El político práctico perece bajo las consecuencias de las teorías que desdeña.1
Considering the state of our economy in light of the scorn that politicians show for the opinions of economists, Gomez Davila’s claim could not seem more true these days.
Today it snowed in Princeton. This alone strikes me as odd, because I can remember very few Octobers in which it has snowed in New Jersey. What strikes me as far more bizarre is that it snowed today and yet it was nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit only two days ago.
In general, I often wonder whether the weather in the New York City area is not becoming increasingly erratic from day to day. In fact, I often wonder whether sudden shifts in temperature are not likely to prove more dangerous for planet Earth than any gradual change in the mean temperature.
Tonight I decided to do some simple data analysis to determine whether or not there really is greater changes in the day-to-day temperature than there were when I was younger. My analysis of average temperature data for New York City for the past fourteen years left me with some surprising results, which are graphically depicted below.
What do these graphs show?
First, they show that the mean change in temperature from day to day has not consistently grown over the last fourteen years. My perceptions of increasingly unpredictable weather do not seem to have been very accurate.
Second, they show that the mean temperature is, indeed, increasing each year. Global warming seems to be meaningfully affecting the average temperature in New York City.
Third, they show that the weather’s variance has been relatively constant for the last fourteen years. The weather, relative to its mean, is not getting more extreme.
In short, I seem to have totally wrong. The weather may be hotter than before, but it is not some much more erratic than it was ten years ago.
I was quite amazed by this graph, which I saw on Swivel today. The graph implies that there has been a very considerable increase in the number of crimes over the last sixty years of Swedish history.
The increase was so great that I was skeptical at first. “The population of Sweden,” I thought, “must surely have risen during the last sixty years, but this graph does not indicate that it is the number of crimes per capita. If the population has grown by a factor of four during the past sixty years, a constant crime rate per person would explain this data.” I therefore set upon finding data for myself to test this question. I found population data here and crime data here. Using these, I came up with my own graph, showing the total number of reported crimes per capita in Sweden since 1950. You can see it below.
This graph implies that the crime rate really has grown considerably over the last sixty years in Sweden. I knew this conclusion was going to be forced upon me after I saw the population data for Sweden for the period in question. In 1950, the population of Sweden was 7,041,829; in 2007, it was 9,182,927. The population has therefore only grown by 130% during the last sixty years, while the crime rate has grown by a factor of 669% absolutely and by a factor of 513% per person.
So, I have to ask: “what’s the matter with Sweden?”
Are you unsure if depressions are at least partly caused by a self-propagating group fear response? Maybe this piece of spam I just got will help to change your mind:
WACHOVIA CORPORATION NOTICE. Citigroup announced a buyout of Wachovia brokered by the FDIC. All Wachovia bank locations will be in the Citigroup merger to prevent failure of Wachovia. The Citigroup/Wachovia would focus on upgrading banks' security certificates. All Wachovia customers must fill the forms and complete installation of new Citigroup Standard digital signatures during 48 hours. Please follow the installation steps below: Read more>> Sincerely, Cecile Bowling. 2008 Wachovia Corporation. All rights reserved.
Steven Pinker has given us all yet another reason to think highly of him:
he’s one of ten people who’ve put their entire genome online in an attempt to push science forward amid growing fears about personal privacy and genetic discrimination.
I, for one, am tempted to join the cause — whatever the risks may yet prove to be. I really must have listened to too much Black Flag as a kid.
Being a Gene Expression reader, I’ve wanted to start playing with the GSS (General Social Survey) data for some time. This past week, I finally started to do just that. Taking advantage of the freely available downloads of GSS data in SPSS format and R’s “foreign” library for reading in SPSS data, I’ve found a result that will probably amuse most American liberals, despite their ostensibly unilateral opposition to wage inequality. The result, which is predictable but still worth having confirmed empirically, is that there is a fairly consistent positive correlation between skepticism regarding the veridical truth of the Bible and one’s real income in the 2000-2006 data sets. The graph below illustrates this correlation, which hovers between 0.15 and 0.19 during this 6 year period.
For those interested in verifying this result, the relevant variables are BIBLE and REALINC in the GSS data. I’ve converted the replies “WORD OF GOD”, “INSPIRED WORD”, and “BOOK FABLES” into the integer values 2, 3, 4 as numerical measures of skepticism. Real income is clearly already a numerical measure of income.
In case this article hadn’t convinced you that the TSA is a waste of taxpayers’ money, maybe this article will help. Not only is the TSA pointless: it’s filled with crooks who use its irrational regulations as a cover for their own greed.
Every year, I come to agree more and more with this passage from “The Gay Science”:
Truthfulness.– I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: “Let us try it!” But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my “truthfulness”: for there courage has lost its right.1
As part of my current strategy for delaying my return to the ongoing growing pains of learning probability theory, I just installed the most recent best of Firefox 3.1. Its speed really is amazing, so I would recommend it to anyone who can afford to risk having their browser crash once in a while. It renders most of the pages I frequent substantially faster than Firefox 3.0.
It occurred to me today that the reason I find attempts to “beat Vegas” so odd is that I am nearly certain that, if you are smart enough to actually beat Vegas and yet you are not spending your time trying to beat Wall Street instead, you must be stupid.
Consider this my proof by contradiction that no one ever beats Vegas.