Vegan? – No thanks, I’m not hungry…

Failblog.

Occam’s razor

Here’s the link. At least when it comes to the second half of the century, the two variables track each other quite closely. Follow the link for more.

“Ungdommelig kådhed”??? “Minder om”???

180

De *** er syge i bærret, og mennesker som dem burde simpelthen ikke have lov til at gå frit omkring her i landet.

50.000 hits!

Hvis du scroller ned og kigger ude til højre, vil du opdage at bloggen nu er mere end halvvejs de 100.000 hits.

Hvis vi antager, at antal hits i alt er et groft mål for bloggens samlede impact over tid, er denne nu omtrent 1 procent af uriaspostens. – og godt 12 % af punditokraternes.

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Update:

Ligesom ved nogle af de tidligere milepæle må dette naturligvis, kommer jeg lige i tanke om, siges at være en god anledning til at komme med noget generel ris/ros og eventuelt forslag til ting, der kan gøres anderledes her på bloggen.

How many firms “deal” with their economic troubles

My previous post on newspapers just reminded me of this strip, which I would assume is actually more relevant now than it was when it was first made four years ago:

Just browsing…

Random wikipedia browsing. The arrows indicate that I followed a link leading to the article on the other side of the arrow head. I had been reading about exoplanets (did you know that we have detected only ~350 planets outside our own solar system?) a couple of days ago, so there was nothing random about the article I started out with:

55 Cancri -> 55 Cancri d -> Argument of periapsis -> Orbital mechanics -> Universal variable formulation -> Laguerre’s method -> (jump) trebuchet -> Torsion engine and Battle of Xiangyang -> Yuan Dynasty and Song Dynasty -> I felt tired and went to make a cup of coffee, so I stopped browsing even if I did get rather curious about the early development of forensic science that took place in the Song Dynasty centuries before this field was first studied in Europe…

If you have but the least bit of interest in any given subject X, obtaining more knowledge about X is usually both fun and rewarding. Don’t ever let anybody tell you differently.

PET-kommissionens rapport

…blev offentliggjort i går. Læs den her.

Mikael Jalving er ikke imponeret.

The future of newspapers

Richard Posner gives us an update.

I agree with most of what he says, in particular I like to believe that the thesis that the transitory (/expected) income shock many people experience rigth now might shift their consumption patterns permanently in a way that will harm the printed news medias also in the long run is valid. The likely impact of this effect is increased by the combined facts that a) the slowdown has hit males much harder than females and b) males are all else equal more likely to have a newspaper subscription than females.

However, do notice that we’re in Denmark still pretty far away from a “paperless society” without printed news (…that people pay for) and -entertainment (I have to add this, even if it is perhaps redundant: Who can tell the difference these days anyway?). For the period 2005-2007, the average annual household spending on newspapers and magazines in Denmark exceeded 2200 kroner*, or about 6 kroner a day pr. household. The number will surely be lower for the period 2007-2009, but the point stands.
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*I’d like to throw a link, but I have a bad experience with linking to dst-tables. However, if you want to know, go to Statistikbanken’s website, then select FU5: Husstandenes årlige forbrug efter forbrugsart og husstandsgrupper. That table has data on this specific variable from 1993 to 2007.

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Update: I must admit I hadn’t noticed that Becker had already published his post when I read Posner’s. Here it is. His conclusion:

Although the printed newspaper industry is doomed, and will be missed by those of us that remember newspapers in their heyday, they are being replaced by good substitutes in the form of blogs, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, online news gathering by various groups, including newspapers, and other electronic forms of communication. People in democracies will continue to have access to independent and often quite accurate, reports on events in their own countries and most other parts of the world. In fact, the populations of undemocratic countries now have much greater access to what is happening in the world than they had in the past because it is far more difficult to suppress access to the Internet and other electronic forms of communication than it is to suppress newspapers.

Becker’s notions about the also in the future continued free access to independent and accurate news in democratic nations even despite the death of the traditional printed newspapers only apply if politicians don’t fuck it up. I’m not sure they won’t, and I’m sure they’ll try: For example by handing out ever increasing amounts of the taxpayers’ money to the traditional newspapers in order to force people to continue to buy their products, or (no wait, it’s and, not or) by telling people what they can, and cannot, write on blogs/twitters/facebook pages/ect.

