Today's employee viewing of moose display cancelled
Thursday, July 02, 2009
That's a headline on our corporate intranet this morning. Where do you work?
posted by henry |
7/02/2009 09:28:00 AM|
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Shit I Don't Get: BMI
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
This is part 1 in an infinite-part series called, "Shit I Don't Get." Today's subject: Body Mass Index.
I'm 5' 10". I weigh 177 pounds. My BMI is 25.4, which means I'm overweight.
Here's the problem:
6 months ago, I weighed 170 pounds, which made me 'normal'. Since then, I've been running more and lifting, so now I'm basically the same guy, but with bigger arms, chest, and legs, only now i'm 'overweight'. I'm an overweight guy with a 31 inch waist.
What the fuck? This is what you get when you try to use an index.
posted by henry |
7/01/2009 12:08:00 PM|
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Ichiro and Knowing What You Don't Know
Monday, June 29, 2009
Last week someone asked Ichiro if he was more locked in at the plate than ever before, and he said,
"It's impossible to prove that. Please analyze it among yourselves. I cannot."
If I were going to get a tattoo this afternoon, that's what it would say.
posted by henry |
6/29/2009 02:34:00 PM|
(0) comments
Why do we even bother educating anyone?
Friday, June 26, 2009
From another story about the troubles in the heartland, which is actually about how high school kids are going to college instead of working at The Plant:
Fred Gehron, the principal of West Carrollton High School, remembers what happened when he graduated from high school in 1966 and told his parents he wanted to go to college. “I remember them rolling their eyes,” he said. “My father asked, ‘Are you sure that’s necessary? Why not get a job at the steel mill where your brother works?’ ” Rob Alsept, financial secretary for the G.M. union local here, says he took a job at the plant in 1989 at age 19, and bought a house and had a family the next year. The G.M. plant’s basic wage was $28 an hour when it closed. “For the laid-off guys, the highest-paying job I’ve heard anyone find was $13 an hour,” Mr. Alsept said. My last year in teaching -- 5 years experience, 2 graduate degrees, and oh yeah, it was a fucking nice thing to do -- I earned just under $28 an hour, and I did it in a more expensive state than Ohio.
I will go on record: I really don't care if there are no $28 / hr jobs for people right out of high school. I really don't care if it turns out that that was an un-sustainable rate of pay. I really don't care if 19-year-olds can't buy fucking houses.
Year after year, every high school teacher in America told their kids, "Go to college, because that's where the money and the security is." And for 100 years, people went to work at the plant anyway. And now the plant closed because apparently, starting people at $28 / hr for unskilled labor isn't a wise business model, and The News can't get enough of it.
And the worst part is that the horrible consequence highlighted here seems to be that people are having to get trained for better work. Noooooo!!!!
Another gem of heartland wisdom that's complete bullshit:
“My father always told us, ‘As long as you put in an honest day’s work and are an honest person, you’d be O.K.’ That’s not even close to being right anymore.”
Bzzzzt: it's completely true, still. 'Honesty' means looking the facts in the face, and the writing has been on the wall about changes in 'an honest day's work' for years and years and years. Telling yourself or your kids that you're entitled to a low-skill-high-paying job is dishonest -- especially as factories closed and closed and closed and closed and closed.
There's nothing honest about hard work in and of itself. There are hard-working con-men and hired killers. And there are lots of honest people putting in long days at jobs that don't pay $28 /hr, too.
(This is the subtext, of course -- apply modus tollens and you see that this guy's father believes that the working poor are dishonest. So you're honest until you don't have a union to bargain collectively for pay above market rates, I guess.)
I'm sick of this sob story. If it turns out that there's an economic incentive for people to go to college -- even in Ohio and Detroit and West Texas -- what can I say? That's good. The old shit is over. Maybe the fucking Etruscans are hiring, or the Phoenecians, you can go work at their car plant.
Or you can go to college and get some skills that are portable and relevant. Either that, or the Phoenecians.
posted by henry |
6/26/2009 01:38:00 PM|
(3) comments
Iran, Statisitics, and Civic Preparedness
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
So, here's an article from the Washington Post that asserts, based on variances in digit distributions for vote counts in Iran.
I've only analyzed the first claim in the article, the one about final-digit distributions (that it's not uniform), and it's wrong. I have no idea how they got the result they got, but i get a chi-squared goodness of fit rejection of uniformity alpha of about 0.077, almost twice what the article claims. I'm pretty confident I'm doing what they claim to have done -- I have the same data, the same n, and i get a test stat value of 15.52 with 9 degrees of freedom. (Alpha = 0.05 corresponds to a TS = 16.92)
And there are two kinds of comments on this article -- those that say 'Great article! What a fraud!', and ones that say, 'Aaahhh, the analysis looks wrong.'
Which is to say, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think that we have evidence that the election in Iran was fraudulent, and those who know something about (first semester!) statistics.
Tell me again how important it is that our HS students get three years of algebra and no compulsory statistics?
posted by henry |
6/24/2009 01:38:00 PM|
(2) comments
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