A great picture

I couldn’t not post it. More here. A related link is this.

Random wikipedia links of interest

1. Renin-angiotensin system.

2. Aggregation problem.

3. Pawnless chess endgame.

4. Boltzmann brain

5. Insect flight.

6. Homeostasis.

The believer

Pharyngula.

Courageous indeed (or?)

…Of course it all depends on how we define courageous:

more about "Courageous Man Refuses To Believe He …", posted with vodpod

A shorter and more graphic version of this – I highly doubt there’s any fundamental difference between the outcomes related to ‘foregoing conventional treatment’ (say no to chemo, surgery, pain management ect.) in favor of ‘alternative treatment’ and the outcomes related to never getting a diagnosis in the first place and/or getting no treatment whatsoever. Incidentally, The Onion very recently posted what I believe is the first video in Danish; you can watch it here.

Mind mig lige igen om, hvorfor livet er bedre end døden?

Nogle gange trækker jeg virkelig blankt på det spørgsmål. De sidste måske 5 år har jeg formentligt kun levet videre, fordi det er det, man gør, med mindre man er villig til at træffe en meget vanskelig og irreversibel beslutning, der går imod langt hovedparten af ens genetiske programmering; en beslutning som jeg på trods af dette faktisk en gang traf i den periode, uden at det dog lykkedes for mig at afkorte mit ophold her i de sansende væseners verden.

Det har primært været dødsangsten, der har holdt mig i live i det sidste halve årti, ikke erkendelsen af, at livet er bedre end døden. De to ting er efter min opfattelse væsensforskellige. Jeg lever videre, fordi det er det, man gør. U(leve videre fra tidspunkt t til t+1) ~ 0 + epsilon, men E(U(afslutte livet på tidspunkt t))<0, så jeg lever videre. Prøver at fylde min tid ud med ting, min hjerne og resten af kroppen holder af, mange af dem vanebetonede, fordi det er sådan hjernen fungerer, så tiden går hurtigere og døden paradoksalt nok nærmer sig med større hast, end den ellers ville – velvidende at jeg, hvis ikke jeg var så bange for at dø, netop korrekt ville anskue alle de overspringshandlinger, jeg på nuværende tidspunkt fylder på frem til døden gør sit indtog, som lige netop dette; overspringshandlinger, meningsløse og ligegyldige ting, der holder et uløseligt problem mentalt på afstand, men intet gør for at løse det, fordi det netop ikke kan løses. Er det også tilfældet for alle andre, er dødsangsten den dominerende faktor der holder mennesker i live? Somme tider har jeg det på fornemmelsen, andre gange lader det til, at andre mennesker faktisk godt kan lide at leve, og er meget godt tilfredse med at gøre det, fordi glæderne er større end sorgerne på den mentale vægtskål. Giv mig nogle argumenter for, hvorfor livet er at foretrække, mange af argumenterne i den anden retning kender jeg allerede kun alt for godt.

Nej, en vandpistol er ikke svaret.

Jeg er ikke suicidal på nuværende tidspunkt, og mit liv er, målt på nærmest ethvert objektivt kriterium, langt, langt bedre end det var for 2-3 år siden; hvilket netop også noget af det, jeg finder deprimerende (jeg burde i det mindste være rigtig glad bare en gang imellem). Men igen – det er et udtryk for, at jeg har et mentalt overskud, at jeg overhovedet poster en post som denne. Når jeg har det rigtigt skidt, blogger jeg helst ikke (længere), også fordi jeg ved af erfaring, at det er mere eller mindre umuligt for mig at skrive eller tænke kohærent nok til at poste på bloggen i den situation. Jeg leder ikke efter et “højere formål”. Der er ikke noget. Det er metoder til at håndtere denne erkendelse, jeg søger. Jeg har selv spillet djævelens advokat i sådanne mentale udvekslinger fra tid til anden, men eksterne input vil oftest bringe nye aspekter på banen. Så hvorfor ikke bare få det overstået?

Bare lige for at gøre en anden ting lysende klart: Selvom det på nuværende tidspunkt er lørdag nat, er denne post altså ikke et resultat af en alkoholrus. Jeg drikker vel omtrent en genstand eller to om måneden, de fleste i julemåneden, og har ikke været alkoholpåvirket nok til at have et ønske om at skrive om(/vrøvle om…) den her slags emner siden gymnasiet.

