Thankfully this is not news of an airstrike (at least nowhere new, anyway). Instead, it goes to show that if you rename yourself Metta World Peace (formerly Ronald Artest), people like me will find it highly amusing when you are suspended 7 games for a violent elbowing foul in an NBA game.
That likely seems like an unusually large suspension, but I am sure that it takes into account Artest's previous behavior, which includes being suspended 86 games for entering the stands and physically attacking fans back in 2004.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Sunday, April 15, 2012
12-04-15 The Miami Marlins toy
The Brewers have now lost the title of strangest baseball-related
kitschy crowd-pleaser to the Florida Miami Marlins. The sausage race just does not match with
this.
As an extra bonus, before you rename your team be sure to
buy the website for it:
Edit: Posted today, the
15th. Who knew it would take more than a
week to actually be used?
Sunday, April 1, 2012
12-03-25 Roadblocks
Many
suspect that more roads are ‘under construction’ than is strictly necessary,
with the main beneficiary being the construction companies themselves, who lobby
to receive larger government contracts. This rent-seeking behavior is extremely annoying and woefully inefficient for society due to the enormous amounts of gas that is wasted. One suspects that at least some of this
effort is intended to make the roads safer, of course.
Not so much with these roadblocks:
Mullinville,
Kansas has its Elm Street closed to traffic by a private citizen. An M. T. Liggett, who owns property adjacent
to the road, claims that the city lost the rights to the road due to misfiling
some paperwork…back in 1949 (KWCH-12 News), even though the road has been
maintained by the city for the intervening 63 years. Mr. Liggett is demanding the issue be settled
in court, while the city would prefer to negotiate.
Two
days ago, in Hyattstown, Maryland, an armored truck apparently spilled ‘a snow
globe of cash’ onto I-270 (WTOP 103.5 FM). This accident resulted in chaos as the road
was impeded, because 30 vehicles stopped to help…loot the area. The police are asking for the money to be returned,
no questions asked. Good luck with
that. On the other hand, one expects the
discipline for the driver to be severe.
12-03-10 250 to one
It seems likely that regardless of the resolution of this
bitter primary fight, one loser will be the caucus system, simply because it is
not terribly fair. Consider these results
(calculated by CNN, delegate numbers do not match the total because some delegates
are not automatically assigned).
|
Wyoming Results
|
|||
|
Candidate
|
Votes
|
Delegates
|
Votes/Delegate
|
|
Romney
|
822
|
13
|
63.2
|
|
Santorum
|
673
|
7
|
96.1
|
|
Paul
|
439
|
4
|
110
|
|
Gingrich
|
165
|
1
|
165
|
|
Other
|
9
|
0
|
n/a
|
|
Total
|
2108
|
29
|
72.7
|
|
Ohio Results
|
|||
|
Candidate
|
Votes
|
Delegates
|
Votes/Delegate
|
|
Romney
|
456513
|
35
|
13043
|
|
Santorum
|
446225
|
19
|
23486
|
|
Gingrich
|
175554
|
0
|
n/a
|
|
Paul
|
111238
|
0
|
n/a
|
|
Total
|
1189530
|
66
|
18023
|
Thus, a vote cast in Wyoming is worth 250x as much as a vote
in Ohio. This is especially bad given
that Ohio is a swing state, and Wyoming is not.
Just for fun, consider that Guam had 215 votes cast (207 for Romney, 8
uncommitted and none for anyone else!) and assigns 9 delegates, for a ratio of
23.9 votes/delegate.
Thus, the Republican Party (who determines the delegate distribution)
appears to have decided that they care about each Guam voter (who cannot even
vote in the general election) as much as 750 Ohio voters.
12-03-03 Rush Limbaugh
Apparently,
even Rush Limbaugh’s sponsors have limits.
In a victory for human civility, Rush was driven to apologize for his
recent anti-contraceptive character attack on a Georgetown student. To be precise, he apologized for his ‘choice
of words’. Rather an understatement,
given that he called her a ‘slut’ on the national airwaves, repeatedly, and
demanded exotic video from her in exchange for government-funded
contraceptives.
12-02-24 HOW much?!?
Game
theory can easily explain many financial crimes, as it can be treated as an
investment with odds of a positive or negative payout. Due to the negative payout being rather
severe (jail time, for example), one easily-drawn conclusion is that if you
intend to make money through financial crime, it is probably advantageous to
commit one big crime that if successful will be enough for a lifetime, rather
than a bunch of minor crimes. This could
probably be labeled the Madoff Principle over its most famous proponent.
Like
any rule, you can take it to logical extremes.
For example, The police and governance of Southern Italy is usually
considered at best amongst the First World’s ‘least authoritarian’, and at
worst rather inactive in the face of organized crime. It turns out that there’s a level of fraud
that will draw the attention of the authorities even there.
For
example, if you try to conduct a fraud for $6,000,000,000,000 US dollars (Six
TRILLION) using fake Billion-dollar US bonds, it will not work. Someone is going to look into it, even if the
police responsible to investigate are from Potenza, a rural inland Southern
Italian town of about 70,000 people.
According to Reuters, last week eight criminals were arrested for this
crime. Apparently the “year-long
investigation...began as an investigation into mafia loan-sharking, but
gradually expanded.” Hopefully, not too
much of that year was required to determine that your average collection of
6000 billion dollar US bonds (about 1/3 of the value of all US bonds issued!)
is probably fake, although the U.S. Embassy to Italy mentioned in a press
release that “U.S. experts” were responsible for recognizing the fraudulent
bonds.
