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Wednesday, May 02, 2007
The top ten countries in the world according to one particular statistic are:
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Ours is the first generation born after the rise of feminism. We're the first generation of Americans where it's accepted and even expected for women to be as educated as men, and to pursue professional careers of their own. That has two significant effects: one, men value intelligence more than they used to, and two, men and women tend to meet in college or at work a lot more. I'm guessing that means that men and women in couples that form nowadays are much more likely to be intellectual matches than they were 50 years ago. It's well-established that intelligence has a strong hereditary component, so I predict that the intelligence bell curve is going to flatten. There are going to be fewer people around the middle, and more people at the extremes (all else being equal). The smartest will be smarter, and there will be more of them.
Friday, May 04, 2007
Another article on praise, or rather, not praising, to follow up on the one I linked in February. The short of it is, be stingy in your conditional support, and generous in your unconditional support.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
I almost forgot the top ten. Several people guessed right, or close enough: it's the number of executions committed in a year.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Too many guys wear shirts that are too big for them. I know fashion is subjective. I know what looks goofy to me might look fine to someone else. But. The shirt is too big. You want to know how to tell? Look at the shoulder seam. If it's on your arm, the shirt is too big. With your arms at your sides, the seam should be about where your shoulders drop off (approximately, since we all buy off the rack, right?). This isn't an arbitrary rule of thumb. This is engineering. Point one. Your arm moves. The shirt will flex and move at the shoulder. Seams are stronger than fabric. You want the seam at the point of stress. Point two. Your shirt will break at your shoulder. It will also break at the seam. If the seam is in the right place, there will only be one break. If it's in the wrong place, your shirt will break twice. That does not look good. Point three. Clothing manufacturers know this. They size the rest of the shirt appropriately. Big clothes on small people makes them look smaller. Big clothing on big people makes them look bigger. Wear the right size. You'll look better.
I found this cool moth in our garage:
We came across about 10 of these birds wandering around a nearby neighborhood:
Old people lose money buying commemorative coins. The short of it is that one of those late night television advertisers told a bunch of seniors that these commemorative coins would appreciate in value and were a good investment. After buying them, the buyers discovered that the coins' market value was much less than they had thought. Now, I don't want to sound heartless. Nobody wants to see anyone impoverished, especially not the elderly. But come on: Harold Tice of Austin pulled the money out of his 401(k), his home equity and trust funds meant for his grandsons' college education to invest in the coins...And: "I'm 75 years old, and that's all the money I have, and I can't afford to lose it..." There's a whole lot wrong here. First off, though, did the coin sellers deceive the customers? Maybe, it's not clear. The only explicit claims that they made were that the coins would appreciate significantly, which is true, given enough time. They mentioned how supposedly during the Great Depression that the only currency worth anything was gold. I'm not sure about that argument. It's certainly true that a lot of sensible people invest in precious metals to protect themselves against economic shocks during all economic conditions. Even if the sellers did lie, the buyers were irresponsible (to put it nicely). Did any of them get a second opinion from someone about whether this was a good idea? Did they do any comparison shopping to see if they could find cheaper coins? What were they doing speculating with money they couldn't afford to lose? Six people lost $420,000 total. That's $70,000 each on average. If you're draining your 401(k), your home equity, and your grandsons' trust funds to buy any one thing, be it US Treasury bonds or tulip bulbs, you're making a big mistake. Don't get me wrong, the coin dealers are probably jerks. That doesn't matter. Even if they were swell guys with only your best interests at heart, it's a stupid thing to do. This also hits upon a market fundamental. Coins are just like anything else: what they're worth is what someone is willing to pay. I have a 1993 Toyota Corolla worth about $1300, according to the Kelley Blue Book. If I ask you to pay $5000 for it, and you do, well, good for me. You didn't get taken, robbed, conned, or anything else. It's entirely your choice whether to pay $5000 for it. If you then try to sell it for more, but nobody is offering more than $1300, is that really my fault? You gave me the money willingly. If you're really looking for someone to blame, go after all the people who won't pay you more than $1300 for the car. There's no such thing as intrinsic value, and thus there's no such thing as an unfair price. There's just the price you're unwilling to pay or unable to get.
