Moving on to Chapter 1 in my ongoing pedantic plodding through Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!
Continue reading “A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 1”
A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction
So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book Outliers: The Story of Success
To balance things out, I’ve also included some thoughts from the improv part of my brain: the part that takes ideas at more than face value and tries to run with them.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!
Continue reading “A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction”
Deleting arXiv References?
A while back, Aram commented on how he had trouble trying to get arXiv links into a paper he had written (read the further comments for a comment indicating that it was not the policy of the journal to do this.)
Which reminded me: I believe I’ve submitted papers with arXiv references to Physical Review A, but looking back over the papers I don’t see any such references unless the paper was never published. Does anyone know Physical Review’s policy on this? A quick scan of the guidelines didn’t yield anything. Shouldn’t Physical Review be allowing these links? Sure if I want to be careful about a paper I’ll check out the published version, but many times, having the preprint around is extremely useful.
Which reminds me even further: am I the only one who finds it extremely annoying that references in Physical Review don’t include the titles of the papers? (Unless, of course I’m writing a PRL, in which the silly four page limit makes me wish I could use doi’s for references alone.)
Villa Sophia Skiing
Skiing past our home in Seattle:
Later a group of local kids made a snowboard jump…I would have used it but it didn’t look all that sturdy, and I probably would have ended up with an action shot of “Dave destroying local kids joy.”
Bouncing Back From Droping Off The Edge
Whew. That was quite a quarter! Talk about drinking straight from a firehose. Okay, okay, I still have a long list of missed deadlines that I need to get to ASAP, but at last it feels like maybe I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (don’t tell me its the next quarter, I want to be delusional for at least a few days.)
The winter break is always a great time, most importantly because “OMG snow!” (Seattle got another four plus inches of snow last night. Dude, that’s like a two feet equivalent in most of the rest of the northern U.S.!) and because of all the great Christmas cheer (like the war on Christmas taking place right here in Washington. In order to add to this war, my front yard currently includes a Santa Flamingo and his nine flamingo Reindeer:
) And most importantly because I like to spend my winter break thinking really crazy ideas. In other words, it’s more likely that there will actually be something worth reading on this blog in the coming weeks (promised to be crazy however, always ruin being crazy, so I won’t promise to be crazy, because, well, that would be crazy.)
Conference Spam
Amusing, in a twisted an irritating sort of way.
Who’s on first:
Dear scholars:
Here is an invitation letter from 6th International Conference on Service Systems and Service Management(ICSSSM’09) which will be held in Xiamen in June next year. We hope you can submit your new papers and exchange new ideas with us. There is a call for letter in attachment. And if you’re interested in,please login our conference website: http://sm2.xmu.edu.cn/icsssm09/index.htm.
Looking forward to your participation!
ICSSSM09 COMMITTEE
—
Thank you again for your contribution.
Sincerely,
icsssm09 Organizing Committee
Email:
What’s on second:
Please remove me from your email list.
dabacon (at) cs.washington.edu
– Hide quoted text –
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 1:12 AM, icsssm09 wrote:
> Dear scholars:
>
> Here is an invitation letter from 6th International Conference on
> Service Systems and Service Management(ICSSSM’09) which will be held in
> Xiamen in June next year. We hope you can submit your new papers and
> exchange new ideas with us. There is a call for letter in attachment. And if
> you’re interested in,please login our conference website:
> http://sm2.xmu.edu.cn/icsssm09/index.htm.
>
> Looking forward to your participation!
>
>
> ICSSSM09 COMMITTEE
>
> —
> Thank you again for your contribution.
> Sincerely,
> icsssm09 Organizing Committee
> Email:
>
I don’t know’s on third:
ICSSSM09
Dear Author(s):
Thank you for submitting your paper to ICSSSM2009!
We are sorry to notify you that the submitting method has changed
from sending e-mail to this mailbox to login of the conference website
http://one-stop1.baocard.com/icsssm09/en_index.php .And this mailbox
is invalid now. So if you have already submitted your paper, please
make sure that you will re-submit on the website. Otherwise, the paper
which sent into this mailbox will not be collected for the meeting.
And icsssm09 Organizing Committee would not be responsible for it.
Sorry for bringing these troubles to you.
And thank you again for supporting us!
ICSSSM09 Organizating Committee
—
Thank you again for your contribution.
Sincerely,
icsssm09 Organizing Committee
Email:
Large Earth Collider
Oh noes: Scientists Warn Large Earth Collider May Destroy Earth:
BATAVIA, IL–In October, Fermilab scientists joined a growing number of physicists around the world in warning that the Very Large Earth Collider–a $117 billion electromagnetic particle accelerator built to study astronomical phenomena by colliding Earth into various heavenly bodies–could potentially destroy Earth when it sends the planet careening headlong into Mars, Jupiter, or even the sun.
…
Physicists at CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory, who underwrote the VLEC’s construction with donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, agree that there are “some troubling variables” whenever attempting to launch Earth through the vacuum of space into a massive body of solid matter. Yet, they insist, the academic benefits of a planetary collision outweigh any risk of annihilating the Earth
Damn, and I’d just drawn up plans for the Incredibly Large Sun Collider (we can get ahold of the sun, so the joke goes, by traveling there at night.)
A Race
Who can find what is wrong the quickest in arXiv:0812.1385 (or verify that it is correct!)? 1,2,3,….go!
Ponzi Of a Billion Dollar Kind
Holy mole: a $50 billion dollar Ponzi scheme run by Bernard L. Madoff. That’s an astounding amount of money if true.
Update: This is now big news, of course. For an interesting read of someone who has been pursuing this fraud since 1999 see The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud by Harry Markopolos. h/t nakedshorts.
Worldview Manager Hits Prime Time
The Optimizer ideas on Worldview Manager gets written up in Forbes.
The program will work by showing users a list of statements about a topic and then asking them how strongly they agree or disagree with each. At the end, the system will present users with a list of the statements they endorsed that contradict one another. It will also suggest that users reconsider those views and the assumptions behind them.
Similar teaching programs already exist for narrow fields, especially in technical areas of philosophy. Aaronson, though, is extremely ambitious for Worldview Manager and wants it to cover all the hot-button issues: gay marriage, the Middle East and more.
The program won’t take sides. In fact, two people with opposite ideas about, say, animal rights, could both get the equivalent of a passing score from the program, as long as their ideas were internally consistent.
For some reason this last line reminds me of a line from Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Please rank: consistent and wrong, inconsistent and correct, consistent and right, or inconsistent and wrong. Of course you will yell that it is impossible to be inconsistent and correct, but I just watched a PBS special on quantum gravity (the one where the narrator talks really really slow. Does this really help people understand?), so for now I believe otherwise.