Also,
apparently in northern Italy a similar fraud was attempted and stopped in
2009. I had not heard of this incident,
probably because only the paltry sum of $742,000,000,000 US dollars ($742
billion) was involved that time.
12-02-15 When Madonna is not enough...
You
might consider this: Some people
somewhere feel strongly that Weird Al’s universal appeal makes him the ideal
candidate for performing at the Super Bowl halftime show.
http://www.change.org/petitions/the-national-football-league-nerds-everywhere-weird-al-yankovic-performs-the-super-bowl-xlvii-half-time-show
12-02-02 Seventy-Four Dead in Cai-ai-ro
Attention turns again to unrest in Egypt, as Al Masry
football fans stormed the field to celebrate a 3-1 home victory over Cairo’s Al
Ahly. The result is an upset of sorts,
as Al Ahly has been Africa’s most successful team. The deaths of 74 people resulted as the fans
chased the losing team’s players and fans out of the stadium with “knives,
clubs and stones” (NYTimes). Apparently
police had been instructed to not search the fans for weapons before the game, and
indeed not to interfere in the brawl.
Apparently the national security forces intended to use any trouble at
the game as an excuse to maintain martial law in light of the upcoming
scheduled transfer of power to the elected government.
Fans of Tonya Harding will note that Ittihad El-Shorta (Police
Union), the team owned and operated by the Egyptian National Police, is
currently tied with Al Masry in fourth place in the standings about halfway
through the season, and are thus in earnest competition with both teams for
African Champions League qualification.
Apparently video footage shows police officers notably not
helping deal with the crowd or even the injured. Against that villainy, it’s still worth
wondering why this sport continues to observe such violence. Notably, while 74 deaths at a soccer match
seems like a lot, it doesn’t even crack the top 5 most deadly soccer matches
(OddCulture.com). Interestingly, the top
5 all occurred on different continents, with only Oceania thus far spared a
catastrophic game. With this event, the
top 15 have all occurred in different stadiums now.
12-02-01 Republican Primary
As we look at the Republican primary, after Florida, state
number 4, Romney is now an 8:1 favorite over the field to be nominated,
according to those willing to put their money on the line for it. CNN and the other stations, however, are
going to keep inundating us with details, because there’s really no incentive
for them not to do so. After all, what
sort of meaningful content is cheaper than paying some guy to read statistics
off a computer screen? Not to mention
the money from the TV ads themselves.
One might think that the media has an incentive to keep the
appearance of a close race. Certainly
the losing candidates do, but possibly Romney does as well. His ratings decreased when he began to act as
the presumptive nominee. They improved
again, once people remembered that the alternative is Gingrich. I wonder how Romney would do against “A
randomly selected registered Republican eligible to be president” if such an
option were available on the ballot.
12-01-11 Penny...Penny...Penny
Random fact of the day:
Neither the penny nor the nickel is allowed to be exported out of the
United States. The penalty for such an
action is a fine of up to $10,000 dollars and/or 5 years jail time.
Due to either extensive investment or excessive speculation
in the commodities market (depending on your point of view and preference for buying
such luxuries as food and energy), the zinc market has inflated to the point
where the metal within the penny (mostly zinc) had exceeded the value of one
cent. The same policy prevents melting
down the coins in the US either (obviously, the US government can do nothing
about people melting down coins once they are exported).
Interestingly, this policy was implemented in April 2007,
prior to the economic crash. Even more
interestingly, the implementation of this policy correlates with a sudden,
rapid collapse of the zinc market that resulted in the metal losing one third
of its value by the end of 2007 (It continued downwards into 2008 and dropped
precipitously with the economic crash, and has recovered to its end-of-2007
value today).
The unanswerable question is, of course: How much was the world’s consumption of zinc
(an important resource for rust-proofing steel, by the way) modified by people
buying lots of pennies, shipping them abroad and melting them down for an
approximately 0.3 cent/penny margin?
12-01-07 15 Years for Excessive Celebration
Wow. This may be the
worst celebration of the biggest play of a player’s career ever, and it didn’t
happen in soccer. Almost certainly the
99-yard fumble recovery touchdown by the West Virginia safety Darwin Cook was
the biggest play of the guy’s career.
After he scored, he was so euphoric that he ran about 10 yards past the
camera people, the mandatory ‘event staff’ people etc. to pile-drive the Orange
Bowl mascot (yes, not the other team’s mascot, the bowl’s mascot) into the wall
supporting the stands (sportsgrid.com).
The mascot, a human-sized orange, apparently sufficiently
annoyed Cook with its existence that he “was looking for him” by his own
admission to reporters after the game.
This apparently occurred because Cook “did not think he believed in us
either”, according to his own statement after the game. His reaction to learning that the performer
in the mascot suit was a girl was pricelessly honest shocked shame. His gaping mouth is one of the first images
you find when searching his name.
It’s hard to resist pointing out that if future girlfriends see
this act as the defining moment of his football career, he might end up
eligible for (sunglasses) a Darwin Award.
12-01-01 Some Facts
Finding a suitable first blog piece is difficult. Thus, we will start with the state of the
world at the start of 2012.
2012 expected GDP by nation (in T$) (from IMF WEO):
USA
|
15.5
|
China
|
7.7
|
Japan
|
6.1
|
Germany
|
3.7
|
France
|
2.9
|
Brazil
|
2.6
|
UK
|
2.6
|
Italy
|
2.3
|
Russia
|
2.3
|
India
|
2.2
|
Canada
|
1.9
|
Balance
|
23.9
|
Extra Bonus:
US Population (US
Census), ages 20-29:
Male: 21.65 Million
Female: 21.04
Million
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