Opdatering:

En supplerende bemærkning:
Håbet om et bedre liv i fremtiden er også en del af forklaringen for, hvorfor E(U(dø på tidspunkt t)) implicit er mindre end nul; hvis jeg dør på tidspunkt t, forkaster jeg enhver mulighed for at få et bedre liv i fremtiden, og den option ønsker de fleste af os ikke at give afkald på. Selvom denne faktor hænger tæt sammen med dødsangsten, er de to måske ikke helt identiske – og for at være helt klart i mælet: Det er denne faktor, ikke usikkerheden om, hvad der vil ske med ‘mig’, når jeg dør, der har holdt mig tilbage. Den generelle meningsløshed kan bekæmpes med ideen om, at det er processen (livet), ikke endemålet (døden), der bør være i fokus, men hvordan man etablerer et forsvar for, hvorfor det nødvendigvis bør være tilfældet, står ikke klart for mig.

Commodity prices

Just thought I’d post the graph here:

Mark Perry, via MR.

In the graph, there’s included a downward sloping trend. Just two remarks, do note that…

1) given the volatility of this dataset, a lot depends on which time period you’re looking at; a trend from 1935 to 1980 would most likely slope upwards, so it’s not like it’s a natural law that commodity prices slope downwards over time, and…

2) it depends a lot on which commodities you’re looking at. Here’s a graph mapping the cost development of coal, natural gas, petroleum ect.; every single one of these price indexes increased from 1970 to 2000. If you like, you can compare this with this graph of world grain prices over (roughly) the same time period. Incidentally, the estimated world population grew by more than 50 percent during that time period.

Quotes!

Just a random collection of quotes. I normally use twitter to post these, but sometimes the 140 character rule gets quite annoying, so this’ll probably not be the last blogpost of its kind.

A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. (Groucho Marx)

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do. (Benjamin Franklin)

If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything. (William Faulkner)

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last. (Winston Churchill)

They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise. (Boris Pasternak)

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. (Aldous Huxley)

All children are born Atheists (Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach)

The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it. (George Marshall)

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. (Charles Darwin)

We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others. (François de La Rochefoucauld)

The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others. (-ll-) Along the same lines:

The desire to appear clever often prevents one from being so. (-ll-)

If you have never read any of François de La Rochefoucauld’s writing, go here right now. You will not regret it.

A note on taxation in Denmark

I’ve seen the idea of implementing a VAT in the US discussed quite a few places in the blogosphere lately, ie. here. I’m sure it’s a subject that will come up again, so here are a few remarks that might be of interest when it comes to the current Danish tax system.

First follow this link, read all of it, it’s not long. It’s an overview of the Danish income tax system; I could have copied it here, but it’s all there at the link anyway. It doesn’t include everything of course, on top of that Denmark has a VAT of 25 % which isn’t mentioned at the link – you can read more about that here – as well as a lot of fees and levies. The government gets a lot of money from us every year.

It also spends a lot of money. The government debt is actually growing, per capita government debt grew from 35.000 kroners to 55.000 kroners in 2009, a more than 50 % increase (link – in Danish). If you look at the percentage of GDP, government debt grew from ~11 pct. of GDP in 2008 to 18 pct. of GDP in 2009. The Danish National Bank has estimated that this years budget deficit will be 100 billion kroners, which means that per capita government debt will grow to 80.000 kroners by January 2011. That is a total government debt of 437,5 billion kroners – compared to a debt of 195 billion kroners in 2008; the government will more than double its debt in the years of 2009-2010.

Point is, when you add a new income source to the government, the government will find a way to spend the money. New taxes don’t mean lower budget deficits in the future, they just mean higher government expenditures in the future. Denmark is the country in the world with the highest taxes, and our government is still running a budget deficit of 5-6 % of GDP (the government’s own estimate is 4,9 % of GDP for 2010, but its estimate of the debt accumulation is, as is to be expected, somewhat lower than that of the Danish National Bank). Also, the long run fiscal outlook does not look good either – the problem is not limited to current business cycle developments; despite the current very high level of government income, current spending just isn’t sustainable in the long run, even if our relatively low debt to GDP-ratio gives the government some extra years to let everything turn to crap before reforms will be implemented.

