links for 2011-03-30

• Calling BULLSHIT on Rolling Stone
  (tags: politics Media Iraq afghanistan military weekendreading)
• Genius at work: 12-year-old is studying at IUPUI | The Indianapolis Star | indystar.com
  // Interesting stuff.
  (tags: autism cosmology education mathematics people physics psychology science weekendreading)
• Shot in the Dark » Blog Archive » The Midway Rumor Mill
  Quote:"The Central Corridor, as we discussed last week, will tear up University Avenue for the next 3-4 years, and that’s if it’s the rare government project that comes in on time; only the most entrenched pollyanna believes it’ll come in anywhere near the current, already-bloated $1.4 billion price tag.

  And that’s just up-front costs.

  Businesses are already floundering; before an inch of track is laid in the Midway, businesses on the west side of the neighborhood are reporting freefalling customer visits, as the parking and the street barriers strangle access to their stores.

  Several businesses have already closed – perhaps not entirely attributable to the rail construction, yet, but at the very least businesses whose fates were sealed by the oncoming traffic, parking and pedestrian nightmares and decided to cut their losses short.

  // Porky's was on the Burger Tour, and will be affected by this. :(

  (tags: burgertour governmentstupidity localstuff mnpolitics twincities)
• Top 40 Minnesota Twins: #22 Zoilo Versalles » AaronGleeman.com » Aaron Gleeman's Baseball and Minnesota Twins Blog
  Quote:"If you're a Twins fan harboring resentment toward stats-based analysis it's tempting to set up that argument. "Versalles was great in 1965, but those dorks with their calculators don't think so!" Unfortunately, that's inaccurate and ultimately nothing more than attacking a strawman. The premise that those who "scrutinize numbers" don't view Versalles' season as special is flawed because of a failure to realize that any stat-head worth a damn looks past raw stats.

  Versalles' stats aren't eye-popping at first glance, but one of the main goals of sabermetrics is placing stats like that in proper context. Depending on the circumstances, that means looking beyond oft-quoted numbers like batting averages and RBIs, adjusting for era and offensive environment, and making additional positional adjustments.

  // Putting raw numbers into context is the most important aspect of statistics.

  (tags: Baseball sabermetrics statistics Twins weekendreading)
• BBC News – Libya: William Hague hints at Muammar Gaddafi exile
  (tags: weekendreading Libya)

links for 2011-03-29

• No Mortgage Lenders in Jail, but a Borrower Lands There – NYTimes.com
  (tags: crime housing mortgage weekendreading)
• The Greatest Pitcher You've Never Heard Of | ThePostGame
  Quote:"There was a time when John Donaldson was as famous as Satchel Paige. He was heralded as the “famous colored twirler,” whose only crime was playing his best years before 1920, when the Negro Leagues were officially created. Not only did Donaldson miss his chance to pitch in front of large crowds, he missed the chance to cement himself into contemporary baseball history. The pitcher who won more than 350 games and had 4,500 strikeouts has largely been lost to time.

  // Great read about pre-Negro League barnstorming pitcher who deserves to be in the HOF.

  (tags: Baseball history weekendreading)

links for 2011-03-28

• Power Line – Obama on Libya: How Did He Do?
  Quote:"Obama says we have a vital national interest in Libya, and he declares that Qaddafi "must go." Yet regime change is not our goal: "[B]roadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." If I understand Obama correctly–and believe me, it isn't easy–he is invoking Iraq as an explanation for why he doesn't want to overthrow Qaddafi: regime change in Iraq took too long and cost too much.

  That doesn't mean, of course, that deposing Qaddafi would be as hard or take as long. Actually, Qaddafi appears to be hanging by a thread. Obama leaves himself in an inconsistent position, where the U.S. ostensibly has a vital interest in preventing Qaddafi from terrorizing his own people, but not vital enough to do the one thing that would actually bring about the desired result: get rid of Qaddafi.

  // Simply put, Obama was not interested in communicating, only in sounding pretty and not taking a stance on Libya.

