Nautilus Magazine: Why Are US Presidential Elections So Close?

In 2015, a Mississippi state house race ended in a tie, after which the winner was decided by drawing straws. A 2013 mayoral race in the Philippines was deadlocked and resolved with a coin toss. A 2013 legislative election in Austria was decided by a single vote, after wrangling over the validity of a ballot featuring a vulgar cartoon. Heck, I didn’t have to look far to find examples: In 1990, my own uncle lost his bid for Congress by less than 1 percent of the vote. [...]

I plotted the top two popular vote-getters in every U.S. presidential election since 1824, using data from The American Presidency Project. The top two contenders, typically a Democratic and a Republican, but occasionally a Whig, have danced closely around the 50-50 mark for nearly 100 years. Only four times since 1824 has the winner received more than 60 percent of the popular vote. Since 2000, the candidates have been separated by an average of 3.5 points. The median and average separations have been 8.2 and 9.5 points since 1824—a figure skewed upward due to a few outlying and not particularly close races. (The electoral tally doesn’t usually appear so close because the Electoral College tends to magnify differences in the popular vote.) [...]

There are other forces in play that could favor close elections. In congressional (as opposed to presidential) races, winning margins can be driven down by the uniquely American practice of gerrymandering districts. This is a process by which district boundaries are redrawn to the advantage of one political party. In general, parties will want to draw these boundaries so as to give the most seats to their side. But in so doing, giving a candidate with a cushy advantage in a safe district even more votes is essentially wasting those votes. A more efficient way to gerrymander is to create many districts that favor your party by slim (even uncomfortably slim) majorities, so you can rack up more seats with the same number of voters. This, in turn, can create close races when there wouldn’t otherwise have been one.

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CrashCourse: Perspectives on Death: Crash Course Philosophy #17

Today we are talking about death, looking at philosophical approaches from Socrates, Epicurus, and Zhuangzi. We will consider whether it’s logical to fear your own death, or the deaths of your loved ones. Hank also discusses Thomas Nagel, death, and Fear of Missing Out.

The Guardian: God, sex or evolution – why did humans start making art?

Mona (the Museum of Old and New Art) in Tasmania offers some bold and provocative answers. I heard about its latest exhibition, On the Origins of Art, from participant Mat Collishaw, whose art is nothing if not provocative and just the style to suit a museum that seems to want to be the thinking person’s Saatchi Gallery. Collishaw has created a zoetrope sculpture of fluttering hummingbirds to illustrate the theory that early human beings evolved art for the same reason hummingbirds evolved gorgeous feathers and elaborate dances: to seduce the opposite sex. [...]

The sexual display theory is advanced in the Mona exhibition by one of its four curators, the psychologist Geoffrey Miller. The other scientist-curators suggest similarly audacious explanations for the existence of art. Steven Pinker, author of books such as The Blank Slate, shares a hard-headed Darwinian perspective. He suggests that art evolved as a byproduct of other human skills and needs, including conspicuous consumption, and that aesthetic pleasure originates in our practical appreciation of “cues to understandable, safe, productive, nutritious or fertile things in the world”. Brian Boyd, like Miller, thinks art has grown out of the signalling systems that all animals use in mating and the avoidance of danger, while Mark Changizi suggests it reflects our capacity to mimic nature.

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Atlas Obscura: In the Late 1960s, Singapore was Gripped By a Genital Panic

The mass genital shrinking epidemic began in October of 1967. In one case, a 16-year-old male rushed into the General Hospital’s outdoor clinic with his parents close behind. “The boy looked frightened and pale,” as one report described it, “and he was pulling hard on his penis to prevent the organ from disappearing into his abdomen.”

More people followed. Before long the hospitals were flooded with patients. Pork sales plummeted. The Ministry of Primary Production announced that both swine fever and the vaccine were harmless to humans, but the epidemic seemed to accelerate. For seven days it continued, until finally the Singapore Medical Association and the Ministry of Health started appearing on television and radio to announce that suo yang was a purely psychological condition, and that no one had died from it. There was an immediate drop in the number of cases. By November, there were no reports at all.

In the end, a total of 469 cases were recorded, though the real number was certainly higher, since the survey only included Western hospitals and did not account for traditional Chinese doctors. All patients who were interviewed by doctors had heard stories about koro before they experienced it. After the epidemic, the Chinese Physician Association concluded that “the epidemic of Shook Yang was due to fear, rumor mongering, climatic conditions, and imbalance between heart and kidneys….” Meanwhile, a Western-oriented “Koro Study Team,” concluded that koro was “a panic syndrome linked with cultural indoctrination.”

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BBC News: Ukraine crisis: Hackers claim huge Kremlin email breach

Taken together they support the notion that Russia controls the separatist authorities in eastern Ukraine, who have been fighting a war with Kiev since the spring of 2014. [...]

There is an alleged plan for Moscow to provide fuel to the separatist-held regions to deal with shortages.

And there is a list of separatist politicians, which was apparently sent to Mr Surkov's office. The implication is that Russia has a say in who governs separatist-held eastern Ukraine.

Attached to one an email, allegedly sent by the separatist leader Denis Pushilin in January of this year, is a map of Ukraine carved up into three regions. The eastern part is marked as "Novorossiya" (New Russia). The central region is labelled "Malorossiya" (Lesser Russia). [...]

In the words of Eliot Higgins, a British journalist and founder of the website Bellingcat, there is "nothing in there which is individually hugely dramatic". He characterises much of the information leaked so far as "day-to-day boring business".

However, Mr Higgins believes that, taken as a whole, the emails are significant.

"We haven't seen a hack of this type before, showing so much direct linkage between the Kremlin and separatists on the ground."

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