An article on articles about articles

Here’s the link, this is great stuff and you really should read all of it. An excerpt:

“This is a news website article about a scientific paper

In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?”

In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.

If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.

This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like “the scientists say” to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist.

In this paragraph I will state in which journal the research will be published. I won’t provide a link because either a) the concept of adding links to web pages is alien to the editors, b) I can’t be bothered, or c) the journal inexplicably set the embargo on the press release to expire before the paper was actually published.”

The best candidate?

He said he saw a “semi-transparent half tube” spaceship on his balcony. He then entered it and met “human-like creatures in yellow spacesuits”, The Moscow Times reported.

“I am often asked which language I used to talk to them. Perhaps it was on a level of the exchange of the ideas,” he told the television program host.

He had told The Guardian the aliens took him to “some kind of star”.

“They put a spacesuit on me, told me many things and showed me around. They wanted to demonstrate that UFOs do exist.”

Here’s the link. The guy just got re-elected for FIDE-president.

Mandatory SMBC-cartoon:

It’s probably quite telling that Ilyumzhinov is too far out there to even be the main intended target of a takedown like this – he doesn’t just claim that he saw them out of his window, he actually claims that he flew away with them in their spaceship and communicated with them.

On the other hand, when was the last time a US president was elected who didn’t believe in “God”? Ilyumzhinov’s delusions aren’t actually much more crazy than those of ie. George Bush, he just doesn’t share them with a lot of other people, which is why those same people tend to think of him as crazy. Strength in numbers and all that. I think it’s interesting that I live in a culture where even a guy like me tend to automatically judge a person like Ilyumzhinov harder for his moronic delusions than a christian whose views are basically on a similar level of ‘wrongness’. In my view, it’d be nice to live in a culture where religious stupidity was judged as harshly as the stupidity of someone like Ilyumzhinov.

Wikipedia articles of interest

1. Laplace transform. (another thing to add to the ‘this is some of the stuff students of economics like me work with’)

2. Squaring the circle. If you want to know a lot of stuff about ancient greek mathematicians, just go to the bottom of that article and start clicking the links.

3. Tower of London. Today’s featured article. I’m surprised a featured article like this contains a section about ghosts. That part reads a bit too much like a tourist-brochure to my taste. Then again, surely a lot of good stuff in there, though I haven’t yet read much of it.

4. Forensic entomology. “Forensic entomology is the application and study of insect and other arthropod biology to criminal matters.”

(I had no idea such a field even existed!)

5. Banks Island. Almost twice as big as Denmark. I’d never even heard of it. Far more than half of the world’s population of muskoxen lives there, and it’s home to two thirds of the world’s population of lesser snow geese. The island is treeless and had a total population of 114 in 2001. It’s not a very hospitable territory for humans:

The ship above, HMS Investigator, was abandoned in 1853 after it was trapped in the ice. It was not found again until July this year.

Brain damaged?

“OBJECTIVE Hippocampal neurons in adult animals and humans are vulnerable to severe hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia. Effects are hypothesized to be exacerbated during development, but existing studies on developing human brains are limited. We examined whether hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia experienced during brain development in humans affects hippocampal volumes.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We analyzed T1-weighted magnetic resonance images in 95 youth with type 1 diabetes and 49 sibling control subjects aged 7–17 years. Youth with diabetes were categorized as having 0 (n = 37), 1–2 (n = 41), or 3 or more (3+; n = 17) prior severe hypoglycemic episodes. Hyperglycemia exposure was estimated from median lifetime A1C, weighted for duration of diabetes. Stereologic measurements of hippocampal volumes were performed in atlas-registered space to correct for whole brain volume.

