So I'm back in The 'Hagen. Thoughts from last time are here.
A surprisingly large effect of being on holiday is the impact of no longer having data on one's phone. Sitting on a train, one feels what old people must feel like all the time - being the only one with their head up looking around when everyone else is buried in a screen of some form. The temporary feeling of virtue at enjoying one's surroundings is of course revealed to be hollow rationalisation of the worst poser kind, when you start wondering whether you could pick up the train's wi-fi. No, you can't without some email login that sounds too hard, never mind then, the window and people around you were much better anyway.
It is a rare and unusual pleasure to simply spend a day wandering around aimlessly in a city that one has been in once or twice before. It is familiar enough that you don't need a map for decent parts of your walking, new enough that you still find stuff you haven't seen before, and comfortable enough that you don't need to be rushing around a particular checklist of things to get to.
I sat on a bench in the main part of the city, and watched people go by for about 20 minutes. After a while, I began to notice a periodic stream of people walking up, looking in the bins, and then walking off. They didn't look like native Danes, they had slightly more olive colored skin and dark hair. Even in the most famous welfare states, you still apparently get people looking in bins for recyclables. What was odd though, was that there appearance was much less conspicuous than I was used to. Most were reasonably dressed, although cheaply once you stopped to look closer, the bag of choice to carry was a large opaque plastic bag bearing the name of one of the high-ish end retail shops. The overall effect was that of phantom hobos, looking briefly out of place peering into a bin, before slipping off again to disappear in the crowd.
Having hobos collect bottles that are taxed on the way out and subsidised on the way back in for recycling is a particularly useless form of make-work combined with cheap welfare. Since the market value of the bottles is basically zero, and the bottles themselves aren't being cleaned off the street but rather removed from existing rubbish piles, this is pure ditch-digging-and-refilling broken windows nonsense. The actually socially useful task would be to pay the hobos to pick up rubbish off the ground. Of course, if we make this decentralised it leads to moral hazard up the wazoo (swiping entire dumpsters of stuff and claiming it was picked up), and if we solve the moral hazard problem though proper monitoring, we lose the main benefit of the decentralised and freelance way of doing it. Still, I can't help but think there has to be a better way - have a time where anyone can show up and get paid minimum wage for two hours of street cleaning, for instance. There would be some teething issues, but it seems like something worth trying.
The other thing I remember took even longer to notice. I saw a fairly overweight young girl walking down the street, and she looked quite jarringly out of place. What is not seen, as our previously cited guest might have put it. Danes are slim on average - there are some overweight people, but the American right tail of weight just doesn't seem to exist in the same way here. Whatever they're doing seems to be working.
I can't think of the last time I spent an equivalent amount of time observing my own town. Partly this is just taking familiar things for granted, but part of it comes from being in a place that's pleasant to just walk around. There's a lot more to see, and a lot more spots your trip will take you. I think the SWPL types are actually right on this one - American cities are not generally very walkable, and walkability has to be planned in advance, it probably won't spring up organically. What will spring up is nice wide lanes, an extra turning lane, parking on the side of the street, and hey presto!, that 30m of asphalt has made all those charming al fresco cafes you had in mind instantly uninhabitable for the roar of passing cars. If you want walkability, you actually need to do what the Danes do and have extended intersecting streets that are pedestrian only, and make the rest maybe one and a bit lanes total. Walkability, drivability. Pick one. Given we pick the latter for 99.9% of the space in most of our cities, I don't think it would kill us to reserve a tiny bit of the commercial district for the former.
Copenhagen continues to be a lovely place. Long may it be so!
Showing posts with label Random. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Random. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Strangely Addictive
'Random Street View'. All these places I've never been and never will go. Also, it reminds you how despite the fact that if you take a randomly chosen person they're probably in a city, if you take a randomly chosen road, it's probably in the country.
Monday, December 9, 2013
It's white, Jim, but not as we know it
What happens when the whitest band in history covers the second whitest band in history?
A whole metric buttload of awesome, that’s what.
\
24 carat solid rolled gold.
A whole metric buttload of awesome, that’s what.
24 carat solid rolled gold.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Miscellaneous Joy
-Things that make me want to learn computer science - a visual depiction of different sorting algorithms
-Genius!
