c monks posts the alleged rough draft of ben and j-lo's wedding vows.#

Dienekes writes about "Hair Colour Dyes Sales and Observation Selection Effects"#

One of the arguments for the alleged attractiveness of blondes runs roughly as follows:

A. People try to make themselves more attractive
B. People buy dye their hair blond more than they do dark (as evidenced by hair dye sales)

From A and B it follows (according to faulty reasoning as I will show) that people (and esp. women) with light hair are more attractive than those with dark hair.

There are many things wrong with these reasoning, but I will focus on a fault based on observation selection effects.

Read on for the details.

Later he continues on this topic...

In my previous post I disproved the notion that blond hair dye sales indicate that there is a preference for blond hair. In summary, blond hair dyes sell more because most people are brunets and hence the buyng habits of brunets (who change their hair color to blond) dominate the hair dyeing business.

But all of this is based on the assumption that people choose their hair color independently and based on their desire to be more attractive. Even this assumption is false, since hair dye sales are driven largely by the hair dye companies/hair stylists and the fashion industry who create the role models which ordinary women aspire to look like.

Read on for the reason that the hair industry puts more weight on certain colours.

Razib at Gene Expression writes some scintillating satire,#

I am going to shift for this post into a persona I will label "Diversicrat." All questions will be framed in the context of the grand principle-"but is it good for diversity?"-though I will not comment on situations where diversity might battle diversity (ie; Latino immigration causing black flight out of California because of eroding working class wages).

I visited Vermont in June. Nice state. Green hills, small towns, polite Yankees. But where was the diversity? [...]

Woe unto the unbelievers, Vermont is 97% white!!!. The lack of diversity is shocking-snow blindness is a problem in summer as well as winter! (if you know what I mean) And yet somehow these people think themselves liberal-electing a "socialist" to Congress! Yes, they favor income redistribution-but only for white people! A salting of Quebecois here & there does not not a colorful quilt of humanity make.

So. So, funny.

Godless at Gene Expression writes up some refutation of Intelligent Design (as opposed to Evolution.)#

ID is analogous to "F=mv". Like "F=mv", it is manifestly false because it provides no explanatory value. What does the "theory" of ID predict? NOTHING - it simply provides a post facto rationalization for some of the processes observed in biology. Just like "F=mv" vs. "F=ma", ID chokes on those cases that are explained elegantly by the theory of evolution. ID's "answer" is always the same.

[...]

Remember, ID presumes an intelligent being responsible for our creation. Usually the rationale afforded is that we are too complex to have arisen from abiogenesis. Of course, such an argument sets up an infinite recursion, which we can see as follows:

1. Let us call our "complexity" C1. By assumption, anything with complexity at least C1 cannot have arisen from abiogenesis.

2. Let us call the complexity of our putative creators C2. C2 must be greater than or equal to C1. Otherwise a less complex being could have created us.

3. By assumption 1, anything with complexity C1 (or greater) cannot have abiotically arisen. Thus there must be a creator for C2. This creator must have complexity C3 greater than or equal to C2.

It's clear that this recursion doesn't terminate.

There's lots of other interesting things there as well.

Godless at Gene Expression writes about college tuition.#

Slate has an interesting article on the wealth redistribution taking place in higher education. Here are the money grafs:

The colleges' experiment in wealth redistribution has been sustained over the years by their reluctance to compete with each other on price (as distinct from non-price matters, like course selection and celebrity professors, over which competition has always been intense). Although the Ivy League was busted by the Justice Department's antitrust enforcers in the late 1980s, the elite private schools continue to behave like a de facto cartel in the areas of tuition and financial aid. It is not just coincidence, after all, that despite huge disparities in their cost structures and financial resources, the top private colleges year after year charge nearly identical tuitions.

But price competition may be inevitable, no matter how hard the schools try to resist. The sweet scholarship deals offered by rival schools may start eating into the best colleges' applicant pools. An omen was Princeton's decision in 2000 to enhance financial aid packages by replacing loans with outright grants. Yale, Harvard, and other top schools quickly followed suit. A decision by a Harvard, Yale, or Princeton to offer a merit scholarship—that is, a tuition discount having nothing to do with a student's financial circumstances—may not be far behind. That might begin to change the purpose of scholarships from redistribution to incentive.

