New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants the citizens of his metropolis to be healthier. So he has proposed a maximum size limit on how big of a cup a restaurant can use when it serves you a soda drink sweetened with sugar.
I had no idea that New York City had solved its murder problems, homelessness problem, prostitution, drug abuse, parking, infrastructure repair and so on. But they must have for the mayor of the city to spend his time telling people how much soda they can drink.
Diane Sawyer interviewed the mayor and he noted that he woke up the morning after his announcement to headlines calling him things like "Mayor Nanny." He told her that he didn't know if those were supposed to be derogatory terms. Well, that's because you've got a full-on steam of stupid usually reserved for federal-level politicians, Mikey. Those who refer to you as a nanny are NOT complimenting you. They -- like nearly everyone else who still has enough functioning neurons to rub together and spark what we colorfully call "thoughts" -- think you're playing solitaire with two cards. You're a drawerful of dull knives, a sack of hammers, a box full of crayons with no points. You'd be more than a few fries short of a Happy Meal except you think fried potatoes are the greatest crisis your city faces -- or you did until someone read you the calorie count of a glass of soda.
The mayor says he's concerned with the fact that large portions of sodas cause obesity, and he believes that if people have to get their 32 ounces of Coke in two glasses instead of one, they'll see the error of their sugar-snortin' ways. Here's a word you may have overlooked in your headlong dash to tell people what to do, Mr. Mayor: Refill. A lot of restaurants have developed a quaint little custom of having their wait staff ask you if you'd like more to drink if your glass dips below a certain level. Of course, if you tip like you govern, the majority of waiters you've had may have skipped that extra.
I don't know what the mayor's actual concern is, but I don't believe he cares about health the way he says he does, because of what his proposal leaves out. It does not cover diet drinks (troubles with aspartame? Just a rumor!), alcoholic beverages (and you know, one of the things the body turns the alcohol into when it digests those drinks is...sugar) or that pinnacle of slimming slurping, the milkshake. Yup. You won't be able to have 20 ounces of Mountain Dew in a single glass, but you can have a gallon of whipped ice cream as often as your colon will let you.
Nor does the ban affect convenience stores, so if you want to buy a liter of creme soda and sit at your restaurant table and swig it straight out of the bottle and they want to let you, Mikey's Soda Patrol will have to fume in busybody frustration.
I usually think Diane Sawyer is a pretty good interviewer, but she gets downgraded here for not asking the obvious question: "Mr. Mayor, do you view yourself as a cretin or as a full-fledged moron?"
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Taking Stock
So if you bought Facebook stock when it came out last week you were a genius. Or an idiot. Or a dupe. Or maybe an ingeniously duped idiot; it's hard to tell because I've read just about every opinion under the sun.
I'm no money manager, but I've learned a couple of things about stock offerings. One, if you judge whether a stock is a success or failure based on two days of trading, you're likely to be making someone somewhere some money and that someone isn't you. Money managers do well because they spend all day watching this stuff and building data streams about stock behaviors. They do this for months and sometimes the better part of a year before they start trying to guess what a stock price will do. They do not scan the paper's Dow-Jones report, log on to the ol' home computer-doohickey and dash off a half-dozen knee-jerk trades.
And as this piece notes, the purpose of an initial stock offering is to raise cash for a company. A stock purchase is a purchase of the rights of a company's potential future profits in exchange for cash now. So Facebook's word for the offering probably isn't disaster, as this fellow explains. People bought lots of Facebook stock, which made Facebook money. I'm going to guess that merits a "Like," whether on a button or real life.
(H/T Dustbury)
I'm no money manager, but I've learned a couple of things about stock offerings. One, if you judge whether a stock is a success or failure based on two days of trading, you're likely to be making someone somewhere some money and that someone isn't you. Money managers do well because they spend all day watching this stuff and building data streams about stock behaviors. They do this for months and sometimes the better part of a year before they start trying to guess what a stock price will do. They do not scan the paper's Dow-Jones report, log on to the ol' home computer-doohickey and dash off a half-dozen knee-jerk trades.
And as this piece notes, the purpose of an initial stock offering is to raise cash for a company. A stock purchase is a purchase of the rights of a company's potential future profits in exchange for cash now. So Facebook's word for the offering probably isn't disaster, as this fellow explains. People bought lots of Facebook stock, which made Facebook money. I'm going to guess that merits a "Like," whether on a button or real life.
(H/T Dustbury)
Monday, May 28, 2012
The Price of Evil
Many people might like to try being an evil overlord -- at least until your scheme runs afoul of James Bond or some other smarmy do-gooder, you get to have great fun and make sure pretty much everything goes your own way.
But it costs some serious coin to ensure your unbeatability. At the link the fine folks of Creatines have calculated how much "unbeatability" would cost, based on the 1994 list by Peter Anspach, "100 Things I Would Do if I Were an Evil Overlord." The list is of ways to correct common but fatal errors to which Evil Overlords seem prone.
The estimated cost is around $14 million. While you do have some new expenditures, like hiring architects to discover any hidden passageways or secret entrances to your castle fortress (No. 52, $80,000), you also have some savings, like not having to pay to imprison your noble half-brother from whom you usurped the throne (No. 3, -$810,000)
Of course, to scrape together the $14 million, you'll probably have to start your life of crime a little bit before you start your life of crime.
Everything's complicated these days.
