Two months after releasing the iPhone at $600, Apple reduced the price by $200. Early purchasers are outraged, despite the $100 credit Apple subsequently gave them. There were two outraged pleas on The Consumerist, a blog I ordinarily enjoy.

One whiner writes:

In response to the announcement issued yesterday by Mr. Jobs, I would like to know how is it even reasonable to expect that pissed off customers WANT $100 towards more Apple gear? What good does $100 towards new stuff do, if I never plan to shop at Apple again as a result of this greedy stunt? I'm in the tech industry--one could reasonably expect that a new version and a lower price would happen around December, given the holidays and the fact that it's 6 months after the launch. But this week, and a 33% cut? That's outrageous, especially when the standard return policies for most smart retailers are 30, 60 or 90 days...not 14. Apple has just destroyed their brand in my eyes.

I would like to know how this company plans to legitimately address my (and others') concerns--not just pay lip-service and attempt to get us to buy more stuff.

As far as I'm concerned, Apple was under no obligation to provide the $100 credit, for which early buyers should be thankful. Commenters shared my lack of sympathy:

BY CAPTAINCONSUMER

Uh oh, somebody better call the waaaaaaaaambulance.

Look if the prices on these STAYED high or even went up, these same early adopters who defied every warning prices would fall would be GLOATING and CROWING about how they were ahead of the curve and SMART shoppers.

BY YAHONZA

Unbelievable. This whole episode should convince Apple and other companies not to lower their prices so much or so quickly. Nice work, assholes.

BY HOMERJAY

Way to bite the hand that feeds you cool gadgets, douche. Be happy you didn't trade the lease to your car for a Ribwitch.

I was amused by the opening of the June/July 2007 Scientific American Mind article "Seeing the Person in the Patient" by Siri Schubert:

On a Sunday morning in 1963 Theodore Millon woke up in a Pennsylvania hospital. He was in bed at a psychiatric ward shared by 30 patients. One of them thought he was Jesus Christ, another believed he was the pope, and a third claimed he was a corporate CEO who had been hospitalized by mistake. Millon began to fret. "I am wearing a hospital gown like all the other patients," he thought. "Am I really a professor of psychology? Or did I just imagine that?"

Apprehensive, he went to the nurses' station and called the head of the hospital. His anxiety finally eased when the director confirmed that he was, in fact, a clinical psychology professor at Lehigh University and chair of the board of trustees at Allentown State Hospital who was voluntarily spending the weekend in the psychiatric ward....

From an interview of mathematician Christopher Zeeman by Justin Mullins in the July 21, 2007, New Scientist:

Q: You built a world-class mathematics department from scratch at the University of Warwick when it was founded in the 1960s. How?

A: I wrote to the six best topologists in the world asking them to join me. They all said no. So I wrote again saying the other five had agreed, and all replied to say yes.

Scene: Eating sushi

Keith: I once ate some sashimi on top of some sliced radish. I was going to eat the radish afterward, but then I thought: "I don't want to eat that. It's been touching raw fish."

I recently expressed skepticism over specific claims of differences between men's and women's brains, including that women use 20,000 words per day, while men use 7,000. This has now been debunked by Mark Liberman at Language Log in a series of posts:

• < a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003419.html">Neuroscience in the service of sexual stereotypes
• Sex-linked lexical budgets
• Sex and speaking rate

I found out about these posts from the always interesting Mind Hacks blog.

I recently finished reading Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us by Robert Hare. As the title suggests, psychopaths are qualitatively different from other people, literally having no conscience. The book (and another on the subject, The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout) convinced me that this difference really exists. Before that, I assumed that all people who behaved differently from me just had different values or loyalties.

According to Hare, psychopaths have no difficult lying or even contradicting themselves in the same conversation. He gives the following beyond satire examples (pp. 125-127):

When asked if he had ever committed a violent offense, a man serving time for theft answered, "No, but I once had to kill someone."

A woman with a staggering record of fraud, deceit, lies, and broken promises concluded a letter to the parole board with, "I've let a lot of people down....One is only as good as her reputation and name. My word is as good as gold."

A man serving time for armed robbery replied to the testimony of an eyewitness, "He's lying. I wasn't there. I should have blown his fucking head off."

When asked, "Did you actually carry around in your briefcase blank power-of-attorney forms?" his reply was, "No, I didn't carry them around, but I had them in my briefcase, yes."

[Convicted serial killer Elmer Wayne Henley answers an interviewer by saying]: "I'm not a serial killer." The interviewer than says, "You're saying you're not a serial killer now, but you've serially killed." Henley replies, with some exasperation and condescension, "Well, yeah, that's semantics."