-An awesome SMBC on Evolution. Comedy gold!
-In the annals of redneck engineering, Terminal Cornucopia documents all the ways you can make improvised weapons out of items you buy inside airport security. Several of them seem to involve dismembering a lithium battery, exposing it to water to create a heat source, and then having that explode a deodorant can. My favorite is the Blunderbussiness Class, although they gloss over the fact that the video suggests that if you were actually holding it when it fired you'd get your hand blown off.
-An excellent War Nerd column on the Congo. His thesis that the western intelligentsia simply hates the Tutsis seems ex ante implausible (I can't believe most people in the west even know who was killing whom in the genocide), but it seems strangely parsimonious as an explanation of what they actually do. Click it now, because it's only available for 48 hours!
-Genius!
-An awesome SMBC on Evolution. Comedy gold!
-In the annals of redneck engineering, Terminal Cornucopia documents all the ways you can make improvised weapons out of items you buy inside airport security. Several of them seem to involve dismembering a lithium battery, exposing it to water to create a heat source, and then having that explode a deodorant can. My favorite is the Blunderbussiness Class, although they gloss over the fact that the video suggests that if you were actually holding it when it fired you'd get your hand blown off.
-An excellent War Nerd column on the Congo. His thesis that the western intelligentsia simply hates the Tutsis seems ex ante implausible (I can't believe most people in the west even know who was killing whom in the genocide), but it seems strangely parsimonious as an explanation of what they actually do. Click it now, because it's only available for 48 hours!
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Blagh
You know how sometimes you just don't seem to have any anything to contribute? I mean, I'd seen these billboards about 'No Kill Los Angeles', trying to eliminate animals being killed in shelters. The name and the billboard made it sound like one of those magic lefty schemes whereby people just mandate that some action can't happen any more without any idea how to make that happen or who's going to pay for it. Killing shelter animals is now illegal! That means that shelter animals won't be put down, but will just be fed endlessly and housed indefinitely with all of the money that we don't have. So... they'll starve to death but won't be killed? They'll be left on the streets?
But no, it turns out that, despite their name, No Kill Los Angeles actually seems jolly reasonable and are just trying to encourage people to donate money and adopt out shelter animals and spay and neuter pets. Don't you want that to happen, you monster? And then I started to feel mean and cynical for wanting to hack on them just to write a blog post about lefty naivete. Lord knows there's enough of that going around, but none of it seems interesting enough to write about. Government spends $160m to make a website that doesn't work! Nobody saw that coming!
Meanwhile, as I started to write this post I began to feel vaguely guilty that all I thought of when I saw their poster was leftist politics, but the actual fact of animals dying didn't rouse me at all. So then I felt I owed NKLA ten bucks as a cosmic apology, but they very cleverly set the minimum suggested donation button at 25, and now I'd feel too cheap if I checked the 'other' radio button and put in 10. Well played, NKLA. It's a classic Paul Newman in the Hustler maneuvre - act clueless until they've raised the stakes, then BAM!, they're getting taken for all they're worth. So now this has turned into a $25 blog post, and when you divide this by my five readers, each one of you had damn well better be getting $5 of enjoyment right now or this morning is going to turn into a total writeoff.
Meanwhile, as I started to write this post I began to feel vaguely guilty that all I thought of when I saw their poster was leftist politics, but the actual fact of animals dying didn't rouse me at all. So then I felt I owed NKLA ten bucks as a cosmic apology, but they very cleverly set the minimum suggested donation button at 25, and now I'd feel too cheap if I checked the 'other' radio button and put in 10. Well played, NKLA. It's a classic Paul Newman in the Hustler maneuvre - act clueless until they've raised the stakes, then BAM!, they're getting taken for all they're worth. So now this has turned into a $25 blog post, and when you divide this by my five readers, each one of you had damn well better be getting $5 of enjoyment right now or this morning is going to turn into a total writeoff.
So, yeah, that's me. In the mean time, here's some great stuff taken from Morlock Publishing's twitter feed
and
-Wondermark on who can punch harder
Monday, September 16, 2013
Briefly
1. Just $10? Why not $50? Now THAT'S a living wage! It's free, after all.
2. Physicists discover that nominal interest rates are indeed positive.
3. It's not quite as good as Garfield Minus Garfield, but Calvin and Hobbes mashed up with Dune is still quite excellent.
