Quote of the day

The reason that so many of my leftist friends want to insist that poverty is always just relative is that any objective measure of poverty leads to the conclusion that capitalism is an outrageous success.

Mike Munger.

A game

US – Karl Johan Rist (server elo: 1769), 10 min blitz, closed Ruy Lopez:

1. e4 …e5
2. Nf3 …Nc6
3. Bb5 …a6
4. Ba4 …Nf6
5. 0-0 …b5
6. Ba3 …Be7
7. c3 …d6
8. h3 …Na5
9. Bc2 …c5
10. d4 …Qc7

(…no comments on any of the above moves, this is all theory…)

11. Be3? (I’ve actually made this mistake before, but apparently I don’t learn from my mistakes. The move played is a stupid move that loses a tempo and is an open invitation to a draw, as I have no intention of letting the bishop be exchanged on e3. To play a4 here is probably the option I like best in retrospect – I don’t like d5, even if that e4-d5 pawn setup has become somewhat popular these days) …Nc4
12. Bc1 …Bd7
13. a4 …0-0
14. B3 …Na5
15. Bd2 …Rfc8

16. Na3 …cxd4
17. cxd4 …bxa4
18. bxa4 …Nc4
19. Nxc4 …Qxc4
20. Bb3 …Qd3

21. dxe5 …dxe5? (Nxe4 is the only move)
22. Nxe5 …Qxe4
23. Re1

(The position is still materially equal here, so some people might think that 21…dxe5 is ok: It isn’t, fritz is already at appr. +2.00 here. Fritz also likes 23.Bxf7+ – after which white is up a pawn and a quality, which is more than enough for a win even if a lot of pawns have been exchanged already: 23…Kh8(/f8), 24.Re1…Qd4(/Qb7), 25.Nxd7…Qxd7, 26.Be6:

…of course followed by 27.Bxc8. Strictly speaking, given black’s response to Re1 this variation could still have been played in the game – the move order wrt. the bishop and the rook is irrelevant given the fact that black played 23…Qb7 – but I didn’t look too hard for it, and I had already pretty much convinced myself that taking with the knight on f7 was objectively stronger than taking with the bishop. It isn’t, given optimal play by black)

23…Qb7 (…Qd4 is stronger, but black is still in deep trouble, ie. 24.Bxf7+ …Kf8, 25.Qe2 …Bd6, 26.Nxd7+ …Kxf7, 27.Qd6+…Kg6)
24. Nxf7 …Bxh3?? (a horrible move that loses instantly. Kf8 had to be tried, but even with correct play this position is just lost for black)

25.Nd6+! …Kh8
26.Nxb7 …Rab8? (Bg4 is better but nothing can save this position)
27.Rxe7

…resigned,

1-0

…

Btw. Ivanchuk and Navarra is playing a rapid match at the moment in Prague. The timecontrol is 25 minutes plus 5 seconds per move, so most games last less than an hour. Ivanchuk is, despite his very poor performance in Sofia, ahead 3-1. Half of the games have been played. You can follow the games live at the official site here. Here you can find analyses of the games using what I assume is the most recent version of Rybka, a very strong chess program.

LOL!

Link.

Martin Hellman’s take on the risk of nuclear war

I’m sure some of you have already seen it, and I know I am late to the party as both marginalrevolution and freakonomics have already mentioned it and linked to it, but I never got around to linking to it from this blog, even if I found it somewhat interesting when I watched it more than a week ago, a mistake I now shall correct:

Even if the title of the presentation/video is: “Soaring, Cryptography and Nuclear Weapons”, he spends probably 45 minutes talking about nuclear weapons, so that is really what the whole presentation is about. The first 8 minutes or so on soaring is related to his talk on nuclear weapons, and I would advise you to watch it all. You can read a paper closely related to the talk here, if you prefer a written version from a video and don’t have an hour to spare (you should be able to read the paper in a significantly shorter amount of time than it takes to watch the presentation).

A few selected main points:

i) Problems related to high impact low probability events are easily overlooked and/or ignored due to ie. framing and status quo bias (that’s just another way to state what he’s trying to say in the beginning with his 99,9 % safe maneuver).

ii) You need units of time on your risk assessments. And not only because risk factors change over time. The concept of compounded risk is important, and often overlooked.

iii) Status quo bias is very important when explaining the nuclear policy of countries with nuclear weapons. As Hellman states about the US experience: Even minor changes in our nuclear weapons posture have been rejected as too risky even though the baseline risk of our current strategy had never been estimated. (what does this argument, if it is valid, btw. tell us about the sustainability path of the current state of affairs in the long run?)

