Pappus' plane

Probably not a feature I will use

2009-12-29T03:52:18Z

Cool Features on LiveJournal

Make a book
Turn your journal into a bookstore-quality book, created by you.

Definitely something that magictim should consider, though.

Fact

2009-12-26T12:42:15Z

South Africans sound funny when they say 'ice cream'.

This post is brought to you by Kepler Wessels and my general lack of stuff to write about.

Actually, in the time since I wrote that last sentence, I thought I could make a scatterplot.

This is the reciprocal of infant mortality rate against income per capita. Data is from Wikipedia tables or (for the US infant mortality rate data) a now-dead 2005 US Census link.

From the trendlines (and taking the reciprocal again to get the usual infant mortality rate back), we get the following.

$35000: US 8.6, comparable countries (comparable by income at least...) 4.7
$70000: US 5.5, comparable countries 4.1

The US outcomes are always worse than they 'should' be, and they are very heavily dependent on income. (Edit: I don't think the comparison of income-dependence is fair. The data for the other countries is averaged across the whole country. There could be large income-health trends in each of the countries that isn't shown when you aggregate the data like this.)

I have read that comparing infant mortality is not fair on the US because of differences in abortion rates of disabled foetuses and the like, but I did it because it was relatively easy and the results are interesting to me.

In which I delve into the world of diplomatic climate politics

2009-12-24T05:46:52Z

Everyone's been reading this article on how China derailed the Copenhagen talks.

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed...

Haha. A 2020 Peking year in global emissions.

Another implication of this December

2009-12-23T09:04:33Z

I don't know if any of you have noticed^*, but the decade is about to end. I have never been aware of the end of a decade - by the end of the 1980's I hadn't yet started regularly storing memories that I can retrieve today, and the end of the 1990's had, on reflection, more of an emphasis on the first digit of the year changing, rather than the third.

^*This isn't actually true.

So this transition from the aughts to the teens is my first real decade change. I expect it to be insignificant, although I do worry that the changing third digit will wreak occasional havoc on my date-writing - I remember once in the early part of the 2000's, I flipped momentarily and wrote the year as 1998. So I see a real risk of writing '2004' on forms next year.

I expected this entry to be far more scintillating than it has turned out to be.

This is what hyperinflation looks like.

2009-12-21T02:44:13Z

My weekly Translink ticket is going up in price by 39.5% in two weeks. That's an annual rate of about 510 000%.

I had been wondering how long it would take for Translink to start sending real price signals to us paper ticket users. Up until now they've been marketing the go cards as offering a substantial discount on an equivalent single fare, but for a 6- or 7-days-a-week Translink user like me, the paper weekly tickets were still easily cheaper. (The prices were equal for someone doing five return trips a week.)

Somewhat remarkably, I use buses and trains almost enough to make the paper tickets the cheaper option even under the new fare regime. With no changes to my behaviour, I would spend somewhere between $38.97 and $43.83 on go card fares in a typical week, compared to a paper weekly ticket price of $42.40. Of course I probably will change my bus patterns when the new prices come in - I'll plan my journeys so that I take a 196 inbound and 109 outbound for short trips to the city, etc. So even for me, the go card will be probably be cheaper.

Then we're looking at 15% price increases each year until 2014.

Impossible!

2009-12-21T01:43:16Z

I can't be bothered writing anything substantial. This is an Amazon review of Islam and the Jews: The Unfinished Battle, written by a former Muslim scholar of some sort who became a Christian. The distribution of Amazon-review stars is of course a pair of delta spikes, to a good approximation.

Its mentally, socially, physically, irrationally and illogically impossible for one to convert from being a devout Imam in Islam to becomeing a "Christian." This conversion had to be for some financial reason or something.

Mr Speaker

2009-12-19T11:07:52Z

NZ Hansard:

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) to the Minister of Energy and Resources: Has he received my invitation dated 14 December to accompany me, after Parliament rises, on the Gillespie Pass tramping circuit in the north-eastern parts of the Mount Aspiring National Park, so that he can inspect firsthand areas in the conservation estate included in his stocktake of mineral resources, and will he accept it?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister of Energy and Resources) : I have received that invitation, and I say to the member that I think the itinerary that he has put together, for he and I to traipse through the backblocks of New Zealand, is truly splendid. So, on the one hand, I am deeply touched that the member wants to spend so much quality time in the high country alone with me, but on the other hand, I notice that all I am required to do is bring a pair of boots. I have seen that film Brokeback Mountain,so I am afraid that I will remain unavailable.

