Truncated thoughts

A lifetime membership: starting in 2039!

2012-01-28T14:59:00.001-06:00

To celebrate the 175th anniversary of the American Statistical Association, the ASA has a “reverse time capsule” project. Members answer questions forecasting what various aspects of the world will be like in 2039.

The entrants are all professional statisticians willing to pay membership fees, so it’s an elite group. What’s the prize? “When the reverse time capsule is opened in 2039, members with the best guesses will be rewarded with a lifetime membership in the ASA.”

Not much incentive for me. In 2039, I will be 89 years old, if I’m still alive. While I hope to be mentally active at that time, I’m probably not going to be working as a professional statistician. Even if I am, the plausible length of a lifetime membership beginning at age 89 is very short.

What would be interesting would be to do this in reverse: everyone who enters gets a lifetime membership in the ASA starting now. When the time capsule is opened in 2039, those who didn’t win would have to pay up.

More typo irritation

I’m often irritated by simple typos by people who should know better but aren’t paying attention. One of those occurs here. After you give your answer, you can see the answers given so far. But for one question there is a mismatch between the question and the graph of the answers that makes the graph completely ambiguous.

So what is the meaning of the 0-9 bar? Does this mean 0-9% of new automobiles will use only alternative fuels, or does it mean 0-9% will be gas-powered vehicles? Those are opposites, but both answers are reasonable. We can see that either answer is reasonable by noting that the bar for 0-9 is about the same height as the bar for 90-100.

Legally live forever and avoid estate taxes!

2012-01-27T10:01:00.001-06:00

Did you read the good news? It was in hundreds of newspapers on January 27, 2012, in a story by nationally syndicated columnist Scott Adams.

Through a simple process, some of your skin cells can be kept alive forever in a laboratory. So long as any part of your body is alive and functioning, you are still legally alive, and thus can avoid probate, and avoid estate taxes.

Sound incredible? It isn’t. Remember the Supreme Court recently declared that corporations are legally persons and are entitled to spend all they want on political campaigns, so how much more you own living cells?

How does this work?

Here at AmericanSchemes, Inc. we handle everything for you, forever. Just send us a small deposit ($500) and we’ll send you a kit. You will have to gently scrape some of your skin cells off (it won’t hurt!) and send them back to us. Believe it or not, your softest skin is on your buttox cheeks, so those will work better than areas which are more likely to have callouses.

Defending you

This is going to last forever, so you will need someone to manage your assets and defend them against rapacious governments who will try to get around your constitutional rights and seize your assets to finance Ponzi schemes like Social Security. At AmericanSchemes, we will protect you as well as your cultured buttox cells. What’s more, we will do this for only a 1% management fee, which is as low or lower than most other professional money managers. And we do more than they do: for 1%, we protect your ass as well as your assets. And, to insure your assets are protected against those rapacious state and federal governments, AmericanSchemes keeps those assets in the Cayman Islands, just like multi-millionaires like Mitt Romney do.

All that’s required is that you sign the durable power of attorney form AmericanSchemes will send you. No worries that your heirs won’t be as competent at managing your money as you were. We’ll take care of all that.

Utah School Rejects ‘Cougar’ Mascot to Avoid Offending Older Women

2012-01-23T20:33:00.001-06:00

Not from The Onion. From Time magazine.

Mergers get out of hand

2012-01-22T14:54:00.001-06:00

Found on George Takei’s site.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/405608_358395854189874_205344452828349_1336315_638115080_n.jpg

Marketing!

2012-01-22T14:45:00.001-06:00

I was in Target last night to buy some low-end sheets. I found some being discontinued, for $3.88 each, so I’m feeling good as I go by the towel display.

Target had all their grades of towels on display, all in white, with a short blurb on each one. The cheapest bath towel was advertised as their fastest drying towel, and indicated you could save money on your dryer bill by buying them.

Sounded good to me. Only when I’m driving home does the blindingly obvious occur to me: the reason they are the fastest drying towel is because they are thinner.

Of course, that’s why: a thinner towel will obviously dry faster. So, I feel like a bit of a dunce. Still, I think it was a decent price for a towel that seems decently made, so I’m OK with the purchase.

What do these people have in common

2012-01-20T19:19:00.001-06:00

What do I have in common with Florence Nightingale, Alexander Graham Bell, Herman Hollerith, Andrew Carnegie, and President Martin Van Buren?

All of us are/were members of ASA, the American Statistical Association, “the second oldest [170 years], continuously operating professional association in the country.”

http://www.amstat.org/about/history.cfm

Cat names

2012-01-17T08:28:00.001-06:00

I never gave a lot of thought to cat names, but somebody does:

According to Veterinary Pet Insurance Co (VPI) and Petfinder.com, a roundup of the most popular pet names in 2011 saw a new top name for cats, although the trend to use traditionally human names continues.

The top 5 cat names in 2011 were Bella (new winner), Max, Chloe, Oliver and Lucy. Rounding out the top 10 were Shadow, Smokey, Tiger, Charlie and Tigger.

We’ve only had a handful of cats over the last 30 years, but we’ve had a Max (short for Maxwell Housecat) and a Charlie.

Statistics Movies that Never Made it to the Big Screen

2012-01-14T16:13:00.001-06:00

1.    A Regression Line Runs Through It
2.    Against All Odds-Ratios
3.    Alpha Ventura, Stat Detective
4.    American Statistician
5.    An x-bar Is Born
6.    Angels In The Outer Borel-field

and that’s just the”A” section. Too much more at:

http://www.tealdragon.net/humor/lists/statmves.htm

Chicago: Still 2 cities–even more so

2012-01-14T15:29:00.001-06:00

Ed Ziotti has a nice piece on the population changes in Chicago over the last decade, using the Census figures.

Chicago lost population, particularly in the black neighborhoods on the south and west side, which are showing a version of the same emptying-out that affects Detroit and other similar postindustrial cities.

Downtown, there are blue areas that showed substantial growth as housing developments were put in close to downtown. the north side and southwest side also showed growth. These are the higher income areas.

http://chicago.straightdope.com/sdccensus1.php

Four Pinocchios for ‘King of Bain’

2012-01-13T21:35:00.001-06:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/four-pinocchios-for-king-of-bain/2012/01/12/gIQADX8WuP_blog.html

Glenn Kessler gives Newt Gingrich’s PAC it’s “top” rating for lying for its attack ads on Mitt Romney.

I hold no great love for Vulture Capitalists, since I’ve been working for a company that was a failing public company, got bought on the cheap by an smart operator who made another fortune off of it, then sold it to a venture capital firm.

But demonizing Romney for being one of these guys is a bit much. Romney set himself up for this by claiming he knew how to create jobs, which is not at all what such firms do. Their aim is to make money, pure and simple. If jobs are destroyed, so what? If jobs are stripped of benefits, so what? If jobs are created, so what? All that’s beside the point of the venture capitalists making money. Romney was pretty darned good at it, but it doesn’t play well with voters, so he tries to make it look like Bain was some sort of charitable job creation program and he was a capitalist Mother Theresa.

But lying about specific cases is the nature of the Gingrich attack, as clearly laid out in detail by Kessler. If Romney exaggerates, Gingrich lies and distorts.

This isn’t helping.

Potential disclaimers

2012-01-12T08:56:00.001-06:00

Tyler Cowen has a modest ethics proposal:

For anything in the social sciences written by a citizen of China, or by someone with relatives living in China, or by someone working in or for China, there should be a disclaimer on the publication: “Produced under conditions of censorship and threat of career penalty.” I don’t favor actually doing that, but the absence of this idea from the debate is itself revealing.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/01/demystifying-the-chinese-economy.html

We could probably extend this idea far beyond China to other countries. (Remember Salmon Rushdie?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie#The_Satanic_Verses_and_the_fatw.C4.81

And, lest we forget, there’s a variety of self-editing that occurs when writing about issues related to one’s employer or one’s clients.

It’s not really practical to do all these basic disclaimers, of course. And some of the existing disclaimers may not have the desired effect, particularly ones pointing out that this or that is owned by News Corp, which also owns the Wall Street Journal. While this is the required and ethical disclaimer, it also sounds a bit like a product endorsement by the Wall Street Journal.

Strange financial news

2012-01-10T20:13:00.001-06:00

#1: Negative bond yields

Today’s WSJ notes “Investors agreed to pay the German government for the privilege of lending it money.” That’s right – yields are below zero.

This has happened in various safe haven currencies several times since 2009. The Journal mentions the US, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Evidently, the money has to be invested somewhere, and who wants to invest in Greece or Italy?

#2: Bonds more profitable than stocks over 30 years

Yesterday’s WSJ looked at 30 year returns for long term Treasury bonds versus the S&P 500. By 30 year returns, we mean that in 1956 we are looking at investing in 1927 and then redeeming in 1956, or investing in 1982 and redeeming in 2011. They are then reporting all these overlapping 30 year periods from 1956 to 2011.

There is only ONE of these 30 year periods in which T-bills were the better investment. That’s the period ending in 2011. Paradoxically, this means bonds are probably a bad investment now.

Bonds did so well because yields declined from the dizzy heights of the early 1980’s (when I got CD’s at 14%!) to the practically zero yields of 2011. But there’s no further decline in interest rates to be had. If (when?) inflation comes back, there will be a great decline in the value of bonds – or if people lose confidence in the country’s bonds, as is happening with Italy and Greece now.

So, what about that common advice to those near retirement to put more money in bonds each year and less in stocks? The advice is likely to be a good way to have your principal decline. Better to put that “safe” money in CD’s that pay almost nothing but have their principal insured.

#3: The great stock selloff

The third bit of information is that investors pulled out $115 billion more from US stock mutual funds than they put in last year – about $43 billion out of variable annuities and about $71 billion out of other mutual funds. More billions were withdrawn from international funds.

Some of this went to exchange traded funds (ETFs), which rose $37 billion. And some went into bond funds ($52 billion).