Math atheist

A recent conversation with my dad somehow reminded me of this cartoon:

If you haven’t read Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, you have missed out on something quite wonderful. You don’t need to be a child to love that strip – I (re)read a few of the old magazines not long ago while visiting my parents, and it was simply wonderful to re-enter the beautiful world Watterson created. When I first learned that Watterson had decided to end the strip for good, I cried. The reaction was complex: Disbelief, anger, bargaining (I came up with all sorts of things that I would do if only Watterson would change his mind), back to anger, further on to depression and sadness – in a short amount of time I went through the entire Kübler-Ross model. I guess it was a bit like losing a close friend.

Huge estimation errors – dinosaur edition

Scientists have discovered that dinosaurs may have been much lighter and sleeker than previously thought because of potential flaws in the equations used to calculate their weight.

The findings could force researchers to rethink many of their beliefs, particularly about giant plant eaters such as apatosaurus which had been thought to weigh up to 37 tons. The creature’s real weight was closer to 18 tons, according to new calculations.

“Palaeontologists have for 25 years used a statistical model to estimate the body weight of giant dinosaurs and other extraordinarily large extinct animals,” said Gary Packard, from Colorado State University, whose research will appear in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology this week.

“We have found that the statistical model is seriously flawed and the giant dinosaurs probably were only about half as heavy as is generally believed.”

The research does not suggest that dinosaurs were shorter in length or height. These dimensions are clear from the size of their bones. Instead, Packard’s work challenges the depiction of many giant herbivores. Until now they have been shown as well-rounded, powerful animals, when they are more likely to have been skinny and muscular.

Such findings would affect more than just appearance. It would suggest that these animals were leaner and faster, needed less food and had significant differences in lifestyle from what was previously thought.

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Here’s more, HT: Razib. No link to the study, which I would just love to read, as it will not be published until later this week.

I’m pretty sure these findings, if Packard is rigth, will have a profound impact on the field. As the article mentions, size is but one of several variables that need to be reestimated and -explained: A lot of the theory on behaviour, metabolism, thermoregulation ect. on the megafauna inhabiting the earth back then will also need to be rewritten.

Will this get him killed eventually?

The question has been asked before, however it remains as relevant as ever. I still believe the most likely answer is no, but I’m pretty sure a lot of other options are still on the table. Via Susan Polgar’s blog:

MOSCOW — Chess master Garry Kasparov staged the latest of his guerrilla hit-and-run protests against the Kremlin on Wednesday, showing up at the criminal trial of a former billionaire and engaging in a brief, heated debate with one of the prosecutors.

Spectators gawked and whispered when Kasparov sat on a front bench in the courtroom where Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, is being tried on charges he embezzled billions of dollars while he was the chief of the Yukos Oil Company.

Kasparov and other supporters of Khodorkovsky say he is chiefly guilty of making an enemy of former President Vladimir Putin.

Last week Kasparov used a similar gambit, popping up Friday at a ceremony in Sochi during the mayoral race in that city, host of the 2014 Winter Olympics. He managed to do what the challengers on the ballot hadn’t: confront the Kremlin-backed candidate, Anatoly Pakhomov.

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Kasparov, one of the most famous of the Russian opposition leaders, said before the trial began it was his “civic duty” to demonstrate support for Khodorkovsky.

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The latest Khodorkovsky case is seen as a test for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who has called for judicial and political reforms and for broader participation in elections.

These measures would reverse the course set by Putin, Medvedev’s mentor and predecessor, who rolled back democratic reforms during his eight years as president.

“As long as this trial continues, the talk of liberalization remains just talk,” Kasparov said at one point. “It makes the whole concept of law and justice a sad joke.”

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I must admit that I admire Kasparov. He has had a wonderful career, he’s one of the most brilliant chess players that have ever lived, and he could do pretty much whatever he wanted to for the rest of his life. He has a lot to lose, and the expected personal gains from his current activities are very small. Yet still he spends most of his time now working for democratic reforms and speaking out against the tyranny of the current regime. He has some idiosyncrasies, yes; some of his ideas are a little odd, yes; but that’s the case with most of the world’s significant dissenters.