RESULTS Greater exposure to severe hypoglycemia was associated with larger hippocampal volumes (F [3,138] = 3.6, P = 0.016; 3+ larger than all other groups, P < 0.05). Hyperglycemia exposure was not associated with hippocampal volumes (R2 change = 0.003, F [1,89] = 0.31, P = 0.58, semipartial r = 0.06; one outlier removed for high median A1C), and the 3+ severe hypoglycemia group still had larger hippocampal volumes after controlling for age of onset and hyperglycemia exposure (main effect of hypoglycemia category, F [2,88] = 6.4, P = 0.002; 3+ larger than all other groups, P < 0.01).

CONCLUSIONS Enlargement of the hippocampus may reflect a pathological reaction to hypoglycemia during brain development, such as gliosis, reactive neurogenesis, or disruption of normal developmental pruning."

[...]

"Greater exposure to severe hypoglycemia during childhood was associated with enlargement of hippocampal gray matter volume in youth with type 1 diabetes. This effect was not explained by age, sex, degree of hyperglycemia exposure, age of onset, or duration of disease and was equivalent for both hemispheres. Although the direction of the effect was unexpected, the fact that the subset of youth with three or more severe hypoglycemic episodes in their past was different from all other groups, including sibling control subjects, supports the sensitivity of the hippocampus to effects of repeated hypoglycemic episodes during brain development. These data do not support the idea that chronic hyperglycemia in childhood affects gray matter volume in the hippocampus."

…

From a new study, Hippocampal Volumes in Youth With Type 1 Diabetes, by Hershey, Perantie, Wu, Weaver, Black and White (no, I’m not making those last two names up, go take a look at the link).

If I’d participated in the study, I’d have been in the 3 or more group (the ‘more group’ part of the ’3 or more group’, to be more specific).

Promoting the unknown, a continuing series

Book burnings

I’ll give the word to Terry Pratchett, here’s a passage from The Light Fantastic:

“Lackjaw was lost in thought for a moment. ‘Setting fire to things,’ he said at last. ‘They’re quite good at that. Books and stuff. They have these great big bonfires.’
Cohen [Cohen the Barbarian that is, US] was shocked.
‘Bonfires of books?’
‘Yes. Horrible, isn’t it?’
‘Right,’ said Cohen. He thought it was appalling. Someone who spent his life living rough under the sky knew the value of a good thick book, which ought to outlast at least a season of cooking fires if you were careful how you tore the pages out. Many a life had been saved on a snowy night by a handful of sodden kindling and a really dry book. If you felt like a smoke and couldn’t find a pipe, a book was your man every time.
Cohen realized people wrote things in books. It had always seemed to him to be a frivolous waste of paper.”

…

I generally like books. Well, that’s not actually true, I like good books. They are in the minority of all books. Lots of bad books out there. If ten million of those bad books disappeared out of thin air, I think the world would be a better place. People picking up a random book would be more likely to pick up a good one and this would be an improvement over the status quo, because bad books do a lot of harm by making people who read them forget that there are good books out there, or at least by making the good books harder to find. I guess I’m saying I have a hard time getting why anyone besides the clichéed bespectacled 60 year old librarian care about whether some guy decides to set a book on fire or not. Most people who think they ought to hold an opinion on the subject haven’t even read the damn book, many of them haven’t even read all that many books in the first place and most of the ones they’ve read were likely crap anyway. Why care? – life’s way too short to care about something like this.

Symbols are but what we make of them.

Quote of the day

“Psychologist Dorothy Rowe features a few of these ['armor piercing questions', the link below has more, US] in her works on depression and personality; in the “laddering” exercise done to determine a person’s core values, the question “Why is that important?” is repeated many times. The APQ that distinguishes people suffering depression from those who don’t is “Do you believe you are a good person?” According to Rowe, a depressed person will always answer “No”.” (tvtropes – if you’re unfamiliar with that site, don’t click the link and forget you ever read this post)

I’d answer no without even thinking. I don’t know if that disproves her hypothesis or not, though I know what Aristotle would say (he’d say ‘no’ too). Here are the google scholar results on “Dorothy Rowe” + depression.