2. Physicists discover that nominal interest rates are indeed positive.
3. It's not quite as good as Garfield Minus Garfield, but Calvin and Hobbes mashed up with Dune is still quite excellent.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
Miscellaneous Joy
-Apparently someone took the Simpsons marketing scheme as a literal suggestion.
-So various IRS employees were apparently hassling conservative groups about their tax-exempt status. As part of the 'nothing to see here, move along' explanation, we got this classic from the IRS spokesweasel:
If a diplomat is a man sent abroad to lie for his country, a government PR spokesman is a man sent to the press meeting to lie for his federal funding.
Fosetti nails the real story here.
-Comedy gold from Reddit:
-So various IRS employees were apparently hassling conservative groups about their tax-exempt status. As part of the 'nothing to see here, move along' explanation, we got this classic from the IRS spokesweasel:
Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.You don't say? Care to speculate what they were driven by then? Anything at all?
If a diplomat is a man sent abroad to lie for his country, a government PR spokesman is a man sent to the press meeting to lie for his federal funding.
Fosetti nails the real story here.
-Comedy gold from Reddit:
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Miscellaneous Joy
-Mark Steyn gives a rousing defense of free speech following the scandalously underreported assassination attempt on Danish free speech advocate (and critic of Islam) Lars Hedegaard.
-A great model demonstration of herd immunity.
-Theodore Dalrymple talks about how breast cancer screening may end up killing more people than it saves, due to risky treatments being undertaken after false positives. At a minimum, the overall cost/benefit aspect is rather unclear. I'm always reminded of this when people insist that the current healthcare systems don't engage in enough preventative screening of disease. This is certainly possible, but it's usually just taken as given that more screening is always better. Proponents rarely seem to countenance the possibility that you can have too much testing, even just considered in terms of health effects, let alone costs.
-You know how you can tell that a band is awesome? When you go through odd songs from their back catalogue that you've never heard of, and they turn out to be totally sweet.
-The Last Psychiatrist is one of those bloggers with the rare distinction that they usually have something truly different to say about the world (other examples here). He doesn't post regularly, but his stuff is invariably interesting. He had a ripping sledge of people who ostentatiously insist on comforting mourners at funerals a few months back, and another post about a month ago ranging from why women wear makeup to why slaveowners were able to maintain control of such a large population of slaves. Read 'em both.
-I'm certainly no conspiracy theorist, but after both Waco and now Chris Dorner, it's a fair bet that if you find yourself in an extended siege situation with the police, the following might occur:
a) the cops will be throwing flash grenades into the building
b) these may set things on fire
c) when that happens, the police may well prevent the fire department from actually putting out the fire based on the claim (not unreasonable, but also self-serving) that it would be too dangerous to let them approach a building filled with madmen, and hence
d) you'll burn to death, and nobody will much care.
Update: Apparent vocal evidence of the police demanding to 'burn that f***ing house down'
As usual, Chris Rock's advice on "How to Not Get Your Ass Kicked By the Police" is apposite.
-A great model demonstration of herd immunity.
-Theodore Dalrymple talks about how breast cancer screening may end up killing more people than it saves, due to risky treatments being undertaken after false positives. At a minimum, the overall cost/benefit aspect is rather unclear. I'm always reminded of this when people insist that the current healthcare systems don't engage in enough preventative screening of disease. This is certainly possible, but it's usually just taken as given that more screening is always better. Proponents rarely seem to countenance the possibility that you can have too much testing, even just considered in terms of health effects, let alone costs.
-You know how you can tell that a band is awesome? When you go through odd songs from their back catalogue that you've never heard of, and they turn out to be totally sweet.
-The Last Psychiatrist is one of those bloggers with the rare distinction that they usually have something truly different to say about the world (other examples here). He doesn't post regularly, but his stuff is invariably interesting. He had a ripping sledge of people who ostentatiously insist on comforting mourners at funerals a few months back, and another post about a month ago ranging from why women wear makeup to why slaveowners were able to maintain control of such a large population of slaves. Read 'em both.
