Sucre à la crème au sirop d'érable

Sugar, cream, glucose, brown sugar, butter, maple syrup, natural maple syrup flavor, potassium sorbate

140 calories pour 2 morceaux 

30 g sucres 

Diabetes, diabetes, diabetes 

 

Benford's Law

I was listening to the WNYC Radiolab "Numbers" episode and they discussed Benford's law.  Amazing! 

Check it out on Wikipedia:

Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty. This distribution of first digits arises logically whenever a set of values is distributed logarithmically. Measurements of real world values are often distributed logarithmically (or equivalently, the logarithm of the measurements is distributed uniformly).

Chrz!

Greg Robin

Pinker no like Gladwell

I like Steven Pinker's writing.  He is brilliant and conveys his ideas very effectively.  I have not liked Gladwell's writings.  I reeks of what I think of as a journalistic style (I have mislabeled this) - as if he tries to expand each sentence into 500 words.  I was glad to read that Pinker disapproves of Gladwell in substance and style:

The common thread in Gladwell's writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarter back's rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don't predict a teacher's effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in "Outliers") that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.
The reasoning in "Outliers," which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for "What the Dog Saw," the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell's talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

Why are people racist?

1. People are animals.  
2. Animals have behavioral tendencies.
3. Some of these tendencies, in certain situations, help keep the animal alive and more likely to pass on the innate behavioral wiring.
4. Wariness of strangers is one of these tendencies.

One example is to avoid touching feces. Another example is to be wary of strangers.
Why be wary of strangers?
Because they are not bound or restrained by the rules and social pressures of your community.  
Tourists are notoriously disrespectful.  As are armies on the march.
People who look different from you are typically not from your community.

On the bright side, if there is someone who looks or behaves differently but is long-known within a community, then most people (even small town conservatives) tend to accept them as a person.

So, my short answer to why people are racist is because they have not gotten to know very many of "those strange looking people."  Strange and unfamiliar is High-Risk, Low-Benefit. 

I bring this up because I have the good fortune of working with a couple of racist hicks.

ClimateGate

My father, an avowed right-wing muck racker, (I think he thoroughly enjoys being contrary and conservative) sent me several links regarding Climategate last week. I dug into it and found a bunch of polarized crap; so I passed it off as just another case of right wing ranting. This, however, appeared today in the NYTimes Freakonomics column. I've included a short except here:

Many blogs covering the topic are just as bombastic. The most prominent blogs in the arena, however, tend to be less so. That said, emotions still run high — particularly in the comments sections. If you feel like wading into the conversation, you might wish to sample Dot Earth, Watts Up With That, andRealClimate, which presents "climate science from climate scientists." The discussions at RealClimate are intense, for at least two reasons: they are more about the science itself than the conversations at other blogs; and several of its contributors are the very scientists whose e-mails were among the C.R.U. leak, including Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State and one of the scientists responsible for the now-famous"hockey stick" graph, which has been widely used as evidence of a dangerous global-warming trend.

I find it interesting that many people have completely uninformed opinions. In this case, many people believe there is no such thing as global warming and others who believe it is perfectly reasonable to pass draconian command and control laws to

reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In some circles, if you say that you believe in global warming, it is almost as flaky as saying that you believe in god. You have to quickly qualify your statement to make it seem more reasonable and thought-out that simple blind conformity.

But, back to my original topic, I'll just say that I am surprised ClimateGate made it to the popular media... And with a big splash too - currently 114 length comments on Dubner's blog!

StatCounter

I am smiling right now. This is very cool.

I installed StatCounter on my blog and found the one person in the world, aside from my wife, who has at least glanced at writing: somebody in

Country	Korea, Republic Of
Region	Pusan-jikhalsi
City	Busa

They were looking for "political return on investment" and happened across my blog!

Celebrity appeal

Why do people care about celebrity gossip? 

If I turn off my sense of superiority and cynicism, it is fun to hear the gos in bite-size format.  

It is about the same as hearing gossip about someone I know personally.  For example, someone I know sent out a text message saying he couldn't ride that morning because he had too much drink and blow.  This is classic what-the-f**k gossip. "Blow"? 

Am I low-class or innately stupid and unrefined if I look at traffic accidents as I pass by?  Or if my interest is peaked by people behaving badly or bizarrely? 

Have you heard of George Clooney?  Probably.  

Have you heard of Chris Smith?  Probably not - so my gossip about him probably not too interesting to you.

Cheers,

Greg Robin