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Weekend Music Thread

by jaymaster on October 15, 2010

in Music

Getting a bit of an early start this week. I’m heading out this evening with some guys from work to celebrate the departure of a particularly despised co-woker…

In last week’s thread, I mentioned to Dean that I was not much of a Black Sabbath fan. And in fact, after a few listens, I traded the one Sabbath album I ever owned for a Donna Summer album.

At some point this week, my favorite song from that album came back to me. I remember listening to it over and over again. So often that my older sister bought me a pair of nice head phones so she wouldn’t have to hear me playing it ever again!

Looking back 30+ years, I must say the song has held up spectacularly well!

You could walk into most any dance club in any corner of the planet today, and still hear it (or a very close derivative) being played. Many folks consider it to be the inspiration for the trance/techno genre that followed.

Donna Summer: I Feel Love

Anybody feel like sharing some linky love?

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I Love xkcd

by Dean Esmay on October 15, 2010

in humor

Hahaha!

Geek humor. Beep, beep.

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Efficient Market Hypothesis and the Tinkerbell Effect

by Eric Rall on October 14, 2010

in Economics

Two economists are walking down the street. One says to the other, “Hey, is that a $20 bill lying in the gutter?”

Without looking, the other replies, “No, it can’t be. If it was a $20 bill, someone would have picked it up by now.”

That’s an old joke economists tell to make fun of themselves. The specific idea being made fun of is the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which holds that in general, arbitage opportunties are rapidly competed away. Arbitage is the process by which you can make money by finding two different prices that don’t make sense relative to each other, for example if Acme stock costs $25/share in New York and $30/share in London, you can buy up Acme stock on the New York Stock Exchange and immediately sell it in London. But you don’t see many arbitage opportunties like that, because if stock prices diverge by even a few cents in different markets, investors jump on it and bid up the price in the cheap market and bid down the price in the expensive market. The idea can be and is generalized to all sorts of money-making opportunities and even non-financial competition. Two everyday examples of efficient market hypothesis effects:

  • Lines in the grocery are usually very close to the same length at each register because if there’s a short line, everyone jumps in it.
  • It’s rare that you can save yourself significant time in a traffic jam by changing lanes, because if a lane is going faster than its neighbors, everyone merges into it, thus slowing it down.

There are two forms of the efficient market hypothesis. The strong form is what shows up in the joke, that markets are always right and so there’s no $20 bills waiting to be picked up. This is clearly bunk, even for the straightforward case of financial markets.

The weak form holds that there are no economic profits available by actively seeking $20 bills lying in the street unless you have some particular advantage in spotting and grabbing them. “Economic profits” means profits above and beyond a reasonable return on your labor, investment, and risk. So maybe you find a $20 every three hours of searching, but in the same time you could have made $30 or $40 waiting tables. Applied to financial markets, the weak form of the efficient markets hypothesis means that if your assessment of a stock’s fair price differs from the market’s price, the market may well be wrong, but it’s more likely that you’re wrong unless you know something the market doesn’t.

The weak form of the efficient market hypothesis holds precisely because there are people who believe themselves (rightly or wrongly) to have some special advantage in picking out places where the market is wrong. Perhaps they have some special insight. Perhaps they have access to resources that most of us don’t. Perhaps they’ve simply spotted a $20 bill by chance without going out of their way to look for it. Or perhaps they’re fools. All of these are the case in varying degrees for different people. But for whatever reason, people are looking for the $20 bills, so all the bills get picked up.

Which brings us to our second topic this evening, the Tinkerbell Effect. The name is a reference to some versions of the Peter Pan story, in which Tinkerbell is mortally wounded, but since faeries are powered by belief, the audience can heal her by applauding to show they believe in faeries. There’s an old saw that reality is that which doesn’t simply go away when people stop believing in it; tinkerbell effects are the exceptions to that rule, things which are indisputably real but which only exist because people believe in them. Speculative bubbles are one example: for many years, it was widely believed that housing prices always went up, and it was true so long as everyone believed it, but once people stopped believing it, it abruptly ceased to be true. The value of fiat currency is another example: I’ll treat dollars (which have no inherent value) as if they are valuable because other people believe they are valuable, which makes them valuable. One of the biggest examples is countries and governments, which are the product of shared belief. In 1989, a series of political events and protest movements culminated in everyone simultaneously ceasing to believe in East Germany, and as a result East Germany ceased to exist.