-I'm certainly no conspiracy theorist, but after both Waco and now Chris Dorner, it's a fair bet that if you find yourself in an extended siege situation with the police, the following might occur:
a) the cops will be throwing flash grenades into the building
b) these may set things on fire
c) when that happens, the police may well prevent the fire department from actually putting out the fire based on the claim (not unreasonable, but also self-serving) that it would be too dangerous to let them approach a building filled with madmen, and hence
d) you'll burn to death, and nobody will much care.
Update: Apparent vocal evidence of the police demanding to 'burn that f***ing house down'
As usual, Chris Rock's advice on "How to Not Get Your Ass Kicked By the Police" is apposite.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Miscellaneous Joy
-A thoroughly fascinating description of how to interact with corrupt police in third world countries from John McAfee, who's had to test some of that knowledge recently. One bit that I wouldn't have thought of:
-If this is true, it seems that Kim Dotcom is learning the hard way the lessons of Patrick at Popehat's description of the Blutarsky Doctrine when speaking to the police:
"Do not get out of the car, even if ordered to do so. Your car is your only avenue of escape. It’s a ton or more of steel capable of doing serious harm to anyone foolish enough to stand in front of it, and once underway is difficult to stop. The checkpoint police in Central America never chase anyone down, in spite of years of watching U.S. Television and action movies. It’s too much work, plus they could have an accident. It’s not worth it for an unknown quantity. And they won’t shoot, unless you’ve run over one of them while driving off. It makes noise and wastes a round that they must account for when they return to the station – creating potential problems with the higher-ups. Not that I recommend running. It’s just that outside of the car you have lost the only advantage you have."-Richard Fernandez has a great suggestion for UN peacekeepers in Africa, given their complete inability to preserve the peace even when outnumbering the rebels by 17,000 against several hundred:
"The UN should form up their troops into a brass band to provide music and entertainment as a backdrop to proceedings. They serve some purpose that way."-Things which were thoroughly predictable continue to keep occurring.
-If this is true, it seems that Kim Dotcom is learning the hard way the lessons of Patrick at Popehat's description of the Blutarsky Doctrine when speaking to the police:
"Hey man, you f***ed up. You trusted us."
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Miscellaneous Joy
-Incentives? Who gives a damn about incentives?
-Partly in regards to this, Obama was asked what Donald Trump has against him. Good question - maybe Jack Ryan would be able to answer.
-Rowan Atkinson continues to kick ass.
-Apparently carousing in North Korea sometimes carries a heavy price.
-With the US election being merely weeks away, this is a good time to not be on facebook. That way you won't be subjected to the brilliant insights of all sorts of fools that insist on blasting their endorsements to all and sundry. This post of mine from a year and a half ago still seems right to me.
-Partly in regards to this, Obama was asked what Donald Trump has against him. Good question - maybe Jack Ryan would be able to answer.
-Rowan Atkinson continues to kick ass.
-Apparently carousing in North Korea sometimes carries a heavy price.
-With the US election being merely weeks away, this is a good time to not be on facebook. That way you won't be subjected to the brilliant insights of all sorts of fools that insist on blasting their endorsements to all and sundry. This post of mine from a year and a half ago still seems right to me.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Miscellaneous Joy
-Entirely Alive! defends giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union. I tend to agree. Let's put it this way - it's a hell of a lot better than giving it to that tree-planting woman who wasn't sure if AIDS might be created by western scientists or not.
-The War Nerd is back with a surprisingly positive assessment of Obama's foreign policy, at least the war-fighting part. I can't say I'm thrilled with said foreign policy, but it sure could have been a lot worse (and it's unlikely that John McCain would have been any better either). Incidentally, I tend to dislike parts of it - the Libya intervention, for one - because I didn't see what political purpose the whole thing served, and I still don't. The US didn't lose many troops, but losing an embassy is no laughing matter. I did find myself wondering how Brecher would reconcile his like of Obama military policy with a) Brecher's own Law of Counterinsurgency Warfare: 'Bribe 'em, Nuke 'em, or Just Leave 'em the Hell Alone!', and b) his suggested response to the Iranian hostage crisis, c.f. the Benghazi crisis. I'm guessing that this is more a 'if you're going to fight it, how should you do it?' than a 'should you fight it?', but I don't know.
