Sunday, November 15, 2009
This is a post about why gerrymandering might not be as unethical as it appears; or maybe it’s about the hidden agenda of those who argue against it. Each time you encounter a highly skewed (power-law) distribution the population spread out on the long tail can be assumed to suffer from a severe coordination problem. [...]
I have recently started reading Albert Hirschman’s 1991 book “The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.” I’m only 20 pages into it so no telling where it’s going. But so far, it has totally blown me away. The book is an outline of three styles of rhetoric that are commonly used by reactionaries, i.e. those [...]
Asked what the earliest known joke is Robert Mankoff, here in this long geeky video on cartoon humor, spins a tail saying: Shortly after the Civil War. He tells a two awful early proto-jokes, one from the Greeks along with another from the century before the Civil War. He’s wrong about this as you can [...]
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
When dealing with communities it’s nice to have some frame works. For example I like both the one from Collaborative Circles and this one. And I often highlight how the common cause that binds a community can be outward facing (defensive) or inward facing (building something). Here is another one: a dozen metrics for [...]
This first chart shows the economic growth of various nations during the years of the Great Depression. The red arrows show when each nation abandoned thier commitment to extremely ‘sound money’ as represented by the gold standard. (The original source pdf.) This second chart is about the current recession. It shows the correlation between the level of fiscal [...]
Cars get into accidents. Adding cars to the system increases the number of accidents. The paper discussed here argues that adding a car in a high traffic state adds about $2,500 worth of additional costs, almost $7 dollars a day! Here in Boston, a bus/subway transit pass costs a bit less than $2/day. My somewhat [...]
The folks at DailyKos have an interesting series of surveys. The second question from this one has been getting a lot of play recently, but the first question is interesting as well. A lot of people no longer identify as Republican and those left behind are settling into increasingly minority opinions. Thanks to Jim I’ve [...]
That is the voteview plot for the current supreme court; which can be contrasted to the same plot for voters in various states. The horizontal axis accounts the vast most of voting behavior and is a measure of economic liberal-conservative; i.e. the degree that government should shape markets to the benefit of small v.s. large economic [...]
I suspect a lot of people believe that their state has a progressive tax structure, i.e. that the well off pay a larger percentage of their income and wealth than to the poor. That belief is wrong. There are a very few exceptions, Delaware for example – at least in 2002. Here’s what it really [...]
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Thank you, my fellow Americans!
Fresh Links…