But it costs some serious coin to ensure your unbeatability. At the link the fine folks of Creatines have calculated how much "unbeatability" would cost, based on the 1994 list by Peter Anspach, "100 Things I Would Do if I Were an Evil Overlord." The list is of ways to correct common but fatal errors to which Evil Overlords seem prone.
The estimated cost is around $14 million. While you do have some new expenditures, like hiring architects to discover any hidden passageways or secret entrances to your castle fortress (No. 52, $80,000), you also have some savings, like not having to pay to imprison your noble half-brother from whom you usurped the throne (No. 3, -$810,000)
Of course, to scrape together the $14 million, you'll probably have to start your life of crime a little bit before you start your life of crime.
Everything's complicated these days.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Memorial
Remembering, with thanksgiving, those who were and are often better than we sometimes deserve. May they rest in the peace we all pray one day comes in this life as well.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Catching Waves
What I recall of my school science usually referred to gravity as one of the four main forces that worked between objects in the universe -- they were electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and gravity.
Big objects have more gravity than smaller objects, we learned, which is why small objects in space either crash into the bigger objects or fall into an orbit around them. The bigger objects exert more gravitational force. Only it turns out, as Albert Einstein figured out in 1916, that gravity isn't really a force between objects at all. It only seems to be, because we perceive three dimensions of space instead of the four dimensions of space-time. We experience time's passage, but we don't really perceive it the way we perceive height, breadth and depth. In four dimensions, gravity can be seen for what it really is: the curvature of space-time.
The most common illustration of what this means is picturing a bowling ball or something heavy, resting on a trampoline. A small marble rolled in the ball's direction will curve towards it because the bowling ball curves the surface of the trampoline. The more massive the ball, the greater the curve.
So what Einstein theorized and what scientists have found evidence of is that when objects move through space-time, they create little gravity-wave ripples in it. And as the article linked here notes, I do mean little. The best theories about gravity waves is that the strongest of them -- created when two black holes collide, for example -- would move a subatomic particle a distance of one part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This number is called "one sextillion," if you're curious.
This is why they are hard to find, and why only recently have scientists been able to devise experiments to try to measure them directly. They want to do this because gravity waves could be keys to measuring what physics are like in really weird places, like black holes, as well as measuring oddball structures that might make up the universe, like superstrings.
Chances of surfing such waves are remote, of course. For one, they move at the speed of light, which makes it hard to keep up with them. And for another, as mentioned above, they are very small. If they're only going to move a subatomic particle 1 in one sextillionth of a degree, the chances are slim they'll propel you and your board anywhere when they do.
Big objects have more gravity than smaller objects, we learned, which is why small objects in space either crash into the bigger objects or fall into an orbit around them. The bigger objects exert more gravitational force. Only it turns out, as Albert Einstein figured out in 1916, that gravity isn't really a force between objects at all. It only seems to be, because we perceive three dimensions of space instead of the four dimensions of space-time. We experience time's passage, but we don't really perceive it the way we perceive height, breadth and depth. In four dimensions, gravity can be seen for what it really is: the curvature of space-time.
The most common illustration of what this means is picturing a bowling ball or something heavy, resting on a trampoline. A small marble rolled in the ball's direction will curve towards it because the bowling ball curves the surface of the trampoline. The more massive the ball, the greater the curve.
So what Einstein theorized and what scientists have found evidence of is that when objects move through space-time, they create little gravity-wave ripples in it. And as the article linked here notes, I do mean little. The best theories about gravity waves is that the strongest of them -- created when two black holes collide, for example -- would move a subatomic particle a distance of one part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This number is called "one sextillion," if you're curious.
This is why they are hard to find, and why only recently have scientists been able to devise experiments to try to measure them directly. They want to do this because gravity waves could be keys to measuring what physics are like in really weird places, like black holes, as well as measuring oddball structures that might make up the universe, like superstrings.
Chances of surfing such waves are remote, of course. For one, they move at the speed of light, which makes it hard to keep up with them. And for another, as mentioned above, they are very small. If they're only going to move a subatomic particle 1 in one sextillionth of a degree, the chances are slim they'll propel you and your board anywhere when they do.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Deja Vu
This being Memorial Day weekend and the occasion of the Indianapolis 500 race, a local radio station is using that theme as the "Oklahoma 500," in which they will count down the top 500 classic rock songs of all time.
They have as yet omitted how this will differ from any other weekend, playlist-wise.
They have as yet omitted how this will differ from any other weekend, playlist-wise.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
You Sank My...
Nick Berry, president of a data mining company in Seattle, goes into some considerable detail here about the best way to increase your chances of winning in the old game "Battleship." Berry's blog entry is pretty complex, but a lighter-math version of it can be found at this Slate article.
The boiled-down version is this: Rather than call out random points ("B-4!"), simply start by picking every other point on a row until you make a hit. If I remember right, I used to try crossing the board with two diagonal lines to narrow the potential ship locations.
Another, more complicated strategy assesses the probability of certain ships in certain areas of the board, as those probabilities are more and more constrained by each move.
Berry does not offer a sure-fire strategy for not winning the game, but Universal Studios may be consulted for advice on how to make a Battleship loser.
The boiled-down version is this: Rather than call out random points ("B-4!"), simply start by picking every other point on a row until you make a hit. If I remember right, I used to try crossing the board with two diagonal lines to narrow the potential ship locations.
Another, more complicated strategy assesses the probability of certain ships in certain areas of the board, as those probabilities are more and more constrained by each move.
Berry does not offer a sure-fire strategy for not winning the game, but Universal Studios may be consulted for advice on how to make a Battleship loser.
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