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October 31, 2005
I love apocalyptic movies
I love those movies where a few hardy survivors grapple with the end of the world or human life on it. I often wonder how I would deal with the strain of such a situation. 28 Days later, portrays rather more realistically than most what total social breakdown caused roaming zombies would look like. A major reason the protagonists need to undergo a dangerous trip is that they run out of water both to drink and use for sanitary purposes. The clever people at the world toilet organization have created a system that uses just a couple of plaster buckets, some plastic tarp, and some old cloths hangers to create an ultra-low water usage, but sanitary human waste disposal system. Maybe if you had one of these you'd be able to last until help arrives. Remember to keep extra cans of soup and power bars along with the gallons of water. For extra measure fill the bathtub with as much water as possible at the first sign of trouble.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:45 AM | Comments (2)
October 30, 2005
Even the feminists seem to think feminism is dead
Maureen Dowd, in a lucid and sad portrayal of the state of dating in America, explores why gender equality never showed up.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:33 AM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2005
Voting with your feet?
What do you do when you own a few shares of a corporation, and you later discover that they are engaged in illegal or unnecessary pollution, strike breaking, or just selling a dangerous or low quality product?
The classic advice your broker would give you is to sell your shares and but the stock of a company that affirms your values. But that same broker, if he is honest and informed in the investment theory of the last few decades, will tell you that the majority of your money should be in mutual funds that index the whole stock market. Sure you could invest in one of the ethical investing index funds, but they have fees that are 10 or 20 times higher than broad market index funds.
So what are all those people desperate to make the world a better place but have a retirement to worry about supposed to do? Is it possible that the growth of index investing is in part causing the growth of activist shareholders? They can't leave, so they have to get angry. A minority of them may actually try to change the culture of the companies they own. They could attend meetings, start proxy battles, and otherwise become activists as they vote the proxies of their investments. Mutual, insurance and pension funds, eager to protect their own reputations, might consider the same issues in how they vote their shares.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)
The NY times gives Walmart a fair shake
Weal-mart has been in the news a lot over the last few days. First, the CEO of Weal-mart called for raising the minimum wage, a policy called sometimes an ethical watershed and other times brilliant and self-serving depending on the pundit 's ideology. Just as that was settling down, Wal-Mart leaked an internal memo where they detailed how they could control their health care costs, including discouraging the sick from applying by making physical activity part of nearly every role. But today, the NY times of all places has a nuanced analysis of the paper where they detail the many positive steps they want to take too, like paying more for preventive care, lowering employee prices for healthy foods, and providing a few generic drugs a year.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:23 AM | Comments (0)
October 27, 2005
Are India and China really the next super powers?
Surely the current threat of India's IT workers (just a million of them) and China's manufacturing (less than a third of that of either the US or Japan) is exaggerated. Yale Global online seems to think that China and India's common rural/urban inequalities, India's horrible infrastructure and China's totalitarianism, there isn't much to worry about later either.
Meanwhile, the econobrowser explores why China's economic statistics are a bunch of lies and other nonsense.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:32 PM | Comments (5)
October 26, 2005
I against my brother, I and my brother against our cousin, I, my brother and our cousin against the neighbors, All of us against the foreigner
It seems that the Satmers, an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect is in the midst of a schism, where the upstate New York members are actively hostile with the members from Brooklyn. Yesterday, they got into a huge brawl and the police had to be called. As my father says about the American Left during his crazy years at Cornell, there is no minority position so extreme and rare that a group will not splinter over it.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:19 PM | Comments (1)
October 25, 2005
Predict Your Child's Adult Height
If you know know any healthy (not limited by any bone growth diseases) children (>=8 girls, >=9 boys) then you can estimate their adult height. Couldn't find any estimates of the error of this calculation.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:19 PM | Comments (0)
Is the Nobel Prize for Peace a dubious honor?