Oh, a short addenda: I have not written about Iran during the last weeks, even if I’m well aware a lot of stuff is going on there. If you want to know more about that subject, read about it somewhere else – preferably other blogs. The short version of my owns views is this: a) (Of course) the whole election was a fraud, both in theory (who were allowed to run) and in praxis (massive voting fraud). b) Ahmadinejad sucks, and most of the alternatives, including Mousavi, suck marginally less. c) I know very little about Iran and thus do not feel confortable writing about this subject. Also, I wouldn’t say that I don’t care about what goes on in Tehran these days, I just don’t care enough to blog much about it. As said, lot’s of other people do.

A little recycling is probably in order:

Maybe it doesn’t need to be so hard after all…

The clip is from The Big Bang Theory. I’ve seen the first two and a half episodes, and so far I think it’s hilarious.

Sammensæt din egen skattereform

Statistisk årbog for 2009 blev udgivet for ca. en uge siden, og er nu lagt ud i elektronisk form på dst’s hjemmeside. Jeg kan anbefale folk at følge linket til årbogen, og så i øvrigt tage et godt langt kig på Tabel 402, side 431 og frem.

Minarkister af forskellige afskygninger skulle kunne finde rigtigt mange gode forslag til poster, der burde fjernes fra den opgørelse: “Offentlig orden og sikkerhed” samt “forsvar” udgjorde, jf. side 425, sidste år kun i alt 4.6% af de offentlige drifts- og kapitaludgifter. Bemærk i øvrigt at der er noget overlap når det kommer til Tabel 402, som kan gøre det nødvendigt at dykke lidt længere ned i tallene for ikke at komme til at dumme sig; for bare at tage et eksempel er transport- og energiministeriets udgifter til infrastruktur i dette års finanslov budgetteret til 6,6 milliarder, eller ca. 1% af nettodriftsudgifterne, men de samlede udgifter til infrastruktur udgjorde i 2007, jf. Tabel 328, side 342, ca. 15 milliarder kroner, eller omtrent 2.5% af de offentlige driftsomkostninger – det er med andre ord ikke alle offentlige infrastrukturudgifter, der går via transport- og energiministeriet.

Som altid vil jeg pointere, at det at privatisere folkekirken, kongehuset, DR eller noget helt fjerde, eller det at nedlægge klimaministeriet/miljøministeriet/kulturministeriet eller noget helt fjerde er pebernødder i den store sammenhæng. Sociale udgifter samt udgifter til sundhed og undervisning dækker mere end 70% af det offentlige budget, jf. figur 8 side 425, og man kommer ikke ret langt, hvis man går uden om disse poster.

Why culture matters…

Jewkes and her colleagues interviewed a representative sample of 1,738 men in South Africa’s Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces.

Of those surveyed, 28% said they had raped a woman or girl, and 3% said they had raped a man or boy. Almost half who said they had carried out a rape admitted they had done so more than once, with 73% saying they had carried out their first assault before the age of 20.

The study, which had British funding, also found that men who are physically violent towards women are twice as likely to be HIV-positive. They are also more likely to pay for sex and to not use condoms.

Any woman raped by a man over the age of 25 has a one in four chance of her attacker being HIV-positive.

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Here’s the link, via MR.

Stuff like this is also one of the reasons why I’m not an anarchist. I’m not inviting to a long discussion here, I’m just saying that things like these certainly do not in my mind disprove that Hobbes had a point.

Social Intelligence

Here you can find some of Bryan Caplan’s advice on how people who suck at social stuff and actually want to improve can do better:

1. Good conversation is an exchange. The most basic form of social ineptitude is to say what’s on your mind, even though you have no reason to believe your listeners are interested. Even more cloddish: Saying what’s on your mind, even though you know that your listeners are not interested.

In a useful conversation, in contrast, there is a double coincidence of wants. You have to be interested in what I have to say; I have to be interested in what you have to say. This is an important reason why people with conventional interests seem more socially intelligent. Even if they don’t check whether their audience cares, it probably does.

I imagine that my teenage self would immediately object, “But no one’s interested in what I have to say.” My two replies: (1) If that’s true, it’s still better to keep your thoughts to yourself than antagonize people you’re going to see repeatedly. (2) People will be much more interested in your thoughts if you make marginal adjustments in topics and presentation.

2. Be friendly. It’s not just good advice for libertarians; it’s good advice for people. A strong presumption in favor of kindness and respect almost never hurts you, and often helps you. Note that I say “presumption.” Don’t “wait and see” if people deserve friendly treatment. Hand it out first, no questions asked. You will make friends (very good), avoid making enemies (good), and occasionally show undeserved kindness and respect (only mildly bad).