…which leads us to…

iv) This risk is not well understood, and very difficult to assess – and nobody really seem to care about it much.

v) There are many different ways nuclear weapons can be used today, both when it comes to warfare and -terror. Some scenarios lead us to a state we can return from again; others do not. Close monitoring of early warning signs is critical when it comes to risk assessment and -prevention of this problem.

…

The recently conducted North Korean nuclear weapon test was one of the warning signs mentioned above, and it sure as *** did not decrease the risk of nuclear weapons being used somewhere in the future.

More general comments: I would say I think Hellman overestimates the risk, but I’m also pretty sure I think most people underestimate it, and/or don’t think about it at all. Also, I’m not so sure this risk is either as assessable or as preventable as Hellman believes. But, I must add, I do not think that the fact that the risk is not easy to properly estimate, is a weighty argument against trying much harder than we do today to do so. Last, compounded risk is important, but it’s also a problematic concept to use when forecasting and designing long run estimates, precisely because risk factors change a lot over time: The risk of nuclear war was zero 80 years ago, but that fact is irrelevant today. Yes, you can weigh the data in the model so that risk in recent periods weigh higher than risk many decades ago, but it’s not clear that this is the best approach (in a crisis, a near miss 40 years ago would provide better information on how to act – or on how not to act – during the crisis than the risk assessment ten years ago, and the actions undertaken then, where nothing out of the ordinary happened) – maybe it would be better to weigh annual data according to the risk of the specific year, so that the actions undertaken in relative high-likelihood neighborhoods (near-misses) will be better taken into account? Maybe a combination, and maybe seven other variables should be included? No matter how you weigh the data, you’re gonna have problems knowing what to do in a bad situation, even if you knew the proper risk model and distribution of the data, which you most certainly don’t. If people don’t think long and hard about this before something ugly pops up somewhere down the line – and the default position here would probably be that the fact that some people did think long and hard about this for some time would decrease the chance of “something ugly” eventually popping up – there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done in a very short amount of time, and that is a recipe for disaster. As Hellman makes it clear in his presentation, the “do/think-very-little” seems to be the current state of affairs, seeing as no one so far has even made an attempt to quantify the risk we’re facing.

Oh yes, one thing I forgot: In my mind, the risk of nuclear weapons being used is not on a path of uniform motion, where the absolute risk of one or more nuclear bombs being used somewhere increases over time at a steady pace, whereas the annual risk is fixed. I think the absolute risk in the long run is accelerating, that is, the risk of a bomb going off increases over time and gets bigger every year. This is related to the fact that I do not consider the most relevant metric, when it comes to the risk of a nuclear bomb being used, to be the number of weapons available in the world, but rather the number of relatively autonomous agents each having at least one – and that number has only gone up since the first nuclear test was conducted.

72 virgins

A parable on Obsolete Ideologies (or is it -Christianity?)

You are General Eisenhower. It is 1945. The Allies have just triumphantly liberated Berlin. As the remaining leaders of the old regime are being tried and executed, it begins to become apparent just how vile and despicable the Third Reich truly was.

In the midst of the chaos, a group of German leaders come to you with a proposal. Nazism, they admit, was completely wrong. Its racist ideology was false and its consequences were horrific. However, in the bleak poverty of post-war Germany, people need to keep united somehow. They need something to believe in. And a whole generation of them have been raised on Nazi ideology and symbolism. Why not take advantage of the national unity Nazism provides while discarding all the racist baggage? “Make it so,” you say.

The swastikas hanging from every boulevard stay up, but now they represent “traditional values” and even “peace”. Big pictures of Hitler still hang in every government office, not because Hitler was right about racial purity, but because he represents the desire for spiritual purity inside all of us, and the desire to create a better society by any means necessary. It’s still acceptable to shout “KILL ALL THE JEWS AND GYPSIES AND HOMOSEXUALS!” in public places, but only because everyone realizes that Hitler meant “Jews” as a metaphor for “greed”, “gypsies” as a metaphor for “superstition”, and “homosexuals” as a metaphor for “lust”, and so what he really meant is that you need to kill the greed, lust, and superstition in your own heart. Good Nazis love real, physical Jews! Some Jews even choose to join the Party, inspired by their principled stand against spiritual evil.

