US income distribution

Where is the middle class in this figure? If we eliminate young and old people, does the peak shift to the $30k range, or are things bleaker than I had thought? [ See links in comments for better figures. ]Wikipedia: ... Household income in the United States varies substantially with the age of the person who heads the household. Overall, the median household income increased with the age of householder until retirement age when household income...

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Iceland: Let banks go bankrupt

A misallocation of human capital: @2m4s.See also The illusion of ski...

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Big data from a big eye in the sky

From NOVA Rise of the Drones.ARGUS ("Wide Area Persistent Stare"): 1.8 Gigapixels, built using off the shelf components: 368 cellphone cameras, 5 MP each. Can surveil 15 square miles simultaneously from 17,000 ft, with 6 inch resolution of objects on the ground. Generates 1E6 terabytes of data per day. This system has been available for a couple of years already. Watch What Drones Can See on PBS. See more from NO...

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Learn to solve every problem that has been solved

Feynman had that on his final blackboard. Crazy? Even for Feynman? An admirable ambition, nonetheless.At what point did this become impossible for even the smartest human alive? What if we amend it to Learn to solve every important problem that has been solved? (For some threshold of importance...)Feynman's TO LEARN list:Bethe Ansatz, Kondo Effect, 2-D Hall Effect, "accel. temp" = Unruh Effect?, Non-linear classical HydrodynamicsDo I know anyone...

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Wonders of science

More iPhone snapshots in aid of my long term memory :-)Jeff Hawkins at a recent MSU workshop Cognitive, Evolutionary, and Computational Models of the Mind.URA (Universities Research Association; oversees the operation of Fermilab) meeting in Washington, held in the Washington Post building.Bill Foster, one of two physicists in Congress, addresses the meeting.William Brinkman, Director of the Office of Science at DOE.Pier Oddone, Fermilab Director.The...

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As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods

An earlier post, Discrete genetic modules can control complex behavior, described genetic control of burrowing behavior in deer mice. A reader commented that the results were entirely unsurprising. I wasn't aware of similar results in mammals, but of course this sort of thing has long been known in drosophila, thanks to Seymour Benzer and collaborators.WSJ: ... When the great California Institute of Technology geneticist Seymour Benzer set out in...

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US-China software arbitrage

Who says outsourcing doesn't work?  :-)This is just a single anecdote, but it suggests that US software developers cost many times more than coders of similar quality in China ...Verizon RISK team security blog: ... As it turns out, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm. Bob spent less that one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him. Authentication was no problem, he physically FedExed his RSA token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during...

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Discrete genetic modules can control complex behavior

"Horses ain't like people, man, they can't make themselves better than they're born. See, with a horse, it's all in the gene. It's the f#cking gene that does the running. The horse has got absolutely nothing to do with it." --- Paulie (Eric Roberts) in The Pope of Greenwich Village.NYTimes: ... Dr. Hoekstra started with a species called the oldfield mouse (Peromyscus polionotus), the smallest of the deer mice. For 80 years or more, field scientists...

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The good books

I did some unpacking today and assembled some favorite technical books (mostly physics) on one set of shelves. There are more that are still lost in boxes, but I think this is a decent collection. Surely no man can call himself educated without being familiar with the contents of a few of these books ;-)In response to comments I'm posting some shelves of less technical books. The best way to characterize the collection below is that all of these...

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Low hanging fruit and technological innovation

Have we picked all the low hanging fruit? GDP growth may not be the same as growth in "utils" (units of utility, as in happiness or utility function), but it's a reasonable proxy. Click graph below for larger version.The util return per unit of technological effort is probably decreasing as the problems left to be solved become more challenging. But it's hard to put a util value on some things that are in the foreseeable future, like machine intelligence...

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Cognitive, Evolutionary, and Computational Models of the Mind

Video of talks from the MSU workshop New Frontiers in Cognitive, Evolutionary, and Computational Models of the Mind. Compliments of BEACON:The BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action approaches evolution in an innovative way, bringing together biologists, computer scientists, and engineers to study evolution as it happens and apply this knowledge to solve real-world problems. BEACON is an NSF Science and Technology Center, headquartered at Michigan State University with partners at North Carolina A&T State University, University...

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Sprints, interval training and energy expenditure

I've read studies in the past that found jogging or running at a moderate pace burns calories at a rate of about 100 calories per mile. This rate of energy expenditure depends on bodyweight, but only weakly on the actual running speed. Thus if you run, e.g., 2 miles you probably burned about 200 calories (depending on how big you are), whether you ran at 7 minute pace or 11 minute pace (i.e., you covered the distance in 14 minutes or 22 minutes).However, from personal experience it seems that sprinting increases the rate of calorie consumption...

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Annals of brainpower: Oregon football

Q: How does Oregon football compete against the top teams in the country (four BCS appearances in the last four years) with recruiting classes that almost never break the top 10, and are usually ranked below 20? (In today's 2013 rankings, they're at 42!)A: Great coaching by Chip Kelly and his staff. This video explains some of the basic concepts behind the Oregon spread offense. See also The zone read option game for Kelly's extremely well-written explanation of the Oregon running attack. Even a casual investigation reveals that football is...

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Scientific publications by country

Click for larger image.Judging by the numbers alone, China needs only 10 or 20 years to catch up with the US. But of course it takes a long time to build a high quality scientific tradition and infrastructure, so this is probably an underestimate.The collapse of Russia is very sad.Anglosphere still dominant, both in quantity and quality, normalized to population. Highly cited papers metric probably a bit biased toward these countries, but even correcting...

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