Isn’t she lovely
Isn’t she wonderful
Isn’t she precious
Less than one minute old
I never thought through love we’d be
Making one as lovely as she
But isn’t she lovely, made from love
Congratulations, John and Belle!
From the monthly archives:
April 2004
I’ve been reading Anthony Grafton’s “Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astronomer”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674006704/henryfarrell-20 which is a lot of fun. Grafton has a lively writing style, well exemplifed by the following (unfair but funny) dig at the dismal science.
bq. At the most abstract level, astrologers ancient and early modern carried out the tasks that twentieth-century society assigns to the economist. Like the economist, the astrologer tried to bring the chaotic phenomena of everyday life into order by fitting them to sharply defined quantitative models. Like the economist, the astrologer insisted, when teaching and writing for professional peers, that astrology had only a limited ability to predict the future. … Like the economist, the astrologer proved willing in practice, when powerful clients demanded it, to predict individual outcomes anyhow. Like the economist, the astrologer generally found that the events did not match the prediction; and like the economist, the astrologer normally received as a reward for this confirmation of the powers of his art a better job and a higher salary.
In my intro class I’m teaching Garrett Hardin’s famous 1974 article, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” I hadn’t appreciated quite how horrible it is. It’s not (just) that I disagree with his conclusions – I teach material I disagree with all the time. It’s the incredibly weak arguments and the snide innuendos.
At 10:31 Central time, here’s the top news on the top news websites:
MSNBC: Trains Crash, Explode
CBS News: Heavy Toll In N. Korea Train Crash
FOX News: Report: Thousands Hurt, Killed in N. Korea Crash
CNN: Michael Jackson indicted
ABC: Michael Jackson facing trial
The stories on the crash are reporting as many as 3000 dead or injured. Meanwhile, CNN and ABC have the story in sidebars. These are not good priorities, my friend.
UPDATE: At 10:55, Michael Jackson is still the top story at both CNN and ABC.
UPDATE: 11:25. CNN’s top story is now the crash, while ABC’s is still Michael Jackson.
I’m working on a piece on the Iowa Electronic Markets in my copious spare time at the moment. Just as a warm-up, here’s a few questions for finance mavens.
1. In the 1996 Presidential vote-share market, after the candidates have been nominated and adopted, what should the sum of the values of the CL|DOLE(Clinton vote share given Dole as opponent) plus V.DOLE (Dole vote share) contracts be?
2. What percentage return would you have made in the 2000 winner-takes-all market by buying the BUSH contract at the point when DEM was at its peak and holding to maturity?
3. You hold a porfolio in the current 2004 Presidential vote-share market long BU|KERR but short BU|CLINT. If George Bush were to announce tomorrow that he had decided to withdraw from the race, what would be your profit or loss?
Answers below the fold. Historical price and prospectus data available on the IEM website.
John Maynard Smith, pioneer of the application of game theory to evolutionary biology, has died. There are obituaries in the “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1082979,00.html , “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1200211,00.html and “Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/22/db2201.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/04/22/ixopright.html .
Caroline Minter Hoxby has just published a paper (available, like all her papers, free at her website) in the Swedish Economic Policy Review claiming that the performance of Milwaukee’s public schools (measured in terms of test scores per dollar of spending) improved quite dramatically during the heat of the battle over vouchers (in the late 90’s), and that the gains of that time do not seem to have fallen back (though they have plateaued).
There’s been surprisingly little blog comment on the release of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli atom whistle-blower. He’s been released subject to outrageous restrictions on his freedom of association and movement. Jonathan Edelstein has a “fairly balanced and moderate post”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/024458.html on the subject, Gene at Harry’s place has “a somewhat sneering one”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/04/21/the_cult_of_mordechai_vanunu.php . But despite Edelstein’s reasonable tone, I can’t agree with him when he writes
bq. Vanunu betrayed his country and chose illegal rather than lawful means to pursue his political agenda; it was his choice to go to a foreign newspaper with classified information rather than addressing his concerns to left-wing Israeli lawmakers.