The Hitler Youth remains, but it’s become more or less a German version of the Boy Scouts. The Party infrastructure remains, but only as a group of spiritual advisors helping people fight the untermenschen in their own soul. They suggest that, during times of trouble, people look to Mein Kampf for inspiration. If they open to a sentence like “The Aryan race shall conquer all in its path”, then they can interpret “the Aryan race” to mean “righteous people”, and the sentence is really just saying that good people can do anything if they set their minds to it. Isn’t that lovely?

Soon, “Nazi” comes to just be a synonym for “good person”. If anyone’s not a member of the Nazi Party, everyone immediately becomes suspicious. Why is she against exterminating greed, lust, and superstition from her soul? Does she really not believe good people can do anything if they set their minds to it? Why does he oppose caring for your aging parents? We definitely can’t trust him with high political office…

…

Read the rest of the parable here. The position of “F” is, I presume, roughly the position of Adam Frank, whereas the position of “Y” is the position of Eliezer Yudkowsky – see the links at the top of the post for more.

Quotes of the day

Perusing the archives of xkcd, I came across a link to Summer Glau’s twitter (among others). Summer Glau is best known from her parts in Firefly and the recently cancelled show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles – I haven’t seen many episodes of the latter, but I have seen Firefly a couple of times. In both she plays unconventional roles; in the former she’s a dangerous and insane genious, who’s escaped from a government facility where they were doing experiments on her brain; in the other she’s a robot. Just so you get the picture, she’s certainly not afraid to take on roles that are a little out of the mainstream…

She hasn’t updated the twitter in 10 months, and there aren’t a lot of entries, but it’s still way too good to only include one quote. Here are a few entries from the twitter:

…

# Typing into a tiny box. What are you doing?
7:57 PM Apr 6th, 2008 from web

# I already answered that.
7:57 PM Apr 6th, 2008 from web

# Twitter just failed its Turing Test. I ninja kick you, Twitter!
7:58 PM Apr 6th, 2008 from web

…

Twitter! I require coffee! *crosses fingers*
8:08 AM May 26th, 2008 from web

No coffee from Twitter. I guess I should go make it myself.
9:19 PM Jun 3rd, 2008 from web

Five days I waited, little website. And still no coffee. I will be having a conversation with your manager.
9:23 PM Jun 3rd, 2008 from web

…

Support the police: confess to a string of unsolved murders.

…

Overheard: “Celibacy beats the hell out of monogamy.” Still trying to figure that one out.

…

“Everyone and everything you care about will be brought to ruin.” Hmm… Some fortune cookies make me want to swear off Chinese food.

…

On the set all day today. Initiating subroutine kill_all_humans(). Okay, I’m in character!

…

# Homeland Security just asked what I needed all that uranium for. I told them about the spaceship. They asked to come along.
9:32 PM Jul 24th, 2008 from web

…

Too bad there aren’t more girls like her around: If there were, my chances of finding a partner would go up a bit (not much though, because such a girl would have nothing to do with me anyway, but that side of the equation is best ignored for the time being).

Patientfordeling

Nedenstående er en statistik over sygehuspatienter opdelt efter dominerende diagnose. Jeg fandt ud af, at jeg egentligt var irriteret over ikke at vide mere om dette. Tallene er fra 2007, og kommer fra Danmarks Statistik. Bemærk at “sygehuspatienter” ikke er lig “antal indlæggelser”: Antallet af indlæggelser i 2007 var næsten 1.2 millioner, svarende til ca. to per patient i gennemsnit (ikke fordi sådan et gennemsnit er meget værd – givet variationen i indlæggelsesgraden på tværs af patientgrupper giver det ikke meget mening at opgøre en sådan størrelse), hvoraf ca. 865.000 var akutte. Bemærk på den anden side også, at opgørelsen formentligt kun inkluderer patienter, der har været indlagt, og ikke eksempelvis patienter der følges eller behandles ambulant på et hospital (sagt på en anden måde inkluderer statistikken ikke alle indlæggelser, men den inkluderer alle, som har været hospitalsindlagt, og kun dem, der har været hospitalsindlagt): Eksempelvis er hovedparten af diagnosticerede diabetikeres således tilknyttet en endokrinologisk afdeling på et sygehus, og hvis alle disse patienter var med i opgørelsen, ville antallet af diabetikere i tabellen være langt højere end de ca. 5000, opgørelsen inkluderer.