Hon David Parker: Will the Minister reconsider if I offer to carry his pack?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Given the circumstances, not even if hell freezes over.

Video with more here. (Via Tim Blair.)

Credit card psychology

2009-12-18T02:46:09Z

I recently had my credit limit increased from $2100 to $4000. As a result, I'm told when I sign in to the online banking that I have over $4000 available on my card. My reaction is that I can now spend HEAPS with it (about $1900; I seem to have internalised $2100 as being zero), and it takes a non-trivial amount of time (a couple of seconds or so) to remember that I would actually have to pay for it.

I can understand compulsive credit card users now.

Stoning

2009-12-17T01:10:08Z

It is gruesome. Link for those in the mood for photographs of it, from the Daily Mail. They have pixellated the worst of it.

Then, because it's the Daily Mail, you get comments like this one:

I thought it was England. The only thing that told me otherwise was the barren vegetation and the Archbishop of Canterbury's absence approving Sharia Law

This is pretty important.

2009-12-15T06:38:33Z

The Oz:

The Prime Minister's office declined to comment on whether he had accepted Holy Communion. However, those present at the service confirmed to The Australian Online that he had.

Facebook

2009-12-14T02:10:02Z

I like to think that I'm reasonably in tune with the latest popular outrage against Facebook, whether or not I agree with the outraged. But now I'm not sure, because I'm not sensing general bewilderment at the latest privacy settings changes.

People who pay attention to these things are of course up in arms, but I'm not seeing droves of my friends joining protest groups. I'm therefore wondering if not that many people care anymore, but perhaps more likely is the explanation that most people didn't actually pay much attention to the required privacy settings check last week and just went with the defaults.

The problem is that the defaults were a huge reduction in privacy, setting a large chunk of information completely public. Since I'm suddenly able to see some wall-to-walls involving people I'm not friends with, I'm guessing that at least a sizeable minority of people accepted the defaults to get rid of the annoying intrusion on their Facebook life that was the reading of the new settings.

I have also seen this sort of thing since the changes:

Friend X wrote on Random Y's wall.

That would usually only be visible if the post was visible to me, which in the vast majority of cases it shouldn't be. Now, sometimes it still isn't visible, since Random Y hides their wall from most users, but the link still appears, and I know that Friend X was writing on Random Y's wall.

There's other stuff about applications and friends lists. I find the wall stuff really weird though.

Hey, it's December!

2009-12-12T05:08:55Z

Some of you need to listen to this.

Eckart-McHale

2009-12-11T05:11:44Z

I was wondering about doubling times recently, and scribbled out a quick calculation with logs to discover what is actually a well-known approximation, the rule of 70. Divide 70 by the interest/growth/whatever rate, and you have the doubling time. This sort of thing might come in useful if you don't have a calculator on hand, and want a quick mental estimate.

What on earth is the purpose of the Eckart-McHale rule, described on that Wikipedia page? It takes the rule of 69.3 and multiplies that result by 200/(200 - r). Are there people out there who

a) calculate doubling times,
b) while not on a computer, and
c) only have a standard calculator?

There's something in this for all of us.

2009-12-10T02:43:10Z

Brisbane Times:

He found himself leaning forward, with one hand across his face.

Deep in thought.

"I am a spirit igniter, not a foofer," Ms Gore said.

Hardly the message sold by the awkward, tangled Coalition in the past month.

"I am a spirit igniter, not a foofer," Mr Abbott and 110 others then repeated.

Ms Gore realised she had her crowd.

"So, very important. So no more foofing. Christmas is a very foofy time."

Indeed.

82

2009-12-09T23:49:50Z

Last night was the last trivia of the year, so all you LJ trivia addicts will just have to read some Trivial Pursuit cards for the next few Thursdays.

Round one. How many Summer Olympics have been hosted by Spain? In which month did Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett die? What word means both a strong Irish accent and a type of shoe? True or false: ponies become horses at the age of 2. Who wears a wimple? How long is there between rounds in a professional boxing bout? 14.

We did all right in the music round, knowing all the 70's songs and 90's artists, just losing three points on the films. 13. Tiebreak question: The West Indies played their first cricket Test in which year? I knew that one.

Round three. Which cotton fabric gets its name from the French town of Nîmes? Which train station is between Grovely and Ferny Grove? What is 54 in roman numerals? True or false: Liv Tyler's birth name was Olivia. What was the highest-rating TV show in Australia this year? True or false: Nelson Mandela is an honorary member of the Harlem Globetrotters. Tiebreak question: In which year did Tamworth host its first annual country music festival? I got that one too. It's a pity we missed out on both of those tiebreaks. 13.