The efficient market hypothesis is an example of a Reverse Tinkerbell Effect: if everyone believed in it, we’d all stop looking for the $20 bills, and markets would cease to be efficient as money piled up unnoticed in our streets.

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Another Obama Shortcoming

by Dean Esmay on October 14, 2010

in humor


Has Obama Failed To Reduce Hostility Toward Obnoxious Americans Abroad?

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The fear factor

by Ron Coleman on October 13, 2010

in Ethics,Mideast,journalism

Here’s the post that’s already rounded up all the commentary on this latest version of an increasingly tired story, and already been linked to by the Blog of Record (more on Glenn’s own take below):

As Radley Balko noted in yesterday’s Morning Links, the Washington Post and other newspapers pulled Wiley Miller’s syndicated “Non Sequitur” cartoon from their comics pages two Sundays back, because Miller pulled a familiar-to-Reason-readers “where’s Waldo?”gag with the Prophet Muhammad, satirizing the new 21st century taboo on the depiction of even jokes about the fear of depicting a historical figure who really existed. . . .

Advice for my newspaper friends: Listen to Penn Jillette. “[W]e haven’t tackled Islam because we have families,” he says. “[A]nd I think the worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that you’re afraid to talk about it.” There, that wasn’t very hard, was it?

No, it’s not at all — that’s exactly what I said right here on Dean’s World way back in 2006!  I’ll spare you the clicking, the meat of it being here:

Is religiously offensive material different? Only if you’re religious, or very sensitive to religious sensibilities. But the bookstores are packed, overflowing in fact, with books that criticize, abuse and demean religion; if they made that a section of the average Barnes & Noble it would take up the whole downstairs, so they distribute them in other categories!

No, the nub of it here is that the magazine won’t be carried “because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.” They’re not really covering up or even, I think, suggesting that Muslims were the victims of these riots in any morally meaningful sense.

What they’re saying is, “Sorry. We don’t want riots in our stores, okay? We don’t want our directors kidnapped. We don’t want our employees blown up.” Tim Blair think that makes them contemptible chickens. Glenn Reynolds calls them cowards. You know what? On my Likelihood of Confusion blog, where free speech is one of my thematic topics, I have still not reproduced the cartoons. I have a family, people. I can’t make a stand on this (supposedly) moral point; I’m not dying on this hill; and as a religious person myself, by the way, I’m not necessarily interested in promoting mockery of the founders of religions in the public forum. (But see here.) . . .

I’m open to persuasion on this. I realize this position represents a moral compromise. But my guess is that people who own businesses and homes, who have families and friends in the real and vulnerable world, will recognize that you have to pick your battles. Waldenbooks and Borders are only book stores. I don’t expect the Department of State to be so cautious. But how many armored divisions does Borders have?

Does every mall need to have barbed wire around the food court, checkpoints at the ATM’s and metal detectors at Hot Sam’s, all so we can make fun of the Prophet everywhere, all the time?

To which Glenn Reynolds responds — well, no not to my piece, but to what’s going on — in his post, linked to above, very incisively:  ”May you have joy of the incentive structure you’re creating, O guardians of societal values.  Because you’re going to be living with it.”

And that is an important distinction.  Ron Coleman and his blogs are one thing.  Even bookstores are another thing.  But “The Fifth Estate”?!

Turns out they’re not quite the “other thing” they would have us believe, I guess.

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Chinese Government Upset By Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize

by Dean Esmay on October 13, 2010

in History,Politics

Aw, poor babies.

Now let him out of jail, you dishonorable, cowardly thugs.

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Minnesota Intellectual Property Law Attorneys?

by Ron Coleman on October 13, 2010

in Blogs and Blogging,humor

Did I ever tell you my views about Minnesota intellectual property law attorneys?

As you can probably guess, I’d like everyone to know about these views.  That I have.

About intellectual property attorneys.  In Minnesota.

And what’s becoming of blogging, too.