I’d like to elaborate a little on that last point. Right now, a newborn Dane will on average, given current policy, cost the government 900.000 kroners (NPV) during his/her lifetime (no, the numbers are not the same for the two genders as females are on average more costly than males, but I’ll let that one slide for now). The DREAM-group (Danish Rational Economic Agents Model) has calculated that the 2006 structural (non-business cycle related) primary public budget surplus of 3,8 percent of GDP will turn into a 3,6 percent deficit by 2040.

Quote of the day (/week?/month?)

This one is just great:

One of my favorite rants is to imagine that the personal auto had not been invented 100-odd years ago, and we were all riding around in trains and trolleys and buses.

Along comes the smart inventor. He, of course, is called before a Senate committee.

Senator: So, Mr. Inventor, how fast do you think these vehicles will go?

Inventor: 60 or 70 or 80 miles an hour.

Senator: OMG! How are you going to keep them from running into each other at those speeds?

Inventor: We’re going to paint lines on the road.

We’d still be riding in trolleys.

Link.

A couple of brain teasers

I have, with admittedly somewhat varying intensity throughout the period, been studying László Polgár’s book, which I’ve mentioned before here on this blog and on twitter, for months. I thought I might as well share a few of the problems with you, so that you have an idea what it’s about. In the post I’ll write a little about the book first, then I’ll post two random problems from the book; if you want to skip directly to the chess problems, just scroll down until you get there.

The book contains chess problems and nothing else. 5334 of them. Not all of them are composed, some positions are from actual games that have been played between various strong players. Some of them are quite easy, some of them are very, very hard. Far most of the book is made up of problems that consist of positions where you are supposed to find a ‘mate in one’, ‘mate in two’ or ‘mate in three’, even though there’s also a few combinations, simple endgames and such at the end of the book. Far most of the problems are ‘mate in two’ problems. I’ve included a couple of problems in the end of this post. I shall not post ‘the answers’ unless asked for it, and if so only in the comment section. Not all roads lead to Rome; there’s only one correct solution. Here’s a picture of a random page from the book (the notes written in between the diagrams aren’t there when you get the book – I wrote those, and they are the solutions to the problems in question):

30^2 is 900. This is just to say that a mate in two can be a lot harder than it looks, so don’t beat yourself up if you’re having some difficulty solving it; if you have Queens on the board, a few other pieces and an open position, you’ll often have to implicitly analyze well beyond 500 possible positions in a ‘simple’ mate in two problem. A lot of them you can discard out of hand, but there’s still often a lot of complexity left in positions that on the surface look very simple. To state this another way: There are a lot of these problems that you simply can’t solve by just blindly trying every move you can think of, at least not in a time frame most people would consider acceptable – you need to find the plan. Finding the plans is what makes you better.

I believe I’ve improved my play somewhat by using this book, even if it’s hard to know for certain as I don’t have a rating and currently play only unrated games online. You’ll need some other stuff to teach you the basics, but going through this book systematically is a great way to improve a bit beyond the 1200 crowd. Even if one might think that a book containing almost nothing but mating problems would be skewed towards teaching only the tactical elements of the game, there’s actually a lot of positional stuff hidden here as well.

Ah, yes, the problems I’ve picked out:

a) In this problem, you need to find a way for white to mate in two moves, no matter how black responds to white’s moves. That is, after white’s second move black is supposed to be check-mated:

b) This is a mate in three moves instead, white to move:

Another thing to add to the list…

I have this running gag with my brothers where if I see something completely *** that someone is doing, I’ll give my brothers a carte blanche to murder me if they ever find me doing the same thing (to put me out of my misery). So far the list includes (among other things, can’t remember them all…): Working as a circus clown, -ll- a priest, having a role as a mook in a B-movie (…and lots of other specific movie-related themes), probably all the possible kinds of jobs involving interacting with small children on a daily basis (and therefore having to act and talk like a moron on a daily basis), working as a journalist covering the actions of the royal family, working as a sports commentator of any kind, ect…

Well, here’s another thing to add to the list:

Via Lotte’s recent comment on Bohemianrapsody.

Post number 1000

I did not expect to ever get close to that when I started this blog. Just as I never expected to get 100.000 hits, a number I’ll likely reach in just a few more months.

So yeah, there are a lot of posts here on this blog by now. If you ever feel like reading some stuff I’ve written about a particular subject, you can use the categories or the search function in the sidebar to navigate. I’ve tried during the lifetime of this blog to make this kind of navigation easier than it used to be, and I do believe I’ve become a lot better at using the categories than I used to be. Quite a few of the categories actually by now have a post volume that I think make them worthwhile using.