¶ 1440 Posted at 01.15 PM ⇒ No Comments ( stupid people | freedom ) I rarely found class lectures to be useful when I was in college. The only benefit was they imposed some degree of structure, making sure the material passed through my brain at least once. I guess it's also worth something that it gave me a chance to talk to the prof, but I rarely needed that, and they had office hours anyway. In general, lectures were like textbooks on tape, except without the tape. One thing they definitely were not is teaching. I can read the book on my own. Teaching is about interaction. Teaching isn't a broadcast-only script; it's a stream that flows and changes direction in reaction to the students. Teaching is the teacher knowing her students and customizing the presentation to them. She skips the parts that they already know and spends extra time on the ones that are hard. She uses different media and styles of presentation to adapt the material to different learning styles. There are frequent questions, extended explanations, digressions, group discussions, etc. The teacher embeds the relevant concepts in a context familiar to the students to help them understand. The teacher is available for one-on-one supplemental tutoring in case any individual is having trouble, to customize the presentation to an audience of one. Printed textbooks are one-size-fits-all 1 . So are lectures. Real teaching is something different. It makes sense why things went that way. Lecture comes from the Latin verb legere, to read. The first universities appeared centuries before the printing press. Books were rare and expensive. Reading aloud was the only way to disseminate the information. It doesn't make sense why things are still that way. It would be a far better use of resources to focus on creating really high quality teaching materials that are widely used 2 , and allowing the faculty to focus on research and real teaching. The current system is just a waste for everyone involved.
1
I used the qualifier printed because electronic books offer the potential to be the best of both worlds, like in Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age. Of course, few people in the mainstream think about it that way; they just think of e-books as the same old thing using a different presentation technology. That's the way things go, just like the first online store fronts were print catalogs in HTML. When you learn a new thing, you start by doing the old things in a slightly different way.
2
As opposed to the corrupt practice of professors using their own textbooks and forcing the students to buy them at ridiculous prices.
Charles Stross is an uneven writer, but he sure is a smart guy. From a transcript of a talk he gave:
One of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so.As much as I like that quote, it's worth reading the whole thing. This should help you understand why science fiction isn't just interesting, it's important.
¶ 1442 Posted at 04.06 PM ⇒ No Comments ( quotes | science! ) Thursday, May 17, 2007
I take no pleasure in the passing of Jerry Falwell. To be sure, he was a bad man. He was the epitome of the entrenched hard-liner. He spread hatred and bigotry, and did a lot to hold back the progress of civilization. The wheels of progress will move more smoothly without him in the way. Nevertheless, his death is not a cause for celebration. I hate the idea of living in a world where the only way to achieve progress is to kill those holding it back, or at least to wait until they die. I regret that Jerry Falwell didn't learn the errors of his ways while he was still alive, and while it could still do good. Surely humanity is capable of more. A world where everyone's beliefs and views are effectively given to them at birth and cast in stone is a depressing, pointless one. Without the capacity to learn and grow, we are left with little. Jerry Falwell does not seem to have learned or grown much in his time on this Earth, but there was still hope as long as he lived. Now there is no longer that hope, and so I can take no joy in his death.
Friday, May 18, 2007
A co-worker and I have been going back and forth about the usefulness of tests to measure a job candidate's potential. He pointed me at a weblog post discussing how knowledge doesn't automatically mean ability, suggesting that the point was that knowledge tests are wrong. I don't quite agree. It's not about whether tests work, but rather whether tests measure the things you care about. Rarely do tests measure exactly what the job calls for. That's due to a number of factors, among them that the job isn't clearly-defined and subject to change, or that the skills it requires are hard to measure, or that testing is just too much work. As a result, we use proxies, more easily measured attributes that we believe correlate to job ability. Sometimes these correlations are stupid, where someone may be thought of as a bad programmer because he always has to look up the difference between an inner join and an outer join (that's me). Other times they are useful, like determining someone's potential as a running back from their 40-yard sprint times. It's not that knowledge tests are wrong. Knowledge tests are quite good as tests of knowledge (duh). What's unclear is whether they are good proxies for ability. I think the evidence is clear that they're neither excellent nor awful. It's important to call out this relationship because of how often we use easy proxies as shortcuts for harder or impossible measurements. We assume that someone who writes clearly is intelligent, or that someone who speaks assertively has given the matter much thought or is right, or that someone who is Indian is a software developer. This proxy problem happens in a lot of different situations. IQ tests certainly measure something that correlates to intelligence, but it's pretty definitely not intelligence itself. Programmer productivity often correlates to lines of code produced or bugs fixed, except when it doesn't 1. We also see it in measurements of school quality 2. Tests are just like statistics: it matters a whole lot how you use them.
1 And that's ignoring the skewing of behavior caused by the test itself; if I get rewarded for producing more code, I'll do that, even if it's no better.
2 Except that's even worse, because the tests are absolute measures, not relative ones. Assume one school has ninth graders in the 75th percentile and twelfth graders in the 75th percentile, while another school has 25th percentile ninth graders and 50th percentile twelfth graders. The former school will be thought of as a better school, even though the latter school clearly did a better job. Schools aren't there to produce students of a particular quality; they're there to improve their students.
Monday, May 21, 2007
The NY Times says employers are unhappy with the new immigration bill because "it would not cure the severe labor shortages they foresee in the coming decade." I have a cure for labor shortages that works every time in every situation: pay more.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
The NY Times has the story about a site dedicated to revealing identities of people cooperating with law enforcement. That is very bad.