Hoover was a free-market fundamentalist non-interventionist

“…and Roosevelt’s New Deal saved capitalism”. That’s actually a popular narrative these days, I think. That doesn’t make it any more true.

Federal expenditures during the Hoover administration (via David Friedman):

1929 3,298,859
1930 3,440,269
1931 3,779,868
1932 4,861,696

As Friedman notes:

These figures greatly understate the increase, because during this period prices and national income were falling. Measured in purchasing power rather than in dollars, federal expenditure roughly doubled over the final three years of Hoover’s administration. Relative to GDP, it nearly tripled.

…

Wikipedia’s article on Hoover provides further details of interest:

Franklin D. Roosevelt [during the election campaign] blasted the Republican incumbent for spending and taxing too much, increasing national debt, raising tariffs and blocking trade, as well as placing millions on the dole of the government. Roosevelt attacked Hoover for “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of leading “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, accused the Republican of “leading the country down the path of socialism”.

As I’ve remarked on wikipedia’s talk page, the reference in the wikipedia article actually does not include the “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history”-quote, which I perhaps tend to think is just made up and thrown in with a few other quotes, because “who actually checks the sources, right?,” but the rest of them seem valid. Roosevelt attacking another president for being a big-spender who wants to control everything from Washington: I think that’s kinda funny. No more funny than the claim that Hoover’s policies were laissez-faire, mind you, but close. During his precidency, which was just one presidential period, Hoover raised the top marginal tax rates from 25% to 63% and nearly trippled federal spending as a percentage of GDP: Yeah, he was a true libertarian, that’s for sure!

…

UPDATE: The Roosevelt-quote about Hoover’s administration being the greatest peacetime spending administration was actually correct. I was correct too though, in that the reference given in the original article was invalid. However, a valid reference has been added since I tagged the article only a few hours ago. Wikipedia when it’s best. I have very little doubt now that the quote is correct. The link I just provided isn’t the reference added to wikipedia, that reference is to a book which I cannot access online: However, the quotes are identical and both are from history books, which tend to lose the author his or her career very quickly if he or she lies too openly in them, by inventing quotes out of thin air. Also, the two books do not stand alone.

Interesting

In astrophysics and physical cosmology, Olbers’ paradox, is the argument that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe. It is one of the pieces of evidence for a non-static universe such as the current Big Bang model. The argument is also referred to as the “dark night sky paradox” (see physical paradox).

Much more here. I love wikipedia!

I remember that this really puzzled me when I was a kid, that is, why the night sky looked the way it did (Olbers’ paradox actually isn’t a good place to start if you want to know that, but anyway…). I didn’t get why, if there was a lot of stars around in the sky, lighting up everything, then even if the universe was very large and the stars were far away, why was everything so dark at night? If there was a star in almost every direction I could see, then why wasn’t the sky much brigther? Also, if the universe was infinitely large (I had a really difficult time accepting that statement), then there would be an infinite number of stars too, rigth (no, that’s not right, see point a in the link. But I didn’t get that back then of course)? And if there was an infinite number of stars, they would light up the whole sky, not just bits and pieces here and there, rigth? Asking my parents didn’t really help… (I’m pretty sure it was during my “asking age” I wondered about this, that period of your life where you drive your parents insane by asking them so many questions that no human being can possibly answer all of them, but I’m also quite sure it took me a long time to pass that age, so that doesn’t really help me pinpoint the exact time).

Btw: If you were wondering, the number of stars visible with the naked eye at night-time at any given location on earth, given ideal viewing conditions, is in the neighbourhood of 3.000, as Asimov expressed it in his book Facts and Fancy (recommended): The faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye, under the best conditions, is of magnitude 6.5 and the number of stars that exist in the entire circuit of the skies that bright or brighter is just about 6000. That’s all. That’s the hard fact of it. Six thousand.

For comparison, it is estimated that the total number of stars in the observable universe is 7×10^22.

Is it ok to assume the world is Cobb-Douglas?

