'Culture'

Dancing About Architecture

O. K.:

Ever asked an academic about their research only to be subjected to 20 minutes of nonsensical droning? Thanks to YouTube, it just got a whole lot easier to explain a complicated thesis at a cocktail party. In early October, Ph.D. students worldwide were challenged by Gonzo Labs/AAAS to re-create their dissertations through interpretive dance and post the videos on YouTube. Dozens of performances were submitted, ranging from tangos to Lindy Hops to night-vision hula-hooping. The choreography was scored on its ability to bridge the gap between art and science, though you should feel free to judge based on levels of jubilation and pure absurdity.

An interpretive dance of my thesis would have to involve a lot of beer and a lot of broken furniture. It’s difficult to describe a thesis that could be summed up as, “Eh, maybe.”

'Culture'

El Mariachi

OK, I understand that not everyone has the same taste in music. For some people, mariachi music is charming, entertaining and fun. Fine.

But, please, if you are in a crowded restaurant, could you please PLEASE for the love of God limit yourself to three songs or fewer? Having the band surrounding your table for an entire hour is just begging to have a chair thrown in your direction.

If I’d had cash, I would have paid the guys $20 to go away. Just for a few minutes. My entire dinner conversation consisted of this:

Dad: Do you want flu shots when you’re in Atlanta?

Me: Do I want to do shots with the nanny?

Politics

Thursday Morning Linkorama

1 Comment

Ugh. So much going on. So little time to write about it.

  • Freakonomics reminds us that the government is not one to lecture the big three about unfunded pension liability. Not when staring down the $50 trillion throat of Social Security and Medicare.
  • A devastating account of what torture does to our soldiers.
  • Cato takes on the idea that college is a financial burden. $20,000 worth of debt seems reasonable for an education. But I’d forgotten that we don’t expect people to pay their debts anymore.
  • Orac talks about the long waits for mammograms. Between greedy lawyers and greedier insurance companies, the margin on mammography is disappearing. Does anyone care? Or are they too busy planning a government takeover of health care to introduce even more rationing?
  • No, Virginia, the government can’t really cure a recession — not even with tax cuts.
  • Free Plaxico Burress!
  • Free internet? Gee, I’m sure there won’t be any unintended consequences there. Since when did internet access become an inalienable right? Trial by jury, right to bear arms, free speech … at least 3 Mb/s? Whatever.
    • Politics

    Better Than A Bailout

    5 Comments

    The most depressing thing about Reason’s analysis of the financial meltdown? This:

    No one fully understood how exposed the mortgage-backed securities were to the rising foreclosures. Because of this uncertainty, it was hard to place a value on them, and the market for the instruments dried up. Accounting regulations required firms to value their assets using the “mark-to-market” rule, i.e., based on the price they could fetch that very day. Because no one was trading mortgage-backed securities anymore, most had to be “marked” at something close to zero.

    This threw off banks’ capital-to-loan ratios. The law requires banks to hold assets equal to a certain percentage of the loans they give out. Lots of financial institutions had mortgage-backed securities on their books. With the value of these securities moving to zero (at least in accounting terms), banks didn’t have enough capital on hand for the loans that were outstanding. So banks rushed to raise money, which raised self-fulfilling fears about their solvency.

    Two simple regulatory tweaks could have prevented much of the carnage. Suspending mark-to-market accounting rules (using a five-year rolling average valuation instead, for example) would have helped shore up the balance sheets of some banks. And a temporary easing of capital requirements would have given banks the breathing room to sort out the mortgage-backed security mess. Although it is hard to fix an exact price for these securities in this market, given that 98 percent of underlying mortgages are sound, they clearly aren’t worth zero.

    So instead of simply tweaking the regulations, the government decided to spend great flipping wads of cash. I realize that Washington’s solution to everything — education, healthcare, terrorism, etc. — is to spend money. But this is ridiculous. We could have apparently literally saved tens of billions with a rule tweak.

    But, of course, tweaking rules doesn’t make you look glorious for suspending your campaign.