-Ken at Popehat responds to the free speech critics who suggest that America needs to reconsider cultural values other than free speech. The 'alternative cultural values' on closer inspection turn out to be exactly what you'd expect - narrow-minded bigotry, cry-babies with exquisitely sensitive feelings, hypocritical 'tolerance for thee but not for me' types, and barbaric lynch mobs more at home in the middle ages. It's worth being reminded of this.
-Still on free speech, Jonathan Turley at the Washington Post describes the arguments being advanced in favor of censorship. Julia Gillard, Australia's worst Prime Minister since Malcolm Fraser, made an appearance with this quote: “Our tolerance must never extend to tolerating religious hatred and incitements to violence”. I couldn't tell whether this meant that we shouldn't tolerate hatred of religions (as Turley seems to imply) or hatred by religions (which, in the context of Islam, implies the opposite side of the debate). The UN press release seems to imply that she meant the latter. Which is good! Except that this was preceded with the statements that 'denigration of religious beliefs was never acceptable'.* Wrong, you clueless pandering fool. It is acceptable. Otherwise we live in a country with de facto blasphemy laws. It seems there are no depths that she (continuing the cringeworth tradition started with Kevin Rudd) will not debase Australia in order to try to get the pointless prize of a temporary seat on the UN Security Council.
*(This was quoted indirectly in the UN press release, but it turns out that the statement 'denigration of religious beliefs was never acceptable' is a direct quote. Honest to god, I sat through the whole 15 minutes of pathetic bromides to make sure there wasn't some context I was missing. There wasn't).
Other clanger lines delivered:
Cancel that - madam, fire yourself. Or just wait for the Australian people to do it for you soon enough.
-Nydwracu rounds out the latest anarcho-tyranny in the UK. The UK Police - they can't catch the guy that burgled your house, but they can catch you if you make an off-colour remark on twitter.
-The War Nerd is back with a surprisingly positive assessment of Obama's foreign policy, at least the war-fighting part. I can't say I'm thrilled with said foreign policy, but it sure could have been a lot worse (and it's unlikely that John McCain would have been any better either). Incidentally, I tend to dislike parts of it - the Libya intervention, for one - because I didn't see what political purpose the whole thing served, and I still don't. The US didn't lose many troops, but losing an embassy is no laughing matter. I did find myself wondering how Brecher would reconcile his like of Obama military policy with a) Brecher's own Law of Counterinsurgency Warfare: 'Bribe 'em, Nuke 'em, or Just Leave 'em the Hell Alone!', and b) his suggested response to the Iranian hostage crisis, c.f. the Benghazi crisis. I'm guessing that this is more a 'if you're going to fight it, how should you do it?' than a 'should you fight it?', but I don't know.
-Ken at Popehat responds to the free speech critics who suggest that America needs to reconsider cultural values other than free speech. The 'alternative cultural values' on closer inspection turn out to be exactly what you'd expect - narrow-minded bigotry, cry-babies with exquisitely sensitive feelings, hypocritical 'tolerance for thee but not for me' types, and barbaric lynch mobs more at home in the middle ages. It's worth being reminded of this.
-Still on free speech, Jonathan Turley at the Washington Post describes the arguments being advanced in favor of censorship. Julia Gillard, Australia's worst Prime Minister since Malcolm Fraser, made an appearance with this quote: “Our tolerance must never extend to tolerating religious hatred and incitements to violence”. I couldn't tell whether this meant that we shouldn't tolerate hatred of religions (as Turley seems to imply) or hatred by religions (which, in the context of Islam, implies the opposite side of the debate). The UN press release seems to imply that she meant the latter. Which is good! Except that this was preceded with the statements that 'denigration of religious beliefs was never acceptable'.* Wrong, you clueless pandering fool. It is acceptable. Otherwise we live in a country with de facto blasphemy laws. It seems there are no depths that she (continuing the cringeworth tradition started with Kevin Rudd) will not debase Australia in order to try to get the pointless prize of a temporary seat on the UN Security Council.
*(This was quoted indirectly in the UN press release, but it turns out that the statement 'denigration of religious beliefs was never acceptable' is a direct quote. Honest to god, I sat through the whole 15 minutes of pathetic bromides to make sure there wasn't some context I was missing. There wasn't).
Other clanger lines delivered:
'Australia's values in the world are those of the UN.'I certainly hope not.