3. Keeping friends is more important than getting your way. You should think twice before asking anyone for help. If you still think it’s a good idea, try to make your request easy to refuse. “How would you feel about…” is much better than “Please, please just do me this one favor!” In the short-run, of course, the pushy approach is often effective. But life is a repeated game, pushing leads to resentment, and your relationships are more valuable than almost any specific victory.

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I don’t have friends, so #3 is irrelevant for me.

I hate how complicated all that social stuff is, so simple things like Caplan’s advice #1 above is always a great help, even if I’ve probably heard all these things before. In most social settings, the only exception is when I spend time with my close family where these things don’t really matter all that much (to me anyway), I spend a lot of energy thinking about what I’m supposed to do and say, and not do and say, in this specific social setting, which is very hard and exhausting in the long run (yes, I have a pretty high score on the autism spectrum). Mostly I just dislike spending time with other people, probably because there rarely if ever is a double coincidence of wants in any conversation in which I participate. Incidentally, even if advice #1 might make me better at social interaction, I’m not sure I shall try to consciously apply it anytime soon. The more social rules of thumb like these I become aware of, the more I seem to get convinced that it just isn’t worth it to have a social life.

17 kilometer

1 time, 3 kvarter.

Ikke nogen imponerende tid, men jeg er smadret. Ingen øvrige opdateringer i dag.

If research papers had a comment section…

Link.

Bombardér hovedkvarteret 1.5

Her kan du finde min første post relateret til Mikkel Plums bog, hvis du ikke allerede har læst den. I denne post følger herunder nogle flere citater fra bogen, som jeg allerede nu ikke har noget problem med at anbefale, selvom jeg indrømmet stadig mangler at læse halvandet hundrede sider:

i) For at arbejderne kan leve, må de dræbe kapitalisterne. For at arbejderklassen kan komme til magten, må den sende borgerskabet i døden. [...] Der er for lidt had her i verden, og det bor i de forkerte hjerter. Der er for få våben her i verden, og de ligger i de forkerte hænder. Der er for lidt revolutionær bevidsthed her i verden, og den sidder i de forkerte hoveder.

Leif Varmark, Vindrosen #3, 1973. (gg. s.135 i B.h.)

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ii) Baader-Meinhof-gruppen kan og skal naturligvis forsvares over for borgerlige, men en tilbundsgående diskussion indadtil af sabotageaktioner – af problematikken omkring legalitet-illegalitet er en forudsætning for, at den danske venstrefløj kan tage ved lære af f.eks. den tyske venstrefløjs erfaringer … De fleste af os er parate til at blæse en lang række virksomheder i luften, for vi har snakket så længe, men vi har åbenbart ikke snakket længe nok og godt nok. Det må være vores opgave at hjælpe til med at få arbejderne og arbejdernes kommende parti til at give startskuddet til åbning af fronten.

Vibeke Sperling, Politisk Revy, august 1972 (gg. s.236 i B.h.).

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iii) Vi afviser, at den palæstinensiske befrielsesbevægelses flykapringer og aktioner i Israel er terrorisme. Det palæstinensiske folk står bag disse kampformer, og dette er for os det afgørende.

Anne Grete Holmsgaard, International Bulletin #14, 1978 (gg. s.263 i B.h.).

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iv) Teorier om og forsøg på ad fredelig vej at gennemføre socialismen, har altid ført til nederlag for arbejderklassen. Arbejderklassen kan ikke tage den borgerlige statsmaskine i besiddelse og sætte den i bevægelse for sine egne formål. Tværtimod må arbejderklasssen sønderknuse det borgerlige statsapparat og erstatte det med arbejderklassens egen statsmagt, proletariatets diktatur. Arbejderklassen må forberede sig på væbnet kamp i opgøret med borgerskabet … Historien har med al tydelighed vist, at den herskende klasse aldrig frivilligt giver afkald på sin magt, men vil anvende statsmagten til at under trykke arbejderklassens kamp for socialismen.

Kommunistisk Arbejderparti (KAP)’s principprogram, 1976 (gg. s.266 i B.h.).