    War on Terror

    Mumbai Lessons

    A great post on what we can learn from the Mumbai attacks. Money quote:

    If there’s any lesson in these attacks, it’s not to focus too much on the specifics of the attacks. Of course, that’s not the way we’re programmed to think. We respond to stories, not analysis. I don’t mean to be unsympathetic; this tendency is human and these deaths are really tragic. But 18 armed people intent on killing lots of innocents will be able to do just that, and last-line-of-defense countermeasures won’t be able to stop them. Intelligence, investigation, and emergency response. We have to find and stop the terrorists before they attack, and deal with the aftermath of the attacks we don’t stop. There really is no other way, and I hope that we don’t let the tragedy lead us into unwise decisions about how to deal with terrorism.

    We need to stop reacting and start acting.

    Politics

    Outliving

    2 Comments

    Will Saletan makes a dumb point:

    As the latest Reuters report notes, over the last four decades, U.S. life expectancy has climbed from 70.8 to 77.8 years. By 2015, it’s on track to hit 79.2 years. Meanwhile, unlike other industrialized democracies, the United States has replaced pensions with 401(k) plans. So your retirement-income pie can suddenly shrink—as, for example, it’s doing right now—and, at the same time, the longevity you’ve gained from all this lovely industrialization requires you to carve that pie into more and more annual pieces.

    Apparently, we should prefer the certainty of pensions — these being the pensions that are bankrupting both industry and the nation. These being the pensions that are almost guaranteed to be slashed and hacked to the bone to balance budgets.

    Sorry, Will, I’ll salt my 403b into more conservative investments before I become a ward of either the state or my employer. I’ll trust my income to the vagaries of the market before I trust it to the inflationary vagaries of politics.

    Sports

    Why Fans Don’t Vote

    Here’s why, as bad as the sportswriters are, the fans should never control the doors to the HOF. Less than 75% think Ricky Henderson is a HOF player. 10-time all-star, MVP, most runs in history, most steals in history, 2nd most walks in history, 297 HR, 3055 hits. Only 74% think that describes a Hall of Fame player.

    I’ll put off my diatribes about Tim Raines and Bert Blyleven until the writers show that they’re only slightly less dumb.

    Continue reading Why Fans Don’t Vote →

    Sports

    The BCS Stumbles To The Finish

    So what is the BCS going to do this year? Here are the top 14 teams at this moment: Alabama, Oklahoma,Texas, Florida, USC, Utah, Texas Tech, PSU, Boise State, Ohio State, TCU, Ball State, Cincinnati, Okie State. Of those:

    Oklahoma and Texas are guaranteed in unless Mizzou pulls an upset. In that case, Mizzou and Texas go in. (I’m assuming UT gets an at-large bid).

    Penn State is in.

    Cincinnati is in.

    The winner of Virginia Tech/Boston College is in.

    Both Alabama and Florida are in (I’m assuming the SEC title game loser gets an at-large bid).

    USC is in, unless they choke against UCLA. In that case, they may get in anyway with Oregon State rematching against PSU in the Rose Bowl.

    Utah is in as they are the highest-ranked non-BCS champion.

    That leaves only one lonesome at-large bid left, which may reduce to zero if UCLA pulls the upset.

    Now apart from the very real possibility that Florida wins the SEC, gets ranked in the top two but fails to make the BCS game (the computers forcing a Texas-Oklahoma rematch — does it pay to be in a top-heavy conference or what?), this last bid is a problem.

    It should go to Boise State. They are an undefeated conference champion whose ranking below Utah is arbitrary. I expect, however, that it will go to Ohio State. OSU is from a BCS conference and has a large fanbase that will bitch if they don’t get in.

    Moreover, I think that the BCS bowl committee still doesn’t consider non-BCS conferences to be “real teams” and their undefeated champions to be an illusion. Granted, Hawaii was awful last year (although they were facing the second-best team in the nation). But Boise State and Utah have shown, in past years, that they can run with the big boys quite well, thank you. They at least deserve a shot.

    And what about Ball State? Yeah, they’re Ball State. But they still played well this year. They still won their conference in undefeated fashion (modulo this weekend’s game).

    Anyway, barring an upset by Mizzou or UCLA, here is how I see it playing out:

    Rose Bowl – PSU vs. USC
    Fiesta Bowl – Texas vs. Utah
    Orange Bowl – Virginia Tech vs. Cincinnati
    Sugar Bowl – Alabama vs. Ohio State
    National Championship – Florida vs. Oklahoma

    I’ll save my playoff rant — the one about how USC, Penn State, the SEC loser, the Big 12 #2, Boise State and Utah all deserve a shot at the title — for another post.

