17 year cicadas and Illinois politics

Item #1: Roland Burris is on tape offering a check to Governor Blago. He says he did nothing wrong because he didn't actually deliver the check.

Item #2: Our "reform" governor Pat Quinn offers to meet with people at dinners -- if they pay $15,000 to meet with him.

Item #3: 17 year cicadas have few natural defenses, but survive and prosper because they overwhelm those who would otherwise eat them -- the birds wander around, satiated and unable to eat another cicada.

This is the Illinois politicians hope -- Patrick Fitzgerald can indict and convict everyone. Most of them will survive.

Cro-Magnon needles

Charles Wm. Dimmick writes:

> Amazingly enough, some anthropologists believe that
> the rapid spread of Cro-Magnon culture into Europe
> is related both to the development of complex speech
> patterns and the invention of the sewing needle, both
> occurring about 40,000 years ago.

That's a very interesting speculation.

At that time, I would guess we are talking about needles made out of bone. But Charles adds more:

> Or antler. An important Cro-Magnon invention was the
> ability to groove and split antler to make long straight
> splinters that could then be shaped into spear points
> [especially barbed harpoon-like points] and sewing
> needles.

and Peter Boulding continues today's lesson on Cro-Magnon man:

It's pretty amazing what Mr C M M managed to use antlers for. I've seen a trench eighteen inches wide and four feet deep cut into solid chalk, running in a 100-foot diameter circle round the top of one of those dome-shaped Dorset hills, that was dug entirely with pieces of antler; no sign of flint tools. The trench was the foundation of a wooden henge: at three-foot intervals there were foot-deep round holes in the base of the trench for the telegraph pole-sized wooden uprights. The henge, whose purpose is unknown, took two generations to build; four generations later the entire structure was very deliberately burned down: again, we have no idea why, but it's not that simple to turn that many telegraph poles into charcoal, not when they're buried five feet deep in tightly-packed chalk infill.

Although Peter needed to clarify, in response to this objection:
> I didn't know that any of the henges, wood or stone, were CMM. Are
> you sure?

No, you're right: I was using "CMM" to indicate what archaeologists and anthropologists nowadays call simply "modern man"--i.e. CMM and everyone descended from him; we used to refer to ourselves as CMM to merely to distinguish ourselves from the Neanderthals we supplanted. AFAIK no known henges are anything like 10,000+ years old; the one I referred to was onlyabout a third of that age.

So ends today's Anthopology lesson.

Fishing thought for the day

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Improve the technology of fishing, continue to treat fishing grounds as a commons, and collapse the ecosystem.

Taxpayer dollars at work

the Illinois Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled against the Wheaton Warrenville school board for claiming it would be an invasion of its superintendent's privacy to publicly disclose his employment contract.

So what? Well, here's the interesting angle:

It cost school district's taxpayers more than $62,000 in legal bills to fight the case.

Quotes above from the Trib.

Are women less happy?

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers report:

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men.

Interesting to see other bloggers (better known ones than I) commenting.

Gregory Mankiw notes:

"It sounds like either the women's movement was a mistake or subjective happiness is not the right objective."

Andrew Gelman notes:

"If I were Betsey Stevenson, I might be a little unhappy that Mankiw referred to the authors unalphabetically as Wolfers and Stevenson!" and more substantively "I think he's right that subjective happiness is not an "objective." "

But if happiness isn't the objective, what is? Well, there are things larger than ourselves, and larger than our own happiness.

I don't know that one would expect people to be especially happy during a transition time -- e.g. a transition involving changes and a lack of clarity of what a "woman's role" is, or whether that term is even meaningful.

One might speculate about the happiness of freed slaves in the decades after the Civil War, although there probably isn't any quantitative data.

More recent examples of large societal transformations might involve eastern Europe, China, etc. which might have data.

Pole of Inaccessibility

Today's fun term is  "Pole of Inaccessibility."

 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility

 

"A pole of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach owing to its remoteness from geographical features which could provide access. The term describes a geographic construct, not an actual physical phenomenon, and is of interest mostly to explorers."

 

"In North America, the continental pole of inaccessibility is in southwest South Dakota (43°26′N 102°23′W / 43.433°N 102.383°W / 43.433; -102.383 (Continental Pole of Inaccessibility in North America))"    I would have guessed North Dakota, but close enough.

 

Another way to look at your job

It's not just a job; it's becoming a millionaire on the installment plan.