From a new working paper by Shekhar Aiyar (IMF) and Carl-Johan Dalgaard (University of Copenhagen, DoE):

We use international data on relative factor shares and capital-output ratios to formulate a number of tests for the validity of the CD assumption. We find that the CD specification performs reasonably well for the purposes of cross-country productivity accounting.

You can download the whole paper at the link. The paper is a work in progress, so the “tables” and “figures” are still left blank in the text, even if they are included in the appendix, and that makes it a little bit more difficult to make sense of it all without too much scrolling. However I’ve only just skimmed the paper so far anyway, but I must admit that, for various reasons, I wasn’t all too surprised by the result.

Oh, if you don’t have a clue what the study is about, the Cobb-Douglas production function is the standard production function in economics, primarily because it’s a relatively simple functional form that has a lot of nice mathematical features, which makes it very easy to work with. Here’s wikipedia’s article on the Cobb-Douglas function.

Also, I’d just like to state for the record that insomnia sucks.

Quote of the day

Now what exactly is the HDI? The one-line explanation is that it gives “equal weights” to GDP per capita, life expectancy, and education. But it’s more complicated than that, because scores on each of the three measures are bounded between 0 and 1. This effectively means that a country of immortals with infinite per-capita GDP would get a score of .666 (lower than South Africa and Tajikistan) if its population were illiterate and never went to school.

Bryan Caplan. I liked this one too:

Scandinavia comes out on top according to the HDI because the HDI is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is.

Aktiekurser

Ok, jeg var til noget fætter-kusine træf (min fars fætre og kusiner) med familien for en uges tid siden, og kom på et tidspunkt ind i en diskussion om aktiemarkedet. Det her er helt basale ting alle økonomistuderende, der har haft finansiering 101, burde vide, så den er slet ikke henvendt til dem, men derimod til de folk, der så godt som intet ved om emnet:

a) I finansiel teori antages det, at aktiekurser udvikler sig på baggrund af det, økonomer kalder en “tilfældig gang” (random walk). Det betyder, at man ikke med nogen sikkerhed kan forudsige, om de vil gå op eller ned i fremtiden. Antagelsen hænger tæt sammen med den efficiente markedshypotese (EMH). Et godt billede af, hvad dette indebærer, ses i billedet nedenfor, der viser otte forskellige versioner af en random walk datagenererende proces:

Hvis du er lidt fysik- eller matematikkyndig, findes der også en lidt anden måde at sige dette, som også Greg Mankiw for nyligt mindede os om: Man kunne sige, at aktiekurser er omtrent brownske bevægelser. Kursen lige nu vil altid være relativt tæt på kursen for fem minutter siden; men den retning kursen tager over de næste fem minutter, behøver ikke være den samme, som den retning den bevægede sig i de foregående fem minutter.

Jo flere der tror, at ovenstående betragtninger ikke er korrekte, jo mere korrekte bliver de.

b) Alle “finansielle rådgivere”, børsmæglere og lignende er sælgere, også selvom de kalder sig noget andet. De lever af at folk laver handler, for de fleste af dem tager penge for hver handel. Derfor vil de oftest gerne have dig til at foretage justeringer i din portefølje så ofte som muligt, for det er faktisk en af de ting, de lever af. Husk i den sammenhæng, at hvis en aktie har tjent 10 % i en kort periode, og du derefter sælger den og dine handelsomkostninger er 10 %, så er det faktisk kun din “rådgiver”, der har tjent penge på handlen. Hvis nu man også medtager det koncept, der kaldes alternativomkostninger, i sine overvejelser, som dækker over, at du i stedet kunne have ladet aktierne være, med håbet om at de ville gå yderligere op, eller måske kunne have investeret pengene i noget andet med et positivt afkast, ja så har du faktisk tabt penge på den transaktion, du blev rådet til at gøre af din “rådgiver”.

c) I finansiel teori gælder det i forlængelse af a), at det risikojusterede afkast for et finansielt aktiv altid vil være mindre end eller lig det risikojusterede afkast for en portefølje af finansielle aktiver. Sagt på en lidt anden måde, er der grundlæggende ingen dårligere måde at investere sine penge, end at lægge alle sine æg i en kurv og sætte alle pengene i, eksempelvis, Vestas eller Novo Nordisk. Det er kort sagt en meget god ide at sprede sin risiko, så man eksempelvis både investerer i aktier og obligationer, fordi nogle af de ting, der kunne resultere i lavere afkast på den ene af dem, måske ikke vil ramme den anden lige så hårdt, eller måske ligefrem gavne den anden. Uanset om du føler, du er en mand (for det er oftest mænd, der tænker sådan) med is i maven, er det ikke et udtryk for din frygtløshed, at du sætter alle pengene på Vestas (eller hvad det nu måtte være): Det er et udtryk for, at du opfører dig dumt. Hvis du opførte dig smart, kunne du tjene endnu flere penge, uden at øge risikoen i forhold til før; eller du kunne skrue lidt ned for din risiko og tjene det samme afkast som før, men sove betydeligt bedre om natten.