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Monster Guitar: Texas Flood

by Dean Esmay on October 12, 2010

in Music

I can just watch this in awe for the sheer technical prowess. Not to mention loving it musically. I think I get out of watching certain musicians what others get out of watching professional sports. The emotion is so powerful too; you can tell he’s one of those people who emotes through his instrument, sings through it, and does not merely play it.

By the way, my eldest son was a big fan of this when he was only 2 or 3 years old. I told you I have a cool kid. :-)

(More here.)

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Tim Gunn

by Dean Esmay on October 12, 2010

in Gender Issues,Human Rights,Law and Morality,Medicine,The Third Sex

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Religious Bigotry In Nevada Senate Race

by Dean Esmay on October 12, 2010

in Politics,Religious Paranoia

You know, you would think someone from Mormon Country would know better than to indulge in blatant religious persecution and slanderous religious lies, but hey, what do I know? Republicans have been hijacked by this hysteria, which mirrors anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, and yes, anti-Mormon religious paranoia so well it’s eerie.

I am tempted to pledge to vote the straight Democratic line this election just in protest for Republicans allowing this filth in their midsts–and this is a party I’ve voted for pretty regularly ever since 1996, including every Presidential election. However, that would mean I had to vote against my current Congressman, Thaddeus McCotter, and he’s a good man. So I’ll just have to vote for the Democrat in every single other office just to protest.

I don’t even like Harry Reid, but I hope he whips the snot out of this woman.

By the way, I was just in Dearborn, Michigan visiting friends, who were utterly shocked to learn that their town was now ruled by Sharia law. They didn’t know whether to laugh at how ridiculous this is or cry at how slanderous it is.

Do not try to excuse this woman to me. She has no excuse. She’s either appallingly ignorant or deeply dishonest. Pick one. She makes me ashamed for my country.

No, I do not wish to discuss it, or hear any rationalizations from anyone.

(Thanks G.)

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Geek History

by Dean Esmay on October 11, 2010

in History,humor

Modern business machines, circa 1947.

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Views of Europe

by Dean Esmay on October 11, 2010

in humor

Chuckle-worthy.

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Weekend Music Thread

by Dean Esmay on October 9, 2010

in Music

For my little Draco, who had some trouble today:

Love you Drake. Daddy misses you.

I also miss SRV. He’s another one you can scare guitarists with. Even on something as simple as this he’s amazing to watch.

So, anyone else got some cool tunage?

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Somebody Who Matters Wins The Nobel Peace Prize

by Dean Esmay on October 8, 2010

in Human Rights,Politics

Oh. My. God. Someone who actually matters and desperately deserves it has won the Nobel Peace Prize: Liu Xiaobo.

To quote Celia Farber (who I hope will forgive me for doing so): “I am so sick of living in a world where everybody is expected to know who Snookie is but nobody is expected to know who Liu Xiaobo is. Indeed, until today, none of us did. I certainly didn’t, and that makes me really angry. This puts CURRENCY back into sacrifice.”

Amen.

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Wisdom of the Founders

by Dean Esmay on October 8, 2010

in History,Politics

“I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the same coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1810

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Gentlemen’s gentlemen

by Ron Coleman on October 7, 2010

in Legal Issues,Popular culture,humor,movies

I had written a post on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® that riffed — non-substantively — on the definition of “gentleman” before getting into some fairly obscure technical aspects of trademark law, and — well, it went something like this:

Reuters reports on a high-class trademark story I’ve been following since my own dancing days:

The male erotic dancer company Chippendales stumbled on Friday when an appeals court ruled that it could not trademark [sic] the bow tie and shirt cuffs that the men wear.  The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in a ruling which included a sketch of a fit gentleman shown from the waist up wearing only a bow tie and shirt cuffs that the US Patent and Trademark Office was correct in refusing to trademark [sic] the Cuffs and Collar costume.

“A fit gentleman”?  Fit?  Yes, certainly.  But “gentleman“?

Well, “gentleman” has long ceased to mean “gentleman,” after all.  I hear radio actualities where the cop says, “Then the gentleman proceeded to pistol-whip the granny and proceeded down toity-fifth street where he encountered the officers and was apprehended.”

And then, of course, there’s the “gentleman’s club,” inside of which the one thing you are not likely to encounter is, I can only speculate, a gentleman.  There are websites like that too, I hear.

But more on that sort of thing shortly.