The problem here, of course, is a lack of competition. It's my opinion that the best way to bust this cartel is with a merit based scheme similar to the one I outlined earlier. Briefly, a national examination modeled after the brutal Indian Joint Entrance Examination is administered to all comers. The top scorers are funded by corporations, the military, the civilian government, and philanthropists to pursue higher education in return for a service/employment commitment after graduation.

A very interesting idea. Damn, I say "interesting" a lot.

Brad DeLong wonders what he doesn't know...#

What Does Alan Greenspan Know That I Do Not?

That was a question I asked Don Kohn at Jackson Hole. I did not get an answer.

Let me explain. Eight times since his appointment to his post as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, I have thought that Alan Greenspan has made a significant monetary policy mistake. Eight times. And at least six of those eight times, I have been wrong.

I conclude that Alan Greenspan knows things--important things--about macroeconomics, about monetary policy, and about the relationship between economic structure and macroeconomics that I do not.

My Economics professor is cool. But Brad seems cooler because I know what he's actually interested in.

Raymond Chen writes that the taskbar wasn't always as it is today...#

Why does the taskbar default to the bottom of the screen?

It didn't always.

The original taskbar didn't look at all like what you see today. It defaulted to the top of the screen [...]

The Yeti links to a story about responsibility and the problem with raising taxes on "the Rich."#

On election day, you and the majority of people in the country vote for the candidate who wants to raise taxes on the "rich". What the heck, your next door neighbor who just bought a new Mercedes definitely isn't hurting for money. People like him SHOULD pay higher taxes! Sure, he seems like a nice enough guy, but hey, he can afford to pay a few more dollars in the name of balancing the budget. It's only fair, right?

[...]

Your former "rich" landlord had his taxes raised too, so he decided to increase your rent payments, forcing you to move. You hated him for that, but now that you think about it, at least he always made sure your utilities worked, the garbage was collected, the toilet didn't back up every other day and the place wasn't infested with roaches and other vermin...unlike your new landlord.

The local retail stores, manufacturers, distribution companies and the like all had their taxes raised as well, so they decided to pass their increased costs onto you. When push came to shove, it was either raise consumer prices or lay off your friends who work for them. After all, did anyone really expect the owners of those companies to take a pay cut on behalf of people like yourself who just voted to raise their taxes?

This is similar to the assertion that 100% of your Social Security is paid by you, rather than a 50/50 split between you and your employers, because they just push the cost on you with increased prices on goods and decreased wages.

Why I like Carly...#

The gist of the funny picture, incidentally, because I can't hold it in anymore, is that my deT professor made us all little wallet size reproductions of a portrait of de Tocqueville. And let's talk about how much I loved this? Loved it. I was trying to avoid the lameness that was having a picture of deT in my room, but if somebody gives you one, that's completely not the same thing at all. So he's sitting on my desk right now. It's really encouraging actually -- I never got what people got from those WWJD bracelets, but now I think I might. WWdTD, man. He'd do his homework. He'd be conscientious. He'd have his insecurity complexes but he wouldn't let them rule his life. Word to that. De Tocqueville is my mentor thanks to my current lack of one in real life.

[...]

Oh, there's more to that deT picture story. So I was up on the floor where I have that class yesterday, and I saw Alexis peeking out from underneath a table at me. Someone had abandoned their portrait after class! How could you be so insensitive? I don't know. It's beyond me. But of course I couldn't just leave him there, waiting to be picked up by a cleaning crew. So I had a French Philosopher In My Pocket for most of the day yesterday. And then I decided to give him away to make someone smile.

Dan Wood would like to see some Safari features,#

Here's an idea for Safari: Many web sites/pages now offer an RSS feed equivalent of their contents, not unlike this weblog! As RSS is getting more and more popular, it would be cool if Safari would detect the presence of an RSS feed (through the <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" ... > tag) and activate a UI element on its toolbar that the user could use to drag to their favorite news reading program ....

I'd also like to see a Apple news reader, it would probably be the balls. No offense to NetNewsWire, which I use and love, but I worship the Apple.