Health disparities in the EU

The title of the paper, Inequalities in healthy life years in the 25 countries of the European Union in 2005: a cross-national meta-regression analysis, was too long for me to use as a post title.

“Background: Although life expectancy in the European Union (EU) is increasing, whether most of these extra years are spent in good health is unclear. This information would be crucial to both contain health-care costs and increase labour-force participation for older people. We investigated inequalities in life expectancies and healthy life years (HLYs) at 50 years of age for the 25 countries in the EU in 2005 and the potential for increasing the proportion of older people in the labour force.”

“Findings: In 2005, an average 50-year-old man in the 25 EU countries could expect to live until 67,3 years free of activity limitation, and a woman to 68,1 years. HLYs at 50 years for both men and women varied more between countries than did life expectancy (HLY range for men: from 9,1 years in Estonia to 23,6 years in Denmark; for women: from 10,4 years in Estonia to 24,1 years in Denmark). Gross domestic product and expenditure on elderly care were both positively associated with HLYs at 50 years in men and women (p<0,039 for both indicators and sexes); however, in men alone, long-term unemployment was negatively associated (p=0,023) and life-long learning positively associated (p=0,021) with HLYs at 50 years of age."

I did not know that Denmark did that well on this metric. The link has a lot more.

Another world

This post was interesting. Here’s a quote from the Henderson piece (the original post has been deleted but Brad Delong reposted it):

“A quick look at our family budget, which I will happily share with the White House, will show him that like many Americans, we are just getting by despite seeming to be rich. We aren’t.” [...] “The biggest expense for us is financing government. Last year, my wife and I paid nearly $100,000 in federal and state taxes, not even including sales and other taxes.” [...] “Our next biggest expense, like most people, is our mortgage. Homes near our work in Chicago aren’t cheap and we do not have friends who were willing to help us finance the deal.”

“Like most working Americans, insurance, doctors’ bills, utilities, two cars, daycare, groceries, gasoline, cell phones, and cable TV (no movie channels) round out our monthly expenses. We also have someone who cuts our grass, cleans our house, and watches our new baby so we can both work outside the home. At the end of all this, we have less than a few hundred dollars per month of discretionary income. We occasionally eat out but with a baby sitter, these nights take a toll on our budget. Life in America is wonderful, but expensive.

If our taxes rise significantly, as they seem likely to, we can cut back on some things. The (legal) immigrant from Mexico who owns the lawn service we employ will suffer, as will the (legal) immigrant from Poland who cleans our house a few times a month. We can cancel our cell phones and some cable channels, as well as take our daughter from her art class at the community art center, but these are only a few hundred dollars per month in total.”

Both high-income and low-income people have a lot of fixed costs, in the sense that we all choose to think of stuff that isn’t fixed as if it is. Most stuff that’s fixed is only fixed until your income changes. The Henderson person shows a real lack of imagination. ‘If we still are to live in this neat house in a nice neighbourhood, own two cars, buy new clothes regularly, eat well…’ How about ‘what would happen if my income dropped to half of what it is now?’ No, I don’t like the ‘tax the rich until they are poor mindset’, but if you can take a hit like that permanently and survive, you’re very rich in my mind. That said, it’s pretty much human nature to think the way the Henderson person does. Limited ressources, unlimited wants.

Wikipedia articles of interest

1. False friends. Not what you think. One of the examples from the article:

“In Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, gift means “poison” but also “married”.”

2. Hernán Cortés.

3. Coriolis effect. If you click the link, do note the number of links to articles on physical oceanography at the bottom of that post. Wikipedia is amazing.

4. Topographic prominence.

“In topography, prominence, also known as autonomous height, relative height, shoulder drop (in North America), or prime factor (in Europe), is a concept used in the categorization of hills and mountains, also known as peaks. It is a measure of the independent stature of a summit…”

5. Citric acid cycle. Here’s the not-quite-so-short-version (click to view in a higher res):

Quotes

1. “Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.” (Hans-Georg Gadamer)

2. “We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said” (-ll-)

3. “The fact that you will regret a choice does not imply that the choice is irrational, since the way our regret works is itself irrational.” (Wei Dai)

4. “Just because you are anti-evolution doesn’t mean you are anti-science.” (Conor Lenihan, Ireland’s Minister of State for Science, Technology, Innovation and Natural Resources. A guy like that most likely stops at the first sentence in a post like this (recommended).)