'The UN is.. the story of navigating the winds of change, the end of colonialism, bringing self-determination to the worlds great majority, the billions of the global south'.It's also a story of cliches lifted straight from a third-rate sociology faculty lounge!
'2015 is a goal, but it is not a destination.'Madam, fire your speechwriters.
"There can be no poverty alleviation without the creation of wealth and jobs. Growth alone is never sufficient.'Fight that mangled strawman! I know I've heard lots of people advancing the argument that 'growth, without the creation of wealth and jobs (whatever the hell that is) is sufficient for alleviating poverty'.
Cancel that - madam, fire yourself. Or just wait for the Australian people to do it for you soon enough.
-Nydwracu rounds out the latest anarcho-tyranny in the UK. The UK Police - they can't catch the guy that burgled your house, but they can catch you if you make an off-colour remark on twitter.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Immature, But Hilarious
Every now and again, I worry that this site may be at risk of being too self-serious.
So with rectification in mind, I laughed hella hard at this one:
Ha!
We now return you to your regularly scheduled high-brow pomposity.
So with rectification in mind, I laughed hella hard at this one:
Ha!
We now return you to your regularly scheduled high-brow pomposity.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Random Thoughts on the Turkey
-It's very refreshing to see people smoking outdoors in restaurants. Not because I smoke. Nor because I like the smell of smoke while eating my food. But just because I love the smell of governments not interfering with how private businesses wish to operate their dining establishments.
-Perhaps related to the above, it was interesting to see large-ish (~15-20 storeys) glass office buildings where the windows actually opened, so the building was basically a glass rectangular prism, but with a few windows tilted open. I haven't come across that anywhere else.
-The 'Stray Animals Measure of Poverty' has another out-of-sample confirmation. There's a fair number of them, tilted mainly towards cats for some reason. They mostly look healthy, so it clearly ain't India, and there's definitely more than what I saw in Greece (a perhaps regionally comparable country in some respects, but not others). Sure enough...
-Out of all the places I've been on holiday, the proportion of tourists (not locals) who were speaking English was probably lower than nearly anywhere else I've been. Except for the beach parts in the southwest, which were populated with uncouth Brits on holiday, with all the attendant delights that that brings.
-If I had to nominate something for the language trait most characteristic of Turkish English (at least on the low level of street tourist interactions) it would be beginning sentences with either 'Yes' or 'Yes please'. So you'll walk past a store, and they'll open with 'Yes please, come look at these beautiful necklaces' or 'Yes, what would you like to drink?'. This was common enough that I'm guessing that it's a feature of spoken Turkish that they're just literally translating across to its English equivalent.
-Perhaps related to the above, it was interesting to see large-ish (~15-20 storeys) glass office buildings where the windows actually opened, so the building was basically a glass rectangular prism, but with a few windows tilted open. I haven't come across that anywhere else.
-The 'Stray Animals Measure of Poverty' has another out-of-sample confirmation. There's a fair number of them, tilted mainly towards cats for some reason. They mostly look healthy, so it clearly ain't India, and there's definitely more than what I saw in Greece (a perhaps regionally comparable country in some respects, but not others). Sure enough...
-Out of all the places I've been on holiday, the proportion of tourists (not locals) who were speaking English was probably lower than nearly anywhere else I've been. Except for the beach parts in the southwest, which were populated with uncouth Brits on holiday, with all the attendant delights that that brings.
-If I had to nominate something for the language trait most characteristic of Turkish English (at least on the low level of street tourist interactions) it would be beginning sentences with either 'Yes' or 'Yes please'. So you'll walk past a store, and they'll open with 'Yes please, come look at these beautiful necklaces' or 'Yes, what would you like to drink?'. This was common enough that I'm guessing that it's a feature of spoken Turkish that they're just literally translating across to its English equivalent.
Friday, August 3, 2012
Random Thoughts on the Olympics
- It's always good when you're watching a group of runners lined up on the track without hearing the earlier announcements, and you can tell the event purely by the competitors involved. Hmm, Kenyan, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Kenyan, Ethiopian ... it's starting inside the track, so it's not the marathon, meaning it's got to be the 10,000m. Sure enough, it is. Correlations, man - is there anything they can't tell you?
-It was grimly hilarious a few days ago to watch the Australian Olympic officials trying to put on a brave face after winning Sweet F. A. when the swimming was all done.