  (tags: obama Libya)
• CNBC's Fast Money: Morning Note: Gold Replacing Dollar as World’s Reserve Currency? – CNBC
  Quote:"Gold and silver have become the inflation hedges of choice for some investors. Gold hit an intra day high today of $1,448 per ounce. Silver is trading at 31-year highs, hitting an intra day high of $38 per ounce.

  // There are big consequences if the dollar is dropped as the world's reserve currency (ask the Brits about it). And see below about the current monetary base.

  (tags: currency debt deficit economics gold libertarianism)
• Pascack Valley Regional High School District in northern New Jersey goes high-tech, gives all students laptopsCBS New York
  // There is very little evidence technology actually increases academic achievement. In fact, most of the time it does the opposite. Perhaps the new KhanAcademy model will reverse this, but I highly doubt schools are going to be doing the KhanAcademy schtick. Teaching kids to look stuff up on Wikipedia is not education.
  (tags: education school technology trends)
• Captain Capitalism: "Why Can't We Just Print Off More Money?"
  // Graphy goodness, the Captain lets us see the current monetary base compared to the norm, and the news is not good if you have any cash or savings. If you have a lot of debt, it's a little better.
  (tags: economics inflation monetary.mischief)
• Japan's pet survivors face post-tsunami struggle
  Quote:"In Sendai, tsunami warden Mr Kamata tried to return for his dog — a large pedigree Akita — after warning neighbours about the incoming wave, but found his way blocked by the churning water.

  // Akitas…now there's a dog. A dog's dog.

  (tags: animals dogs tsunami)

From the Notebook

Image via Wikipedia

- Published an article on pro-life Crisis Pregnancy Centers.

-Went to the MOB event, saw a few people, actually talked to a few others (Mark, John, Mitch, Brad). Would’ve stayed longer but I was really tired from a long day of fantasy baseball drafts and drinking.

-I have gone through all my old blogger.com blogs and put them under private viewership. Eventually I intend to delete them (all the posts have been transferred to this blog and the archive). If, for some incredibly odd reason you want access to my blogger.com blogs, contact me.

-Saw ”Sucker Punch” at St. Anthony Main. There was too much “Girl Power” and not enough Tengu Monster killing, and it was too loud, and I hated the music, and there was too much crying, and I’m a little embarrassed to admit I even paid to see it (I didn’t, thankfully), and it started too slow and ended quite stupidly. But, the Steam-Powered Zombie Nazis (though technically, they weren’t Nazis as it was a WWI fantasy and not a WWII one, regardless) made this film worth seeing.

Books Read:

-Pascal’s Treatise on the Arithimatical triangle. This is part of the Great Books ten-year reading program, and was very difficult to understand (terrible translation). But, I did recognize some of the statistical concepts. Fortunately, there are plenty of youtube videos available that make learning about “Pascal’s Triangle” rather easy. If only I had to factor more binomial expressions in my life.

-”Let’s go to the Movies” by Lester Gordon. I barely consider this a book. It was a collection of trivia, quotes and anecdotes about movies and famous actors and actresses. But, because I’m having a hard time getting books finished, I’m counting it. It’s dated, so don’t bother.

-John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” –Another selection from the Great Books reading program– I liked this essay. It presents the foundation for what we call “classical liberalism” including the limits of government power, the value of free speech, and the limits and requirements for government interventions. Because Mill is an atheist (agnostic), this book might not get read by conservatives as much as it should.

Related Articles

• Generating Pascal’s triangle using Python (yjl.im)
• “If John Stuart Mill were around today, he would likely ask, ‘When did Bob Wright and the left turn against free speech?’” (althouse.blogspot.com)
• John Stuart Mill On Government Power (samuelatgilgal.wordpress.com)

links for 2011-03-27

• Freedom in the 50 States
  // Not surprisingly, Minnesota doesn't do so well.
  (tags: politics freedom economics statistics philosophy libertarian map numbersandstudies)
• Neighborhood hit by mortgage crisis battles back – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"Just two months after Madruga took title, somebody broke in and ransacked three of her houses. "They stole even the (electrical) outlets, the knobs on the doors, everything," she says. The Youmans' landlord went into foreclosure and the couple lost roughly $5,000 — the portion of their monthly rent that was supposed to give them an equity stake. They moved to a second house down the street, determined to make a go of it.