So why the decline? It could be those pesky baby boomers again. The great stock boom in the 1990’s and early 2000’s occurred as baby boomers invested in retirement. But now they are retiring (voluntarily or involuntarily) and will become net sellers of stocks for the next 30 years or so.

With the large baby boomers as net sellers, and with their children burdened by student loan debt and a lack of home equity, who’s going to be on the buy side of transactions? Maybe not enough people to keep the market growing.

#4 So what to do?

Haven’t figured that out yet. This might be a good time to invest in real estate if I knew anything about it, but I don’t.

Want to go on a record-breaking bicycle ride?

2012-01-08T20:13:00.001-06:00

See link for a bike that plays records as it goes….

http://www.dezeenscreen.com/2012/01/05/dezeen-platform-feats-per-minute/

The moral delusion of the politically religious

2012-01-08T12:01:00.001-06:00

I read Steve Chapman’s op-ed piece “Rich Santorum’s Moral Delusion” in the Chicago Tribune just after returning from church this morning, and I think it’s an important piece not just about Rick Santorum but about the effect of religion in general.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-oped-0108-chapman-20120108,0,6317818.column

A couple of paragraphs:

Consider homicide, which is not only socially harmful but a violation of one of the Ten Commandments. Mississippi has the highest rate of church attendance in America, according to a Gallup survey, with 63 percent of people saying they go to church "weekly or almost weekly." But Mississippians are far more likely to be murdered than other Americans.

On the other hand, we have Vermont, where people are the most likely to skip church. Its murder rate is only about one-fourth as high as the rest of the country. New Hampshire, the second-least religious state, has the lowest murder rate.

These are no flukes. Of the 10 states with the most worshippers, all but one have higher than average homicide rates. Of the 11 states with the lowest church attendance, by contrast, 10 have low homicide rates.

Chapman also cites the familiar statistics showing that states which allow gay marriage often tend to have less divorce and teen pregnancy than other states – so much for gay rights undermining the family structure.

What impact does gay marriage have on how kids handle sex? Massachusetts, the first state to legalize it, has less teen pregnancy than the country as a whole. Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire and Vermont, which have also sanctioned same-sex unions, are also far better than average.

Does gay marriage undermine the health and stability of heterosexual marriage? Not so you can tell. Massachusetts has the nation's lowest divorce rate. Iowa and Connecticut are also better than most. Vermont and New Hampshire are about average. In the Bible Belt, by contrast, marriages are generally more prone to break up.

So is religion a sham? No, but religion does tend to make you think that you perhaps know better than others. An appropriate parable for all of us is the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector:

Luke 18:9-14

New International Version (NIV)

The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector
⁹ To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: ¹⁰ “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹ The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. ¹² I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
¹³ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

¹⁴ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+18%3A9-14&version=NIV

Thought for the day

2012-01-05T23:58:00.001-06:00

“…although Spain is hardly an intellectual superpower, it translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years.”

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science

I don’t know. A thousand years? Still let’s suppose it’s even just one year – that’s still incredible.

Not much hope for me, then.

2012-01-04T22:05:00.001-06:00

No, this is NOT from The Onion.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/04/stephen-hawking-women-complete-mystery

Organic: bad for the environment?

2011-12-31T13:35:00.001-06:00

It was perhaps inevitable that when organic produce became more popular, industrial farming would figure out how to exploit the price differential – while actually harming the environment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/science/earth/questions-about-organic-produce-and-sustainability.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

The article focuses on imported Mexican organic produce, but it’s only a short jump to see that this sort of “letter of the law” organic is probably common among US organic farms as well.

Blood pressure

2011-12-29T04:20:00.003-06:00

This year I have developed high blood pressure. Medication has helped, but it's been a bit unusual to have consecutive readings with both systolic and diastolic pressure in the normal range.

Until this week. So what's special about this week? (1) I'm not working much. Nominally, I'm not working at all, but I am checking the occasional email and responding to things that need to keep moving. (2) I'm doing more bike rides. (3) I'm drinking less coffee.

We'll try to sort out the causality more as 2012 starts!

Corrupt government <> Big government

2011-12-28T15:13:00.001-06:00

I’m lifting this post from a comment made by “kiwi dave” on the Marginal Revolution site, just because I found it so interesting.

kiwi dave December 27, 2011 at 10:03 am

According to the recently-released Corruption Perceptions Index study from Transparacy International covering 2010, four of the ten least-corrupt countries were Nordic (Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway) and all have comparatively large governments in Government spending/GDP terms (i,e, over 45% – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#Government_spending_as_a_percentage_of_GDP) — however, the other five all have much lower government spending — Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland and Singapore – the latter three of which have significantly lower government spending/GDP than the US (34, 32 and 17 respectively, versus almost 39 for the US). New Zealand and Singapore came first equal, higher than any Nordic country other than Denmark. So there doesn’t appear to be any obvious relationship between size of government and corruption. Three points to note, though:

1. tax/spending as a proportion of GDP is only one way to look at the size of government, and probably not the most accurate (albeit the most convenient); a truer picture would take into regulatory burden, intrusive bureaucracy, market distorting rules etc. This stuff cannot be easily quantified, although, from the anecdotal evidence I’ve heard, the Nordic and Benelux countries have comparatively “small” governments in that sense, despite having large welfare states.

2. even if there is no (or a negative) relationship between size of government and corruption, the same level of corruption in a country with a bigger government will still have a bigger effect, ceteris parabus, than in a country with a smaller government. In a sense, it was irrelevant how dirty the 19th Century US Federal government was because it was so tiny. Whereas even a low level of corruption in a government that exercises massive control over the economy could be very distorting.

3. in a country with a “big” government (in the sense I described above), more corruption may be better than less: it could be that if all regulations were carried out to the letter, it would be impossible to do business; if some of these burdens can be averted with a little baksheesh, though far from ideal, it is probably better than the alternative.

The original post can be found here, a couple feet down in the comments: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/the-governance-premium.html#comments

Photographers

2011-12-28T00:02:00.001-06:00

Photographers are almost always nice people, and I feel complimented when I’m asked to help them out, but I must admit sometimes the results are a bit disappointing.

Exhibit #1

Abby and I were on the 400 trail in Wisconsin (Reedsburg to Elroy) when a photographer wanted to take our picture. Actually, in true photographer fashion, he wanted us to ride the same portion of the trail over and over again until he got the picture he wanted.

So, what picture did they put up on the site? It’s us all right, but this is actual size (about 1 inch square).

http://www.400statetrail.org/

Of course, it could be worse. We could be the family farther in the background – who had already started posing when we arrived.

Exhibit #2

The Evanston Bicycle Club evanstonbikeclub.org often starts rides at the Panera near the Wilmette train station. It’s a win-win, since some of us get coffee and maybe a bagel and we’re there early before the place gets busy.

Panera decided to put us in their newsletter, which was nice. The photographer they sent was a bike enthusiast as well (although a mountain biker). We had maybe three dozen people at the shoot and he took dozens of photos. But only one made it into the article, and it’s about 1.5 x 1.5 inches.

http://mypanera.panerabread.com/storiestips-view.php?id=145

I think that’s my head on the left, in the back. Maybe not.

A side issue: note the cyclists in the photo are all men, although there were many female members who showed up at the shoot. Panera customers tend to skew female, so perhaps this was one way to show off the attraction to male customers.

It’s déjà vu all over again

2011-12-27T09:57:00.001-06:00

Christmas, when I get insulted

2011-12-26T22:55:00.001-06:00

Christmas afternoon, I decided to take a walk. It was cold, so I had my work jeans on, hiking boots, a hoodie and a windbreaker. I didn’t really have a destination, but ended up at the 24 hour Walgreens about 2 miles away, and bought some ice cream for dessert and some chewing gum.

On the way back, I was going to cut through the sidewalk behind Goode and Fresh Pizza to go through Sleepy Hollow Park. I wanted to throw out the gum wrapper so I went up to the dumpster behind Goode and Fresh.

When I turned around, there was a policeman getting out of the car, investigating why I was behind the building. A brief interview, and I was on my way.

“How did those jeans get dirty?” asked my wife when I returned home. They’re the jeans I work around the house and yard in. I don’t remember how they got dirty. They are supposed to be dirty – otherwise it doesn’t look like I’ve been working.

“You look like a derelict in those dirty jeans and that old windbreaker. That’s probably why the policeman investigated you.”

I explained that the policeman was actually a policewoman – a striking blonde in her 30’s – but my wife stuck to her derelict theory.

Was NASA’s space shuttle program a failure?

2011-12-26T22:43:00.001-06:00

Pretty much, argues John Millis, with some good reasons:

http://space.about.com/od/spaceshuttlemissions/a/Was-The-Space-Shuttle-Program-A-Failure.htm?nl=1

The program cost twice as much as anticipated.

The plan was to have made 50 flights a year; over 30 years that would be 1500 flights. But, less than one tenth of the planned 1500 flights were completed – just 135.

1 in 25 of the astronauts involved in the program died as a result of participation.

It’s hard to think of a lot of scientific achievements that came from this program, despite its high cost. On the other hand, it’s easy to think of achievements from unmanned flights (Voyager, most notably, but also the Mars missions and others) or from the telescope program (Hubble, Chandra, Kepler, etc.)

This is pretty much my viewpoint as well. The space shuttle was pretty much an expensive dead end, with few spinoffs and no breathtaking advances in human knowledge. Not even another Tang.

Minor correction: we’re not all doomed (at least not this way)

2011-12-24T14:18:00.001-06:00

A correction in the New York Times (online) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/science/forecast-for-sagittarius-a-black-hole-a-cold-gas-cloud.html?ref=science

Correction: December 20, 2011

An earlier version of this article stated erroneously that Sagittarius A* has a gravitational pull so great that it will eventally consume everything in the galaxy.

A minor nit is that the correction itself misspells ‘eventually’.

It’s reassuring, I guess, that Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, is not going to consume everything in the galaxy, although I for one wouldn’t be around then anyway.

Do we hate the rich, or don’t we?