5. Having included 4, I have to include this as well:

“Dogbert: My invention can detect human stupidity. It has a very simple interface. All I do is point it at people.
Dilbert: Then what does it do?
Dogbert: Why would it need to do anything else?”

6. “‘What am I going to die of?’ said Rincewind.
The tall figure hesitated.
PARDON? it said.
‘Well, I haven’t broken anything, and I haven’t drowned, so what am I about to die of? You can’t just be killed by Death; there has to be a reason,’ said Rincewind. [...]
Death appeared to reach a conclusion.
YOU COULD DIE OF TERROR, the hood intoned. The voice still had its graveyard ring, but there was a slight tremor of uncertainty.
‘Won’t work,’ said Rincewind smugly.
THERE DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A REASON, said Death, I CAN JUST KILL YOU.
‘Hey, you can’t do that! It’d be murder!’” (Terry Pratchett, The colour of Magic)

7) “Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.” (Francis Bacon)

8 ) “The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.” (-ll-. Youarenotsosmart’s latest post has a lot more on this subject)

Random remarks

1) A follow-up on the poll I set up a long time ago. 7 people had mentioned this blog at some point in interpersonal communication that did not take place online. As I mentioned on the twitter, I assume that I’ve lost quite a bit of readers along the way, so the total number of people who has mentioned this blog to others the good old ‘mouth-to-mouth’ (or is it ‘mouth to ear’?) way is likely higher (/significantly higher?) than 10. I did not see that one coming at all, I had this idea that (my kind of) blogging and (-ll-) blog-reading was quite a bit more ‘isolationist’, with much less overlap between blogs and Real Life. At most I’d have thought a couple of readers had mentioned the blog to a friend at some point and that’d be it.

Only one respondent had not mentioned any blog at all in an interpersonal communication setting that did not take place online. Far most readers, 10 out of 12, seem to talk regularly with other people about the stuff that they read on blogs. People who read blogs usually read quite a bit more than just one, that was no surprise to me; it’s very easy for me to see when a potential new long-term reader – or at least someone who thought something I wrote was interesting (?) – has stumbled upon my blog. It usually means that 10 or more of the links on the blog-roll get an extra click that day. The most common number of blogs the readers follow on a regular basis was 8-10.

2) Would I be blogging if I had a girlfriend and a few relatively close friends with whom I spent some time with on a regular basis? Another way to ask a similar question would be: Would I have had a girlfriend by now if I’d spent the time I’ve spent blogging (and doing blogging-related activities, like reading wikipedia or some random books) looking for a partner instead? Would that outcome have been preferable to me?

I’m not sure I like the answers to these questions.

3) Responsibility sucks, I hate that part about being an adult. There, now I’ve said it. At least I’m honest about it.

Income and happiness

“Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience — the frequency and intensity of experiences
of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ∼$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.”

Here’s the paper, called: ‘High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being’, by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton.

Income != Wealth. In general I’d argue that the income coefficient will underestimate the utility of money because of this in analyses like these, as the low income group both contains people who have significant assets and relatively low income (retirees) and people with similar incomes but no assets and/or significant debt; the latter group is more vulnerable than the former and estimating something like self-reported anxiety while completely disregarding savings in the money part of the equation is perhaps not exactly optimal (I’m almost certain it’s a data problem here, not an oversight by the authors, I’m just saying that it’s likely a problem).

