October 15th Links

• An ancient glacial lake that formed in the Great Lakes region of North America, Lake Agassiz, is named after him, as are Mount Agassiz in California's Palisades, Mount Agassiz, in the Uinta Mountains, Agassiz Peak in Arizona and in his native Switzerland, the Agassizhorn in the Bernese Alps. Agassiz Glacier (Montana) and Agassiz Creek in Glacier National Park and Agassiz Glacier (Alaska) in Saint Elias Mountains, Mount Agassiz in Bethlehem, New Hampshire in the White Mountains also bear his name. A crater on Mars Crater Agassiz and a promontorium on the Moon are also named in his honour. A headland situated in Palmer Land, Antarctica is named in his honor, Cape Agassiz. A main-belt asteroid named 2267 Agassiz is also named in association with Louis Agassiz. [Wiki]
• Military press: Heels together with strict form with no pre-movement momentum. It is called the "Military Press" because this movement used to be the general indicator or test of one's strength in the military. The military press targets the deltoid muscles in the shoulders as well as the triceps. Additionally, it works the core and legs, which the lifter uses to help stabilize the weight. [Wiki]
• In the Lehigh Valley area it is not uncommon to find older buildings completely covered with slate, as is the building in the photograph above. The roofs on the Moravian College main campus are composed of slate, most of which probably came from the slate quarries of the Lehigh Valley. Consequently, most of it would be the local Martinsburg Shale, which was metamorphosed to a slate. Comenius Hall is on the left of the photograph above. [Gerencher]
• This wall map measures 35 feet by 8 feet and consists of 51 plastic and 56 paper map sheets, complete or partial, to create a scene which extends from the Gulf of Mexico (left) to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence (right) at a scale of 1:250,000. North is on the oblique, to the upper right. Each of the 107 individual map sheets measures 1 degree of latitude by 2 degrees of longitude. Because longitude converges toward the poles, the sheets are trapezoids, rather than rectangles, and the more southerly sheets are wider than the more northerly sheets. This creates a challenge to form a mosaic in the oblique view shown. The map resides on the wall outside the Earth Science classroom, room 106 Collier Hall of Science. [Gerencher]
• Today is November 25, 2002. Early this morning, my 15-year old son and I returned from the last game of Dan's football career—a typical-of-Columbia last-minute loss to Brown—a team that had only one Ivy League win until they beat Columbia. No decision I have made in my 56 years gives me more profound and bitter regret than my decision to recommend that Dan go to Columbia in February of his senior year of high school. If I had it to do over, I would recommend Pomona College. Dan also says he would have gone to Pomona if he had it to do over, but he has a more complex perspective on Columbia than I do because it meant to many more things to him than just football game playing time. For Dan's perspective, contact him. This is his father's Web site. The problem with Ivy League football is the team size is far too big—ridiculously big. The problem with Columbia is that the coaching staff is incompetent, the athletic director is apparently more interested in cronyism than competent coaching, and the administration above the athletic director does not care whether he engages in cronyism at the expense of the athletes or not. [John T Reed]
• Look up a hello world application in java. So, teacher what is a class. What does public mean. What is static void. This is seven chapters of a textbook just to say hello world. Including a f-ing array of strings as an argument. And a dot notation. What is System. What is out? [Phil G]
• On May 13th I established a new personal record for the longest non-stop hike in my life. Not only it involved 52km and 12 hours of walking but also an ascent of 1500m up to Rigi mountain at the very end of the hike. Me and my friend Ilya have participated in an annual Swiss event called Rigimarsch. It is a night time hike from a town called Bremgarten all the way up to the Rigi mountain. [link]
• In the same accelerated spirit of recent thru-hiking record attempts in the United States, his journey is about setting the FKT (fastest known time) from Patagonia to Alaska. It took Meegan 6.5 years and Bushby seven. Harrison is trying to do it in 20 months. "People are always telling me, 'You should see this along the way,' but I'm in a race," he says. [Outside]
• There is a tendency among modern people to avoid thinking of themselves as what they are (a sack of flesh occupying physical territory) and to instead think of themselves as a disembodied entity that exists primarily in idea-space and social-media-space. The younger someone is these days, the more likely they are to feel that changing the text in the "Political Views" box on Facebook is a profound statement—Facebook is real life, real life is only real if it's photographed and published electronically somewhere, etc. I'm probably not the only one who's heard a non-celebrity sincerely refer to their "personal brand." [Social Matter]
• That's such an obvious concept—that there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers. Conversely, if you own the only newspaper in Oshkosh and they were to invent more efficient ways of composing the whole newspaper, then when you got rid of the old technology and got new fancy computers and so forth, all of the savings would come right through to the bottom line. In all cases, the people who sell the machinery—and, by and large, even the internal bureaucrats urging you to buy the equipment—show you projections with the amount you'll save at current prices with the new technology. However, they don't do the second step of the analysis which is to determine how much is going stay home and how much is just going to flow through to the customer. I've never seen a single projection incorporating that second step in my life. And I see them all the time. Rather, they always read: "This capital outlay will save you so much money that it will pay for itself in three years." So you keep buying things that will pay for themselves in three years. And after 20 years of doing it, somehow you've earned a return of only about 4% per annum. That's the textile business. And it isn't that the machines weren't better. It's just that the savings didn't go to you. The cost reductions came through all right. But the benefit of the cost reductions didn't go to the guy who bought the equipment. [Munger]
• For intelligence specifically, repeated attempts to find rare IQ-increasing genes have come up totally dry. We don't know of any and the best available evidence is that there might not be any. (There are lots of rare variants which decrease IQ, but you don't want to select for those.) Intelligence seems to be mostly driven by common variants likely to be present in any set of parents, which you want to select for, and then to some degree by relatively rare but harmful variants, which you want to select against. [Gwern]
• The chart below shows a tally of an even broader set of technical, monetary, sentiment, and economic features frequently observed at bull market peaks, where the bars are restricted to periods with both overvaluation and unfavorable market internals on our measures. The only time we've ever seen a confluence of risk factors anywhere close to those of today was the week of March 24, 2000, which marked the peak of the technology bubble. In my view, this sort of analysis is useful because it doesn't rely on any single risk factor, and emphasizes that while these risk factors can emerge individually without consequence, a large and critical mass of them probably shouldn't be dismissed. My impression is that this is as close as one gets to ringing a bell at the top. [Hussman]
• Read a book or an article and diligently mark the passages and portions that stand out at you. If you have a thought, write it down on the page (this is called marginalia). Fold the bottom corner of the page where you've made a note or marked something (alternatively, use post-it flags). A few weeks after finishing the book, return to it and transfer those notes/thoughts on to the appropriate note cards. Why wait? Waiting helps you separate the wheat from the chaff. I promise that many of the pages you marked will not seem to important or noteworthy when you return to them. This is a good thing–it's a form of editing. [Ryan Holiday]
• During periods of major technological change, the construction of accurate price indexes that capture the impact of new technologies on living standards is beyond the practical capability of official statistical agencies. The essential difficulty arises for the obvious but usually overlooked reason that most of the goods we consume today were not produced a century ago. [NBER]
• As Erasmus, the 16th century scholar once put it, "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes." On top of that, books are an investment. I hear from people all the time who tell me they plan to buy this book or that book. Plan? Just buy it. I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I’d never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it. [Ryan Holiday]