d) Hvis mæglerne/rådgiverne/osv. (“sælgerne”) vidste med 100% sandsynlighed, hvilke aktier/obligationer/osv. der gik op og ned fremover, hvorfor pokker skulle de så fortælle dig det, i stedet for at investere hver en øre de selv ejede i aktien/obligationen/osv.???

De fleste “finansielle rådgivere” ved mere end dig om de finansielle markeder, det er der ingen måde at komme udenom, men du betaler faktisk også i dyre domme for den viden, og det er meget tvivlsomt, om den viden de har, er det værd, du betaler dem for den.

Husk også på, at når du spørger ind til formueforvalteres “tracking record” (hvor godt de har forvaltet de penge, de har haft dispositionsret over), vil de fleste af dem altid kunne finde mindst 10 eksempler, hvor de har gættet rigtigt og tjent penge for klienten. Det de ikke fortæller dig er, at 15 andre ved en anden lejlighed mistede en ordentlig luns af pensionsopsparingen. Hvorfor skulle de dog det? Hvis du undlader at benytte dig af muligheden for at sætte pengene i en index fond (se nedenfor), så skal du ikke tage de ansatte i den finansielle sektors egne ord for noget som helst: Så skal du sætte dig grundigt ind i sagerne. Sætte dig ned og se grundigt på tallene, så du ved hvad du går ind til, og derfor ikke pludseligt bliver overrasket over, at transaktionsomkostningerne er uacceptabelt høje, eller over at formueforvalterens eller pensionskassens risikoprofil måske slet ikke matcher din egen.

e) En del banker/investeringsforeninger har en valgmulighed, hvor man kan lade sine penge være placeret i en fond, der søger at afspejle markedets generelle udvikling, hvilket betyder at risikoen bliver spredet rigtigt godt ud: Det kaldes en index fond. For mange almindelige mennesker vil det være en god løsning at sætte sine penge i en sådan fond. Læs mere om dem her.

Quote of the day

“You’re wasting your time,” Doc Daneeka was forced to tell him.
“Can’t you ground someone who’s crazy?”
“Oh, sure. I have to. There’s a rule saying I have to ground anyone who’s crazy.”
“Then why don’t you ground me? I’m crazy. Ask Clevinger.”
“Clevinger? Where is Clevinger? You find Clevinger and I’ll ask him.”
“Then ask any of the others. They’ll tell you how crazy I am.”
“They’re crazy.”
“Then why don’t you ground them?”
“Why don’t they ask me to ground them?”
“Because they’re crazy, that’s why.”
“Of course they’re crazy,” Doc Daneeka replied. “I just told you they’re crazy, didn’t I? And you can’t let crazy people decide whether you’re crazy or not, can you?”
Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. “Is Orr crazy?”
“He sure is,” Doc Daneeka said.
“Can you ground him?”
“I sure can. But first he has to ask me. That’s part of the rule.”
“Then why doesn’t he ask you to?”
“Because he’s crazy,” Doc Daneeka said. “He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.”
“That’s all he has to do to be grounded?”
“That’s all. Let him ask me.”
“And then you can ground him?” Yossarian asked.
“No. Then I can’t ground him.”
“You mean there’s a catch?”
“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who want’s to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

…

From Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, which I’m currently reading.

Promoting the unknown

(at this moment, all of the above have less than 3000 views. Also, #2 is a bit slow to load – give it a few secs to buffer or it will cough a bit in the beginning, which is something you really don’t wan’t it to do)

I wasn’t all too happy about the previous video I posted of the third piece, which is part of the reason why I chose to – well, sort of – double post it. I haven’t played much the last couple of months, but I am getting to the point where I can almost play it correct and in tempo. Of course it would take at least another month to have it ready for a public performance, but I feel no time pressure or need to get it perfected that fast – I guess that’s one of the many good things about only playing for yourself and never playing in public if you can avoid it (I have given only a handful of, more or less, public piano recitals during the last half decade, and only one of them included playing in front of some people I didn’t know. If anything that’s a good thing for classical music as a whole: If people wan’t to listen to classical music, by *** they really shouldn’t be listening to people like me, when recordings of people like Lipatti, Horowitz, Kempff and Gilels are readily available. This point I have had quite a bit of difficulty explaining to my parents).