You should read all of it, it’s not a long paper but it’s quite good. Here’s another sequence I found interesting:

“Although concavity is entailed by the psychophysics of quantitative dimensions, it often has been cited as evidence that people derive little or no psychological benefit from income beyond some threshold. Although this conclusion has been widely accepted in discussions of the relationship between life evaluation and gross domestic product (GDP) across nations (11–14), it is false, at least for this aspect of subjective well-being. In accordance with Weber’s Law, average national life evaluation is linear when appropriately plotted against log GDP (15); a doubling of income provides similar increments of life evaluation for countries rich and poor.” [my emphasis, US]

‘Jargon’

“Generally, the likelihood function is the joint density (or probability function for discrete variables), de…fined as a function of the unknown parameters…” (math stuff omitted)

[...]

“This estimator is rarely available, since the second derivatives of the log-likelihood function are often complicated nonlinear functions of the data whose exact expected values will be unknown. The estimator is
positive de…finite provided θ(0) is identi…ed, and therefore usually positive de…finite in fi…nite samples.”

I just got thinking. This makes perfect sense, I understand what’s being said. But how many assumptions about prior knowledge does it take to get a likelihood of 0,5 of someone understanding all of this? Regular reader ‘Plamus’ knows this stuff, I’m sure about that, but is he even in the majority or not of my readers? How many such sentences would I meet if I started reading a book on histology? (I know the answer to that and my respect for doctors went up after that.)

It’s not the marginal piece of information that’s a problem. It’s all the stuff you need to know and remember in order to understand the marginal piece of information.

The Devil’s Dictionary II

Second – and likely last installment – in the series, here’s the first. If you decide not to read the book, it’s not my fault. (‘Info’ can skip this post as well if he likes… – and so can everybody else; but remember that there’s no need to skip it just because you’re uncertain if you’ll like the post. On my blog, I have recently implemented this really fair and good policy that you get all the money back if you’re unsatisfied with what you’ve read. I have to agree that the 50 percent off policy probably was a bit of a rip-off). Anyway, selected quotes (d-e):

1) “DAWN, n. The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.”

2) “DECIDE, v.i. To succumb to the preponderance of one set of influences over another set.” …

3) “DEFAME, v.t. To lie about another. To tell the truth about another.”

4) “DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters.” …

5) “DESTINY, n. A tyrant’s authority for crime and fool’s excuse for failure.”

6) “DIAGNOSIS, n. A physician’s forecast of the disease by the patient’s pulse and purse.”

7) “DISCUSSION, n. A method of confirming others in their errors.”

8 ) “EAT, v.i. To perform successively (and successfully) the functions of mastication, humectation, and deglutition.

“I was in the drawing-room, enjoying my dinner,” said Brillat-Savarin, beginning an anecdote. “What!” interrupted Rochebriant; “eating dinner in a drawing-room?” “I must beg you to observe, monsieur,” explained the great gastronome, “that I did not say I was eating my dinner, but enjoying it. I had dined an hour before.” (sometimes the entries/’explanations’ are written in a deliberately abstruse style, but in my opinion this but adds to the reading experience)

9) “ECCENTRICITY, n. A method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to accentuate their incapacity.”

10) “ECONOMY, n. Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford.”

11) “EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.”

12) “EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.” …

13) “ELOQUENCE, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.”

14) “EMOTION, n. A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the heart to the head. It is sometimes accompanied by a copious discharge of hydrated chloride of sodium from the eyes.”

15) “ENCOMIAST, n. A special (but not particular) kind of liar.”

16) “EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom. Following are some of the more notable epigrams of the learned and ingenious Dr. Jamrach Holobom:

We know better the needs of ourselves than of others. To
serve oneself is economy of administration.

In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a
nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal
activity.

There are three sexes; males, females and girls.

Beauty in women and distinction in men are alike in this:
they seem to be the unthinking a kind of credibility.

Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be
ashamed of.

While your friend holds you affectionately by both your hands
you are safe, for you can watch both his.”

17) “ESOTERIC, adj. Very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds, — exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found greatest acceptance in our time.”

18) “ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.”