  // Another consequence of having a glut of housing, theft. When there are too many homes unoccupied, it's very easy to break in and steal copper pipes and other material goods. Which is why the most important stat when it comes to housing is making sure there is only a five month supply on the market. More than that, and you invite decay.

  (tags: housing weekendreading)
• homeowner-no-savings-some-options: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance
  Quote:"It should never have come to this. Ms. Wilson attended the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1950s, though she left before graduating to move to New York and marry her college sweetheart, the Minimalist sculptor and sometime rock musician Walter De Maria.

  // Wow, I'm absolutely shocked a woman who left college to marry a "minimalist sculptor and sometime rock musician" would have failed to put away some money for retirement. Just shocked.

  (tags: budget finance money personal retirement savings)
• Online Library of Liberty – The Sphere and Duties of Government (The Limits of State Action) (1854 ed.)
  // This essay influenced John Stuart Mill and was the first real defense of personal/individual liberty.
  (tags: books conservative.canon great-books liberty weekendreading)
• Celtx – #1 Choice for Media Pre-Production
  (tags: film opensource randomlinks screenwriting software tools writing)

links for 2011-03-25

• Stocks vs. Real Estate | 1 | CNNMoney.com
  Quote:"The results? Housing delivered a solid but unimpressive annualized return of 8.6%. Commercial property did better at 9.5%. The S&P, however, delivered a crushing 13.4%.

  Other studies argue that real estate's returns are much worse. Yale finance and economics professor Robert Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance, who looked back to 1890, contends that only twice has real estate produced truly outstanding returns: after World War II, when returning troops were starting their families, and from 1998 to 2005, a period he thinks is a bubble.

  Housing's rate of return, he argues, has to trend back to the mean of about 3% a year – barely above the inflation rate. If that's starting to happen now, he says, we could be facing many years of losses.

  (tags: business economics finance housing investing money numbersandstudies realestate)
• 破産を遷延する　- Japanese Bankruptcy « Retronomics Blog
  (tags: business economics weekendreading)
• Safety Nets and Scaffolds: Parental Support in the Transition to Adulthood – Swartz – 2011 – Journal of Marriage and Family – Wiley Online Library
  Abstract quote:"Using longitudinal data from the Youth Development Study (analytic sample N = 712), we investigate how age, adult role acquisition and attainments, family resources, parent–child relationship quality, school attendance, and life events influence support received from parents in young adulthood. Parental assistance was found to be less forthcoming for those who had made greater progress on the road to adulthood, signified by socioeconomic attainment and union formation. The quality of mother–child and father–child relationships affected parental support in different ways, positively for mothers, negatively for fathers. School enrollment, negative life events, and employment problems were associated with a greater likelihood of receiving support. The findings suggest that parents act as “scaffolding” and “safety nets” to aid their children's successful transition to adulthood.

  // So really, this study told us stuff we already knew.

  (tags: economics family.values numbersandstudies parenting)
• Gen Y Not Slackers, Just Slow Starters – Yahoo! News
  Quote:'The new data came from the Youth Development Study, a survey of young adults. The study has followed a group of ninth-grade students enrolled in St. Paul, Minn., public schools in the fall of 1987; the students and their parents filled out questionnaires every year or two. Swartz analyzed data from 1997, when the participants were 24 years old, through 2005, when they turned 32.

  "We were interested in this older period of young adulthood," Swartz told LiveScience. "What defines this giving? Why do they give?"

  Most of these parentally dependent twentysomethings have launched into adulthood by their 30s, only about 15 percent still receiving aid of some kind from their parents, the results showed.

  // I really want to read this study, I doubt strongly its veracity.

  (tags: business economics numbersandstudies parenting)
• Houdini's Last Living Assistant Dies, But His Legend Lives On – MOVIE TALK on Yahoo! Movies
  quote:"Dorothy Young, the last surviving assistant to share the stage with Harry Houdini, died this week at the age of 103. Young passed away at a retirement community in Tinton Falls, N.J. according to a spokesman from Drew University where she was a longtime patron.