 

http://www.chron.com/apps/comics/showComick.mpl?date=20090520&name=Bizarro

 

Greatest thing since when?

On AFCA, Les speculates about sliced bread:

"W.E. Long, who promoted the Holsum Bread brand, used
by various independent bakers around the country, pioneered and
promoted the packaging of sliced bread beginning in 1928. In 1930
Wonder Bread, first sold in 1925, started marketing sliced bread
nationwide." [source: Wikipedia]

So, sliced bread comes AFTER the automobile, the airplane and the radio, and only a few years before jet airplanes, rockets, the atom bomb, and the first computers.

WolframAlpha prepares to advance human knowledge

Why should you care? Take a look and be amazed.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Wolfram published a paper on particle physics at age 15, and runs the company that produces Mathematica software. Is this the next big thing? I don't know, but the introduction suggests that it may be wonderful in the same way Wikipedia is wonderful.

At any rate, the intro is certainly worth a look.

More on "n" as a male name marker

Perhaps we are seeing the emergence of a linguistic marker -- but I know little of linguistics.

Consider the top of the male last letter frequency distribution in 2006:
Last letter % of Males
n 35.3%
r 8.9%
l 7.7%
s 7.2%
e 6.7%

Now look at the same distribution for female last letter frequency in 2006:
Last letter % of Females
a 40.0%
e 17.8%
n 13.5%
y 13.3%
h 6.5%

(The last column counts each name on the 1000 list equally.) Note that the "n" frequency for boys is about the same order of magnitude as the "a" frequency for girls.

So perhaps we are culturally evolving to that letter becoming a marker of the child's sex.

There's also more here on Andrew Gelman's blog.

Males names: the "n" word

Over at Baby Name Wizard, there's a fascinating comparison of the last letter of male first names.

Laura shows that, over time, these have been changing so that a huge number of them end with "n": this doesn't show up in the 1906 or 1956 data, but is a gigantic effect by 2006 -- 35% of males born in 2006 have first names which end in "n", with the next letter, "r", at 9%.

I got curious (or I'm procrastinating; take your pick). The data are readily available at the social security administration site
http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/popularnames.cgi
and 2006 does indeed show the effect Laura indicates.

Interestingly, of the top 10 names only Ethan (#4) has the final n. But lower down we get to long strings in the rankings:
19 John
20 Logan
21 Christian
22 Jonathan
23 Nathan
24 Benjamin
25 (Samuel)
26 Dylan
27 Brandon
...
35 Jackson
36 (Jack)
37 Kevin
38 Gavin
39 Mason
40 (Isaiah)
41 Austin
42 Evan
43 (Luke)
44 Aidan
45 Justin
46 Jordan
47 (Robert)
48 (Isaac)
49 Jayden
50 Landon
...
222 Camden
223 Dillon
224 Braxton
225 Clayton
226 Keegan
227 Jalen
228 Ruben

Economics joker

There's nothing funny about the economy now, but there is a funny economist:

Yankee madness

This entire item is from phil.mushnick at the New York Post. Admittedly, the new Yankee Stadium opens at the wrong time, at an economic downturn, but you wonder how this was ever supposed to work:

“Reader Gary Cicio, NYC podiatrist, did the research, and asks us to choose one of the two options to see a Mariners-Yankees game this season, and from the very best seats:

“Option 1: Two tickets to Tuesday night, June 30, Mariners at Yanks, cost for just the tickets, $5,000.

“Option 2: Two round-trip airline tickets to Seattle, Friday, Aug. 14, return Sunday the 16th, rental car for three days, two-night double occupancy stay in four-star hotel, two top tickets to both the Saturday and Sunday Yanks-Mariners games, two best-restaurant-in-town dinners for two. Total cost, $2,800. Plus-frequent flyer miles.”

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05082009/sports/moresports/kay_shills_as_fans_get_oaked_168207.htm?page=0

 

You can learn a lot from garbage

A lot of sources are listed in this online poll. My first thought was "paper in the trash" when I saw "Refuse" as the last entry.

36,000 ordinary flu deaths each year?

That 36,000 number gets a lot of press these days, but where does it come from?

There's a really nice explanation of it on Effect Measure

Net: there's no straightforward way to do a count, the 36,000 number is just an estimate (based on multiple ways of estimating), and in any event that number varies a lot from year to year. There's more, but I will refer you to the link above.

Interestingly, one of the main methods is Serfling's method. This bears a striking similarity to the measures used to assess the success of sales promotions.