2011-12-23T17:36:00.001-06:00

That’s the subject of a couple of blog posts by Andrew Gelman, who takes on the issue of seemingly conflicting poll results.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/do-we-hate-the-rich-or-dont-we/

http://andrewgelman.com/2011/12/surveys-show-americans-are-populist-class-warriors-except-when-they-arent/#comments

At issue is, in part, the tone of the 2012 campaign. Should a successful Democratic candidate take on the trappings of a class warrior, or talk about getting people jobs.

Ambiguity

At heart is a natural American ambiguity towards the rich.

Americans don’t hate the rich. Why should Americans hate the rich? We all want to be rich. We cherish the opportunity to be rich. If we can't be rich, we want to work hard so our children can be rich.

The ambiguity occurs here: when we are rich, we will still call ourselves "middle class" and be humble and not push our way in line. We don’t want to seem rich, even if we are. We’re not rich. We just have money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzxF-M2erx8 -Joe Walsh singing "Life's been good (to me so far)".

And if we become super-rich, we’d like to give most of it away to do good in the world. At the end of the robber baron era, we have Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford all setting up highly visible charity and foundation efforts that endure today. In our era, we have Bill Gates and Warren Buffet doing much the same thing.

I don’t see much advantage to the class warfare approach to campaigning. We don’t hate the rich, we want to be rich.

Sure, we hate Bernie Madoff, the financial “geniuses” at investments banks who gave us a serious worldwide recession, and personal injury lawyers. But we don’t hate them because they are rich. We hate them because they got rich immorally, or at least amorally, and didn’t create anything useful. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, was acclaimed.

Newsweek misses a chance for a Douglas Adams homage–by 4

2011-12-23T17:04:00.001-06:00

On the top of this weeks cover is the headline:

The Meaning of the Universe See page 46

If this had been page 42, this would have been an excellent homage to Douglas Adams, the beloved author of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and other books. In those books, 42 IS the answer to the meaning of the universe.

The number 42 is, in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, "The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything", and is calculated by an enormous supercomputer over a period of 7.5 million years to be 42. Unfortunately no one knows what the question is. Thus, to calculate the Ultimate Question, a special computer the size of a small planet and using organic components was created and named "Earth".

For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_%28number%29

Douglas Adams is following in the footsteps of Lewis Carroll, who’s “Alice in Wonderland” also contains allusions to this number.

So they are off by 4. On page 42 is a 4 page interview with Joe Biden. If they had just flip-flopped those articles!

Making us aware that more people are aware of awareness.

2011-12-23T12:27:00.001-06:00

Figuring a good joke deserves repetition (or knowing that Americans have short attention spans), theOnion has been featuring this month this story from 2009, declaring December as National Awareness Month.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/december-named-national-awareness-month,2853/

The comic strip “F Minus” notes how successful this campaign has been:

http://www.gocomics.com/fminus/2011/12/23/

A mathematician’s Advent Calendar

2011-12-23T11:44:00.001-06:00

Yes, this is from xkcd. How did you guess?

http://xkcd.com/994/

If you don’t get the joke: http://www.answers.com/topic/zeno-s-paradoxes

Achilles runs a race with a tortoise, who has a start of n metres. Suppose the tortoise runs one-tenth as fast as Achilles. Then by the time Achilles has reached the tortoise's starting-point, the tortoise is n/10 metres ahead. By the time Achilles has reached that point, the tortoise is n/100 metres ahead, and so on ad infinitum. So Achilles cannot catch the tortoise.
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/zeno-s-paradoxes#ixzz1hNfGUQrp

Yes, yet another redesign

2011-12-23T00:30:00.001-06:00

I’ve abandoned the newer Blogger design I was using. I didn’t like the fact that the headlines got lost. The search function didn’t seem to work. The fancy views didn’t seem that helpful.

I don’t seem to be able to get it quite the way it was before, but I think this is more readable.

Covering all the bases

2011-12-23T00:07:00.001-06:00

Adjacent ads on my Facebook page.

Modern phenomena explained by graphs

2011-12-21T19:54:00.001-06:00

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/etc_correlation50__01__960.jpg

One example below:

Yes, Physicists, there is a Santa Claus

2011-12-20T19:42:00.001-06:00

There are a number of "scientific" debunkings of "Santa", such as this one called "The Physics of Santa Claus".

It should probably be enough to point out that the "scientific" evidence in these articles seldom agree, with the math differing by orders of magnitude from one "scientist" to another. But the Christmas season is a season of joy, and I'd rather shed light on the solution rather than just criticize the misled. These articles point out a number of "facts", contending that one Santa just couldn't do it all, but they fail too see the obvious conclusion -- FRANCHISING! This also explains why "Santa" is often known as "Santa Claus".

Let me explain:

1. By some calculations, Santa would need to make 822.6 visits per second, or 2,961,360 per hour. However, if we assume that there are 740,340 worldwide Santas (the exact number is known only to the Salvation Army), then each Santa has to make 1 visit only every 15 minutes.

2. Roughly speaking, this is

5 minutes for travel (footnote below)
1 minute for sorting out that house's gifts
1 minute for chimney diving / lock picking
3 minutes for gift arranging
2 minutes for cookie eating
1 minute for exiting premises and returning to sleigh
2 minutes "slack" time for unforseen events (most commonly, large dogs)
---
15 minutes

3. "Santa" is, of course, a very sought after title, and the geographic franchises to be the local "Santa" are subject to yearly adjustments due to population shifts. The changes in the legal paragraphs governing geographic territories in the "Santa" agreement are called "Santa Clauses", a term which eventually has been commonly applied to "Santas" themselves.

I am happy to be able to clarify this matter, by applying basic statistical and operations research principles --and please note that I am a member of both ASA (the American Statistical Association) and INFORMS (the professional society for Operations Research and Management Science).

Footnote: The travel time has been reduced considerably in the past century by the use of "jet sleighs" manufactured by Boeing. The original model 7 sleigh is, in fact, what gave the Boeing corporation its name. Elves, noticing how the new sleighs (with, sadly, aluminum reindeer) bounced from housetop to housetop, cheered "Boing! Boing!", which in an Elvin accent sounded like "Boeing! Boeing!".

Worse than socks?

2011-12-19T19:10:00.001-06:00

Thought for the day

2011-12-19T08:57:00.001-06:00

“A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.”

– John Kenneth Galbraith (Economist)

Whimsical currency designs

2011-12-18T21:28:00.001-06:00

Over at the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2011/dec/17/writers-artists-design-money#/?picture=383404290&index=11 they’ve got a slide show on modern currency designs, each with its own spin.

The modern currency is no longer backed by gold, or silver, or really much of anything. Here’s one idea for getting some backing behind the currency.

The artist credit is Posy Simmonds. Banknote Design for Sat Review

This one inspires more confidence:

This is because of Dicken’s financial advice (put in the mouth of Micawber)

“Annual income twenty pounds,

annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and six pence,

result happiness.

Annual income twenty pounds,

annual expenditure twenty pounds and six pence,

result misery.”

Credit: Robert Harris Banknote Design for Sat Review

The ragged edge of control

2011-12-18T15:51:00.001-06:00

My friend Chris writes:

“Operating at the ragged edge of control means inevitably that things are going to get away from you! That's the deal. Our everyday sense that things will simply continue, be alright, that the past will be the best predictor of the future--these are assumptions that don't reliable work out here. Beyond the horizon of personal control looms a violent world of abrupt and no doubt final consequences. But if you're eager to take that plunge into essential expereince, the rest of life gradually becomes just the place everybody else lives--but not you.”

This reminds me I’m teaching forecasting next term. This is the second time I’ve taught it. It was odd to start teaching forecasting at a time when we were in (and still really are in) a severe recession due in part to idiot forecasts and the fraudulent ability to market those idiot forecasts as AAA rated.

The underlying idiot assumptions were laid out by Taleb in Black Swan, before the bubble burst. I’ve largely worked in different areas than Taleb, so I’m going to lay out a few key points a little differently.

1. Sure, the past is the best predictor of the future. As Damon Runyon said, “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.”

2. #1 is true until it isn’t. But predicting turning points is very, very difficult and usually seen only with hindsight.

3. People underestimate the error in forecasts. Even when it’s on the page, they don’t want to see it.

4. Worse, statistical estimates of error are often underestimates. In general, a good statistician will give a broader estimate of error than a bad statistician, given the same data and even the same modeling family, and tend to take longer to produce that estimate. This does not tend to make statisticians any more popular.

a. A simple example may help. The error around a survey estimate is often estimated just as 2((p(1-p)/n)^.5), as if the data were from a simple random sample (rather than a complex design with a generally larger error term), and as if the non-respondents had the same opinions at the respondents (probably not completely true).

b. Another example: companies may pick the supplier who promises the smaller error term – if that estimate is not correct, this will likely be apparent only after some time delay and the switching cost to a different supplier may not be worth it.

5. If we are dealing with political polling, as in point #4, the error is not critical. But if we are dealing with risk assessment in financial instruments, this difference can be catastrophic – and has been.

All of which means it’s a humbling time to be teaching forecasting methods. These methods are of value, but have to be taken with some skepticism. Not too much, though. Graduate business school isn’t really preparing students to be “eager to take that plunge into essential experience”. It’s preparing them to have better careers and build better institutions, hopefully with integrity.

Gingrich tries spin control on Freddie Mac

2011-12-17T15:05:00.001-06:00

Gingrich received $1.6 million from Freddie Mac, the politically connected mortgage firm that’s collapsing at great taxpayer expense.

This drastically undercuts his credentials as a small-government conservative.

Gingrich tries to dig himself out. But listen: (emphasis added)

"I just want to set the record straight," Gingrich said. "We had a company. The company had three different offices. We were paid annually for six years, so the numbers you see are six years of work. Most of that money went to pay for overhead, for staff, for other things that didn't go directly to me." http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-rt-us-usa-campaign-gingrichtre7bg0ho-20111217,0,804746.story

It went to a company I owned, so it didn’t really go DIRECTLY to me. Great defense. So much better that it went INDIRECTLY to him. Maybe next time they could leave the money in a bus station locker.