  Young was cast in Houdini's traveling show at the age of 17, reports Variety. She attended an open casting call in New York, and although she was originally stuck in the back of the crowd, Houdini spotted her and asked to see her dance. After impressing the magician and his manager, she was signed to contract to join his show.

  // It's sad we only get to hear about people like this after they've died.

  (tags: houdini Magic obits)
• 26-year-old self-published ebook sensation lands 7-digit deal – Yahoo! News
  quote:" "the runaway ebook renown of 26-year-old publishing-house reject Amanda Hocking," who has sold more than a million copies of what she describes on her blog as "young adult paranormal romance" and "zombie urban fantasy" tales via digital platforms like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook.

  As of Thursday, the former indie author from Minnesota is a vampire-hot New York publishing house property. Hocking has inked a four-book, $2 million-plus deal with Macmillan imprint St. Martin's Press, the New York Times reports. The agreement comes on the heels of what the Times described as a "heated auction" that apparently became a bit too heated for Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins. The first book in the series is set for a fall 2012 release.

  But it's unclear how Hocking's royalties will compare with the profits she was reaping on her own. The author has said she was selling 100,000 copies of her nine ebooks every month for as much as $3 a piece;

  (tags: books publishing writing)

links for 2011-03-24

• 'Kinetic military action' or 'war'? – Jonathan Allen – POLITICO.com
  //"Kinetic military action" is redundant. Action implies kinesis.
  (tags: English language Libya military)
• WWII vet discovers he’s not a U.S. citizen – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"Davidson was born in British Columbia in 1916. He checked up on his citizenship before joining the Navy and was told by an inspector at the U.S. Department of Labor Immigration and Naturalization Service he had nothing to worry about. Now he worries that he won't be able to prove his citizenship, because his parents were born in Iowa before local governments started keeping records of birth certificates in 1880. "I want it squared away before I pass away," he says.

  Schoolcraft says they tried to dissuade him from pursuing the matter. Employees at the local passport office scared them, telling her father "If he pursued it, (he could) possibly be deported or at risk of losing Social Security."

  // Fortunately, Senator Murray's office is helping out. Hope he gets everything squared away, he deserves it.

  (tags: immigration military)
• FEMA: First Aid Kit
  Just FYI:Assemble a first aid kit for your home and one for each car. A first aid kit* should include:

  •Sterile adhesive bandages in assorted sizes
  •2-inch sterile gauze pads (4-6)
  •4-inch sterile gauze pads (4-6)
  •Hypoallergenic adhesive tape
  •Triangular bandages (3)
  •2-inch sterile roller bandages (3 rolls)
  •3-inch sterile roller bandages (3 rolls)
  •Scissors
  •Tweezers
  •Needle
  •Moistened towelettes
  •Antiseptic
  •Thermometer
  •Tongue blades (2)
  •Tube of petroleum jelly or other lubricant
  •Assorted sizes of safety pins
  •Cleansing agent/soap
  •Latex gloves (2 pair) Sunscreen
  Non-prescription drugs

  •Aspirin or nonaspirin pain reliever
  •Anti-diarrhea medication
  •Antacid (for stomach upset)
  •Syrup of Ipecac (use to induce vomiting if advised by the Poison Control Center)
  •Laxative
  •Activated charcoal (use if advised by the Poison Control Center)

  (tags: disaster emergency health safety)

links for 2011-03-23

• Eric Schmidt (Ex CEO and current Chairman – Google) management style and CIO « Engaged IT for the CIO
  (tags: business ericschmidt google weekendreading)
• NationalJournal.com – New Home Sales Dive to Record Low – Wednesday, March 23, 2011
  // Graph goodness. I like how it shows what a failure the tax credit was for new home buyers. It delayed the bottom, it didn't prevent it.
  (tags: housing numbersandstudies)
• South Dakota Passes Tougher Regulations on Abortions – ABC News
  // Good for SoDak, I hope the law sticks.
  (tags: abortion life sodak)
• NYC judge calls off plans for Google library
  Quote:"Google lawyer Daralyn Durie testified at the hearing that fewer than 10 million books of 174 million books in the world would be affected by the settlement, and that 5 million of those affected were out of print. Google has estimated that about 130 million titles would likely get into its digital library.