Ezra Levant still going strong

It’s against the law in Canada to publish anything that is: “Likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt.” Steve, that’s crazy. Exposing a person to feelings is against the law? I mean – according to that definition, if you go to Yat Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, and you leave with hateful feelings towards Germany, Yat Vashem the Holocaust memorial is guilty of a hate crime…

[...]

Freedom of speech is the strangest thing, Steve, it’s a gift you’ve got to give your enemies, if you want to keep it to yourself. [...] It’s something we have to give to the folks we totally despise, people who are wrong and rude and offensive, because if they can’t have it, well then we won’t have our rigth to be dissidents.

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From this 18 minute interview with Ezra Levant, who is still going strong (I was unable to embed the video, but I recommend it, especially to those of you who haven’t heard the name of Ezra Levant before). These two articles are great too – do follow the link in the latter to the Power Play episode – the whole setup is just hilarious.

What I have been reading

i) Dickens. I have completed the book now, well a little while ago, but I never got to tell you people what I thought afterwards. That’s an easy task: Read the damn book! Nuff said.

ii) Catch-22, by Joseph Heller – I have finished that one since my last book update too. It was very good, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, even the parts I wasn’t supposed to be enjoying.

The book is very funny, but you should not read it (only) for the laughs. The sheer absurdity of almost everything that goes on in the book is a big part of what makes it so wonderful, but that absurdity applied just as well to the real world at that time, which is a point Heller gets across with great force. I’m still very impressed by the way the book changes direction about half way in or so, without ever really breaking the flow of the story: It gradually becomes more serious, more tragic, as Yossarian’s “friends” keep dying all around him, for no good reason, and people all around him keep trying to kill him too, for no good reason. The moronic XOs and COs, people like Major Major Major Major Major, and their various stupid ideas, even more absurd proposals, their own motivations for doing what they are doing – and their complete lack of understanding of their soldiers’ motivational setup – combined with the stupid bureaucratic setting that these people work in, makes for a lot of very funny pages – until you remember that not all of this is made up by Heller, and that some of those people were actually very real. It’s that way about a lot of what happens in the book; it’s funny, but you know deep down that you’re actually not really supposed to be laughing here. Heller seems to all the time be telling us between the lines that if you think the book is messed up, then you’re wrong; it’s not the book that’s messed up, it’s the real world that’s messed up.

iii) Franz Kafka: The Trial, translated by Breon Mitchell. I have completed the novel, even if I have still not yet read the last 20 pages of the “Fragments” section of the book (Kafka died before the novel was ever finished, and he wrote in his will that it was to be destroyed when he died. The Fragments part of the book consists of additions, unfinished chapters ect. that never made it into the novel proper).

It’s not a fun book to read. In a way, it is actually a horrible book to read. But you can’t lay it down. At least I couldn’t. It wasn’t anything like I’d expected, but then again, after having read it, I realized that I actually didn’t really know beforehand what to expect. It’s absurd like Heller, but not much fun to read. Just like Yossarian, Josef K. is caught in a catch-22, before that term had ever been coined. As the novel progressed, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I might have done things differently from Josef K., had I been in his situation; but the more pages you read, the more you realize that whatever you might have said or done differently, very little would have changed. The novel is so well written that the slow but still immensely brutal realization that there is no escape, no hidden loophole somewhere that you (or Josef K.) can find to bring a stop to the nonsensical trial, which incidentally pretty much nobody – including the people who are trying to get you convicted – seem to know anything about, is almost as hard on the reader as it is on Josef K. As you read on, you get to feel K’s despair, and I must say it really got to me. All the way through, you can’t stop looking for loopholes that just aren’t there and never were.

Heller was greatly inspired by Kafka’s authorship, and the impact of two other authors I have read recently, Fyodor Dostojevskij and Charles Dickens, are also easily recognisable in his novel. Catch-22 is, even if it has twice as many pages as the latter, easier to get through than The Trial, even if it is not exactly a walk in the park. If you’re not sure if you can handle Kafka, my advice would be to start out with Heller and then perhaps later move on from there. As Howard Jacobsen puts it in his introduction to Catch-22, Heller’s book is: Kafka popularized rigth enough, Kafka made available to those who would never go near Kafka, but by no means Kafka alleviated.

iv) Bombarder Hovedkvarteret, by Mikkel Plum.

I have in a recent post made it clear that I find the book very promising. I naturally still do.