I find this pathetic. The Olympics are a multi-billion dollar industry, which at the end of the day rides on the talents and literal blood and sweat of the athletes. The Olympic committee members are wined and dined around the world with the status of heads of state.

Yet the best athletes in the world. Those who win a gold medal. Don't actually get a gold metal.

It's gold-plated silver. It must contain at least 6 grams of gold (roughly $150 on the current market.) I've seen some different statistics, one saying the medals are 150 grams, another saying roughly 250. Let's assume the last one, and assume that the Jade makes up 50 grams, that leaves 200 grams of metal. Current gold prices are about $710 for 28 grams. So a medal would be worth about $5050 in gold. According to Yahoo answers, there will be 302 gold medals issued. For a total of just over 1.5 million dollars worth of gold.

The Olympics can afford that. NBC paid more than 800 million dollars to win the broadcast rights in the US. Internationally, the bids add up to well over a billion dollars.

With all the money behind the Olympics, the least they could do is give actual gold medals to the winners.

We played Team Handball in high school gym class back in good old Wisconsin. It is perhaps the most bizarre sport I've played. Imagine soccer, but you use your hands and dribble the ball like in basketball. Rather than a basket, keep the goal as in soccer. Imagine the goalie trying to stop a guy from throwing the ball into an enormous goal. Good luck. Anyway, my impression of the sport was pretty much this guy's, from the Corner:

As my brother and I were trying to figure it out (we were watching Spain versus Poland), one of the Spanish players actually clotheslined one of the Poles — I mean he hammered this poor Polish dude. We both howled. It was cartoon funny — like when Bugs Bunny clotheslines the wolf. All that was missing was the head and body going forward while the rubber-like neck goes ten feet in the opposite direction to a reverberating “boing!”

Play stopped, but no foul was called. The poor dazed guy picked himself up, rubbed his jaw, and incredulously gestured to the referee — arm fully extended in the proper clothesline position. The ref and the Spanish clothesliner both just shrugged, like, “Sorry dude, all part of the game.”

Hilarious!

Ann adds: I would only add that at our high school...only the boys played handball. I believe at the time, the girls were outside playing field hockey.

From the AP, via the Minneapolis Star-Trib:

LUVERNE, Minn. - Randy Swaney will spend the rest of his life in prison without a chance for parole in the death of a state park worker in 2001. The 37-year-old man was sentenced Friday morning in Luverne after being convicted of all seven murder charges in the death of Carrie Nelson at Blue Mounds State Park...

The jury deliberated for six hours before returning its verdict before dawn Friday. It convicted him on three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder.

Why didn't Minnesota charge him with genocide? In any case, I'm glad to hear they put him away for good.

After sitting on its hands, letting the National Enquirer take the lead on the whole "John Edwards' Love Child" affair, it's clear that the New York Times has decided that the best defense is a good offense.

Two Georgians Say They Have Bigfoot’s Body

But on Friday at a hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., a pair of Bigfoot hunters say they will present what they contend is the most definitive proof yet of an animal that science says does not exist: DNA evidence and photographs of a dead specimen they say they found in a remote swath of woods in northern Georgia.

Yes, that should help sales. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Char has a good point, I think, about a recent report on Obama's tax proposal by Alex Brill and Alan D. Viard, which was linked by Greg Mankiw. You can read about it in Char's posts, and in the comments thereto. One of the authors of the report, Alan Viard, replied to Char's original post. I added some comments too, less snarky than usual.

However, I still disagree on a technical point, which is the claim that you can increase marginal tax rates across the board and still lower the total tax.

Char writes:

I don't have the tax code in front of me, so I'll have to use a cartoon example (again). A firefighter with two kids earns $50,000 per year. Under the current tax code (let's say) after taking the personal exemption and so on, she pays taxes on $30,000. She's in the 20 percent tax bracket, so she pays $30k x .2 = $6000. She has two kids, so she gets a tax credit of $1000 x 2 = $2000, so her final tax burden is $4000.