While getting lost in Wikipedia, I came across this article on Australian criminal Mark Read. Note the sidebar: "Part of the series on Australian criminals." There is no corresponding series on American criminals.
The first movie I remember mutating the studio logo was "The Matrix" turning it green and monochromatic. Everybody's doing it now, of course. Is it just me, or was that the first one? Or, if not the first, was it the first mainstream one?
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Speaking of movie intros, I could do without them entirely. We started watching "Superman Returns" and there were like 2 minutes of opening credits. They should just launch into the movie and have all the credits at the end. It's not like any of it is necessary to understand the movie; indeed, it detracts from the experience. Obviously I can fast forward through them, but I shouldn't have to, and sometimes they combine the credits with introductory scenes. I'm sure the Directors' Guild and the Writers' Guild and all of them are the ones who insist on it 1. The other annoying thing is how some DVDs always make you go through the FBI warning and often trailers and some stupid intro to the DVD menu. You can't fast-forward, go to the menu, or do anything else to get around it. I don't buy DVDs, but it would really annoy me to have to go through that every time with a movie I ostensibly owned. What I've started doing is putting the DVD in and hitting PLAY a few minutes before I'm actually going to sit down to watch the movie. That works, but again, I shouldn't have to. The DVD consortium has rules. You can't get a DVD player that actually lets you skip the parts you want to skip. Not only do they have rules, but the DMCA makes it so that nobody can break the rules.
1 even the producers have a guild
Political correctness is about changing the way people express themselves. In theory, that means that people will think differently. In practice, it accomplishes little. Consider the evolution of "crippled." People didn't like being called "crippled" because there was negative baggage, so we started using "disabled" instead. Wouldn't you know it, "disabled" started to have negative connotations, so we switched to "handicapped." Surprisingly, that didn't work, so we decided to give "physically challenged" a try. Well, I guess it was too challenging for us, so we moved on to "differently abled." You get the point. We start using news term to avoid the negative connotations of the old. The problem is that the baggage wasn't attached to the old word, but to the old concept. As long as the concept and its perception remain the same, the baggage will always catch up. There's how fired became laid off became downsized became right-sized might soon become externally redeployed 1. There are certainly plenty of apparent exceptions. Contrast n-plus-5-letters to black 2. Gay is still a neutral term where faggot is not. I suspect that neither of those is an actual exception. Instead, they both demonstrate how newer terms that are free of baggage can only do so when society at large becomes less bigoted and judgmental. The contrast with fired makes it more clear. Involuntary disemployment is always going to be a negative event because it's real and meaningful. It's good to avoid loaded, bad terms for things like race, gender, sexual orientation, and other things that don't (or shouldn't) affect people's lives in general. Losing a job or a limb isn't one of those things. It's one thing to be respectful of disabilities, it's another thing to try to wish them away. I think the key distinction is whether someone would mind shifting into the other category. I think I might mind being black a bit, but much less than 40 years ago. Ditto for being female or gay. However, I can't imagine ever not minding losing leg. That is always going to be viewed as a big bummer. What's important isn't the futile quest for a positive name for something negative, but treating people with respect. And that's a lot harder than changing the way people talk.
1
I googled that phrase expecting to find a nice link to Max Barry's Company, but found almost nothing except a real world use in this EU report (PDF). It's in the wild!
2
Assuming black is ok these days. White seems fine, and I'm cool with brown, but that's hardly conclusive.
¶ 1450 Posted at 05.29 PM ⇒ No Comments ( observations | deep thoughts ) Friday, May 25, 2007
Can you distinguish between fake smiles and real ones? I was awful; I only got 13/20, which is barely better than random.
¶ 1454 Posted at 03.04 PM ⇒ No Comments ( science! | tests ) I don't think I quite noticed in previous readings how much fun Neal Stephenson had writing "Snow Crash.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Both Jessica and my mother were surprised (on separate occasions) when I changed a CD in a carousel-style player without stopping the CD being played. Both players have an "Exchange" button for that reason. I guess most people don't know about it. Really, why should they? The "Open/Close" button ought to do that. There shouldn't be one button for "stop CD and open" and another button for "open without stopping CD." If people really want to stop the CD that's playing, they can press "Stop.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice the growing similarity between Google Earth and the program of the same name in "Snow Crash." It's no coincidence; it's a inevitable application and a logical interface. It's still funny, though.
¶ 1458 Posted at 09.06 PM ⇒ No Comments ( software | books ) There's a site out there doing web-based brain games. I tried their LumosIQ. I think I need more training. I got 127 on attention, 134 on memory, and 152 on processing speed, for a total score of 137.
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I'm pretty sure they're