We had a company. Sure, but it was your company.

Six years of work. So much better that this shows Gingrich was in bed with these guys for six years, not just a short affair.

Money went to pay for overhead. Once money gets inside a company, its fungible – it could go anywhere and it doesn’t matter if this dollar A goes to pay Peter and dollar A goes to pay for Paul, or vice-versa. This makes no more sense than the contention of the state of Illinois that lottery proceeds go to fund education – nominally, they do, but that has just meant other state funding was cut so that the amount provided to education didn’t increase.

It seems like this “explanation” just digs himself in deeper. But then this is a man who, despite a miserable marital record of his own, tried to crucify Clinton for his dalliance with Monica.

Thought for the Day

2011-12-14T17:48:00.001-06:00

From the ad for this issue of Decision Analysis, an INFORMS Journal:

“If the criterion of what the individual considers ‘good’ were not in some sense fixed, making his decisions ‘consistent,’ it would not be ascertainable whether a good use is or is not made of available alternatives, and the word economic would therefore be meaningless.” (Marschak and Radner). This is how Keller starts the latest issue of Decision Analysis.

Attention Fox News: graph the actual data

2011-12-12T23:01:00.001-06:00

I am indebted to FlowingData for this great chart from Fox News. The unemployment rate goes down to 8.6% on the label, but somehow this manages to look flat in the chart, and 8.6% is somehow than the 8.8% figure in March.

Fox News, aren’t things bad enough without making them worse? Would we not be better off as a country with the slight unemployment increase that would result from one less news network?

http://flowingdata.com/2011/12/12/fox-news-still-makes-awesome-charts/

The headline says all you need to know

2011-12-12T19:34:00.001-06:00

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/newt-gingrich-takes-fourth-no-adultery-pledge-205324872.html

Christmas cards

2011-12-11T08:33:00.001-06:00

We haven’t sent out Christmas cards for years. And gradually, people stopped sending them to us. To be honest, I’d much rather get one of those family letters detailing the accomplishments of the year. Sure, people poke fun at these letters, but they provide news and a sense of contact. But email works better for these, anyway, since they can then be filed away and searched for in case there’s a need to remember what the name of the new grandchild is.

But we used to get a lot of Christmas cards – diminishing year by year, but still quite a few. This year, very few. There are probably several reasons for this.

1. Continued decay curve, as people realize we haven’t sent them a card in many, many years.

2. People deceased, particularly as the “Greatest Generation” thins out.

3. Facebook. If you are friends, you can just message holiday greetings and maybe get in one or two messages of dialogue. If you aren’t even Facebook friends, then is it really important?

4. The economic downturn, now in its 5^th year by my reckoning (since I remember selling Dad’s house in 2007, and the downturn was definitely coming in then).

Thought for the day, Limerick edition

2011-12-10T13:07:00.001-06:00

The problem with things people know
They are not necessarily so
One shouts “absolute”
Another “refute”
And a third genius proves that they blow

Found in the comments here http://www.jesusandmo.net/2011/12/07/pegs/

by Nassar Ben Houdja, with meter change by Runar.

WWW has 4.1 dimensions

2011-12-10T13:00:00.001-06:00

A line has 1, a polygon has 2, a cube has 3. How does the concept of dimensions in an information space have meaning?

One can think of hyperlinks in an article (which link to other articles, which link to other articles…) as providing an extra dimension to the article. The Sesquiotica blog sets up these concepts nicely in an article on fractals.

http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/fractal/

The World Wide Web, with its hyperlinks in hyperlinks in hyperlinks, is also, in its way, fractal. That’s right. You are reading this on a fractal that exists (by the calculation of J.S. Kim et al., arXiv:cond-mat/0605324v1) in 4.1 dimensions.

XXX rated colleges

2011-12-09T23:03:00.001-06:00

Forget .com, .org, and .edu. Colleges are buying up the new .xxx domain.

Intended for pornographers, the extension is getting thousands of dollars from colleges and companies who are buying up the sites to do nothing with them.

“The University of Kansas is buying up website names such as www.KUgirls.xxx and www.KUnurses.xxx. … the university and countless other schools and businesses are rushing to prevent their good names from falling into the hands of the pornography industry. Over the past two months, they have snapped up tens of thousands of ".xxx" website names that could be exploited by the adult entertainment business….The university spent nearly $3,000 in all.”

Target, Pepsi and Nike are businesses who are listed in the article at http://news.yahoo.com/thwart-porn-colleges-buying-xxx-sites-193653013.html

But wait. Isn’t this effectively shaking down businesses, requiring them to pay money to protect their trademarks? Sounds like this to me. In fact, at the end of the article we see just such a contention: “Vivas said she doesn't think her company — or any organization, adult-oriented or not — should have to pay to protect its trademarks. Otherwise, "it kind of becomes extortion."”

A Statistician General?

2011-12-04T17:15:00.001-06:00

I’m afraid this is an idea that will never happen.

For one thing, the government take from the lottery (and other forms of gambling) is too big.

Sure, the lottery is called “a tax on the stupid”, but there’s a portion of me that says “OK, tax them instead of me”.

The kinder, gentler part of me sees the prevalence of legalized gambling as a pox on society. Sure, it creates jobs immediately around the casino (or in the lottery outlets), but it does so by siphoning off money that could otherwise be more productive in the economy.

Today's Inspiring Story: Stranded Alaskan survives 3 days on frozen beer

2011-12-04T00:14:00.001-06:00

An Alaska man who wanted to see how far a road would take him got stranded in a snow drift and survived three days in his pickup by eating frozen beer.

View article...

US man leaves jail in missing tourist case

2011-11-30T07:26:00.000-06:00

US man leaves jail in missing tourist case

I was thinking this was a story of a daring jail escape, sneaking out while hidden in a stolen suitcase, but no…

Feed: msnbc.com: Top msnbc.com headlines
Posted on: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 6:11 PM
Author: msnbc.com: Top msnbc.com headlines
Subject: US man leaves jail in missing tourist case

A U.S. business was freed from jail, and free to leave the island of Aruba, but was still a suspect the August disappearance and presumed death of his traveling companion.

View article...

Maybe his crime is being too shelfish?

2011-11-29T12:57:00.001-06:00

The Tribune online has a running feature which shows mug shots that look interesting, with brief descriptions of their crimes.

The guy on the left certainly looks a bit shady, but his crime?

Of course, there’s more to it than that: breaking and entering and stealing a valuable ring.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-cops-man-who-broke-into-sox-gms-home-was-wearing-his-clothes-20111122,0,3656917.story

Today's amazing statistic: half have knowledge of English

2011-11-27T20:28:00.001-06:00

“According to the British Council, backed by many other reliable sources, about half the world's population – 3.5 billion people – have knowledge of, or acquaintance with, "some kind of English".”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/27/translation-creating-global-language

Of course, this number will depend on what qualifies as “some kind of English”, but it’s still amazing.

Much of this spread was imperial – either in terms of the British empire or American media or computerization. But it’s still interesting given the fact that English is not really a great language. Off the top of my head:

Weaknesses

Spelling is both nonstandard and somewhat illogical.

Pronunciation are both nonstandard and somewhat illogical.

Lots of unrelated synonyms reflecting work origins in Anglo-Saxon/German and French/Latin.

Strengths

Uses an alphabet with a small number of symbols.

Does not use tonality.

Does not have a central authority governing usage, so anybody can add a word.

Nouns don’t have sex.

What Middletown USA read around 1900

2011-11-27T17:02:00.001-06:00

Here’s a fascinating article based on a study of old library records from Muncie, Indiana by Frank Felsenstein and James Connolly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/what-muncie-read.html?pagewanted=all?src=tp

“What do these records tell us Americans were reading? Mostly fluff, it’s true. Women read romances, kids read pulp and white-collar workers read mass-market titles.

Horatio Alger was by far the most popular author: 5 percent of all books checked out were by him, despite librarians who frowned when boys and girls sought his rags-to-riches novels (some libraries refused to circulate Alger’s distressingly individualist books).

Louisa May Alcott is the only author who remains both popular and literary today (though her popularity is far less). “Little Women” was widely read, but its sequel “Little Men” even more so, perhaps because it was checked out by boys, too. The remaining authors at the top of the list — Charles Fosdick, Oliver Optic, Martha Finley, L. T. Meade and others — have vanished from memory. Francis Marion Crawford, whose novels were chiefly set in Italy and the Orient, was checked out 2,120 times, whereas Dickens, Walter Scott and Shakespeare circulated 672, 651 and 201 times respectively [Twain’s Huckleberry Finn 192 times; no total given for all of Twain]. Fiction was overwhelmingly preferred, accounting for 92 percent of books read in 1903.”

There are also comparisons to current Muncie. Half of the materials are non-print (DVD, music, e-books, etc), and a lot more periodicals. But in a time of budget pressure on library hours, it’s interesting to note that this issue isn’t new:

“…the decision in 1900 to open a separate Workingmen’s Library for the city’s laboring classes. The public library, a quiet, fastidious setting run by women, did not suit the needs of workers seeking a smoke and a chat. Nor was it open on Sundays, the workman’s only day off.”

Thanksgiving in Vermont

2011-11-25T18:04:00.001-06:00

Not black and white. Just early morning.

Large dog bone

2011-11-25T18:01:00.001-06:00

Chicago has “The Bean” – a sculpture officially called “Cloud Gate”.

This sculpture is in Hanover, NH on the Dartmouth campus. When my wife and I needed to go to the rest room, I said “Let’s meet by the dog bone.” She had no trouble understanding my meaning.

The official name of the sculpture had something to do with torsos. The museum and theatre were closed, so we didn’t get to find out what the locals call it.

A reminder of past economic crises

2011-11-25T17:56:00.001-06:00

This is from the Ben and Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard in Waterbury, VT.

The economic crunch of 1987 was highlighted by a huge drop in the stock market, and lots of worry.

It was a short recession, though, and the stock market recovered.