Ender’s Shadow

I’ve previously read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, the day before yesterday I read Ender’s Shadow. It’s not easy to know what to call it, even if Card does give it a try in his foreword of the book:

This book is, strictly speaking, not a sequel, because it begins about the where Ender’s Game begins, and also ends, very nearly, at the same place. In fact, it is another telling of the same tale, with many of the same characters and settings, only from the perspective of another character. It’s hard to know what to call it. A companion novel? A parallel novel? Perhaps a “parallax”, if I can move that scientific term into litterature.

Ender’s Game is about Ender Wiggin, Ender’s Shadow is about Bean. If you liked Ender’s Game, you’ll like Ender’s Shadow. If you liked Ender’s Shadow, you’ll like Ender’s Game: Both books can stand on their own and both complement the other. I liked both books very much.

Quote of the day

A world turned upside down:

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama’s command that GM’s (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of “pure” free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a “bold” move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too.

Pravda (!!!!), via CountingCats.

The world is strange, and it’s getting stranger every single day.

Meta

Herunder et kort udsnit af de sidste par ugers mere off-beat søgekriterier, der har ledt folk til min blog:

…

torture free videos (?????)

madman nuclear weapons situation ethics

kreationisme popper
(Jeg læste først søgningen som en søgning på, om Popper var kreationist, men det gav overhovedet ingen mening. Måske ledte vedkommende bare efter Popper’s tilbagevisning af kreationismen, og så var søgningen måske ikke så sær endda. Som sagt var det dog ikke sådan, jeg først læste den)

overvågningssamfundet er godt
(mon PET har ledige stillinger, de tilbyder eksterne folk på baggrund af registreret netadfærd? Bare en tanke…)

ny græsplæne
(??? Ret åben søgning, for nu at sige det mildt. Jeg tror ikke han/hun fandt hvad vedkommende ledte efter.)

hvorfor så jøderne jesus som en oprørsmager
(ja, hvorfor mon? Det har også altid undret mig… Eller det vil sige…)

er rasisme [sic] stadig et problem idag

hvorfor er narkotika så dyrt
(til vedkommende, såvel som til den næste, der søger på det specifikke spørgsmål eller en variant deraf: Svaret er “udbud og efterspørgsel”)

speech english about narkotika
(måske man skulle starte med at slå det danske ord narkotika op i en dansk/engelsk ordbog? Det er i øvrigt langt fra den eneste søgning med “sprogforvirring forårsaget af dovenskab” (/eller det vælger jeg at kalde det) – bare tre dage før søgte en anden (?) på “map of østprøjsen”. Held og lykke med at finde et engelsksproget kort indeholdende ordet Østprøjsen!)

ytringsfrihed – forbudt rygning (???)

nuclear war increases global warming
(koblingen mellem atomkrig og global opvarmning ser jeg med jævne mellemrum i google-søgningerne, og jeg kan passende give et kort svar her til de mange nysgerrige: Like hell it does! Linket indeholder et stort sammensurium af ny forskning på området, men det man har fundet er mildt sagt ikke, at vi i stedet for atomvinter får lidt varmere somre. Atomkrig vil bevirke en voldsom nedkøling af jorden, hvilket er grunden til, at man har et navn for netop denne nedkøling: Atomvinter. Hvis Rusland og USA udveksler a-bomber, så vil hungerofrene som følge af temperaturfaldet, den lavere (-og i øvrigt også farligere, pga. øget ozondestruktion) solindstråling og den sænkede nedbørsmængde mest sandsynligt skulle opgøres i milliarder af mennesker, ikke millioner. Noget at huske på, næste gang du snakker med en amerikaner, der brokker sig over, at resten af verden free-rider på amerikanernes militær. Selv en begrænset udveksling af a-våben mellem Indien og Pakistan på måske 50 bomber hver i Hiroshima-størrelse, forventes at sænke den globale temperatur så meget, at temperaturfaldet vil være helt uden fortilfælde, og vil være større end den maksimale forskel mellem højeste og laveste målte gennemsnitstemperatur på jorden på noget tidspunkt, for hvilket vi har pålidelige data – fra omtrent 1870-80 og frem til i dag. Hvis man overhovedet tænker i de baner, at global opvarming har nogen som helst umiddelbar relevans i forhold til en atomkrig, så gør man meget klart, at man ikke aner en *** om, hvad en atomkrig ville indebære. Filmen Threads kan i øvrigt, som en lille sidebemærkning, hjælpe dig godt på vej, når det kommer til at visualisere konsekvenserne af en atomkrig – se den her. Men som sagt: Hvis du bekymrer dig om, at en atomkrig vil lede til (evt. øget) global opvarmning, så hverken ved- eller bekymrer du dig nært nok om risikoen for en atomkrig eller dens konsekvenser for jorden og planetens beboere).