19) “EXCEPTION, n. A thing which takes the liberty to differ from other things of its class, as an honest man, a truthful woman, etc. “The exception proves the rule” is an expression constantly upon the lips of the ignorant, who parrot it from one another with never a thought of its absurdity. In the Latin, “_Exceptio probat regulam_” means that the exception _tests_ the rule, puts it to the proof, not _confirms_ it. The malefactor who drew the meaning from this excellent dictum and substituted a contrary one of his own exerted an evil power which appears to be immortal.”

20) “EXPOSTULATION, n. One of the many methods by which fools prefer to lose their friends.”

The Devil’s Dictionary

I’ve quoted from it before, but although I recommended the book at that point, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve felt that I really should quote a lot more of that stuff. I’ll take this post and at least one more, then I’ll reevaluate. I’ll start with A-C:

1) “ACHIEVEMENT, n. The death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.”

2) “ACQUAINTANCE, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.”

3) “ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.”

4) “ALONE, adj. In bad company.”

5) “BAROMETER, n. An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.”

6) “BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters.” …

7) “BORE, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.”

8 ) “BOUNDARY, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.”

9) “BRIDE, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.”

10) “CERBERUS, n. The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance — against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance. Cerberus is known to have had three heads, and some of the poets have credited him with as many as a hundred. Professor Graybill, whose clerky erudition and profound knowledge of Greek give his opinion great weight, has averaged all the estimates, and makes the number twenty-seven — a judgment that would be entirely conclusive if Professor Graybill had known (a) something about dogs, and (b) something about arithmetic.”

11) “CIRCUS, n. A place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.” [this 'angle' is quite similar to that of Richard Adams' books, which I love (at least the ones I've read)].

12) “CLAIRVOYANT, n. A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron, namely, that he is a blockhead.”

13) “COMFORT, n. A state of mind produced by contemplation of a neighbor’s uneasiness.”

14) “COMPROMISE, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.”

15) “CONFIDANT, CONFIDANTE, n. One entrusted by A with the secrets of B, confided by him to C.”

16) “CONVERSATION, n. A fair to the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor.”

17) “CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.”

18) “CRITIC, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.”

19) “CUI BONO? [Latin] What good would that do me?”

A lot of this is just pure gold, I love that book! Read it!

Bent Larsen has died!

I just learned this, horrible news!

Here’s a chessbase article in English about the greatest Danish chess player that has ever lived. Here’s an article by Thomas Hauge Vestergård of the Danish Chess Federation, in Danish. Here’s google. Here’s his wikipedia article. One excerpt from that article: “Larsen defeated the seven World Champions who held the title from 1948 to 1985. He won games against Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, Mikhail Tal, Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, Bobby Fischer, and Anatoly Karpov” – he’s the best we’ve had, he’s likely the best we’ll ever get.

It’s not been a month since I read his latest article in Skakbladet. Now he’s gone. We all knew he wasn’t in all that good health, sure, but this kind of stuff still almost always comes as a surprise. This book will be on my wish list for Christmas this year.

Social norms

SMBC. In a lot of cases, I believe that person A is much more likely to ‘accept’ that person B has different preferences if person B tries to hide the preference difference behind an ability difference. Preference compatibility is often an important component of lasting non-family-related social ties, so the ‘accept’ in question is by no means irrelevant. I believe preference compatibility is more important than ability homogeneity in most social contexts, which probably is part of the explanation for this phenomenon.

Another funny thing is that it’s also often considered more polite to state that you ‘don’t have time’ to do X than it is to state that you don’t want to do X, even if the outcome is very often identical, as the ‘don’t have time’-state is most of the cases where the excuse is employed a permanent state, rather than a transitory one.