Round four, being the last round four of the year, was on Christmas. Alphabetically, which is the first of Santa's reindeer? The tradition of Christmas trees started in which country? Christmas Island is in which ocean? Which Christmas decoration is a parasite of apples? Hint: it's not a bauble. 15.

Bonuses. In Australia, how many millilitres are there in a tablespoon? Beginning with M, what word means an example of misheard song lyrics? Beginning with P, what word means the periodic forcing motion used to gain momentum on a skateboard (or something)? We missed that last one.

Ninth on the night, eighth I think for the season, about 3 points per night out of the grand final playoff for the $1000. Which is a pity, because we knew all the answers and would have won the money if we'd made it.

The End of Poverty

2009-12-09T02:14:32Z

So a couple of weeks ago I finished Sachs's book. I of course read it with my Easterly goggles on, since I read Easterly's book first. For that reason, my perspective was basically: we know that a lot of aid has been wasted in the past, so how does Jeffrey Sachs think we can do better?

Obviously he didn't write his book like that, since Easterly's was basically a reply to Sachs and not the other way around. But there are enough arguments made so that you can imagine what some of a detailed Sachs response would look like. (Actually, we can get a short version - this is Sachs's review of The White Man's Burden.)

Easterly's anti-planning mentality has a couple of layers. One (the main one, which is what I got the strongest impression of) is that it just isn't going to work unless you have some sort of accountability and monitoring of results. But a large part of that argument is built on the idea that so much planning is inept - he talks about aid officials being shifted around from country to country, gaining no deep understanding of any country that they're supposedly helping. He might also have complained about one-size-fits-all budgetary conditions during the structural adjustment era, though I can't remember and I can't be bothered checking the book again.

Anyway, Easterly's reaction to these problems is that planning fails. Sachs's is to say that we need massively, stupendously detailed plans. There is a really really long checklist with headings and sub-headings that the development economists in a country should work through before coming up with an appropriate plan. One of Sachs's points is that there needs to be aid used to help boost lots of different areas simultaneously, sustained for at least ten years. The idea being that you need to help the farmers grow food more efficiently, then make sure that the roads are good enough that they can sell them in the nearest major regional market, while also building lots of schools and training teachers so that the next generation of children get educated, and you also need to have a network of basically-trained doctors to cover all the villages, etc. This would presumably be Sachs's other response to why so much aid has done so little good - he thinks that there hasn't been anywhere near enough of it.

Sachs's basic idea is that a poverty trap exists, and that countries need to be given aid to get themselves onto the development ladder, from where they will power themselves ahead now that most people in the country can save and invest. This is of course a questionable hypothesis, relying on the last 30 years of data rather than (say) the last 100. But let us grant it for the sake of argument. Sachs talks about the big GDP per capita growth in Asian countries over the last few decades, arguing that much of it began with foreign aid in the form of the Green Revolution. Once there was enough food production for the country to be fed and farmers to make profits, the extra money fed into the rest of the country and off they zoomed towards being the economic powerhouses they are today.

It sounds plausible enough to me, but the example of the fantastic aid- and trade-based development of Asian countries leads to two consequences, working in opposite directions. The first is that if the greatest developmental aid success stories involved only a relatively small amount of well-targeted aid (high-yielding variety seeds), then why do we need such immensely broad plans for the countries still stuck in poverty? The second is that maybe even if we don't sustain all of Sachs's massive plans for the coming decade or two, it might still do some good.

An answer to the first question might be geography. Almost all countries in South and East Asia have some coastline, which makes international trading a lot easier. Africa has a heap of landlocked countries which rely on poorly maintained roads to transport goods in and out. So they would need more help. But that really only looks to me like a justification of some partial implementation of a Sachs plan, rather than all of it. Surely the intrinsic differences between Asian countries and African countries are not that huge.

I guess I am not completely opposed to the idea that the Sachs plan would work in some meaningful way if implemented, but the administrative web overseeing it would be ridiculously massive, and it is hard to imagine something that starts with Ban Ki-Moon, and ends with lots of African villages, actually coming together and working properly. I suppose what I'd like to see is a trial run on Ghana or something, but there are probably some ethical issues with pouring huge amounts of aid into one country while ignoring a bunch of others.