  // So relax, most books will get scanned (and really, all of them will get scanned eventually).

  (tags: books google law)
• Stuff Academics Like | An ongoing celebration of the academically obscure, pretentious, and bizarre.
  (tags: blogs randomlinks humor academia humanities parody education)
• How To Make $1 Million Before You Graduate – Forbes.com
  (tags: bio business weekendreading)

links for 2011-03-22

• How To Make $1 Million Before You Graduate – Forbes.com
  (tags: bio business weekendreading)
• Tour De Gall | Culture | Vanity Fair
  // Wow, what an article.
  (tags: weekendreading food restaurant writing good.writing)
• Paris Hilton prosecutor arrested for buying cocaine – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"The Las Vegas deputy district attorney who prosecuted Paris Hilton for cocaine possession was arrested over the weekend after allegedly buying a rock of cocaine, authorities said on Monday.

  Clark County Deputy District Attorney David Schubert, 47, was taken into custody in Las Vegas on Saturday afternoon and booked on one count of cocaine possession.

  // Just end the drug war.

  (tags: drugwar martyemail)
• 22 Secrets HR Won’t Tell You About Getting a Job – Manage Your Life on Shine
  Quote:" “If you’re trying to get a job at a specific company, often the best thing to do is to avoid HR entirely. Find someone at the company you know, or go straight to the hiring manager.” –Shauna Moerke, an HR administrator in Alabama who blogs at hrminion.com

  // Noted!

  (tags: employment job jobs jobsearch HR finance business)
• US jet crashes in Libya; fighting rages in cities – Yahoo! News
  (tags: Libya war military weekendreading)
• Captain Capitalism: Must Hit the Ground Running
  (tags: HR business economics weekendreading)

links for 2011-03-21

• Power Line – Soak the Rich? They Are Already Soaked
  Quote:"We pointed out a couple of years ago–time flies–that the United States has the most progressive system of personal taxation of any developed country. Now, the Tax Foundation has the same message. The top ten percent of American taxpayers pay more to the national government in taxes, both as a percentage of the total taxes collected and in proportion to their share of the national income, than upper-income taxpayers in any other developed country. This chart says it all:

  // If you start to include corporate taxes and unbelievable levels of regulation and bureacracy, America is basically a democratic-socialist country.

  (tags: taxation)
• Shot in the Dark » Blog Archive » LGA: Putting Off The Inevitable
  Quote:"That’s the point that the DFL wants to keep obscuring; while the original stated purpose of LGA was to help lower property taxes for cities whose infrastructure needs outstripped the population’s ability to pay – building water treatment plants and police stations and schools in towns that couldn’t afford them, then or now – it has become a subsidy for big, bad, profligate urban DFL mismanagment; the Twin Cities, Duluth and Rochester get twice as much LGA per capita as the rest of the state, and that’s with the “the rest of the state” including the cities housing a third of the population that get no LGA at all.
  (tags: LGA mnpolitics MOB)
• Existing-Home Sales Plunge, Setback for Housing Recovery – CNBC
  Quote:"The National Association of Realtors said Monday sales fell 9.6 percent month over month to an annual rate of 4.88 million units, snapping three straight months of gains.

  The percentage decline was the largest since July.

  Economists polled by Reuters had expected February sales to fall 4.0 percent to a 5.15 million-unit pace from the previously reported 5.36 million unit rate in January, which was revised slightly up to 5.40 million.

  The median home price dropped 5.2 percent in February from a year earlier to $156,100, the lowest since April 2002.

  // Pretty obvious to me, there won't be a housing market recovery until people have jobs.

  (tags: housing numbersandstudies economy)
• [1103.1224] Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency
  Quote:"We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both number of laws passed and average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an "efficiency golden rule" which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.
  (tags: democracy numbersandstudies politics)
• The Dead Pool – Death Pool – A celebrity deadpool contest. Dead pool contest, gossip and celebrity headlines.
  (tags: celebrity randomlinks)
• Union Myths – Page 1 – Thomas Sowell – Townhall Conservative
  // There is no free lunch, part MMCXXIII
  (tags: economics unions weekendreading)