Richard Tallent writes about outsourcing,#

I say we outsource our Congress. It's not like they give a flying rat's poo about their constituents anyway, they are too busy fighting over offices and grandstanding on non-issues like "the war on terrorism" (what a joke), prescription drug coverage (no good w/o a job), and tax breaks (also no good w/o a job). HELLO MCFLY! We have an economy, the tech industry could help pull everyone out of the ditch if we could get these companies to stop sending our money overseas (does a ship "save costs" by throwing cargo overboard?) and use it to get a few qualified people out of unemployment lines and bankruptcy courts over here.

Jorrit Wiersma writes about the conference he is at. It's all about gamma ray bursts (GRBs), very neat stuff.#

The explanation is that the source of the GRB is a big explosion and that the afterglow is emitted by the shock wave that is formed by this explosion in the surrounding medium. Because they last so long, afterglows are easier to observe than the main burst (once you know where to look for them), so they give us a lot of information about their source. The problem is that the shocks that emit them are formed so far away from the burst source that they do not give us very detailed information about their source. This is why the actual source of GRBs is still unknown, although the consensus seems to be that they are either formed by the collapse of very heavy stars or the merging of two neutron stars.

Via Joi Ito and Tom Coates is an old copy of Home and Gardens with an interview with Hitler. Wacky.#

Michael Watkins is a master of seeing through Wolfowitz's crap.#

Wolfowitz Survival Strategy #4. Shift the argument to whatever is most marketable and pretend this was your argument all along. Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War: With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy

"In a telephone interview Saturday, Wolfowitz denied that the administration is providing different justifications for the war with Iraq. He said he and other administration officials had been "clear from the beginning" that there were three arguments for invading Iraq: halting the development of weapons of mass destruction, liberating the country from "a terrible tyranny," and creating a democratic model that would serve as an inspiration for the rest of the Middle East."

Excuse me, but what about terrorism? What convinced Congress and the American people to support the war? It's telling and terrible that there is no mention of terrorism in this list of rationales. [...] I don't care if Wolfowitz is a liar or merely an incompetent, what he has done is unforgivable.

Michael Feldman writes about a record temperature in Cambridge...#

A team of physicists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created the coolest thing in the world. Using a labyrinth of lasers, lenses, and magnetic fields, the scientists chilled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded, half a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. "Sometimes your strategy is just to go for the record," said Wolfgang Ketterle, one of the team's leaders, a long-distance runner who compared breaking the record to when he ran a marathon in less than three hours. "Just for the heck of it -- going for the record brings out the best in you."

The guy should know. Ketterle shared a Nobel Prize in 2001 for cooling gas to a temperature so cold that its atoms entered a never-before-seen state of matter: They moved in unison instead of jumping around randomly at varying speeds as they usually do.

Michael Feldman also posts about the ruling that invisible police officers are illegal,#

An interesting case out of Olympia, Washington. Police suspected William Bradley Jackson of the murder of his 9-year-old daughter, but had no evidence. So they planted a GPS tracker in his vehicle and followed it until it led them to the victim's shallow grave. The police said this was the same as following a suspect in an unmarked car. The court disagreed.

Don Park writes something very interesting about Jihad being like an immune system for Islam.#

I thought about 9/11, wars, and religions for most of today, playing with perspectives that will allow me to get a better grip or understanding of what is going on. [ Actually I was working all day on crypto code of all things, wrestling with PKCS#11 and hand-parsing ASN.1. No wonder I had a background train of thought running... ]

Most interesting one I came up with was seeing Islam as an immune system, designed to defend the body, Islamic nations, against invaders whether the invader is an army or a meme. From this perspective, a call for Jihad is a signal to increase production of antibodies (terrorists). Now the questions I raised in my Understanding Jihad post makes a lot of sense.

He refers to this old post that is just as cool.

I can't get a firm grasp on this Jihad thing. First, there seems to be no restriction on who can call it. If you are a Muslim, you can call for a Jihad. Second, there seems to be no way to call off a Jihad. Only when you have peace, Jihad ends. Lastly, Jihad seems to be all about striving for peace with allowance for use of force against aggressors as a last resort. Jihad reminds of how antibodies work except definition of harmful is rather loose. I suppose if you are living in a sparsely populated harsh environments like Middle Eastern deserts, you need something like Jihad to gang up on anything that threatens their lives.