A game

(Anonymous player) – US, 10 min. blitz, Petroff’s Defence:

1.e4 …e5
2.Nf3 …Nf6
3.Nxe5 …d6
4.Nf3 …Nxe4
5.d4 …d5
6.Bd3 …Bd6
7.0-0 …0-0
8.c4 …c6
9.Nc3 …Bf5
10.cxd5 …cxd5
11.Re1 …Nxc3
12.bxc3 …Bxd3
13.Qxd3 (I find no need to discuss the moves above in detail, it’s all theory so far)

13…Nc6
14.Bg5?! (Rb1 is stronger) …Qd7
15.Re2 …Rfe8
16.Rae1 …Rxe2
17.Rxe2 …Re8
18.Kf1 …h6

19.Bh4 …Re6
20.Rxe6 …fxe6 (I wasn’t confortable with 20…Qxe6 on account of 21.Qb5. However, that move is not really a threat given black’s best response: 21…Qe4!. This neat fritz line explains nicely why 22.Qxb7 is suicide (no, I hadn’t found that myself, which is why I didn’t play 21…Qxe6): 22.Qxb7? 22…Qd3+!, 23.Ke1 (Kg1?? is mate) …Qxc3+, 24.Ke2…Qc2+, 25.Ke3 (Kf1…Qd3+, 26.Ke1…Bb4, 27.Qxb4…Nxb4) …Qe4+, 26.Kd2…Bb4+, 27.Kc1…Qd3, 28.Be7 (28.Qxc6??…Ba3++)…Bxe7 and black has now both lost a piece and is forced to give up the Queen to avoid mate)

21.Bg3 …Bxg3
22.hxg3 …Kf2
23.Ke2 …a6
24.a4 …Qd6
25.Qc2 …Qa3 (thinking about getting ready to shake hands by now, but I would like to give it at least 10 more moves. White has doubled pawns after all)

26.Nh4 …Ne7
27.f4 …Qd6
28.Kf3 …b5
29.axb5 …axb5

30.Qd3 …b4
31.cxb4 …Qxb4
32.f5 …Qe1 (It’s getting clear that it’s white that fights for the draw. However white should be able to hold this position with correct play. The position isn’t equal, but I doubt black has enough for a win with correct play by both players: Not a lot of pawns left on the board, they are all pretty close to each other and both Queens and knights left on the board – should probably be draw, even if white would have to fight a bit for it. However, white needn’t make many mistakes before the game is lost. Actually, he needed only make one: )

33.Kg4?? (the losing move)

33…fxe5!+
34.Nxf5 …Qe6
35.Kf4 …g5+
36.Kg4 …Kg6!

In this position the white knight is lost and white has no choice but to exchange queens after black’s check on f5. So here white resigned. A good game.

Micro vs macro

If I had to pick an animal to describe the US economy rigth now, I’d have to go with the hamster. But like a really tired hamster, that has been running around in its cage for the last seven years. Right now it’s exhausted. As a microeconomist, I’d say that the hamster needs some rest. Macroeconomists of course look at the hamster and think that it needs some methamphetamine. Now, I’m sure that they’re right… Over the last month I’ve learned that the three most terrifying words in the English language are “macroeconomists agree that”… I’m sure that they’re right on the hamster needing methamphetamine – all I’m saying is that in two years, that is going to be one ugly hamster…

Via Greg Mankiw.