them. Letting somebody pass is "catering to them," and they're a random jerk. Letting somebody in to merge is only permissible if they're adequately virtuous and have suffered the same delays you did. Anybody slower is holding you, personally, back, and they're a jackass. But it's always about you, the driver, the protagonist of the story.
It's not about you. Grow up.
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My comments:
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(1) No one seems to have thought about the simplest remedy: instead of putting up a merge sign, put up a half-mile of fence between the two lanes so no one can merge until the merge point.
(2) Anyone who has ever used the Lincoln or Holland Tunnels to get to Manhattan during rush hour knows that you can still assert your turn to merge even when everyone is less than six inches behind the car in front.  It is impossible for the people in the thru lane to drive so close that others cannot merge in.  That is a 12-lane-to-2-lane merge and it works every morning, without excessive gunfire.

We are prisoners of our own device....

When you read advice columns, you find people writing in to ask questions that are trivially dispensed with.  At age 70, none of their questions lack an immediate answer.  One thing that I have learned after decades of life is how to resolve apparent dilemmas.  Most people imprison themselves with fallacious rules.  Life does not work the way you think it does; it is far less structured.  The Eagles had it right when the penned a lyric for Hotel California: we are prisoners of our own device.
You are free!  The cage is unlocked!  Free yourself!