-It was grimly hilarious a few days ago to watch the Australian Olympic officials trying to put on a brave face after winning Sweet F. A. when the swimming was all done.
http://au.oztips.yahoo.com/news/article/-/14433008/aussies-not-panicking-over-low-medal-count/
But fear not, says Australia's deputy chef de mission Kitty Chiller.
"Very early days, we're only just starting the second quarter," she said.
"We've got rowing, we've got track cycling, we've got sailing, genuine gold medal hopes - three in each of those events.
"We're certainly not panicking. There's a still a very positive feel amongst management and the athletes.
"Sure, we maybe have missed out on a few medals that we thought we could've one but we've also won others - 4x100m freestyle wasn't a gold medal favourite.
"There's certainly no fear at the moment that we've failed, that we're not on track.
"We still believe we can genuinely finish in the top five overall."Translation: the tanks are descending on Berlin from both the east and the west, but the German Army is about to fight a glorious rearguard action!
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Why I don't use hotel safes
People focus on the salient risks. OMG, someone might steal my passport!
Fair enough - they might. But truthfully, how high is the risk of this if you're staying in a decent hotel and it's somewhere not in plain sight, such as in a bag?
I submit that it's not very high. The only guy I know who ever personally got anything stolen was while staying in a dorm room in a backpackers, and it was stolen by the other guy in the room, not the maid. As it turns out, the backpacker stole his MP3 player that he'd fallen asleep while listening to, right from out of his ear! Talk about chutzpah. We'll file that as 'one more reason to avoid hippies in backpackers'.
But a low risk of theft is, on its own, no reason at all not to use a hotel safe.
On the other hand, if you're anything like me, do you know what the much bigger risk of you being separated from your passport is?
Leaving it in the damn hotel safe when you check out of the room because you forgot to get it out.
I've done that at least once, years ago, but thankfully I remembered when the taxi was only halfway to the airport.
It's not a salient risk, but it's much, much higher.
Fair enough - they might. But truthfully, how high is the risk of this if you're staying in a decent hotel and it's somewhere not in plain sight, such as in a bag?
I submit that it's not very high. The only guy I know who ever personally got anything stolen was while staying in a dorm room in a backpackers, and it was stolen by the other guy in the room, not the maid. As it turns out, the backpacker stole his MP3 player that he'd fallen asleep while listening to, right from out of his ear! Talk about chutzpah. We'll file that as 'one more reason to avoid hippies in backpackers'.
But a low risk of theft is, on its own, no reason at all not to use a hotel safe.
On the other hand, if you're anything like me, do you know what the much bigger risk of you being separated from your passport is?
Leaving it in the damn hotel safe when you check out of the room because you forgot to get it out.
I've done that at least once, years ago, but thankfully I remembered when the taxi was only halfway to the airport.
It's not a salient risk, but it's much, much higher.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Miscellaneous Joy
-The Last Psychiatrist has a great essay about self-destructive behaviour.
-I got 99 problems, but an incorrect understanding of criminal procedure laws ain't one. (Via AL)
-"Evening dress is the first step towards civilization" (via)
-40 varieties of wrong thoughts, by David Stove.
-Ave Atque Vale, Donald J. Sobol. I remember reading the Encyclopedia Brown stories when I was a kid. When I read the news, however, it reminded me that I hadn't had a single thought about Encyclopedia Brown in at least twenty years. Strange.
-I got 99 problems, but an incorrect understanding of criminal procedure laws ain't one. (Via AL)
-"Evening dress is the first step towards civilization" (via)
-40 varieties of wrong thoughts, by David Stove.
-Ave Atque Vale, Donald J. Sobol. I remember reading the Encyclopedia Brown stories when I was a kid. When I read the news, however, it reminded me that I hadn't had a single thought about Encyclopedia Brown in at least twenty years. Strange.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Little Victories
So today was one of those cases of getting unreasonably excited by something completely trivial and ridiculous.
It's taken three years of (sporadically) eating lunch at the same sandwich place, but I finally got asked if I'd like 'the usual'. I thought that kind of thing only happens on TV shows! The investment has paid off.
Being asked if you want 'the usual' of course marks one as the aristocracy of any establishment. The staff recognise me! They pay attention to my whims which, fortunately, never change.