Perhaps my most generous reading of it is that if Sachs himself were heavily involved in the aid programme to a given country, and all the relevant powerful people did what he told them to, then it might work. That is the impression I get from the first few chapters, which are sort of like a "Jeffrey Sachs as Superman", jetting from country to country to fix broken economies. When the local political leaders all agree with Sachs's diagnosis and prescription, things work well, as in Poland post-Cold-War. When they don't, they turn into the Russian disaster. He didn't talk about it, but perhaps we could add that when the plans are made by inferior copycats (as in all those non-Polish post-Cold-War economies), things don't go so well. Or maybe Poland was just lucky. I don't know.

Keyboard

2009-12-07T03:27:51Z

It being that time of the Olympiad, I resolved to once again improve my mediocre piano keyboard skills^*, which currently are at a stage not far advanced on where they were in 1993. I bought myself a new keyboard on the weekend. Unlike my old one, the piano sound doesn't become a bass guitar below middle C, and in fact sounds something like a piano. I went far more expensive than I could have done, paying $500 so that I got all the nice sounds. That's roughly the cost per statistical life saved by these guys, so I will endeavour to fall for the sunk cost fallacy and make sure I practise a lot.

^*This idea of a four-year cycle can't be too far off accurate. My peaks were in 1993, 1996, 2000 +/- 1, 2004, and now hopefully 2009-10.

I got given a handy couple of sheet music booklets with the keyboard, ranging from easy to moderately difficult (I don't really know music grades, but the hardest of them would be a long way below Grade 8 or whatever). I sound occasionally fluent on the easiest of them, though I was noticeably better on the second day. My reading off a bass clef is still slow. I was, however, able to recognise the few opening notes of 'La valse d'Amélie' that I managed to play.

When I was playing the guitar I developed a sort of rudimentary intuition for chords and chord progressions; I am completely unable to transfer this to the keyboard. I can play the first chord of a song I've played on the guitar, and then all my brain does is tell me which frets my fingers should next go to.

Microcredit

2009-12-05T10:52:11Z

So there I was, idly thinking about writing something about microfinance and wondering if Muhammad Yunus really deserved that Nobel Prize, when Tim Harford comes along and beats me to it. Well I could hardly pretend to be original now, what with all the avid Harford readers amongst you.

But I do have something to add to the results of the studies that Harford talks about. I read this article recently, which suggests that there is a microcredit bubble in India. If it is a bubble, what would happen if it bursts? And so on.

Well anyway, a bit after I read that I came across this article, entitled 'What can we learn from mass defaults?', mentioning a town in Karnataka in its intro.

And what can we learn from these mass defaults?

...15,000 MFI clients defaulted on their loans. Local Muslim organizations through their clerics had summoned all Muslim borrowers to stop repaying until further notice, claiming that paying interest contradicted the Koran.

Presumably there are already Islamic MFI's, which charge zero interest and a flat fee roughly equal to what a four-month repayment at 30% p.a. would entail....

81

2009-12-02T23:44:22Z

It was a busy night, and we reflected the extra busy-ness from last week by doubling our team size.

Round one. Which country does the clothing and fashion company Joop come from? Which chocolate bar, which has been on the Australian market for 62 years, is about to stop being made? Which indoor pastime ends with 'casting off'? Which group recently released a cover of 'Bohemian Rhapsody', gaining millions of YouTube views in a week? What is the modern name for German Measles? 14.

In the music round, we didn't know who sang 'He's Gonna Step on You Again', and a few other things. 12.

Round three. William Shakespeare lived during the reigns of which two English monarchs? Which model Ferrari has a name meaning 'redhead'? What is Carrie Bradshaw's favourite brand of shoe? Which common material is made from sand, limestone, and sodium carbonate? All Queensland cab number plates start with which letter? We scored a perfect 16, the only team to do so. $20!

Round four was on an amusing topic - the names of the trivia teams. For example, there's a team called 'G-O-G-G-O', and there was a question: Goggomobils were made in Germany, but where were the Goggo Darts made? 'No, not the Dart, not the Dart...' What is a sheepshank? 'Gaussian Eliminator' is a term used in which field of learning? Anyway, we scored 13.

Bonuses. Who made the Baby Doll perfume? What is the capital of Tunisia? High School Musical was set in which US city? We missed two of those, and so ended up down in 11th place. One extra bonus would have given us third, and with both we would have won.

In which Translink takes $2.90 and several minutes off me

2009-12-02T00:34:13Z

I buy a weekly ticket from the train station every Monday. It is a good system - I can then travel on any Translink service between zones 1 and 4 for the rest of the week. This means I never have to worry about buying bus tickets.