Mohamed El Baradei, won the Nobel prize for Peace this year for his efforts to keep the atom used for peace. But not all winners are saintly do-gooders working for impeccable causes. While all the winners have had their hand in peace, many have also had their hand in war and murder. Take for example, the heads of state. By the nature of their duties, they are simultaneously most likely to cause and prevent violence. So it isn't a surprise that 10 heads of state (at the time of award) are on the list, even though most caused a few people to go to their maker. The award has also gone to a few debatable causes. Mother Teresa did much for the worlds poor, but she hurt them too by working against family planning and condom use. The red cross protects the weak, but by making war humane, do they make it more common? Even the United Nations Peace-Keeping Forces have been accused of worsening conflicts and troop mayhem .
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2005
The existence of a powerful and battle-proven military makes the job of diplomats and political leaders vastly easier
Kagan, in the latest issue of The Wilson Quarterly, discusses the importance of the threat of force in effective diplomatic action. He defends force, not just as the failure of peaceful negotiations, but an essential accompaniment, where both are far more effective together. Also of interest is the role of conclusive victory in subduing insurgencies. He argues that decisive victory, combined with reasonable and legitimate terms of surrender will enervate resistance to dominant powers, regardless of the strength of ideology uniting the insurgents.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
Brazil gun prohibition referendum soundly defeated
Brazil shares a high level of gun violence and murder with the United States. Interestingly, taking into account an average household size of 3.5 member, Brazil only about 3% of households with gun owners, whereas the US has about 35% of households with a gun.*
So you might think that with all that gun violence and low rates of gun ownership, that gun control might be popular, if misguided. The NY Times announces and Volok analyzes the defeat of the recent Brazilian referendum on banning guns.
*
Of Arms & the Law confirms that Brazil has a much lower ownership gun density.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:25 AM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2005
Critique of a Critique of Medieval Philosophy
I stumbled upon a critique of theology in an article in Philosophy Now.
I think the reasoning has a mistake, but I need some geek help to sort out He seems to assume that because if time is infinite, it is uncountably infinite, when in fact, Plank time suggests that it is either finite or countably infinite.
Would someone take a look?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2005
Gifts to the power user in the next version of Excel
I'm a power user of Excel. When I want to do some data analysis, automate a repetitive task, or mock up a user interface, I reach for Excel. If Excel can't be bent to the task at hand I'll reach for VBA, R, Eviews, or Perl, but usually I can work it up quickly in Excel. Once in a while, while working on a monster formula, I bump into an environmental limit of Excel. I've learned that many of these environmental limits will be expanded in the next version, Excel 12. There will also be big improvements in how Excel displays long formulae.
The maximum length of formulas (in characters)
Old Limit: 1k characters
New Limit: 8k characters
The number of levels of nesting that Excel allows in formulas
Old Limit: 7
New Limit: 64
Maximum number of arguments to a function
Old Limit: 30
New Limit: 255
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2005
Do you have trouble saving?
Good investment depends far more on good saving than anything else. In a tremendous improvement on the piggy bank, Bank of America has a great new way to make saving painless and inevitable. Simply round up all your transactions to the next dollar and deposit the change into a bank account. At 20 transactions a week, this could probably be good for an extra $500 in savings a year. Give this to a struggling college kid and they could open their first brokerage account by graduation.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:43 PM | Comments (0)
USA Today, while usually vapid, has something interesting to say about making us safer
An Op-Ed in USA Today discusses how a healthy dose of federalism in airport security could make us safer.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:33 PM | Comments (0)
A small number of gay marriages will have large knock on effects
A guest blogger on Volokh has thoughtful look into how legalization on gay marriage could have a tremendous influence on heterosexual marriage, even if they remain rare. It also comments more generally on how the law affects beliefs and opinions.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:59 AM | Comments (2)
October 19, 2005
MTA to offer half price subway fares and other discounts in December
The NY Times reports that the MTA, leveraging an unexpected revenue surplus and higher gas prices, will be offering $1 subway fares and extending ulimited ride metrocards. It is expected to reduce congestion over the shopping season.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2005
Until consumers want rights we'll keep giving them away
There are many users concerned about the rights that they sign away in end user licensing agreements when installing software, but not so obsessed that they'd read the long and cryptic agreements. I'd hope that the solution to this would be to have standard, end user friendly licenses, and then only highlight the exceptions to the standard contract. It doesn't seem like that is happening, but Copyfight points out a helpful alternative, EULAlyzer, an application that scans for abusive language in these contracts.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:12 AM | Comments (1)
October 14, 2005
The games people play
Check out this tiny game collection that fits in an Altoid box.