The strange thing is that, more I read about Jihad, more I am reminded of Bush. While Saddam and other Muslims are calling for a Jihad, Bush is actually doing Jihad by using force to curb evil. While he is not a Muslim and it is arguable whether or not there was no other workable alternative, Bush is on a Jihad against Saddam who was threatening peace in the region and at our gas stations. Since Saddam has been a rather disappointing enemy of war, we'll soon have peace in the region and Bush's Jihad will end. Jihad is Cool.

That second paragraph is spot on.

Zeldman writes about Patent Nonsense.#

IE Patent Endgame Detailed: A federal judge "rejected Microsoft's post-trial claim that Eolas had misrepresented the facts in the patent case, which claimed the software giant had stolen browser technology relating to plug-ins. The ruling came after a $521 million verdict against the software giant last month, and ends Microsoft's first attempt to challenge the result."

Besides paying over half a billion dollars to the patent holder, Microsoft is supposed to cripple its market-leading browser so that IE/Windows will no longer seamlessly play Flash, Quicktime, RealVideo, or Adobe Acrobat files, Java applets, and other rich media formats. Once the company does this, any site that uses these technologies will no longer work in the browser most people use.

So surreal, I love patents.

Tony Pierce links to, and excerpts, Rob Brezney's wonderful horrorscopes.#

1. When people ask you to do something, ask if they want fries with that.

6. Page yourself over the intercom. Don't disguise your voice.

7. At lunchtime, sit in your parked car with sunglasses on and point a hair dryer at passing cars. See if they slow down.

11. Put mosquito netting around your work area. Play a tape of jungle sounds all day.

13. Specify that your drive-through order is "to go."

15. Tell your children over dinner, "Due to the economy, we are going to have to let one of you go."

16. Put decaf in the coffee maker for three weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.

Oh my gawd.

Ask Hanson second hand quotes Thomas Jefferson, who's a big smarty pants. This is the quote, it's a duesy.#

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Note, how do people feel about the boxes? Would just a line on the left be better?

Yesterday I read the book That Summer by Sarah Dessen and I enjoyed it a whole lot. It's a quick read and it's one of the two books that inspired How to Deal. I completely agree with a blurb on the back of the book by "Booklist": ``This first novel is written with such easy grace that you want quote sentence after sentence.''#

The girl in the book, Haven, has a tough time growing up. Literally. This quote is very funny...#

I was compact at six, able to fit neatly into small places that now were inaccessible: under the crook of an arm, in the palm of a hand. At five-eleven and counting, I no longer had the sense that someone like Mrs. Thomas could neatly enclose me if danger should strike. I was all bony elbows and acute angles, like a jigsaw puzzle piece that can only go in the middle, waiting for the others to fit around it to make it whole. [p. 10]

Haven works in a cheap children's shoe store and this quote says something that's true about many children's places.#

Little Feet was too cheep for helium, so all we gave out were balloons pumped from a bicycle pump, with a ribbon tied around them so you could drag them along behind you like a round plastic dog. There's something depressing about a balloon that just lies there, listless. I always felt apologetic as I offered them to the children, as if it was somehow my fault. [p. 44]

A final quote from this book occurs when Haven's best friend is telling a story about this hometown-hero model girl's mental breakdown.#

"She woke up at four A.M. and made pancakes, and when Mrs. Rogers went downstairs to see what was going on, that was when Gwendolyn told her. Standing there at the stove flipping pancakes at four A.M. and telling this horrible story. She ate ten pancakes and burst into tears and Mrs. Rogers said she is just at a loss as to what action to take. And since then, Mrs. Oliver says, Gwendolyn hasn't said a word."

"Ten pancakes?" I said. This, to me, seemed like the most unbelievable part of the story.

"Haven, honestly." Casey hated when anyone tried to take away from whatever story she was telling.

[p. 85]

So I liked the book. I'm officially a fifteen year old girl, apparently.#