Monday December 29, 2008

not a free market on information The free market as a control mechanism has been taking a beating lately but you would have thought that it wasn't so unpopular that this study would surprise anybody. Restricting information and reducing transparency leading to non-optimal behavior shouldn't surprise anybody. ( Dec 29 2008, 02:58:31 PM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday December 24, 2008

Obama with a wedding ring? These pictures seem to be getting press because he is smoking. I'm more interested in the wedding ring almost a decade before his wife. ( Dec 24 2008, 11:26:07 PM PST ) Permalink

Thursday December 18, 2008

statistical language

From NYT concerning the list of people who have donated to Clinton's foundation:

The foundation said that its median gift since its inception came to $45 and that nearly 90 percent of its gifts were $250 or smaller.

Isn't this kind of heavy tailed distribution of contributions leading to a small number of influences exactly what middle America shouldn't want to see? Given the focus on "median" instead of "mean" and then the use of language which seems to indicate a large number of small donations I'd guess the hope is that most people reading think "mean" and don't envision a really rightward skewed distribution with a few people out on the tail having Bill's ear. ( Dec 18 2008, 10:18:40 AM PST ) Permalink

Thursday December 20, 2007

adjusting to the playing field If you coping strategy involves the use of drugs I can see allowing their use in competitive situations. Adjusting your brain chemistry to be something closer to optimal is something that you can do throughout your life unlike adding more time to every situation. Still, most of these chemicals have had very little real time in the market. Buyer should be careful. ( Dec 20 2007, 09:43:01 AM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday December 19, 2007

Leveling the playing field? I was recently talking with a neighbor who mentioned that his youngest child in college was getting extra time on tests due to his ADD. This was an attempt at "leveling the playing field". My first reaction was to wonder how many of the resumes I'd recently looked at included this bias. You don't get to dumb down the smart guys or slow down the fast guys or even the playing field in any business competition. I think helping students build coping skills in the real world especially before college makes a lot of sense. But college is a time of learning how to be independent and learning how to deal with the real world in a somewhat softer environment. Reducing the amount of competition seems like a poor tradeoff to me. I found a fewlinks which cover this issue. This article gave me a better feel for both sides of the issue. ( Dec 19 2007, 10:49:46 AM PST ) Permalink

Monday December 17, 2007

Security Feelgood? While ordering things for Christmas I had a few large items sent directly to the recipient. One vendor requested that I contact my credit card company to put an alternate address on file. Neither the vendor nor the credit card company seemed to be able to do much in support of this procedure other then to mutter "identify theft". Now, if I was going to steal using a credit card I would think having the items send to a residential address wouldn't be so smart. It leaves a pretty easy to follow trail and to do any real damage would mean a pattern of purchases that would be easy to detect. Does the public at large think this increases their security by the same amount that it costs the credit company and ultimately the consumer? ( Dec 17 2007, 04:13:55 PM PST ) Permalink

Friday February 09, 2007

friends don't...

Driving around Tahoe I saw a bumper stick on a SUV with Alaskan plates which read:

Friends don't let Friends
Eat Farm Raised Fish
Support Alaska's Wild Fisheries

There was emphasis and capatilization used radomly which I certainly have mangled. My first thought was that given the first and last lines I could write a bunch of middle lines. But instead of either of the extremes what is wrong with advocating managing our reusable resources in a long term manner? Are we so resource constrained that we have to fight for every morsal ignoring the future? ( Feb 09 2007, 12:49:15 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday August 10, 2006

Domo Arigato

Come back from the wsop and they turn me into a robot. I was doing reasonable well in the main event with 40k in chips at the second level of day 2b when I made a really good read on an overly tight player and then tried to move him off the hand I knew he had and couldn't be moved off of. I suck.

( Aug 10 2006, 01:59:52 AM PDT ) Permalink

Tuesday July 18, 2006

Earth tones?! belong in Vegas

Earth Tones? Have you ever seen how I dress? I have no clue or caring about colors.

No, the bear didn't get me. Just my own inability to coordinate. Post panic show frisbee isn't such a good idea. But the July 4-6th shows in Stateline, NV were pretty good. Fortunately I broke my leg after the shows.

I'll be playing in the WSOP ME again this year. Should be interesting hobbled. ( Jul 18 2006, 08:59:01 AM PDT ) Permalink

Thursday July 13, 2006

purple pain Nails by my niece. Cast by my doctor. Floor by my wife. Breakage by me. ( Jul 13 2006, 02:55:52 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Wednesday March 08, 2006

movie plot horror My dairy relatives use to tease me about this when I visited them as a youth. ( Mar 08 2006, 05:23:45 PM PST ) Permalink

Sunday February 05, 2006

precision I wonder how far the time had to be tweaked in this article to make the time 4:20? ( Feb 05 2006, 05:56:37 PM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday July 27, 2005

polyphasic letdown I didn't last a week sleeping the uberman sleep schedule. When I was just about to get into the right sleep phase I would end up missing a wakeup and resetting my body clock. The next two weekends make this experiment impractical but after that I'll have to try it again. ( Jul 27 2005, 02:55:55 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday July 20, 2005

polyphasic sleep Patri Friedman's mention of polyphasic sleep has me experiementing with it this week. I normally sleep very erratically with short periods (less then a week) of fairly normal 8 hour sleep periods followed by long periods of less sleep per day. I'm only in day two of my experiement but I seem to have fallen into the rhythem fairly easily. Maybe it natural for me? The real question is going to be is if once it becomes ingrained is the pattern two inflexible to be changed for tasks which take longer then 3.5 hours? ( Jul 20 2005, 02:20:07 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday May 05, 2005

Personal log stardate... I've kept a dead tree journal for some time now. Its an on again, off again sort of thing. Recently I've really been itching to keep the same thing on my thumbdrive where I can store images, sounds, data, etc. along with my entries in a form factor I can carry with me anywhere. So as a first try I looked around for software that would allow me to keep a personal log in html. Most of the things I found didn't really fit or were for hand held platforms (low datarate entry devices). One thing I ran across is elog. From a shared lab log type of thing it sounds like a cool tool. But still didn't quite meet my needs. Just as I was about to hack something up with Ruby on Rails (I'd already decided whatever I did should be in Java/Ruby/something I could run on a variety of platforms) I ran across Pimki. Pimki is a wiki/weblog/todo list/RSS feed generator package written in Ruby. Its not really meant as a personal log but provided me most of what I wanted in one fairly simple package. There are a few things it lacks in the security area. I would like to be able to logout without shutting down the server and I would like to be able to keep the data encrypted. But all in all its a fairly reasonable package. I suspect my personal log will be electronic from now on. ( May 05 2005, 12:53:01 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]