It even includes a version of Magic, called Duel that you can play with a conventional deck of cards.
The rules of Duel.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)
Wow, that's one way to get them to leave your country
The famously tolerant Dutch are proposing to ban the Burka. "The ban is likely to be enforced in shops, public buildings, cinemas, train and bus stations and airports, as well as on trains and buses."
While this might be and effective method for discouraging additional Muslim immigration and internal ethnic separatism, I doubt that the European Convention on Human Rights will let it stand.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:02 PM | Comments (0)
And you think Disney cleans up fairy tales?
Marginal Revolution reports that the Simpsons has been translated into Arabic, after some plot rewrites that remove references to beer and pork.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2005
Greeks 75 Maya 2, but this time the loser dies
A wonderful piece that displays the superiority of Greeks to the Mayans, political correctness be damned.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:32 PM | Comments (0)
Travels with Charlie Toothpaste
I hate little travel toothpastes. They just don't hold enough to bother using them, but it seems silly (and perhaps unsanitary or ineffective) to use a whole tube for this purpose. Anyone know of an intermediate travel size? Or am I condemned to just traveling with half used big tubes?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:32 PM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2005
What you measure moves
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a measure of journal impact has come to dominate all other factors in evaluating the importance of a paper. Important papers are published in high impact journals, unimportant ones in unimportant ones.
This has lead to strategic behavior among journal publishers and paper authors that is distorting those rankings.
Examples of that strategic behavior includes:
1) Looking favorably on potential papers that cite other papers in the same journal
2) Citing academic allies and avoiding citations of ideological enemies
3) Using it as a substitute for understanding the work of colleges.
4) Publishing review articles that summarize but contain no new ideas.
An obvious improvement on this would be to weight internal citations and those of review articles lower than that of cross-journal and original research citations.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:11 PM | Comments (1)
October 7, 2005
Did Bush say Bush said God told him to invade Iraq?
The Times of London, among many others, is reporting that Bush said God told him to invade Iraq.
Nabil Shaath claims that in June of 2003, Bush told Abu Mazen, the Palestinian Prime Minister that he was religiously inspired to go to war with Iraq. I strongly doubt this is true. Abu Mazen and his team have their own reasons for painting Bush in a bad light. With all the reasons for going to war, why would Bush tell a suspicious, nearly hostile, Arab leader that his real reason was exactly the one that would enrage the secular elements of American society and the Arab street?
Ah you might say, if we merely acted in upright manner, no one would ever give such an accusation credence. If French President Chirac were accused of the same thing, would that even make the news?
I certainly don't want to live in a theocracy, but likewise I do not want to live in a country where being a faithful warrants a presupposition that one is unqualified for public office. American lessons with the Catholics (to the Pope), Jews (to the nation of Israel) , and communists (to the USSR) suggest that the cure to dual allegiances in our leadership is worse than the disease.
So given that Bush isn't going to change his stripes to placate barely pleasant allies and the outright hostile Arab street, what can Bush say or do now that would convince the guy on the street in Egypt or France that the real reasons for his policies is that they make good economic, utilitarian, or political sense and not that it came to him in a revelation?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:58 AM | Comments (1)
October 6, 2005
Back after a break
Happy New Year Jewish readers. While waiting out the famously long goodbyes of my girlfriend's family on Rosh Hashanah, I picked a handy copy of The New Yorker. In flipping through the cartoons, I stumbled across a fascinating article about the modern admission system of the Ivy League, specifically Harvard, Princeton and Yale. I was stunned to learn that the modern "balanced student" admission system has its roots in an antisemitic desire to control the number of Jewish students at Harvard.
That reminded me of the role in nativist and anti-catholic values in creating the modern separation of church and state in the US.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:35 PM | Comments (0)