Now, in the 5th year of economic troubles, the flavor would be appropriate – but not funny.

Quiz

2011-11-19T15:03:00.001-06:00

What English word retains the same pronunciation, even after you take away four of its five letters?

(answer in comments)

If only Congress would DO NOTHING

2011-11-19T14:04:00.001-06:00

Ezra Klein contends that a good solution to many of our deficit problems would simply be for Congress to DO NOTHING.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-do-nothing-plan-now-worth-71-trillion/2011/08/25/gIQAmfIIYN_blog.html?wprss=ezra-klein

One can easily read this as an indicator of just how dysfunctional Congress is currently, that doing nothing is better than whatever they have been doing. One can also see this as a sign of hope: surely our Congressmen might be capable of this, at a time of gridlock.

So how does this work?

I’ll refer you to Klein’s article for more details, but it breaks down as follows:

1. Let the temporary income and estate tax cuts expire (Bush tax cuts) plus the temporary AMT exemption.

2. Let the Medicare physician reimbursements be paid according to schedule, instead of continually paying a higher rate.

3. Take the automatic cuts from the “SuperCommittee”

So there you are: a do-nothing plan for U.S. fiscal health, and one that would seem to have an actual chance of getting done – I mean, not getting done.

The banality of evil: another chapter

2011-11-14T20:48:00.001-06:00

The woods are full of Bernie Madoff wannabees. One of these is Tim Roth of Champaign, Illinois. Roth was a financial advisor who basically just put client funds into his own accounts.

There were suspicions. How did Roth deal with these suspicions?

In 2003, TD Ameritrade raised concerns with Comprehensive Capital Management — which employed Roth as an investment adviser — that Roth had transferred client funds into accounts he owned.

To help satisfy the concerns of CCM's compliance officer, Roth transferred his ownership of Keyop Exercises in August of that year to a friend and partner in another business.

That arrangement was made with the understanding that the friend would be merely a nominee-owner acting at Roth's direction and control, with Roth continuing to make the decisions.

According to the plea agreement, Roth bought a stamp with the friend's signature so Roth could operate the business without involving the friend.

In 2007, the friend — who was identified in the plea agreement only as "RM" — asked to be removed as owner of Keyop.

Roth subsequently named another person — identified only as "GR" — to be president and owner of Keyop.

Even so, the plea agreement said, Roth maintained full control over Keyop and its accounts.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/courts-police-and-fire/2011-11-06/lack-written-oks-may-have-made-fraud-scheme-hard-detect.html

See what I mean by banality? Forget sophisticated techniques for cybercrime. Roth used a rubber stamp to evade the TD Ameritrade and CCM compliance process for years.

So, how many decades will this prime minister be in office?

2011-11-14T07:23:00.001-06:00

[New Italian Prime Minister] “Monti must now draw up a Cabinet, lay out his priorities, and see if he has enough support in Parliament to govern. Rival political parties offered various degrees of support, including one demand from Berlusconi's party — the largest in Parliament — that his government last only as long enough as it takes to heal Italy's finances and revive the economy.”

http://news.yahoo.com/italys-premier-monti-rushes-build-govt-113112423.html

I’m betting the Republicans won’t make the same demand of Obama, or he might be president-for-life!

How you earned your money matters

2011-11-13T13:59:00.000-06:00

That eminently reasonable man, Tyler Cowen, has a NYTimes op-ed today that is worth reading on the values divide, and inconsistency, affecting both contemporary American “conservatives” and “liberals”.

Tyler skewers both sides, although naturally I’m going to quote two points on which I particularly agree:

“…higher status for the wealthy can easily lead to crony capitalism. In public discourse social status judgments are often crude. Critical differences are lost, like the distinction between earning money through production for consumers, as Apple has done, and earning money through the manipulation of government, which heavily subsidized agribusinesses have done. The relevant question, in my view, is not about how much you have earned but about how you have earned it. To further confuse matters, many right-wing Republican politicians supported corporate bailouts and corporate welfare far beyond what was necessary to stabilize the economy, in doing so further muddying the difference between productive and predatory capitalism.

“The second problem is that many conservatives have become so attached to their cultural vision that they have ceded sound, technocratic reasoning to the left and center. For instance there is a common willingness among conservatives to defend the Bush tax cuts, even though the evidence does not show much of an economic payoff.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/business/turning-the-dialogue-from-wealth-to-values.html?_r=1

Dallas Symphony math

2011-11-11T21:27:00.001-06:00

The Dallas Symphony is likely to be involvent soon.
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kera/news.newsmain/article/0/0/1873447/North.Texas/Dallas.Symphony.Near.Insolvency

There’s a numbers story here, and perhaps a matter of perspective.

How’s attendance been?

[Dallas Symphony Board Chairman Blaine] Nelson says that acclaim has not translated into ticket sales. … "I mean, our paid attendance, on average, for all concerts is less than 65 percent, so the hall is virtually empty.”

Virtually empty? 65% doesn’t sound so bad to me as an average. It certainly doesn’t sound like “virtually empty”.

65% would rank 14th among 30 major league baseball teams.
http://espn.go.com/mlb/attendance

It’s lower than any NBA team in 2010 (lowest was 69%, for the Nets).
http://espn.go.com/nba/attendance/_/year/2010

But, it looks to be higher than any WNBA team, although that assumes that the WNBA and NBA teams are playing in the same space, since there’s no percentage of capacity given.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_National_Basketball_Association#Attendance

My point is this: at 65% attendance, should you be losing millions of dollars?

11/11/11 11:11

2011-11-11T11:11:00.001-06:00

Trying to post this at 11/11/11 11:11 a.m.

This is the last day of this millennium expressible only in binary digits (0 and 1).

Old joke: There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.

Article on Roger Ebert

2011-11-07T22:24:00.001-06:00

I have found myself agreeing more with Roger Ebert than with any other movie critic.

There’s a great article on Ebert by Maureen Dowd here. I give it thumbs up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/books/review/life-itself-a-memoir-by-roger-ebert-book-review.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

But my favorite quote isn’t something Ebert said, but something Ebert got Robert Mitchum to say:

The man who became famous for bellowing at Siskel believes the key to a good interview is shutting up. He encouraged subjects like Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum and Woody Allen to give monologues.

¶ “Somebody asked my wife once, What’s your idea of your husband?” Mitchum told him. “And she answered: He’s a masturbation image. Well, that’s what we all are. Up there on the screen, our goddamn eyeball is six feet high, the poor bastards who buy tickets think we really amount to something.” He continued: “Making faces and speaking someone else’s lines is not really a cure for cancer, you know,” noting that one of the greatest movie stars was Rin Tin Tin.

Euro crisis solution

2011-11-06T11:35:00.001-06:00

The Kardashians make $65 million a year.

Paula Poundstone suggests that they buy Greece.

But then, what about Italy? Perhaps we should put a surtax on each pizza.

A mild winter?

2011-11-05T21:29:00.001-05:00

Wooly bear at the Chicago Botanic Gardens is over 1/3 brown, indicating a mild winter.

Actually, it’s more likely the wooly bear is telling us about PAST weather instead of FUTURE weather.

Another beautiful fall day – lots of them this year. Here’s a flock of geese at the Garden, near Spider Island:

Do I care about the Big 12, Pac 12, Big 10, Big East? No.

2011-11-01T23:39:00.001-05:00

Athletic conferences are realigning. The Big “East” may add Boise, which I have to tell you is nowhere near the east coast. It’s not even near eastern Idaho. How’s that going to work out for the soccer teams and other minor sports?

The Big 10 has 12 members. I have no idea how many the Big 12 has, except that it probably isn’t 12.

I no longer care. It’s just filler in the sports pages since the World Series is over, there’s no NBA, and it’s too early in the hockey season.

Statistics Quiz

2011-11-01T21:42:00.001-05:00

From Raymond Johnson

https://plus.google.com/116264189418994838408/posts/CSXeyftovTJ

Christian Economics

2011-10-31T21:41:00.001-05:00

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Asteroid sharing almost same orbit as earth, around the sun.

2011-10-31T17:18:00.001-05:00

Cruithne is approximately 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) in diameter, and its closest approach to Earth is approximately thirty times the separation between Earth and the Moon (12 Gm or twelve million kilometres). From 1994 through 2015, Cruithne makes its annual closest approach to Earth every November.^[4] Although Cruithne's orbit is not thought to be stable over the long term, calculations by Wiegert and Innanen showed that it has probably been synchronized with Earth's orbit for a long time.

There is no danger of a collision with Earth for millions of years

“there is no danger” the classic line from the first reel of disaster movies, but in this case they should be able to do a good forecast.

http://www.analyticbridge.com/profiles/blogs/asteroid-sharing-almost-same-orbit-as-earth-around-the-sun

Citigroup: never let ethics in

2011-10-30T19:48:00.001-05:00

Settling a $285 Million Fine

In October 2011, Citigroup agreed to pay $285 million to settle charges that it misled investors in a $1 billion derivatives deal tied to the United States housing market, then bet against investors as the housing market began to show signs of distress, the Securities and Exchange Commission said.

The S.E.C. said that the $285 million would be returned to investors in the deal, a collateralized debt obligation known as Class V Funding III. The commission said that Citigroup exercised significant influence over the selection of $500 million of assets in the deal’s portfolio.

Citigroup then took a short position against those mortgage-related assets, an investment in which Citigroup would profit if the assets declined in value. The company did not disclose to the investors to whom it sold the collateralized debt obligation that it had helped to select the assets or that it was betting against them.

Citigroup received fees of $34 million for structuring and marketing the transaction and realized net profits of at least $126 million from its short position. The $285 million settlement includes $160 million in disgorgement plus $30 million in prejudgment interest and a $95 million penalty, all of which will be returned to investors.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/citigroup_inc/index.html?scp=1&sq=friedman%20citibank&st=cse

Get that? This is like a used car dealer selling you a car with no brakes, then taking out a life insurance policy on you.