The “betrayal of country” accusation strikes me as somewhat dubious. There have been plenty of whistleblowers in Britain — such a Clive Ponting, Sarah Tisdall and, most recently, Katharine Gun — who have gone to the press with details of possibly illegal and certainly immoral behaviour by Britain’s governments and defence establishment. But no-one has called them traitors. As far as I can see his crime was not to weaken Israel’s security by revealing genuine secrets, but to bring into the light of day facts about Israel’s nuclear programme that everyone knew but which couldn’t be admitted openly for political and diplomatic reasons. Do such revelations a traitor make? As for the accusation of using illegal means, that’s pretty laughable given that Vanunu was illegally kidnapped in Italy! Or is illegality ok for states but and not for their citizens?
Jay Nordlinger, of the National Review, on hypocrisy:
I had a memory: It was of Ronald Reagan and his dealing with the hostage situation in Lebanon. An AP reporter was held captive there — name of Terry Anderson. He had a sister named Peggy Say, and she became kind of a spokeswoman for the hostages’ families. Every day, she’d be out in front of the White House, sockin’ it to Reagan, saying how he was hard-hearted and callous and rigid and all the rest of it. And the media were in broad agreement with this. Reagan had a ridiculously inflexible position: No negotiations with terrorists.
But, lo, it was revealed that Reagan was a softie, that he was, indeed, flexible, that he was engaged in some maneuvering to free those hostages, so concerned was he about the individuals’ fates.
And the media (along with the rest of the Left)? They turned on a dime. Now they were super-principled about terrorists. Now any dealing for the release of those hostages was a travesty and an outrage.
Is Nordlinger honestly and truly trying to say that the President should have the authority to secretly cut deals rewarding terrorists? It appears that he is.
Iraqi police recruits, children on a school bus and many others were killed today in a series of bomb attacks in the British-controlled city of Basra that claimed at least 68 lives…
The explosions sowed panic across Basra, which had been relatively peaceful during this month’s upsurge of violence in other parts of central and southern Iraq.
US officials believe al-Qaida linked Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was behind the Irbil, Baghdad and Kerbala attacks. They claim an intercepted letter revealed a strategy to foment civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims to make the country ungovernable.
Basra’s governor also blamed Osama bin Laden.
From today’s Washington Post:
The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq.
At issue was a passage in Woodward’s “Plan of Attack,” an account published this week of Bush’s decision making about the war, quoting Rumsfeld as telling Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, in January 2003 that he could “take that to the bank” that the invasion would happen…
Woodward supplied his own transcript showing that Rumsfeld told him on Oct. 23, 2003: “I remember meeting with the vice president and I think Dick Myers and I met with a foreign dignitary at one point and looked him in the eye and said you can count on this. In other words, at some point we had had enough of a signal from the president that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you can take that to the bank this is going to happen.”
We are hearing about this because the Administration directly contradicted a celebrity Post reporter about a hot news story, and the reporter kept his own records.
What haven’t we heard about?
UPDATE: Some insightful commentary on this story, and Woodward generally, from Ranting Profs.
A local DJ played ‘The Year of the Cat’ a few weeks ago and said that it was about ‘some British comedian called Tony Hancock‘ (yeah, like, the greatest single-handed comedian of the 20th Century, but I’ll let that pass). So, I listened to the song over and over again. And then again. I know the story of Hancock’s life better than anyone my age should, and though the song does sound a little sad, I simply can’t get the reference. (Is ‘a country where they turned back time’ Australia? If so why?) Google doesn’t help much: I got this German site, and an error message. Now I hear Steve Harley’s show and he (who ought to know) associates the song with Yussuf Islam which makes much more sense. Does anyone know the story about this?
“CNN reports”:http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Music/04/21/music.worst.songs.ap/index.html that _We Built This City_ by Starship has been voted worst song of all time in what looks like a slightly less scientific poll than we could get by sampling the readership of a random blog. The list of the 50 worst looks like it is designed to bring back bad music memories. Other offenders honored include Paul McCartney (twice), Vanilla Ice, Billy Ray Cyrus and Toby Keith. (TK is on the list only because it was produced by the anti-American liberal media.)
Norris McWhirter, the man responsible for the Guinness Book of Records, and, arguably, the British public obsession with meaningless facts has just died. Read the obituary, which has entirely admirable people saying very nice things about him. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead so I won’t.