Yes, of course this “fit” bloke is a “gentleman”:  Didn’t you read what the story said?  Look what he’s wearing:

Chippendales Outfit Denied Trademark Protection


A bow tie!  And detachable collar and French cuffs!  Sure, the collar and cuffs are attached to nothing but air, but still — what could be more gentlemanly than that?

Which is all very well and good… but evidently not enough to constitute inherent distinctiveness . . .

Then I was playing around with it, and there were learned comments, and I kept coming back to the gentleman thing.  Well, ultimately I ended up just dropping this video into the post, at the end.  Now dat, my friend, is “gentlemen”!

And it’s just so, so good I had to share it here, too.

Oh, and by the way — I know that a “gentleman’s gentleman” is a valet, okay!

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Pink Ribbons Not Helping

by Dean Esmay on October 7, 2010

in Science

I’ve thought for years that the “pink ribbon” campaign for breast cancer research was mostly futile, because most of the money doesn’t go to research programs likely to do much good. It’s always hard to say that because people seem to be more emotional about this than rational: “how could you be against fighting breast cancer?” That isn’t the issue. The issue is, I don’t believe most of the research money is going to research that’s going to be particularly useful; most of the efforts expended on genetic research and viral research are not ever going to pan out to anything more than marginal results, because that’s all that hundreds of billions of dollars and literally decades of research on viral and genetic causes on cancer have ever results: improvements on the margins.

It is a bit of a relief to see that the lack of fundamental progress is now being noticed by more and more people. Although this lack of progress isn’t just on breast cancer, it’s on most forms of cancer. The “steady improvements” are always marginal, always in slightly-less-deadly chemotherapy or radiation regimes, this or that identification of genetic or viral things that give small percentage increases in improvement, but never anything truly dramatic.

Until the cancer research field gets out of a non-working paradigm and starts aggressively pursuing other paradigms for cancer causation and detection, we’re never going to see more than marginal improvements. This is something that happens in any large bureaucratic enterprise: ossification sets in, and fundamental shifts happen at a glacial pace. This shouldn’t be acceptable, and taxpayers and people who give money to non-profits for research should be demanding research on alternative theories and alternative treatments and alternative paradigms. Do I have a proposed one? No, that’s hardly the point; although Duesberg’s research on aneuploidy still gets far too little attention or funding, he’s not the only one. Most of the money goes down the same exact hole it’s been going down since the early 1970s, and everyone seems to be afraid to say so.

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Warren Buffet Says More Wall Street Fat Cats Should Go Broke

by Dean Esmay on October 6, 2010

in Economics,Politics

Warren Buffet nails it.

I have had about enough of corporate America, including the banking industry, and the useless distraction of demanding “smaller government” when what is needed here is much stronger and more vigorous government in the financial sector. For damned sure.

Are they going to call Warren Buffet a “socialist” next? Accuse him of having problems with “envy?”

More government here, please. Bigger government here, please. Faster, please.

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Questions and Ruminations About Viral Video

by Dean Esmay on October 6, 2010

in Communism,History,Music,humor,movies

The following viral video has been making its rounds the last few months, and I’m very curious about about it.

First off let’s establish that it’s very well-done and even amusing. Two questions come to mind when watching it, however:

1) What film did this originally come from?
2) Is that a young Chairman Mao dominating that video, or just some early Chinese actor who looks somewhat like a young Chairman Mao?

If it is Chairman Mao, I find myself wondering how many people watching it realize they’re being entertained by footage of the man who was, by most reliable sources, the single biggest mass-murderer in human history–at minimum doubling Adolf Hitler’s body count just in terms of civilians executed it for purely ideological reasons? Most reliable sources estimate that over his mass-slaughter career, Mao Zedong killed between 45 and 72 million civilians–men, women, children–in intentional mass slaughter for political purposes. In short, arguably the single most evil human being who ever walked the Earth.

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Does The World Still Need Wonder Woman?

by Dean Esmay on October 5, 2010

in General Geekery,TV,movies

BERJAYAI see that we are getting very close to a new Wonder Woman TV series, potentially by television genius David E. Kelley, the brilliant creative force behind shows such as Boston Legal and The Practice (and Alley McBeal).