This from Thomas Friedman:

Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

It doesn’t get any more immoral than this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/friedman-did-you-hear-the-one-about-the-bankers.html?_r=1&ref=citigroupinc

The Hudspith Steam Bicycle

2011-10-30T10:55:00.001-05:00

From the great tradition of tinkerers comes this steam-powered bicycle developed by Geoff Hudspith.

The power source is an Optimus paraffin burner, which sounds to me a lot like a backpacking stove.

It looks unbalanced, but “The weight of the boiler is largely counterbalanced by the weight of the flywheel, transmission and water pump, etc, and the water tank on the rear right hand side when underway. It is only ever a problem when lifting the machine up or down the stairs to my first floor council flat, single handed, when the front end tries to flop over to the left all the time. “

Cementing Geoff’s membership in the tinkerer’s group is this final comment.

“Such a machine is never truly finished, and most times I run it, I think of an improvement to make for next time. After all, it has only taken me 30 years so far!”

In terms of why you would want to do this, I think “Because” is the only answer.

Point | Counterpoint

2011-10-29T15:11:00.001-05:00

http://www.baikbike.com/gm-bites-bicycles-and-giant-bites-back/

GM takes a swipe at bicyclists, and Giant fires back.

The McItaly burger

2011-10-29T13:34:00.001-05:00

Yes, there have been endless commercials this week informing us that the McRib is back at McDonalds.

But the real news right be six time zones away, where the McItaly burger has been introduced at Italian McDonalds restaurants. The McItaly is “an Italian beef burger strategically arrayed with local toppings such as Asiago cheese and artichoke spread.”

On the one hand, “Agriculture Minister Luca Zaia, who has taken to wearing a McDonald’s apron to promote the McItaly, praises McDonald's for giving Italian farmers and cheesemongers a boost.”

On the other hand, “A fast-food burger is a fast-food burger, says Hailey Eber in BlackBook. Wrapping the McItaly in the flag (literally — the burger is packaged in national colors) neither makes it a source of Italian pride nor a healthy meal. Forget about the McItaly. McDonald's should focus on devising a truly healthy burger.”

More here: http://theweek.com/article/index/106187/the-mcitaly-burger-uproar

Would this be similar to opening an Olive Garden restaurant in Florence?

Muslim Students Sue Catholic University of America for ”Surrounding Them With Catholic Symbols Which are Incongruous to Their Religion”

2011-10-28T21:23:00.001-05:00

Muslim Students Sue Catholic University of America for ”Surrounding Them With Catholic Symbols Which are Incongruous to Their Religion”

Well, not actually Muslim students, but a serial litigator with too much time on his hands.

http://crimejusticeandamerica.com/muslim-students-sue-catholic-university-of-america-for-surrounding-them-with-catholic-symbols-which-are-incongruous-to-their-religion

Quote of the Day: Euro Crisis

2011-10-27T09:58:00.001-05:00

“Sometimes I think the euro zone debt crisis is like watching a remake of the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day, with the screenplay written by Financial Times correspondents.”

MICHAEL SCHUMAN | Time.com

http://news.yahoo.com/europes-debt-crisis-agreement-good-bad-ugly-104500661.html

Eat like a caveman

2011-10-25T16:58:00.001-05:00

Ever get a meal at one of those Medieval places? Luckily, they use modern food preservation techniques – there’s a time for authenticity, and there’s a time for public health. But there’s another food theme coming. From Spiegel:

Berlin Restaurant Caters to Modern Cavemen
No cheese, bread or sugar are available at a recently opened Berlin
eatery. In fact, guests are served dishes made only of ingredients that
would have been available to their hunter-gatherer ancestors. The Stone
Age fare is prepared by adherents of the Paleolithic movement, who say
their restaurant is the first of its kind in Europe.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,782747,00.html#ref=nlint

“Many people think the Paleolithic diet is just some hipster trend but it's a

worldwide phenomenon, with an online community that spans the globe," he told

SPIEGEL ONLINE of the growing interest in caveman cooking.

I note with approval the stainless steel all over the kitchen, and the presence of forks.

The food doesn’t look bad at all – lots of salads, some salmon, no gluten grains.

Chicago

Locally, there does seem to be a paleo movement, but it seems to mean something different. For example, a website called PaleoHacks has this Q&A:

Q: I'm planning a trip with the girlfriend to Chicago in a week or so, and I'd love to find some paleo-friendly places to eat there.

A: We have a few Brazilian steakhouses here. I have only been to Fogo de Chao http://www.fogodechao.com/ and it's excellent. I don't know where their meat comes from and when I am going out for a special dinner, I don't really worry about it. There is also Brazzaz, but I haven't been there. http://www.brazzaz.com/

I've wanted to try the french fries at Duck Fat Grill http://www.duckfatgrill.com/, but again, I've never been there. Not much on their menu looks extremely Paleo friendly.

Here is a list from urban spoon listed as gluten-free friendly.

http://www.urbanspoon.com/t/2/1/Chicago/Gluten-Free-Friendly-restaurants

http://paleohacks.com/questions/25188/paleo-friendly-restaurants-in-chicago#ixzz1bpidLLCR

I’ve eaten at Fogo de Chao, and it’s impossible for me to think of an evening dining at Fogo de Chao as an evening of healthy eating. They should have a cardiologist on staff.

Quote of the day: E.O.Wilson

2011-10-24T17:39:00.001-05:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/e-o-wilson-rsquo-s-theory-of-everything/8686/?single_page=true

Howard W. French in the Atlantic

Wilson announced that his new book may be his last. It is not limited to the discussion of evolutionary biology, but ranges provocatively through the humanities, as well. Summarizing parts of it for me, Wilson was particularly unsparing of organized religion, likening the Book of Revelation, for example, to the ranting of “a paranoid schizophrenic who was allowed to write down everything that came to him.” Toward philosophy, he was only slightly kinder. Generation after generation of students have suffered trying to “puzzle out” what great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Descartes had to say on the great questions of man’s nature, Wilson said, but this was of little use, because philosophy has been based on “failed models of the brain.”

Answers to the fundamental mysteries of human nature can only be found elsewhere, Wilson told me—in science, and most particularly in genetics and evolution.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood

2011-10-24T11:07:00.001-05:00

Post cleanup

2011-10-24T10:43:00.001-05:00

Storms earlier in the summer led to a lot of downed trees (and 3 days without power). Here’s a neighborhood tree after the storm, and today. There are a few shoots out of the top of the trunk now; let’s see what happens next spring.

Typo of the day

2011-10-23T22:34:00.001-05:00

http://news.yahoo.com/napoli-3-run-hr-puts-rangers-ahead-1-023205352.html

Curious small business juxtaposition

2011-10-23T19:13:00.001-05:00

This is on North Sheridan, near Chase. Per Wikipedia, “Eckankar is a new religious movement founded in the United States in 1965. It focuses on spiritual exercises enabling practitioners to experience what its followers call "the Light and Sound of God." The personal experience of this spiritual Light and Sound is a primary goal of the teaching.”

Located next to a self-service dog wash, you would think they would be more likely to experience the sound of Dog.

Spaghetti and no balls dinner: South Haven Michigan October 2011

2011-10-23T19:03:00.001-05:00

Ford Falcon station wagon

2011-10-23T18:59:00.001-05:00

I was surprised to see this old Ford Falcon station wagon in the company parking lot on Columbus Day (a holiday where any employee can park in the company lot). The Ford Falcon was produced from 1960 to 1970, which means this car is over 40 years old.

My sentiments exactly

2011-10-23T18:48:00.001-05:00

I don’t know the source. A FOAF posted this on Facebook.

Tattoo Barbie

2011-10-22T15:27:00.001-05:00

At first I was appalled. I’m not a tattoo fan [insert standard rant here]. But this is designed for collectors, not for little girls. Who knows what other stuff is out there in the collector market?

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/1020/Barbie-doll-tattoos-Is-new-doll-appropriate-for-kids?cmpid=ema:nws:Weekend%20Newsletter%20%2810-22-11%29&cmpid=ema:nws:NzQ4MDUzNzY5MAS2 has the full story. There’s a nice slide show of historic / exotic Barbies.

Our own Barbies

Our two daughters were decent Barbie fans. Beth’s first one was Space Cadet Barbie (astronaut Barbie was years in the future). Barbie’s head was in a big plastic bubble.

Barbie’s shoes were always getting lost. Then we got a cat, Fritz, who was fond of chewing on the feet of the Barbie dolls. “I felt sorry for Barbies that had no shows until I found Barbies that had no feet”.

We had a plastic box full of old Barbie body parts. Beth and I were going to make a mobile out of the Barbie arms and legs and bodies and heads, put red nail polish in appropriate spots, and hang it by the door on Halloween. Deb strongly objected to this as too grisly. I’m still not sure why this is any more objectionable than the standard Halloween stuff, but we agreed not to do it.

Evanston Bike Club gets a write-up from Panera

2011-10-22T10:48:00.001-05:00

http://mypanera.panerabread.com/storiestips-view.php?id=145

Many of our club rides start at the Panera near Wilmette Avenue and Green Bay Road. It’s a win-win. We are there early morning, ahead of the rush. We either bike there or use the train station lot, so we don’t clog up the parking lot. We make the place look busy and community-like. It’s a good place to stay warm and have a cup of coffee and maybe a quick breakfast.

(I think my wife might be a bit jealous. She’s been a huge fan of Panera over the years – I think I have the lunch/dinner menu memorized from all the times I’ve been there with her – but do they do a story on her? No!)

We didn’t expect to get written up in the Panera newsletter, but here it is (full link above). I think that’s my head between the two guys on the left, but it’s hard to be sure.

Fuel for the Ride

For some of us, a coffee stop at a Panera Bread® bakery-cafe signifies the start of the day. For this club, it’s about the start of a bike ride - sometimes as long as 100 miles. Check out their tips for getting rolling (even if you’re a beginner)

For the members of the Evanston Bicycle Club, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee means it’s about time to clip in and ride. For the past five years, club members have sipped pre-ride java at the Panera Bread bakery-cafe in Wilmette, Illinois.

