Quote of the day

"I'm a miracle of thermodynamics! I'm both extremely hot and extremely cool at the same time!"
- Overheard in New York

Health R&D

Interesting graph suggesting our non-military government research spending is VERY heavy on health compared to that of other countries.

Quote of the day

"When we show a friend a city one has already visited, we feel the same pride as when we point out a woman whose lover we have been."
- Alexandre Dumas, pere (from "The Count of Monte Cristo")

"...he couldn't stop thinking about one day resuming his daily regimen of sexual intercourse with random women who look vaguely like his wife, only skankier."
---

The Onion

Quote of the day

"Mammograms are very uncomfortable, and of course, you don't want to shoot any more radiation into yourself than necessary, so women should have been excited by the news that you probably don't need one until you're fifty. Instead they were outraged. Since this was about spending other peoples' money, naturally we want the right to spend as much of it as possible, even if it's not very useful."
- Megan McArdle

Hagging in the Marriage Market

This post modeling how a small change in sex ratios (20:20 -> 19:20) can have large effects on what people might do to hook up is interesting, even though I'm pretty sure lifetime companion decisions aren't actually made that way.

Although I'm not sure the way we do it actually gives better results.

Webinar on Twitter on Vokle

...was given by Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist.

From my point of view it was a bit chaotic, but then I pretty much
only use Twitter to update my Facebook status - so maybe a good bit
was over my head.

I got a clue about "@", which I'd seen before but didn't understand.

Also a pointer to a couple of services, such as Buzzom, not that I'm
likely to use it.

Best advice: don't be boring. But I already knew that.

The deadliest mittens.....

A couple of years ago, somebody I didn't know walked up to me in a bar and asked "What can you tell me about the Soviet-Finnish war?"

An unusual greeting, and all I could think of on the spur of the moment was "I believe that is when the Finns invented the biathlon, except that they used Russians as the targets."

He grinned and explained that a girl he knew had said he could ask me a question on any topic he could think of and I'd come up with an answer (not true - he just got lucky).

Recently I saw an article explaining the success of one of these early biathlon practitioners, Simo Häyhä, who reportedly took down about 800 Soviets. I'm sure there was more to his success than just his mittens, but it is interesting to think they were a contributing factor.

An excerpt of an excerpt:

One of the reasons Häyhä was so successful, believe it or not, was because of his mitten ensemble. They consisted of three layers: the bottom layer was an incredibly finely knitted tight-fitting glove made of handspun yarn, finer than commercial woolen knits could be found at that time. The second layer was a fingerless mitt that stopped short of the base of his fingers, while covering his wrist and the first joint of his thumb. The outer layer was made of heavy, thick wool, in a technique unique to scandinavia called nålbinding, which was looped rather than knitted. This nålbinded mitten, in addition to being virtually impervious to cold, also had a split in it for his trigger finger, so he could fire his rifle without taking them off.

The underglove was fine enough that he could reload his rifle without taking THAT off, drastically reducing the amount of time that his hands had to be exposed to the cold. And if he did have to do maintenance on his rifle that required the underglove to come off, he could put the wrist-covering mitt back on; because that covered the pulse point in his wrist, it kept his blood warmer longer and kept feeling in his fingers.

I could use something like that in Rochester even when I'm not in a mood to kill people!

Quote of the day

“It’s hard to believe President Obama’s now been in office for a year. And you know, it’s incredible. He took something that was in terrible, terrible shape and he brought it back from the brink of disaster: The Republican Party."

Jay Leno, courtesy of the Volokh Conspiracy

Quote of the day - how to become a great poet

I wrote notes to women so as to have them. They began to show them around and soon people started calling it poetry. When it didn't work with women, I appealed to God.
- Leonard Cohen

Quote of the day

Natural selection, it seems, often smiles on strumpets.
Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Random Cultural Allusion of the Day

Actually, there IS a spoon.

Quote of the day

Lies were also categorised as to whether they were self-oriented or other-oriented with men telling more self-oriented lies than women. Overall, though, men and women told about the same number of lies, contrary to the popular conception that men are bigger liars than women.
- Feldman et al

All science aside, men are still more likely to lie about the size of their sexual organs.

Quote of the Day

But Lady Gaga is a more or less average-to-petite young woman, and she totally rocks the weird fashion. She makes me want to run around in a PVC bodysuit with a rooster hood, or no pants with giant hoof-heels, or whatever weird thing you can imagine. She is really inspiring.
- Prettier Than Napoleon

Chess versus poker

I stopped playing chess on a regular basis a long, long time ago.

When I DO play abstract strategy games, I usually play go.

Once upon a time, though, I was a serious player: a member of the United States Chess Federation (USCF), a player in tournaments, even a (losing) contender for the run-off to challenge for the championship of the US Virgin Islands.

Of the many world chess championships, many have been spectacular failures. There have been lunatics, apparatchiks, and monomaniacs (of course, being a monomaniac might be a prerequisite for being the world's best at almost ANYTHING). One that I've admired, though, has been Kasparov, who wrote this article about chess and computers:

erhaps chess is the wrong game for the times. Poker is now everywhere, as amateurs dream of winning millions and being on television for playing a card game whose complexities can be detailed on a single piece of paper. But while chess is a 100 percent information game—both players are aware of all the data all the time—and therefore directly susceptible to computing power, poker has hidden cards and variable stakes, creating critical roles for chance, bluffing, and risk management.

These might seem to be aspects of poker based entirely on human psychology and therefore invulnerable to computer incursion. A machine can trivially calculate the odds of every hand, but what to make of an opponent with poor odds making a large bet? And yet the computers are advancing here as well. Jonathan Schaeffer, the inventor of the checkers-solving program, has moved on to poker and his digital players are performing better and better against strong humans—with obvious implications for online gambling sites.

Perhaps the current trend of many chess professionals taking up the more lucrative pastime of poker is not a wholly negative one. It may not be too late for humans to relearn how to take risks in order to innovate and thereby maintain the advanced lifestyles we enjoy. And if it takes a poker-playing supercomputer to remind us that we can't enjoy the rewards without taking the risks, so be it.

HT, again, MR!

Most useless dating advice of the month

I rather enjoyed this article, but there was a glaring omission.

The article describes how men's dance moves were judged by women, and "women gave the highest attractiveness ratings to men with the highest levels of prenatal testosterone." So if you're a guy, and you want to glitter underneath that disco ball, just make sure you are exposed to plenty of testosterone while you are still in the womb.

In case you're wondering, yes, I had a high level of prenatal testosterone (PT). The way they determine this is to compare the length of your index finger to that of your ring finger. If your ring finger is longer, high level of PT. The bigger the disparity, the higher the PT.

Interestingly, and I have no idea what this means - if anything, the difference is greater on my right hand than my left: 1/2 a fingernail compared to 1/4 a fingernail.

Fun article, but couldn't they have given the poor male readers at least ONE dance move guaranteed to look good?

HT MR

Quote of the Day

And if you ever become devout pray for me if I am dead. I am asking several of my friends to do that. I had expected to become devout myself but it has not come.
- Hemingway, "A Farewell to Arms"

Quote of the day

"The way to interpret his intentions is not by his words but by his entrails."
- myself, in reference to a rather duplicitous player

Quote of the day

"As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy's father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door."

-- Fareed Zakaria, via MR

Haiti

A bit late on this - but if you're wondering where to donate, Professor Cowen has advice.