Yesterday, I got on the bus to go to QPAC, showed my ticket to the driver, who waved me on. Then he called me back, and said that it was now December, whereas my ticket expired on November 30. Completely befusled^*, I paid $2.90 for a single ticket, and then studied my weekly ticket. It was as the bus driver had said, which meant that either I'd bought the ticket last Tuesday, or the QR official at Park Road station had dudded me. It was the latter.

^*I try hard to coin new variants of words that should already have been thought of. This is another failure - 'befusled' gets four Google hits, including one from a book published in 1826.

This story has a happy ending, insofar as that is possible. I showed the weekly ticket that had lasted a day to the ticket person in the station today, they checked the log of tickets sold, and confirmed that my ticket was indeed bought on Monday at 8:23am, and issued me a replacement for the rest of the week. It's actually a 'replacement monthly', a type of ticket I'd never seen before. This novelty is worth at least a couple of cents to me, so the pure financial loss is not quite as great as the $2.90 I indicate in the title. I did have to stand around for about 7 minutes waiting for the replacement ticket though.

Perhaps we should all revisit this essay.

Incomplete list of things that are good

2009-12-02T00:07:18Z

- Tim Minchin

I went to the first of his two Brisbane concerts last night. After some careful tallying, I worked out that it was the second proper concert I'd ever been to. It was very funny, especially the first half, and my only regret was that I'd heard the opening song before. I laughed a lot when I heard it on the YouTube video, but already knowing the main punchline spoiled it for me a little bit. I imagine that there will come a point where I am familiar enough with the song that the comfortable anticipation of the punchline makes it funny again, but I am not there yet.

The conclusion that I draw from this is a recommendation to people who haven't heard Tim Minchin to not listen to any of his songs before you go to one of his shows. I'm not sure that Minchin would appreciate that advice, though.

Pianos are good.

Global mean temperature fluctuations

2009-12-01T03:15:19Z

Ignore trends for the moment. Why does the average temperature fluctuate from year to year? Is it an artefact of the temperature sampling? Does the total heat content of the earth actually go up and down like that? Is it something like a random walk or does something force it back towards an equilibrium?

Notes on ice skating

2009-11-30T09:53:45Z

I went ice skating for the first time on Saturday. I was understandably terrified beforehand that I would end up in hospital, but my biggest problems two days on are some sore muscles, a blister on my right big toe, and a minor bruise.

I had two main concerns about the technique of ice skating. The first is that I'd never even skated on inlines before, having stuck with the traditional skates even through the 1990's inline revolution.

As you can see, the young me was carefree and didn't even bother with wrist guards.

The second was that I didn't know how to stop. I never even practised stopping on roller skates, always relying and the "crash into the wall" method rather than a T-stop. As it turns out, this was not a major problem - no-one knows how to stop on ice skates.^*

^*The only exceptions were two ice hockey players, the supervisors, and someone wearing a 'synchronised skating' jacket. All the other dozens of people there just skated towards a wall and grabbed it.

When I got on the ice, I found it surprisingly easy to stay upright and to move forward at something around walking pace. I was told that I needed to have my skates more parallel rather than angled outwards, and eventually I managed to get the muscle memory working so that I could move on the straight fairly quickly. I was pretty horribly inefficient, especially early on - I thought I was going to cramp up, so heavily I was working my lower leg muscles.

Unfortunately, my turns were not quite so fluid, and later on, once I was building up speed and the ice was quite melted, I fell over twice in 5-10 minutes. The wrist guards I'd bought were handy.

I had one other slow fall, and about a dozen near-falls.

Bolta doesn't let us comment anymore.

2009-11-29T00:52:40Z

So you, dear readers, get a version of what I would have said in response to this entry of his.

Frank J. Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, on the true significance of Climategate:

Tipler is quoted:

It is an act of treason against science.

And he says other stuff. Anyway, this might be vaguely interesting if Frank Tipler was some kind of authority on science. But he is not, as some of you may be thinking, the Tipler who wrote the textbook that is standard for first-year physics at UQ. That would be Paul Tipler. Frank Tipler is also moderately famous for his books, most notably The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. He followed that up a decade later with a book applying his theory to Christian theology.

Other Bolta blogging: Apparently Samson & Delilah made a profit. I can only guess that this is because they didn't have a scriptwriter.

Spell-checker, editor, or both?

2009-11-28T00:51:57Z

SMH story about legal music download companies:

None of these sites was started by the music industry, which has diverted energies, until recently, into propping up the ancient regimen instead of preparing for the digital revolution.

The word 'regime' wouldn't get automatically corrected, since it's in the dictionary.