“We like starting rides at Panera because it’s a good place to talk and socialize,” says Ken Schulein, the club’s ride chairman. “We get coffee before the ride, the outdoor patio has plenty of room for bikes, and it’s close to a major bike route.”

The 450-member club has a varied membership, split evenly between men and women and with ages varying from teens to riders in their 70s and 80s. “Cycling is something you can do your whole life,” Schulein says. “It keeps you in good condition as you age.”

Along with the weekly rides leaving from the Panera Bread bakery-cafe, the club also stages an annual Halloween costume ride and a Christmas Toys for Tots ride. And throughout the year, club members also roll out on longer touring rides, such as the 100-mile ride to the Jelly Belly factory in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin.

Inspired to get back on a bike (or get out more)? Smart move - cycling can burn 500 or more calories an hour plus build your cardiovascular fitness and leg strength. Here are a few keys to get rolling - and stick with it.

Protect yourself. Wear a helmet every time you ride, no exceptions. Adjust its fit so that the brim rests slightly above your eyebrows (not on the back of your head), with straps so snug that two fingers just fit between strap and chin. If you’ll be riding for more than 20 minutes at a time on a regular basis, invest in some cycling gloves to protect your hands and some cycling shorts to protect your behind. The pad in the shorts will ease the pressure from the bike’s seat and reduce chafing.

Check your saddle. Your leg should have a very slight bend at the bottom of the pedal stroke when you’re seated and pedaling. It seems tall at first, but if you go lower, your knees will ache; go higher, and your lower back will be sore, too. If you have trouble getting comfortable, get fit by a pro at your local bike shop - it’s money well spent.

Drink plenty of water. Many bikes have cages attached that hold water bottles, and they’re there for a reason. Even minor dehydration can make you feel weak and lead to muscle cramping. Take a swig every 15 minutes, at least, especially in hot weather. For long rides, wearing a hydration pack is a smart idea.

Start slow. Riding is a ton of fun, but if you’re new to it, don’t overdo it. Build slowly, adding 10 percent to your total ride time each week, and you’ll fend off muscle soreness and keep all the fun intact.

Get a friend on a bike, too. Cycling is a social sport - you’ll enjoy it even more (and be more likely to stick with it, too) with a friend. And if you can’t find a friend to ride with…

Make connections around town. Planning routes and meeting up with other cyclists at your level can be easier if you tap into community resources, such as recreation departments, local YMCAs, and bike shops. Or try checking out MeetUp.com.
For more information about bike riding and safety, check out the League of American Bicyclists at bikeleague.org. And to see what the Evanston Bicycle Club is up to, go to evanstonbikeclub.org.
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•Getting Revved Up in the Morning

Punctuation saves lives

2011-10-17T22:38:00.001-05:00

Found here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2378443987950&set=a.1412767086631.2056932.1456140801&type=3&theater

What do these colleges have in common?

2011-10-17T22:25:00.001-05:00

I was surprised to see two (I should say "at least two") theology schools on this list.

Give up? http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/17/jstor_partners_with_institutions_to_offer_free_access_to_alumni

Buffeting Cain

2011-10-17T11:41:00.001-05:00

Herman Cain is campaigning on the 9-9-9 tax reform plan. Certainly anybody who does their own taxes will appreciate the need for simplification and tax reform.

But Cain’s plan is a giveaway for the rich. Warren Buffet, who feels the rich are undertaxed, would pay even less taxes – perhaps zero income tax.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/warren-buffett-likely-pay-no-income-taxes-under-215446867.html

“If the "9-9-9" tax plan promoted by Herman Cain, a leading Republican presidential candidate, had been the law of the land last year, Warren Buffett would very likely have paid no income taxes, according to an analysis prepared for Yahoo News and The Lookout by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. At most, Buffett would have paid taxes on just 1 percent of his income.”

Why?

“…the bulk of Buffett's taxable income came from capital gains. Cain's 9-9-9 plan would eliminate taxes on capital gains. According to Labant's rough calculation, Buffett's ordinary income, outside of capital gains, comes to around $4.9 million. At Cain's proposed rate of 9 percent, Buffett would pay around $440,000 in income tax--1.1 percent of the approximately $40 million in taxable income, after deducting for charitable giving and local taxes, Buffett earned last year.”

But won’t Buffet pay those other “9” taxes?

One of the 9’s is corporate income taxes. His companies would pay these, but not him.

The other 9 is a sales tax. Sure, he’ll pay that, but in general as you get richer you spend a lower percentage of your income on taxable items, so as a percentage of his income or wealth the 9% sales tax isn’t that much. For someone who spends everything they make, 9% is essentially 9% of their income.

Windy day at South Haven (MI) beach

2011-10-16T21:17:00.001-05:00

Sunny and mild for mid-October on Saturday, but VERY windy – 30 mph or so. At the South Haven pier the waves were coming in straight enough to ride up the river and overflow the concrete embankment of the river.

Like everybody else, I was using my smartphone camera to capture this. I only went about halfway out the pier. There was only one guy further out, and he weighed about 350 and was a teenager to boot, so I figured he was both more foolhardy and less likely to be washed over.

Going to meetings in self-defense

2011-10-14T10:50:00.000-05:00

One of the main reasons to go to meetings – sometimes the only one – is so they don’t assign you stuff. The worst tasks tend to get assigned to those who aren’t there.

I didn’t realize how widespread this phenomenon was, until reminded by a comment by “Dave” at http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/10/the-negative-externality-of-voting.html#comments

[There is an] African story of why the chicken is the sacrificial animal of choice: All animals were headed to a meeting with the gods, but the chicken decided he could not bothered to attend this meeting. He asked the animals to convey his good wishes to the gods, and added his declaration to support and abide by the resolutions of the meeting. As it turned out, the meeting was meant as a forum to discuss the rampant harassment that man had begun to cause them since he learned to offer blood sacrifice to his gods.

After a long debate, the animals accepted and passed unanimously, a resolution to offer the chicken to man as his primary sacrificial animal. This has remained so till this day!

Ken Jennings’ “Maphead”

2011-10-13T19:39:00.001-05:00

I’ve always been a map nerd, and at one point had scoured enough local gas stations to get highway maps of over 40 of the 50 states, no mean feat to accomplish from Louisville, Kentucky.

I’ve also been a fan of Ken Jennings stint on the game show “Jeopardy”, particularly his humorous comment as he lost to IBM’s Watson computer system, “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”

So when I heard Ken had a new book on maps, and had been a map nerd himself, I figured the book was sure to be entertaining and contain a lot of map nerd trivia.

I’m only in chapter 2, and the book does not disappoint.

I didn’t know there was a category called “triple islands”, but that refers to an island on a lake on an an island in a lake on an island in some other body of water. The largest is in Victoria Island in Nunavut, although it’s an unnamed island on a frozen land mass. Second largest is Vulcan Point, on Lake Taal in the Philippines.

Below you can see the lat/lon mark pretty much covering the unnamed island, which is in a lake, on another island, which is in a lake, which is on Victoria Island in the Arctic Ocean

You can’t see all of Victoria island here – if I zoom out that far you can’t see the small island. On the map below, you can see how large Victoria Island is – and how far north! At the very bottom, I’ve indicated Bowen Park in Waukegan, IL, and a couple of other nearby parks in the Chicago area.

Ah, but there’s more!

Weirton, WV is the only two in the U.S. that borders two different states on opposite sides. West of the town is the Ohio River, and then Ohio. East of the town is that vertical blue line that is the WV-Pennsylvania border.

Does Benford’s Law show financial fraud is increasing? An alternative

2011-10-12T21:44:00.001-05:00

This great post by Jialan Wang indicates the possible increase in “creative accounting” over time, as measured by Benford’s Law.

There is a simple explanation of Benford’s Law at http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/10/deviations-from-benfords-law-over-time-in-u-s-accounting-data.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

In particular, there is this striking graph showing that the lack of fit to Benford’s Law is increasing over time, which might show “accounting statements are getting less and less representative of what's really going on inside of companies. The major reform that was passed after Enron and other major accounting standards barely made a dent.”

An alternative

I suspect Wang may indeed to pointing out questionable accounting, but there are alternative explanations. I posted this comment on Marginal Revolution’s posting:

Possible alternative explanation: Because there has been an increase in reporting requirements during this time, have some of these numbers been “non-Benford-compliant”?

For example, package sizes in a supermarket are not Benford compliant (and I know this from testing it) because so many packages are the same size: 16 oz, 24 oz, etc. You have a lot of 8 oz packages but not a lot of 7 oz packages. But there’s no fraud involved in supermarket package sizes not being Benford-compliant.

Is there a whole class of numbers being reported now (but not in 1960) which aren’t Benford-compliant even if non-fraudulent?

NAME REDACTED responded:

I suspect that a lot of it is due to numbers that have to be made up, because their valuation isn’t really priced by a market.

Ah, yes. “The man wants a number. I gave him a number.” It would come as no surprise if valuations which were not a function of actual working markets would fail to follow Benford’s Law.

So that seems to me to be a possible alternative, depending on the source of Wang’s data. Wang isn’t being coy about it – I’m just not that familiar with the characteristics and sources of that data.

One possibility comes to mind. It used to be that certain assets could be carried at purchase price – an actual price which would be expected to follow Benford’s Law. But over time I believe more assets are required to be “marked to market”, which is fine if there is a market, but gets somewhat subjective if there is no active market. For example, I can easily determine the precise value of 1000 shares of PepsiCo stock as of December 31, 2010 but I cannot easily determine the precise value of 5% of a private company which does not trade on an exchange. So, “mark to market” may be overall a more accurate picture of the company’s position, but produce numbers which are less compliant with Benford’s Law.

Seems a bit risky to me

2011-10-12T16:02:00.001-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/science/13plague.html?hp

“From the teeth of four of those victims, researchers have now reconstructed the full DNA of a microbe that within five years felled one- third to one-half of the population of Western Europe.”