I was startled to learn this only because some weeks ago I had a conversation about this with a friend of mine–not, specifically, about this proposed show, which we did not know about, but about whether or not you could do a credible TV show or movie about this particular character.

See, I’m not sure you can.

Please don’t get me wrong: I really like this character. I have no problem at all with powerful female characters; hell, I wrote a novel about one (one I’d like to adapt to a graphic novel, actually). I also love the genre of superheroes–not exclusively, not as my favorite genre, but it’s as valid a form of fantasy as Westerns, gangster films, mysteries, science fiction, and so on. Done well, it’s all sorts of fun. I gave up regularly reading comic books some years ago, but mostly it was due to time and expense and moving on to other interests; I never lost respect for the art form itself.

I do like superheroes. They’re fun. And I have zero problem with female superheroes. They’re great. I can think of a dozen that would make good movies or TV shows. Wonder Woman just isn’t one of them. I think it’s going to take a powerful imagination–more powerful than mine–to make her work in a modern context.

The problem as I see it with this character is that she was created in the 1930s by two rather forward-looking and progressive psychologists and writers, Elizabeth Marston and William Moulton Marston. They wanted a powerful, athletic role model for young girls who could both be feminine and yet compete in her own right with boys. Running, jumping, fighting bad guys, standing for truth and justice, all that good superhero fantasy stuff. But it was in an era where such ideas were rather strange for girls, and so she carries some 1930s-thinking baggage with her:

Wonder Woman’s real name is Princess Diana. She is the daughter of the queen of Paradise Island (also known as Amazon Island and/or Themyscira). This was an island without any men on it, where the women were more or less immortal and looked over by the Greek Gods, who gave them special powers. Princess Diana was moulded out of clay by her mother, who wanted a daughter but couldn’t have one because there were no men on that island. They stayed completely away from men, and indeed, in most of the old stories, their special powers could be taken away if they allowed a man to dominate them. Wonder Woman was one of these Amazons, who (to make a long story short) left the island to enter “the world of men” and half of what made her story so unique was that she was this figure doing “man stuff” in a world dominated by men, to “prove” that “girls could be like that too.”

It’s 2010. Do we have any shortage of strong, butt-kicking female characters in the movies or on television? I don’t think we do.

I have read a lot of the Wonder Woman stories, starting from the 1930s and 1940s comics, as well as later adaptations and variations on the character, and frankly, while I like her, she has always seemed anachronistic. Her story doesn’t resonate in the modern era; it resonated a little in the 1970s and 1980s, although it still didn’t quite work, but by the 1990s her story seemed completely irrelevant to anything in the modern high-tech world. Women face sexism today but so do men; women are under-represented in some fields but absolutely dominate others. Hell, women are now not just the majority of college graduates, they’re a continually-growing majority. “Yes, girls, look, you can compete with the boys too!” doesn’t strike me as a message that young girls are craving to hear, and most boys have already had that practically slammed into their heads with a mallet since infancy.

Who is this character for? Who does she represent, today?

I have zero–absolutely zero–problem with female superheroes who do ridiculous fantasy impossible things, slinging away bullets, throwing cars, jumping a hundred feet in the air, flying, and so on. It’s Wonder Woman, in particular, I don’t see working in a modern context. How do you make that very 1930s-fantasy character seem like someone people can relate to today? In this part of the world, anyway?

It almost seems as if the only way you can make Wonder Woman work today is to completely change her origin story. But if you change that origin story, do you really have that character anymore? You can fiddle around the edges with the origin of Superman, but he’s still fundamentally this guy from another planet who adopts the Earth as his home and humanity as his family. You can fiddle around the edges with Batman, but he’s still fundamentally a rich kid who got traumatized seeing his parents killed and went off to fight crime. You can fiddle around the edges with Spiderman, but he’s still fundamentally a teenaged nerd who shockingly gets these bizarre powers.

What do you do to fiddle around the edges with Wonder Woman, to make her something other than “a woman in a man’s world” when we no longer really, honestly, live in “a man’s world” in the first place?

I don’t see how you modernize Wonder Woman without making her no longer Wonder Woman. Just someone who sort of looks like her.

(By the way, the 1970s TV show was silly, and barely counts for this discussion, but that show too emphasizes all these rather anachronistic-seeming ideas. To me.)

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