Under Obama's plan (again, I'm making up numbers here just to demonstrate the point), say the marginal tax rate is raised to 25 percent while the child tax credit is doubled. She pays $30k x .25 = $7500 minus the tax credit of $4000 = $3500. She pays less in taxes despite the fact that she pays at a higher marginal tax rate.

Brill and Viard's point is that the higher marginal tax rate will reduce peoples' incentive to work and therefore will reduce growth. Debatable, but not an outlandish speculation. To avoid confusion, they should have made clear that low and middle income earners will at the same time be paying less under Obama's plan than they do now.

I understand his point, but since people who currently make no gross income pay no taxes, marginal rates can only decrease across the board while total taxes fall if there is to be negative taxation, i.e. if a person with two kids and no income gets a $2000 check in the mail. I assume marginal rates are non-negative under any plan..

Specifically, let T(y) be the average tax collected from everyone making y dollars gross income, and suppose m(y)>0 is the marginal rate, so that

T(y)= ∫₀^y m(z) z dz

and in particular T(0)=0. If a new marginal rate comes along, say with Obama's plan, and m₀(y)>m(y) for all y, then clearly T₀(y)>T(y) for all y.

I conclude that marginal rates must fall somewhere below $25k, the region not shown in the orginal graph of Brill and Viard. If the marginal tax rate falls for people earning less than $25k, then they will have more incentive to work. That's the basis of Brill and Viard's analysis after all. Perhaps it's better to provide such incentives to the poor than the rich? One could argue that incentives for the rich are more effective, because they will start new businesses which will help everyone. But then perhaps it would be better to fiddle with corporate income taxes and capital gains taxes instead.

Unfortunately, Alex Brill and Alan D. Viard don't provide a graph for the marginal rates under $25,000. Let's guess at what it might look like. In the first scenario, let's suppose Obama's plan lowers the marginal rate under $25k as shown, so that near zero income the marginal rate goes down by about 6% from a current level 10%. This seems to be in line with what the plan's goal is. I've guessed that the current rate decreases to 10% at zero income. Here is the graph:




It's easy to calculate the effective total tax by income, and the percent change in after-tax income, shown here:





You can see from the graph that with Obama's plan under scenario 1, people will be paying more taxes if they make $40k or more. That's not what the plan will do, according to the analysis in the report Alex Brill and Alan D. Viard cite. Let's guess again, making Obama's plan more progressive. Suppose the marginal tax rate under $25k is zero, under scenario 2. We get the following graphs:





Under this scenario, people making over about $67k will be paying more taxes. It doesn't seem to me that this is in agreement with the Obama plan either. My understanding is that the income level where people will be paying more tax is higher than that.

Something doesn't seem to be adding up right. It is unfortunate that Alex Brill and Alan D. Viard didn't provide all the data.

Update

Greg Mankiw posts a note from Alan Viard:

Given some confusion on the blogosphere, I want to reiterate that my and Alex' article does not find an increase in average tax rates, or in tax payments, at the income ranges shown in the chart. On the contrary, our article makes clear that Obama's proposed tax cuts would cause average tax rates and tax payments to decline throughout this income range...

Ok, this is not possible. Even if Obama's plan calls for 0 taxes below $25k and the current plan has a constant marginal rate of 21% from $0 through $40k, average tax rates go up at the $105,000 dollar point. This scenario clearly over-estimates of the tax break Obama will be giving to low-income people, so I don't think Mr. Viard's data and conclusion are in agreement. See the graphs below.

This site claims that the "Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" was banned by the Federal Government:

The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, written by Robert Brent and illustrated by Harry Lazarus, is a children's book published in the 1960s that was intended to explain to kids how they could set up a home chemistry lab and conduct simple experiments. Supposedly the US government had the book removed from libraries and banned for sale on the grounds that the projects were too dangerous for its intended audience. I would have to agree that you probably don't want your kids making and igniting hydrogen in the garage, ...

Well, I made and ignited hydrogen in my bedroom. What's the big deal? Some electrolysis and a match gives you get a little 'pop.' It would be difficult for a kid to make enough to hurt himself.

You can download "The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" here. Share with a child in your life.

This being the heat of August, naturally thoughts turn to Christmas air fares.

They are ridiculous this year. Within a couple days it went up several hundred dollars for the 4 of us to travel from Los Angeles to Milwaukee. In the end, for my sister to fly Sun-Sun around Christmas, and for me and the kids to fly Sun-New Years Eve is costing about $2,100.

That's what comes from airlines cutting millions of seats.

Book now, or forever stay on the ground!

My wife Jui and I went to the pediatrician's office today to get our daughter Shivani's ears pierced. Shivani is seven months old. Like my wife, practically all little girls in India get their ears pierced, so it sounded like a good idea. I was pretty nervous though.

In the waiting room, Shivani was looking up me and smiling. She looked so trusting!

In the exam room, when the nurses held her down and marked her ears with ink, Shivani started wailing. When they were done marking, and Shivani started to calm down, it was clear to everyone that I was having second thoughts. The nurses gave my wife and me a minute alone to discuss it. In the end, we decided not to go through with it. Thanks to Jui for being so understanding.



I don't want my little girl to suffer, even something as minor as ear piercing. She can get it done later, if she wants. Besides, wouldn't giving her earrings be gilding the lily?

I've written a few posts [1,2,3,4] on economic growth, energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Essentially I've pointed out that energy conservation plans, and the energy plans of both McCain and Obama are not going to help us for long, because with economic growth will come ever-increasing demand for energy.

Now there is this report from the UK on Greens who see GDP growth as the real root cause of the problem:

John Barrett, one of the authors of the reports by the Stockholm Environment Institute at York (SEI-Y) for the government and campaign group WWF*, was quoted by the BBC today:

"We are constantly battling against increases of wealth... There's a very fundamental problem here that no one really wants to talk about..."

Stuart Bond of WWF told the Beeb: "Our claims on emissions are simply a big lie.

"There is no way the government can hope to achieve any of its emissions targets without cheating unless it changes its policies on encouraging flying and hoping to satisfy people's insatiable demands for buying more and more stuff."

As to how that should be done, Bond was reluctant to give specifics. But he said there was a need for a "strategic plan to set out very clearly how the UK will become a low carbon economy by 2050... at the moment there is no central priority for environmental issues. Consumers' consumption of goods is the driver of emissions. The continued pursuit of GDP, of economic growth - that is a mantra that we must question."

So with one hand, I salute them for their honesty and recognition of economic growth as a factor. With the other I point to my temple and move my finger in small circles, the universal symbol for "cookoo."

Frozen water found near Mars' polar ice cap!

Now if only NASA would launch a probe to see if the Sun is really hot.

Found in The Corner:

"Now the world will watch and remember what we do here" Barack Obama, Berlin

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here" Abe Lincoln, Gettysburg

Update:

Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," adding: "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."

Obama is getting a little scary.

Erratum. There was a mistake in my code. I have re-done the figure and the text in this post to reflect the correction. We are doing a little bit worse than I thought, compared to Western Europe and Japan.

In an earlier post, I wrote

... energy conservation of say 20% would only buy us about 7 1/2 years before we are right back in the same boat. This is assuming a modest growth rate of 3% for the economy. My guess is that 20% is a lot, in that it would take a lot of effort and belt-tightening to gain that sort of efficiency.

I would like to go back and try to get a handle on that 20% conservation, which I said was a lot. I recently found this very nice graph at the Wikipedia page on "Energy Consumption."



to which I have added the colored rays shooting out of the origin and the legend at top right (click image to zoom).

The underlying graph plots per capita energy consumption vs. per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The first thing that stands out with this graph is how much GDP per person the US produces vs. nearly every other country. Yes, the US uses a lot of energy, but that is mostly because we produce a lot of stuff per person. More than twice what Spain produces per person. Roughly 50% more per person than Germany. Only Japan has higher per capita output. The second thing to notice is that the US is not that inefficient. There are many countries that do worse than we do, and we are better than the world average. We are roughly as efficient as Spain. If we could get by with 90% of the energy we use, without decreasing GDP, we would be like France. That would buy us 3.6 years before we were consuming as much energy as we are today. Conserving 20% would make us as efficient as Germany, and buy us 7.5 years. The UK is doing well. We would have to cut about 32% of our energy use to get their level of efficiency, and we would gain 13 years in doing so. All of these calculation assume 3% annual growth in our GDP. Japan is doing very well in this regard. Cutting 50% of our energy would get us to where they are, and gain us 23 years. That's not nothing.

Japan and those western European countries have an advantage in that they are not as spread out as we are. They have less transportation costs, for people and freight. They may also have milder weather, I'm not sure. I doubt that many Americans would be willing to adopt a Japanese style of living. Very high population density, with a high percentage of people living in small (by American standards) apartments.

So the bottom line, I think, is that we can do better with our energy use. I still think that 20% would be an ambitious goal, gaining us about 7.5 years. Not earth changing, but not bad.

An interesting article at Forbes.com "The Wiki-Hacker Strikes Again"

By matching users' IP addresses with the public database of addresses registered to different corporations, Griffith's "Wikiscanner" revealed widespread corporate meddling on Wikipedia, as companies attempted to add marketing pitches to their own entries, or hide controversies.

[...] The new Wikipedia-mining tool set allows users to not only filter Wikipedia edits, automatically pinpointing corporations who edit articles about their company or products, but also reveals the corporate affiliation of users whose business and personal IP addresses had been previously masked.

I agree that the anonymity of Wikipedia causes problems with conflict of interest. But this problem is certainly not limited to Evil Corporations. Should a person be allowed to edit his own biography? Should Sierra Club or the NRA or Planned Parenthood be able to edit their entries? Should Democrats edit the article on the Democratic Party? Or the Republican party for that matter? Should members of the McCain campaign be allowed to edit their candidate's page?

Suppose you have some beef with Dow Chemical. Perhaps you are a disgruntled former employee, suing Dow for mistreatment. So you go into the Wiki page, put in a few paragraphs describing poor employee treatment by Dow. Why shouldn't Dow be able to go in and provide some balance?

When this guy's software becomes widely available (in about a week), you will hear a lot from anti-corporate types about corporate abuse of Wikipedia. But corporate abuse is only the very tip of the iceberg.

I wasn't paying much attention to the recent controversy surrounding a paper on global warming that appeared in an American Physical Society (APS) publication. It seems that The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley wrote an article that was critical of the IPCC's conclusions. This made it seem like the APS had pulled back its "the science is settled" stance on anthropogenic global warming.

This was quickly picked up by the Right side of the blogosphere. I saw several sites pointing to this publication as being big news. However the APS quickly added a disclaimer to the top of the article:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions.

So it seemed like the Right blogosphere had been suckered.

But now, in a really fascinating development, the Viscount has fired back! He's demanding an apology from the APS in an open letter. It turns out the paper was in fact peer reviewed (by one reviewer, typical I think of review papers), accepted pending revision, revised and then published. It starts out polite, then quickly takes of the gloves!

19 July 2008
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley Carie, Rannoch, PH17 2QJ, UK

Arthur Bienenstock, Esq., Ph.D.,President, American Physical Society,Wallenberg Hall, 450 Serra Mall, Bldg 160,Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA 94305.

Dear Dr. Bienenstock, Physics and Society

The editors of Physics and Society, a newsletter of the American Physical Society, invited me to submit a paper for their July 2008edition explaining why I considered that the warming that might be expected from anthropogenic enrichment of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide might be significantly less than the IPCC imagines.

I very much appreciated this courteous offer, and submitted a paper. The commissioning editor referred it to his colleague, who subjected it to a thorough and competent scientific review. I was delighted to accede to all of the reviewer's requests for revision (see the attached reconciliation sheet). Most revisions were intended to clarify for physicists who were not climatologists the method by which the IPCC evaluates climate sensitivity - a method which the IPCC does not itself clearly or fully explain. The paper was duly published, immediately after a paper by other authors setting out the IPCC's viewpoint. Some days later, however, without my knowledge or consent, the following appeared, in red, above the text of my paper as published on the website of Physics and Society:

"The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions."

This seems discourteous. I had been invited to submit the paper; I had submitted it;
an eminent Professor of Physics had then scientifically reviewed it in meticulous detail; I had revised it at all points requested, and in the manner requested; the editors had accepted and published the reviewed and revised draft (some 3000
words longer than the original) and I had expended considerable labor, without having been offered or having requested any honorarium.

Please either remove the offending red-flag text at once or let me have the name and qualifications of the member of the Council or advisor to it who considered my paper before the Council ordered the offending text to be posted above my paper; a copy of this rapporteur's findings and ratio decidendi; the date of the Council meeting at which the findings were presented; a copy of the minutes of the discussion; and a
copy of the text of the Council's decision, together with the names of those present at the meeting. If the Council has not scientifically evaluated or formally considered my paper, may I ask with what credible scientific justification, and on whose authority, the offending text asserts primo,that the paper had not been scientifically reviewed when it had; secundo, that its conclusions disagree with what is said (on no evidence) to be the "overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community"; and, tertio, that "The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's
conclusions"? Which of my conclusions does the Council disagree with, and on what
scientific grounds (if any)?

Having regard to the circumstances, surely the Council owes me an apology?
Yours truly,

THE VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY

Give 'em hell Viscount! You are 100% correct. The APS has no business putting that statement at the top of the article. They certainly shouldn't lie about it lacking of peer review. If the article wasn't sound, then they shouldn't have accepted it. Rebuttals to the article may appear in issues of the publication that follow, naturally; that is the proper channel for scientific debate.

Or has the APS declared War on Science?

Pew research has an online poll to test your news knowledge. Some of the questions are very easy, some slightly less so. None are terribly hard, though I did think I might have gotten one of them wrong (I didn't.)

After taking the quiz, you can see how it broke down along gender lines. The average man had a percentile rank of 56%, meaning the average man scored above average (men pulled the average up by 6%.)

Women on the other hand scored far below, at 39%.



Pew also showed the breakdown by question. The only question on which women outscored men was the one with the answer "Oprah Winfrey".

Pew did not ask people for general party affiliation. I would love to know if Republicans outscore democrats in very basic knowledge.

Steve Says: I got 'em all right too, but like you wasn't really sure about one or two. It's interesting too to look at the percentages of people getting each question right. (Spoilers ahead!) More people know Ben Bernanke than Harry Reid. Only 28% know we've lost 4000 service people in Iraq, but 46% percent know it was Kosovo that split from Serbia recently. Of course, 84% know O is campaigning for Obama.

Ann says: The two examples you state--the number of troops killed and Kosovo independence--were also interesting for other reasons. Those with college degrees scored worse on those questions, than people with less education. The Kosovo imbalance surprised me, but not the troop numbers. I think, again, that would be a good question to be able to see political demographics. My guess is that Democrats believe the death toll is considerably higher than it is--and since the college educated are disproportionately Democrats, it would skew their data.

A month or two ago, I poked around on the web to see if anyone played Irish traditional music on harmonica. I really didn't find much. It seemed to me that "harp" would be good for that, having a reedy sound not unlike an accordion. The absence of much stuff out there made me think that perhaps it was too hard to play that style on that instrument.

But I was wrong! I ran across this guy on my blog rounds (at LGF I think):



Awesome! Those tunes are "The Drunken Landlady", "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" and "John Stenson's Reel," standards all. I play them on Irish flute, at a fraction of the "goodness" of this guy.

His web site is here.

Perdue has investigated a researcher for misconduct, finding two instances. One if its misconduct findings:

"The committee also found that Taleyarkhan added another person as an author even though the person did not substantially contribute."

I am shocked, shocked! to hear that such a thing continues to happen. It's a sad day for Perdue. It's a sad day for science.

I live in West Los Angeles, which means I am surrounded by die-hard liberals. I also work at a Jewish hospital, most people I work with are Jewish, and live in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.

The buzz I'm picking up is that Obama has major problems in the Jewish community.

A friend of mine said she attended an Obama event, where he appeared before a group of liberal Jews--which should be a natural constituency. In her words:

"He basically told them F.U....You could practically hear the gasps."

When talking of the Middle East, she said he mostly talked about the suffering of the Palestinians. Not a word about the suffering of Israelis.

I think there's a video of the event online; I'll have a look for it.

The Jewish vote will come down to a simple question: do they want liberal economic and social policies more than they want a sane Middle East policy?

And travels back in time 40 years!

China could beat US to Moon, says Nasa chief.

Jim Manzi continues to write interesting articles over at NRO and its Corner blog. His take on science is pretty interesting, and is a breath of fresh air when the Corner (too often) seems to be dominated by all things Catholic.

However, I would argue with him regarding Genetic Algorithms. My opinion of them is much lower than his.

So-called Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are computer-software implementations of the same kind of mathematics that takes place in the biological process of evolution. [...] Today, GAs are widely deployed in artificial-intelligence computer programming to solve such prosaic engineering problems as optimally scheduling trucks on a delivery route or identifying the best combination of process-control settings to get maximum output from a factory.

In a surprisingly technical detail, he describes a method for toggling 100 switches at an industrial plant to maximize output:

Our goal, then, is to find the “genome” that will lead the plant to run at maximum output. The algorithm creates an initial bunch of guesses — genomes — by randomly generating, say, 1,000 strings of 100 zeros and ones. We then do 1,000 sequential production runs at the factory, by setting the switches in the plant to the combination of settings indicated by each genome and measuring the output of the plant for each; this measured output is termed the “fitness value.” (Typically, in fact, we construct a software-based simulation of the factory that allows us to run such tests more rapidly.) Next, the program selects the 500 of the 1,000 organisms that have the lowest fitness values and eliminates them. This is the feedback measurement in our algorithm — and it is directly analogous to the competition for survival of biological entities.
Next comes the algorithmic process for generating new guesses, which has two major components: crossover and mutation. These components are directly modeled on the biological process of reproduction. First, the 500 surviving organisms are randomly paired off into 250 pairs of mates. The GA then proceeds through these pairs of organisms one at a time. For each pair it flips a coin. If the coin comes up heads, then organism A “reproduces” with organism B by simply creating one additional copy of each; this is called direct replication. If it comes up tails, then organism A reproduces with organism B via “crossover”: The program selects a random “crossover point,” say at the 34th of the 100 positions, and then creates one offspring that has the string of zeroes and ones from organism A up to the crossover point and those from organism B after the crossover point, and an additional offspring that has the string of zeroes and ones from organism B up to the crossover point and those from organism A after the crossover point. The 500 resulting offspring are added to the population of 500 surviving parents to create a new population of 1,000 organisms. Finally, a soupçon of mutation is added by randomly flipping roughly every 10,000th digit from zero to one or vice versa.
The new generation is now complete. Fitness is evaluated for each, the bottom 500 are eliminated, and the surviving 500 reproduce through the same process of direct replication, crossover, and mutation to create the subsequent generation. This cycle is repeated over and over again through many generations. The average fitness value of the population moves upward through these iterations, and the algorithm, in fits and starts, closes in on the best solution..

Whew! Indeed, this is the sort of thing that GA practitioners do.

I think it's nonsense. There is no guarantee you will find the optimum setting this way. Further, there is absolutely no reason to believe a priori that this procedure will work any better than a much simpler non-GA greedy approach would work:

1) Start with an initial random positioning of all 100 switches.
2) Put your finger on the first switch.
3) Toggle the switch.
4) If production decreases, toggle the switch back.
5) Put your finger on the next switch (loop back to the first if you are at the 100th switch), and go back to step 3.
6) Exit when you can't increase production by toggling a switch.

It's clear that this algorithm increases production and must terminate. But like the GA algorithm described, it doesn't necessarily find the best setting. You could run it several times with different random initial states, but even then you are just hoping that you are not getting stuck short of the best setting. You could try flipping 2 switches at a time, or 3, or N. But without more information on the function you are minimizing, it's pretty much hopeless. Only checking all 2^100 possibilities guarantees you will find the optimum setting.

GA has always seemed to me to be hocus pocus. When more is known about the function, you are likely better off with standard descent methods. When nothing is known, GA is likely no better than any other way of repeatedly guessing.