The straight line

There’s an opinion in the Wall Street Journal titled “Democrats Need to Shake The ‘Elitist’ Tag”. It’s by someone called Lynn Forester de Rothschild (“Lady de Rothschild is CEO of EL Rothschild, LLC, a private investment company”). Honk honk!

Multicrastinating: the act of procrastinating with several activities at once.

I don’t know why but of all the musical curiosities I’ve found on youtube this surprised me the most: Elvis singing Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right.

Writing computer programs that make profiles of natural language texts is an interesting thing. It’s not difficult to implement any particular kind of analysis, but there are arbitrarily many ways to analyse something and it’s hard to know what the most interesting thing to analyse would be. I would like to write a computer program that writes computer programs to do the analysis and then figure out what’s most interesting. But I don’t know how to do that and whether that sort of thing

a) has been done
b) is easy to do

So I’m going to study some linguistic programming to see if that helps.

Does anyone else get the feeling that maybe the thing they’d like to study most of all doesn’t exist (yet?)?

Truth in advertising – it can happen, but seemingly only in products for men:

I almost wrote about some things I suspect are necessary for relationships between men and women to be successful, but sadly it’s one of those things you have to get right the first time, or else write about anonymously. I don’t want people to hate me that much.

It feels like half the thoughts I have these days are liable to cause people to dislike me. Whither intellectual bravery? And to what end?

edit: the above doesn’t mean that I think I have intellectual bravery, but rather the opposite.

What is the order of importance of managing the following issues for mankind:

-climate change
-artificial intelligence
-nanotechnology
-biotechnology (esp. the kind that engineers humans)

?

The only part of the order I’m fairly confident about is that climate change comes last (or second last, before biotechnology). It’s probably real, but it’s just not that big a deal. Both the up- and downsides of the other things are more important, and for most of them a big part of the impact is coming sooner.

-A lot of math is seeing patterns and then guessing that they might always be true.
-And then you’re done?
-No, that’s physics.

I totally scooped Politico with my entries about presidential mortality. Ah don’t get enough respect around heah.

For an advocate of socialist public policy it’s disheartening to come to comprehend the levels of waste and inefficiency that are acceptable when public servants spend public money.

Most recently the City of Helsinki has been caught by surprise by the disappearance of JCDecaux-provided rubbish bins. The contract for them ended, so JCDecaux carted off about a thousand of them, presumably to take to the tip (they’re not in great condition). So now they have to be replaced – at a cost of half a million euros, according to deputy mayor Sauri. That’s 500 euros per bin, in bulk. Assuming they don’t go overbudget.

This brought to mind a previous story concerning sound signals at road crossings for blind people. Some years ago the various clinking and rattling signals had been unified to make all the signals uniformly beepy, at unknown (to me) cost. More recently someone had determined that the beepy sounds are no good and should be replaced by clinking (“nakuttava”) sounds. Some existing machines could do this with a software upgrade, but the machines at around 125 crossings would have to be replaced at the cost of 250 000 – 300 000 euros, or 2000-2400 euros per crossing. While I wholeheartedly support the clinking sound and appreciate that the development costs of such technology must be considerable, I can’t help but think that there must be a better way.

I intentionally left assassination out of my McCain/Obama deathwatch entry because it’s hard to tell what the realistic modern-day chances of dying from that are and what the relative risks are for each candidate. Historically, over 55 presidential terms there have been 4 assassinations, so about 7.3 percent of terms end in that. That’s way more than Obama’s chances of dying naturally, so maybe that evens the ratio a bit.

Another way of looking at the presidency: over 276 years of it, there have been four deaths from occupational hazards. For 100 000 workers that works out to ~1450 deaths a year. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that lumber cutting is the most hazardous profession in America with 117.8 deaths per 100 000.

John McCain’s veep choice is about seven times as significant as Barack Obama’s.

My calculations based on recent actuarial data indicate that the likelihood of McCain dying from natural causes during the next presidential term is around 14%. For Obama that figure is 2%.