It's like being the foursquare mayor of a place, except that you don't have to wave you phone around for everyone to know about it.
Good times.
It's taken three years of (sporadically) eating lunch at the same sandwich place, but I finally got asked if I'd like 'the usual'. I thought that kind of thing only happens on TV shows! The investment has paid off.
Being asked if you want 'the usual' of course marks one as the aristocracy of any establishment. The staff recognise me! They pay attention to my whims which, fortunately, never change.
It's like being the foursquare mayor of a place, except that you don't have to wave you phone around for everyone to know about it.
Good times.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Random Observations From Travels Around The USA
Apologies for the lack of updates, I've been travelling around a fair bit recently. Here's my sociological travelogue.
Miami
-To slightly paraphrase Athenios's memorable econ-nerdy description: Take the set of {Los Angeles} AND NOT {New York}. Then lever it up like crazy. The result is Miami.
-To my politically incorrect eye, it seemed like that, for a US city with a high Hispanic population, there was a much larger and more visible Hispanic middle class and upper-middle class than other places I've been. My guess is that this is partly to do with the fact that Miami has a lot of Cuban immigrants, many of them refugees from Castro. During the 70s these tended to be some of the elite of Cuban society, which seems to be less true of the median immigrant from Mexico. The fact that Cubans tend to vote Republican already puts them in a somewhat odd position relative to other Hispanic groups, and the visible trends in Miami seemed consistent with that.
-In the multiple times I've been there, I think I've gotten Haitian cab drivers on nearly every occasion - the giveaway is always the French names on the ID cards in the cab.
Vegas
Earlier thoughts here, here and here.
-Outside of a cocktail party itself, I can't think of any place I've been to where the cocktail dress was so prevalent on the women walking around. Day time, night time, doesn't matter.
-Part of this seemed to from the, how shall I put it, 'professionals'. They tend to stick out. I wonder if the men who partake in such services realise how easy they are to spot at a distance of 50m. My guess is that they kid themselves that people might be mistaking them for friends, girlfriends etc. But they're not.
-Related to the above, it's amusing when you think about it how much men will pay to probabilistically sleep with a women, but how they'll shy away from paying money to sleep with a woman with certainty. The most likely explanations are a very high implied cost of dignity, or the fact that the purchase itself is not the same. In the latter case, one ultimately wants the pursuit and the conquest, and only the probabilistic scenario delivers that. Of course, there's always the explanation of George Costanza cheapness - why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?
Miami
-To slightly paraphrase Athenios's memorable econ-nerdy description: Take the set of {Los Angeles} AND NOT {New York}. Then lever it up like crazy. The result is Miami.
-To my politically incorrect eye, it seemed like that, for a US city with a high Hispanic population, there was a much larger and more visible Hispanic middle class and upper-middle class than other places I've been. My guess is that this is partly to do with the fact that Miami has a lot of Cuban immigrants, many of them refugees from Castro. During the 70s these tended to be some of the elite of Cuban society, which seems to be less true of the median immigrant from Mexico. The fact that Cubans tend to vote Republican already puts them in a somewhat odd position relative to other Hispanic groups, and the visible trends in Miami seemed consistent with that.
-In the multiple times I've been there, I think I've gotten Haitian cab drivers on nearly every occasion - the giveaway is always the French names on the ID cards in the cab.
Vegas
Earlier thoughts here, here and here.
-Outside of a cocktail party itself, I can't think of any place I've been to where the cocktail dress was so prevalent on the women walking around. Day time, night time, doesn't matter.
-Part of this seemed to from the, how shall I put it, 'professionals'. They tend to stick out. I wonder if the men who partake in such services realise how easy they are to spot at a distance of 50m. My guess is that they kid themselves that people might be mistaking them for friends, girlfriends etc. But they're not.
-Related to the above, it's amusing when you think about it how much men will pay to probabilistically sleep with a women, but how they'll shy away from paying money to sleep with a woman with certainty. The most likely explanations are a very high implied cost of dignity, or the fact that the purchase itself is not the same. In the latter case, one ultimately wants the pursuit and the conquest, and only the probabilistic scenario delivers that. Of course, there's always the explanation of George Costanza cheapness - why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)