Not to worry: “it is really easy to break the transmission cycle with antibiotics and public health,” Dr. Keim said. There are still small outbreaks, like one in Madagascar in the 1990s, but “a multiyear large human outbreak is inconceivable in this day,” Dr. Keim said.” Doesn’t this sound like the first real of several horror movies?

Quote of the day

2011-10-11T12:41:00.001-05:00

“Warren is a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts.”

That’s just such a great metaphor it deserves spreading. This is from George F. Will, but he credits the phrase to William F. Buckley describing Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warren-and-liberalism-twisting-the-social-contract/2011/10/04/gIQAXi5VOL_story.html

Can we see the futue?

2011-10-10T13:35:00.001-05:00

It is helpful to remember that we often have no idea what’s coming up.

“At a 1992 conference Bill Clinton convened shortly after his election to talk about the economy, participants recall, no one mentioned the Internet.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sunday-review/the-depression-if-only-things-were-that-good.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1 (David Leonhardt is The New York Times Washington bureau chief)

Obviously, this can be both good and bad, but primarily it is humbling. Not only do we not know how to fix things, we don’t really know what natural forces are moving which will fix things or further break them.

Looking backward, we can see this. As Leonhardt notes:

“UNDERNEATH the misery of the Great Depression, the United States economy was quietly making enormous strides during the 1930s. Television and nylon stockings were invented. Refrigerators and washing machines turned into mass-market products. Railroads became faster and roads smoother and wider. As the economic historian Alexander J. Field has said, the 1930s constituted “the most technologically progressive decade of the century.””

But it didn’t seem so at the time as my parents were eating oatmeal for dinner and passing up college scholarships because they needed the income to support their parents and siblings.

So what about 1992 and the Internet?

It’s important to remember that the Internet didn’t come out of nowhere. You can think of the Internet as an open-source version of commercial services that were already of decent size by that time, notably CompusServe, Prodigy and AOL.

CompuServe started in 1969 and “By the mid-1980s CompuServe was one of the largest information and networking services companies in existence, and it was the largest consumer information service in the world.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compuserve )

The Prodigy service was started in 1980, and had a national rollout in 1990.

America Online rolls out in the 1985-1990 period as well, one platform at a time. From Wikipedia: “Kimsey changed the company's strategy, and in 1985 launched a dedicated online service for Commodore 64 and 128 computers, originally called Quantum Link ("Q-Link" for short). The Quantum Link software was based on software licensed from PlayNet, Inc, (founded in 1983 by Howard Goldberg and Dave Panzl). In May 1988, Quantum and Apple launched AppleLink Personal Edition for Apple II and Macintosh computers. In August 1988, Quantum launched PC Link, a service for IBM-compatible PCs developed in a joint venture with the Tandy Corporation. After the company parted ways with Apple in October 1989, Quantum changed the service's name to America Online.^[24][25]”

These weren’t by any means obscure businesses. Because of who their customers were, they were high visibility businesses with a high growth rate. All were monthly subscription based. You could buy stuff off them such as flowers and groceries to be delivered. But we didn’t seem them as transforming as they turned out to be – and frankly, neither did they because they didn’t come to dominate the Internet.

Leonhardt has a good point that we may not currently be producing the same quality of innovation in this recession as we did in the Great Depression, and which ultimately fueled prosperity after the war. Maybe we aren’t, and maybe we just can’t see it.

My guess, though, is that we aren’t as hungry (i.e. driven) now as we were then. But it’s only a guess.

Facebook ads cover both sides

2011-10-09T21:02:00.001-05:00

I can hardly wait for the ads on my page to escalate as the election draws near. Actually, they probably aren’t after my vote – Illinois is unlikely to be a decisive state in the presidential election – but contributions.

Warm October weekend

2011-10-09T19:21:00.001-05:00

Second weekend in October and the leaves and changing beautifully and the temperature is in the 80’s.

I went to church in (nice looking) shorts and sandals just because I could. I wasn’t the only one.

Went for a mountain bike ride this afternoon. Went west to Beck Lake, and the north along the Des Plaines Forest Preserve path Alison Woods, stopping at River Trails nature center along the way. It’s been a few years since I’ve been there – it used to be a popular place to take Beth and Abby. Beth used to feed the ducks and geese loaf after loaf of bread, but when we went with Abby they’d stopped encouraging and discouraged feeding the birds. Now it’s prohibited.

I’ve never seen so many people on this trail. I think it’s not just the weather, but the fact that they put down some gravel so the trail is better, and finished the connection farther south through Des Plaines. Now I think there’s only one minor gap preventing the trail from being continuous from Madison St up to the Wisconsin border, which has to be about 50 miles. It’s a great bit of quasi-wilderness in the urban area.

Not a CLASS Act

2011-10-09T12:15:00.001-05:00

Alex Tabarrok summarizes the current thinking on the Obama medical plan’s Community Living Assistance Services and Support program.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/10/not-a-class-act.html

“So we have phantom savings from a zombie program and many people knew at the time that the program was a recipe for disaster.”

It’s basically a cynical sham in the plan, put in there to result in “savings”. The sham continues. The government hasn’t implemented the plan, perhaps because there aren’t that many crazy actuaries. But the phantom savings are still there:

“It’s a long-term care plan the Obama administration has put on hold, fearing it could go bust if actually implemented. Yet while the program exists on paper, monthly premiums the government may never collect count as reducing federal deficits.”

It’s at this point that it’s easy to have some sympathy with the point of view of those who want no new taxes period, and who are suspicious of “tax reform” and “deficit reduction” as illusions filled with rotten Easter eggs.

The Obama medical plan is a fine example of this. In the end, it doesn’t cover everybody. It probably won’t lower costs. And it requires a huge tax (in the form of forced insurance) on the young and healthy in order to subsidize rates for the less healthy.

Quote of the day

2011-10-08T21:23:00.001-05:00

“A fanatic is a man who does what he thinks God would do, if only God knew the facts.”

-Mr. Dooley

Indiana Jones could just have gone to Germany

2011-10-08T20:11:00.001-05:00

Remember crystal skulls?

“The fictional film character Indiana Jones would later memorialize Mitchell-Hedges on the silver screen. In the fourth part of the film franchise, the whip-swinging archeology professor searches for a crystal skull in Peru.”

Turns out, they weren’t ancient Peruvian, Mayan, or Aztec at all, but 19th century German. They became a created artifact – a German crystal skull made in the 19th century is one thing, but passing it off as a 9th century or so Mayan treasure is worth considerably more. The story in Spiegel Online is here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,790456,00.html#ref=nlint

“Many fear the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, at the end of the old Mayan calendar -- and that the apocalpyse can be prevented only if all 13 crystal skulls supposedly in existence are displayed in a specific form on that day.”

I guess we’re doomed

Singapore: I can’t complain

2011-10-07T09:07:00.001-05:00

“only Singapore citizens are allowed to complain about Singapore, because foreigners might not know why things are done in a certain way in Singapore.”

(according to the Singapore Ministry of Information)

http://www.complaintschoir.org/singapore/complaintschoir_about_sing.html

Nice video here: http://classyinchina.com/?p=271

Truncated thoughts

A lifetime membership: starting in 2039!

Legally live forever and avoid estate taxes!

Utah School Rejects ‘Cougar’ Mascot to Avoid Offending Older Women

Mergers get out of hand

Marketing!

What do these people have in common

Cat names

Statistics Movies that Never Made it to the Big Screen

Chicago: Still 2 cities–even more so

Four Pinocchios for ‘King of Bain’

Potential disclaimers

Strange financial news

Want to go on a record-breaking bicycle ride?

The moral delusion of the politically religious

Luke 18:9-14

The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector

Thought for the day

Not much hope for me, then.

Organic: bad for the environment?

Blood pressure

Corrupt government <> Big government

Photographers

It’s déjà vu all over again

Christmas, when I get insulted

Was NASA’s space shuttle program a failure?

Minor correction: we’re not all doomed (at least not this way)

Do we hate the rich, or don’t we?

Newsweek misses a chance for a Douglas Adams homage–by 4

Making us aware that more people are aware of awareness.

A mathematician’s Advent Calendar

Yes, yet another redesign

Covering all the bases

Modern phenomena explained by graphs

Yes, Physicists, there is a Santa Claus

Worse than socks?

Thought for the day

Whimsical currency designs

The ragged edge of control

Gingrich tries spin control on Freddie Mac

Thought for the Day

From the ad for this issue of Decision Analysis, an INFORMS Journal:

Read more http://ow.ly/7ZbZS (Well, actually, you can’t because Decision Analysis is for subscribers only – I’m not one – and since this is an academic journal this may be the only understandable sentence in it.)

Attention Fox News: graph the actual data

The headline says all you need to know

Christmas cards

Thought for the day, Limerick edition

WWW has 4.1 dimensions

XXX rated colleges

A Statistician General?

Today's Inspiring Story: Stranded Alaskan survives 3 days on frozen beer

US man leaves jail in missing tourist case

Maybe his crime is being too shelfish?

Today's amazing statistic: half have knowledge of English

What Middletown USA read around 1900

Thanksgiving in Vermont

Large dog bone

A reminder of past economic crises

Quiz

If only Congress would DO NOTHING

The banality of evil: another chapter

So, how many decades will this prime minister be in office?

How you earned your money matters

Dallas Symphony math

11/11/11 11:11

Article on Roger Ebert

Euro crisis solution

A mild winter?

Do I care about the Big 12, Pac 12, Big 10, Big East? No.

Statistics Quiz

Christian Economics

Asteroid sharing almost same orbit as earth, around the sun.

Citigroup: never let ethics in

The Hudspith Steam Bicycle

Point | Counterpoint

The McItaly burger

Muslim Students Sue Catholic University of America for ”Surrounding Them With Catholic Symbols Which are Incongruous to Their Religion”

Muslim Students Sue Catholic University of America for ”Surrounding Them With Catholic Symbols Which are Incongruous to Their Religion”

Quote of the Day: Euro Crisis

Eat like a caveman