Actually it’s more like 7.2 times as significant, but it’s all rather inaccurate. I’ve ignored that:

-both are ex-smokers, McCain has had cancer

-neither is overweight

-statistical lifestyle indicators: McCain has an undergraduate military “degree”, Obama is a juris doctor; McCain is white, Obama is half-black; McCain is silent generation, Obama is (more or less) generation X; both are married, but McCain has been divorced once, etc. From what I’ve heard, Obama’s lifestyle is healthier than McCain’s

Also, McCain doesn’t look like a two-termer: his chances of dying during the next two terms are almost 1/3.

The concept of a market economy is central to the way the world works, so it would probably be a good idea for everyone to have an understanding of it. Nevertheless I was never taught anything meaningful about it at school, and it looks like nobody else was either.

It certainly gets talked about a lot: some people hate it, some people love it. Some people who hate it know that a market is a political system designed to control & oppress the poor using the power of money, ie. a plutocracy. Some people who love it know that it automatically makes the world work in the best possible way: not only is it fair, but it maximises everyone’s happiness, even of those who struggle financially and say that they are unhappy. This follows logically from the fact that people’s lives are determined principally by their free choices, and when people make choices that place them in the gutter, this is because those choices maximise their happiness.

While both the supporters and the critics of markets have ignoramuses in their ranks, I feel that it’s the critics who have a greater responsibility of understanding it. If you want to effectively criticise something, you must first understand it at least at a basic level (this does not apply to continental philosophy).

A couple of months ago there was a reader’s letter in HS on the topic of electrical power capacity. The reader, an engineer no less, was pointing out that the price of heating oil had risen almost to the point where it would be cheaper to heat homes with electricity rather than oil. Since domestic oil-fired boilers also have electrical heating resistors as a backup, he was worried that at the instant that oil becomes more expensive, all those heaters will get switched on, Finland’s supply of electrical power will run out and we’ll be reduced to rationing electricity. His suggestion was that some kind of subsidy be introduced for heating oil to safeguard against this. I leave the question of why this is complete nonsense as an exercise to the reader. If you’re not completely sure, ask about it in the comments and we’ll discuss it. It’s not trivial but certainly worth understanding, so do discuss if you’re interested.

But ponder this: not only did the engineer make the mistake of raising this point, but the people at HS considered it to be a reasonable enough argument to print. These are journalists, people whose job it is to understand and explain the world to us. They are supposed to have greater expertise on almost everything than people like me, but I often feel that the reverse is true. Market-related mistakes like this also occur in articles proper, but I can’t recall a good enough example right now. Of course more pedestrian occurrences of innumeracy like confusing percentages with percentage points or just plain faulty logic also appear all the time.

Here’s another one, also related to the energy market. I’ve often read that electricity is priced according to the most expensive means of production. At any moment, electricity is being produced by hydroelectric dams, nuclear plants, windmills, cogenerating and regular fossil fuel plants etc. These cost widely different amounts of money to run, but the power is all priced at the most expensive type of power, typically non-cogenerating coal plants. Why? This fact is usually given without explanation, which appears to have caused people to believe that

a) some kind of big business legislation is forcing everyone to pay extortionate amounts of money for no good reason
b) there is a conspiracy/cartel on the part of energy producers causing this situation
c) it’s a mystery, scientists are working on it

To clarify this conundrum, consider what would happen if there were a law mandating the price of electricity to be the cost of the average kilowatt hour produced. To clarify further, consider that you want to hire two guys to paint a fence. There’s one guy who wouldn’t work for under five euros an hour and another who wouldn’t work for under ten euros an hour. What salary should you set to get the job done on time?

A study reports that almost half of Australia is “untouched by humans”.

More than 40 percent of Australia, an area the size of India, remains untouched by humans, making the country as critical to the world’s environment as the Amazon rainforests, a study said on Wednesday.

“It’s rare on earth in this century,” Australian wildlife ecologist and report author Barry Traill told local radio. “We need to hold onto this country. It’s just so precious,” he said.

But!

“If you drive through and see these vast areas of bushland, it looks in pretty good shape, but there are subtle changes happening, and we need to get people back out there managing it,” he said.

As usual, I must be missing something.