Both when it comes to posts I’ve already written and when it comes to posts I have yet to write, I’d like to make it clear that you can’t take it for granted that you’ll always be able to go back to the post on my blog. You should save the post somewhere else if you think it’s worth saving. I don’t write many of those posts anyway, but just in case you stumble upon one or two, keep this in mind.

[Comments in Danish are, as always, welcome]

A picture is worth a thousand words

Found here. If you want the 1000 words, just follow the link and watch the video.

If you celebrate that kind of thing and you have a girlfriend/boyfriend (/wife/husband/homosexual partner/multiple sexual partners): Have a happy Valentine’s Day. If you don’t, that’s fine by me too – I never have.

Promoting the unknown, a continuing series

“Medtner’s music unfortunately is of the kind that rarely makes the best impression at first hearing” – Marc-André Hamelin. Give him a chance anyway:

link.

link.

link.

link.

Edit: I don’t know why, but wordpress seems to be having some problems with youtube embeds. I’ve experienced not being able to see the embeds on the page a couple of times, and I can’t see the videos now either. I can’t see the Clementi videos either, it seems to be a universal problem with the embedding function. I’ve added a link to the pieces below the embeds in the post, so that you can at least watch the videos on youtube if the embedded videos here on the site are “invisible” to you. I don’t think I have to say this, but I am very annoyed by this problem right now.

Some search results

I just tried to search for some different terms in google scholar to satisfy my own curiosity, selected results below (the numbers indicates # of hits for each search item):

Economics: 3.060.000

Oil: 2.760.000

Europe: 2.480.000

Africa: 1.740.000

Corruption: 837.000

Uranium: 652.000

“Monetary policy”: 561.000

“Fiscal policy”: 336.000

“Foreign Aid”: 132.000

“George Bush”: 82.100 (interestingly, the first result is a study called Cognitive and emotional influences in anterior cingulate cortex written by a neurologist named G Bush. Not all these studies are about the former President)

“Wal-Mart”: 55.400

“Saddam Hussein”: 49.600

“financial innovation”: 18.200

“bank run”: 5.890

…

A few remarks (more could of course be said): I think it’s interesting that there are more articles available about oil than articles about Europe or Africa (or Asia; haven’t checked NA). I think in general there’s a high output of articles about natural ressources (to mention a few other examples; iron: 2.38 mill, coal: 1.3 mill). Also, there are 67 % more articles about monetary policy than there are articles about fiscal policy. There are almost 10 times as many articles about Wal-Mart than there are articles about bank runs; I did not see that one coming.

Note to self

Well, I found it funny. Here’s the link.

I’ll have to read up on that at some point

With respect to diabetes, it’s now understood that several types of cancer are more common: colon, pancreas, and breast.

Link, the main topic of the article is the hypothesized link between injections of insulin analogs and cancer.

My granddad on my father’s side died of colon cancer, so that one already runs in the family. This link has some information about the genetics of that disease.

14,3 kilometer

1 time, 21 minutter.

Meget langt fra det optimale (den halve marathon skal ned under 1.45, før jeg overhovedet vil overveje for alvor at løbe en hel, og jeg var helt smadret, da jeg nåede hjem, så tidsforbruget skalerer ikke…), men jeg er trods alt så småt ved at være i form igen. Ikke rask, men sundere end gennemsnittet.

Mit akutte kulhydratbehov under løbet er det samme, som da jeg løb 6 kilometer (pr. løbetur, ikke pr. tidsenhed; pr. tidsenhed eller pr. tilbagelagt kilometer er det faldet betydeligt, både pga. markant forbedret energiomsættelse/iltoptagelse og pga. reduktion i eksternt tilført insulin på ca. 0,1 ml på motionsdage). Kan formentligt løbe en halv marathon på samme kulhydratmængde, som det for to måneder siden, for givne insulindoser, ville kræve at have løbet 10 kilometer.

Summa summarum: Det er ekstremt let for diabetikere at registrere, at motion er sundt for os.

Hæh…

Link.

A game

Time-control: 10+0, I was white – here’s the link. Black lost on time, but Fritz evaluates the end position to somewhere north of +7, so it was lost for black either way. In retrospect I made some dubious moves (ie. h5) which might be over-committing and perhaps would have lost me the game against a stronger opponent, and I also missed the shortest way to the win with 31.Bg5, however it was still a very nice game. Here’s the end position, black to move: