I spotted this I PRAY2 license plate in Delaware. The I and the P are separated by one of those donate to the police stickers. Do thise things really get you out of tickets?I suppose I PRAY ALSO was too long to f...
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Back in the early 90's, I once had the honor of playing golf at Rolling Hills Country Club and Golf Course in Ft. Lauderdale where Caddyshack was filmed. That experience didn't give me any extra information I might have used to do better on the Caddyshack 20th anniversary quiz from Mental Floss.I got 67%, 6 out of 9, how well can you do?The 30th Anniversary Caddyshack QuizGood Lu...
Sussex county in Delaware published their top 100 tax delinquents. The .pdf is available from the News Journal. pdf's are hard to use so I put the data into a Google Doc so that anyone can run calculations on it. Kudos to the News Journal and Sussex county for actually providing the data to the public.First the graphs. The plot below shows amount owed by the tax delinquent plotted as a function of the rank for the top 100 tax delinquents in Sussex...
Friday, 23 July 2010
I finally got around to cleaning up some of the junk (archaeological finds) floated in the backyard by the rising and then receding waters of the Shellpot Creek. There was a ton of styrofoam that I wanted to get what I could of, and an assortment of other interesting things.A sampling of the most strange things I collected is shown in the art project photo above.Enough styrofoam to create my own garbage pile in the Pacific gyre. Please carefully...
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Monday, 19 July 2010
Tons of yellow pear tomatoesand grape tomatoes from the tomato plants this season this far.I am not sure how many more yellow pear tomatoes I will get as that plant looks wilted and dying, but I am not sure from what. We have had a long heat wave followed by a lot of rain, and while we kept watering the garden at least during the heat, this one tomato plant out of the four doesn't seem happy at all.Tonight, a yellow pear and grape tomato and onion...
Violins and Starships points to a website that will take your text, perform some machinations on it and determine which author your writing is the most like. I tried some samples and the author it suggests does seem to depend on which text I use. Most of the comments I read seem to be people who have posted work from their short stories, novels and space operas that they are writing. Unfortunately all my writing is here so the blog is what gets...
Saturday, 17 July 2010
While collecting the unemployment data I also ran some reports on the time that people are unemployed. The data is available showing up to 5 weeks, 5 to 14 weeks, 15 to 26 weeks and longer than 26 weeks. One of the signs of the depth of this recession is not just the number of people unemployed but also the length of time they have been unemployed. The charts below show the number of people unemployed for a given number of weeks in a bar chart...
Friday, 16 July 2010
Howard points to an excellent refutation of the ridiculous claims by Laffer that unemployment benefits drive unemployment. The chart from the opinion page clearly shows a lag of 10 months to a year of the peak in benefits payouts vs. unemployment rate peaks. Perhaps it is unemployment which drives unemployment benefits.One thing that drives me nuts on these charts is when the presenter doesn't cite the data. I would make it a requirement that...
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
For the first time since we have lived in this house, Shellpot Creek lept its banks and flooded portions of the backyard.The waterfall is an almost flat raging, rushing torrent.A view of the flooded backyard from an upstairs window. Just as dramatic was that it couldn't drain fast enough in front of the house.The creek flows from the cul-de-sac......down the street.Technically, for a short period this afternoon, our house was on an island in the...
Recent searches led me to several interesting articles by Mark Pagel and co-authors on the evolution of languages. These links may be behind Science or Nature paywalls or subscriptions, so I apologize if you are unable to read them.The basic point is that:1.) Researchers are using phylogenetic trees to classify the relatedness of languages and their divergence from earlier languages. This is an old idea. The link above is to a review of recent...
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Monday, 12 July 2010
Apparently there was a total eclipse Sunday that was only visible across large swaths of the uninhabitated Spouth Pacific (yahoo coverage). It was visible for Chile, and Tahiti and Easter Island. I have been to Easter Island! Given how tiny that island is it is a surprise that an eclipse would catch it, though I suppose almost everywhere on the globe has them sometime.With the baby and the expense and so many other places to travel to we wouldn't...
Yesterday we were driving back home from Norristown down I476 to I95 when we spotted a unusually tall pickup truck in front of us.It was a monster truck driving with us on the road.It was driving next to us on I95 from Norristown to at least the Marsh road exit just south of the Delaware state line where we got off. This vehicle was just a little pickup truck on huge tires and a suspension to go with them. The tires and modifications made the vehicle...
Thursday, 8 July 2010
At Carnegie Mellon I remember that a prerequisite for my psychology classes was to participate in a certain number of psychology experiments. We were the free subjects for the Carnegie Mellon Psychology department. Our department was not unique in this practice and Heinrich Joseph, Stephen Heine, and Ara Norenzayan from the University of British Columbia have a review paper in Behavioral and Brain Science says that the overwhelming number of psychology...
Monday, 5 July 2010
Frequent readers will be aware that an occasional hobby of mine is to numerically model sports and other interesting activities yet I lack much of the time or tools to do so. I have taken on NFL playoff football, both the entire playoffs and detailed modeling of the Superbowl down to the player level. I have also attempted, unsuccessfully, to model March Madness, the NCAA basketball playoffs, performing mostly analysis as opposed building a model...
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