    Sports

    Query

    Four minutes, 9 seconds left in the game.

    You are down by three points.

    You have one time out.

    Your defense has been completely unable to stop the run.

    Why do you not onside kick, Mark Richt?

    Richt is a good coach at Georgia, but his late-game clock management is horrid. He’s lost several games by letting the opposition run out the clock and kick game-winning field goals in the closing seconds while he still had time outs on the board. And today, he didn’t even give his team a chance with an onside kick. All Tech needed was a couple of first downs to ice the game. They could have gotten those anywhere on the field. The only way to try to win was to onside kick.

    (Note: I typed this in as the kick was made.)

    News

    Serious Waste of Time

    There’s a slightly obsessive part of my nature that sites like Sporcle bring out. After a month of memorization, I finally managed to name all 265 popes. It’s not that difficult if your know your roman numerals, some history and smattering of latin. The alternative quiz, which has them alphabetically and without having to use the numerals, helps a lot. I would take both quizzes simultaneously to jog my memory.

    Politics

    Friday Nights Linksorama

  • One other thing I’ll miss about Texas. Fiscal sanity.
  • I tend on the liberal side of social questions, even though my own life is pretty socially conservative. But is it really the best idea for Planned Parenthood to be offering gift certificates? Question: who do you buy these for? What does it say when you buy them? “Hey, I know you sleep around. So here’s a gift that can be used for birth control or abortion, whatever it takes.”
  • I’ve said it before. If Obama ends crap like detaining terror suspects for years without evidence and then just tossing them back home without so much as an apology, his presidency will already be a success. The “conservative” response on this issue has been especially distressing. Apparently, even talking about blowback is anti-American. Look. You can say that blowback is worth it. You can say that blowback doesn’t matter. You can’t rationally say that it doesn’t exist.
  • Why government “energy policy” is a disaster. The feds decided to force their agencies to buy flex-fuel vehicles. Problem: without actual, you know, flex fuels, they’re just inefficient, gas-guzzling, greenhouse-gas spewing behemoths.
    • 'Culture'

    Desperation Strikes Deep

    The economy must be really bad. Amazon.com is slashing DVD prices to levels I had not even imagined. Batman Begins for $4, Spiderman 2 for $2. Seasons of the Simpsons for $15. That’s 60% off or more.

    My cursory glance at other categories doesn’t show nearly as incredible deals. Of course, I’m not looking too closely. I’m buying a house and moving, so a $2 DVD is the extent of my splurging ways. But what’s up with the DVD sales?

    Part of this is must be that the sellers have massive inventory. DVD sales have been slumping for reasons having nothing to do with the economy. I think a lot of stores have stacks of unsold DVDs that they ordered in anticipation of the DVD revolution continuing for all eternity. It may finally be dawning on them that no one needs two copies of Happy Gilmore; in fact most people don’t even need one. So they’re desperate to shed them.

    Selling DVDs dirt cheap will obviously solve this. I normally wouldn’t have bought Spiderman 2, which I thought was a mediocre movie. But at $2, slightly more than a 16-oz coke, I’m willing to get it just in case I have a son who gets into Spiderman or my nephew visits or I feel the sudden light night urge to see Kirsten Dunst “act”.

    I also think the sellers are, mistakenly, thinking that Blu-Ray is going to be their next big thing. So if they can clear inventory to set up Blu-Ray sales, that’s a win. However, I agree with Beradinelli’s that the sellers are overestimating the potential of Blu_Ray. I’m a semi-technophile and have yet to buy a Blu-Ray player. I probably will, but even then, the only movies I’ll buy in Blu-Ray will be new ones. I might replace some visually spectacular titles in my library (LOTR, The Godfather, etc.) but I see absolutely no reason to plonk down $20 to get a slightly nicer version of This Is Spinal Tap.

    The next big collapse is going to be video stores and big box stores like Best Buy. It’s already started, with Circuit City and Hollywood Video scaling back. But Best Buy, in particular, is overbuilding. They just opened a store here in New Braunfels despite having stores in San Marcos and Schertz (15 miles either way). That’s a company long overdue for a market correction.

    Astronomy, Sports, Mathematical Malpractice, Whatever Else Pops Into My Head