Wikipedia articles of interest

1. Somalia. An excerpt:

“In the 16th century, Duarte Barbosa noted that many ships from the Kingdom of Cambaya in modern-day India sailed to Mogadishu with cloth and spices, for which they in return received gold, wax and ivory. Barbosa also highlighted the abundance of meat, wheat, barley, horses, and fruit on the coastal markets, which generated enormous wealth for the merchants.[36] Mogadishu, the center of a thriving textile industry known as toob benadir (specialized for the markets in Egypt, among other places[37]), together with Merca and Barawa, also served as a transit stop for Swahili merchants from Mombasa and Malindi and for the gold trade from Kilwa.[38] Jewish merchants from the Hormuz brought their Indian textile and fruit to the Somali coast in exchange for grain and wood.[39]

Trading relations were established with Malacca in the 15th century,[40] with cloth, ambergris and porcelain being the main commodities of the trade.[41] Giraffes, zebras and incense were exported to the Ming Empire of China, which established Somali merchants as leaders in the commerce between the Asia and Africa[42] and influenced the Chinese language with the Somali language in the process. Hindu merchants from Surat and Southeast African merchants from Pate, seeking to bypass both the Portuguese blockade and Omani meddling, used the Somali ports of Merca and Barawa (which were out of the two powers’ jurisdiction) to conduct their trade in safety and without interference.”

Here’s some more recent stuff:

a) “According to a 2005 World Health Organization estimate, about 97.9% of Somalia’s women and girls have undergone female circumcision” [I much prefer the term 'female genital mutilation', US]
b) “The Central Bank of Somalia indicates that the country’s GDP per capita is $333″ … “About 43% of the population live on less than 1 US dollar a day”
c) “Owing to a lack of confidence in the local currency, the US dollar is widely accepted as a medium of exchange alongside the Somali shilling”
d) “The country’s population is expanding at a growth rate of 2.809% per annum and a birth rate of 43.33 births/1,000 people.[2] Most local residents are young, with a median age of 17.6 years; about 45% of the population is between the ages of 0–14 years, 52.5% is between the ages of 15–64 years, and only 2.5% is 65 years of age or older.”

Not once do the words “basket case” appear in the article.

2) Lagrange multipliers. All econ guys reading along already know this stuff, but to all you other guys: This is some of the stuff students of economics learn (early on, in the mandatory courses of the BA-part of the econ education). Stuff like this and this is also likely to come up at some point, though not everyone will have courses about these things. Some students here choose to work with something like this instead, it is a ‘School of Economics and Management’ after all. I often get confused as to how much stuff you guys know, I only just now figured out that William perhaps had no clue what I meant when I stated in a previous comment that “there’s likely a huge sigma playing in the background”. Economists and statisticians use a lower case sigma to denote the standard deviation of a statistical distribution. So: “there’s likely a huge sigma playing in the background” = ‘my weight likely varies a lot over time’.

3) History of the alphabet.

4) Age of Discovery. I have no clue why this is not a featured article.

5) Star. I’ve linked to the article about the Sun before, but the scope of this article is a little different, even if the Sun is naturally often mentioned in the article in a variety of contexts.

The average US female weighs more than I do

I had no idea it was that bad. Here’s the link.

“Measured average height, weight, and waist circumference for adults ages 20 years and over

* Men:
Height (inches): 69.4 (176,3 cm)
Weight (pounds): 194.7 (88,5 kg)
Waist circumference (inches): 39.7 (100,8 cm)

* Women:
Height (inches): 63.8 (162,1 cm)
Weight (pounds): 164.7 (74,9 kg)
Waist circumference (inches): 37.0 (94 cm)”

The numbers are from 2003-2006, and I’m pretty sure they haven’t gone down during the time that has passed. In case you were wondering, I’m at about 73-74 kg most of the time, so there’s not much of a difference. But still!

Danish females weighed an average of 68,0 kg in 2005, whereas the male average was 83,1 kg (the link has a lot more). The Danish females gained 5,8 kg’s on average from 1987 to 2005, and if that trend has continued since then, they are at 69,6 kg now – not that far behind.

Yes, I know there are significant regional differences in the US, for more on that aspect you can go here.