Saturday, September 5, 2009
Station Fire Update...
Mostly it's good news: the western side of the fire, and much of the southern side, are largely under control. The fire is now mostly burning in deep, remote forests (some unburned for over 100 years) on the eastern edge. Click to enlarge the MODIS thermal imagery at right. No structures are threatened. The Mount Wilson observatory and communications towers were saved by the firefighters.But two firefighters have died, and (unfortunately, unsurprisingly) investigators have pegged the cause of the fire as arson. The Los Angeles Sheriff's department is pursuing the case as a homicide, and Governor Schwarzenegger has put up a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the culprit or culprits.
Good News for Tetris Addicts...
Good news for my mom (a self-confessed Tetris addict):
But best of all is learning new skills or new understanding (as opposed to memorization). A great many things fall into these categories, from algebra to zener diode theory. If you're in your 50s or later, you'll stand a significantly better chance of avoiding senility if you stop watching the boob tube and instead start putting your brain to work (and no, the Discovery channel doesn't work out your brain)...
Sinking blocks and clearing lines in Tetris may pay off with more than just a high score. Playing the classic shape-fitting computer game, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, for just three months may boost the size and efficiency of parts of the brain, a study published September 1 in BMC Research Notes finds.Just about the only thing anyone's discovered so far that help fend off Alzheimer's is brain exercise. Intellectually difficult games (chess, Scrabble, Boggle, etc.) work. Some kinds of games, generally involving spatial manipulation (e.g., Tetris) also work.
But best of all is learning new skills or new understanding (as opposed to memorization). A great many things fall into these categories, from algebra to zener diode theory. If you're in your 50s or later, you'll stand a significantly better chance of avoiding senility if you stop watching the boob tube and instead start putting your brain to work (and no, the Discovery channel doesn't work out your brain)...
Government Employment is Inconsequential...
By which I mean that if you're a government employee, you can screw up massively, demonstrate your incompetence with crystal clarity, and you will not suffer any consequences for it. In fact, you'll quite likely be promoted the next time you cross some “time-in-grade” threshold, exactly as you would have been if you didn't screw up.
It certainly doesn't work this way in the real world of business, where incompetence is generally rewarded with unemployment – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but pretty much inevitably.
If I was incompetent and knew it, or even suspected it, clearly the optimal career strategy would be to wangle a job with the government...
The latest demonstration of this phenomenon is at the SEC, who notoriously botched the investigation into Bernie Madoff's $55 billion Ponzi scheme. Not only did multiple SEC investigations turn up nothing (much to Madoff's surprise – he thought even the idiots at the SEC would figure it out), but multiple independent investigators repeatedly tried to tell the SEC that Madoff was up to no good. The best documented of these was Harry Markopolos, who repeatedly fed information to the SEC for 16 years – and the SEC managed to ignore all this through sheer bureaucratic ineptness. Ironically the current investigators are relying heavily on Markopolos' data, and he's testified to Congress.
So if you were amongst the many innocents who presumed that such manifest incompetence would have some consequence for both the SEC as a whole and for the individuals involved – why, then, you're in for a surprise. Because every single one of the SEC employees associated with the Madoff investigation is either still in the same position, or has been promoted. And utterly nothing has changed in the SEC's organization. If Bernie Madoff hadn't already been discovered, the SEC would still be missing the boat.
Which, of course, makes you wonder how many other undiscovered “Madoffs” yet remain...
The lack of consequence for incompetence in government is high on my list of reasons why we should never entrust our health care to them. And why we should stop entrusting them with other things important to us, such as retirement funding, education, letter delivery, etc. I fantasize sometimes about a new President and a new Congress somehow injecting some consequence into government employees, but those are just satisfying fantasies. In the real world, I suspect the only effective recourse will be to take away the toys we let these unpunished idiots play with.
It certainly doesn't work this way in the real world of business, where incompetence is generally rewarded with unemployment – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but pretty much inevitably.
If I was incompetent and knew it, or even suspected it, clearly the optimal career strategy would be to wangle a job with the government...
The latest demonstration of this phenomenon is at the SEC, who notoriously botched the investigation into Bernie Madoff's $55 billion Ponzi scheme. Not only did multiple SEC investigations turn up nothing (much to Madoff's surprise – he thought even the idiots at the SEC would figure it out), but multiple independent investigators repeatedly tried to tell the SEC that Madoff was up to no good. The best documented of these was Harry Markopolos, who repeatedly fed information to the SEC for 16 years – and the SEC managed to ignore all this through sheer bureaucratic ineptness. Ironically the current investigators are relying heavily on Markopolos' data, and he's testified to Congress.
So if you were amongst the many innocents who presumed that such manifest incompetence would have some consequence for both the SEC as a whole and for the individuals involved – why, then, you're in for a surprise. Because every single one of the SEC employees associated with the Madoff investigation is either still in the same position, or has been promoted. And utterly nothing has changed in the SEC's organization. If Bernie Madoff hadn't already been discovered, the SEC would still be missing the boat.
Which, of course, makes you wonder how many other undiscovered “Madoffs” yet remain...
The lack of consequence for incompetence in government is high on my list of reasons why we should never entrust our health care to them. And why we should stop entrusting them with other things important to us, such as retirement funding, education, letter delivery, etc. I fantasize sometimes about a new President and a new Congress somehow injecting some consequence into government employees, but those are just satisfying fantasies. In the real world, I suspect the only effective recourse will be to take away the toys we let these unpunished idiots play with.
Fascinating Economic Information...
I just discovered a source of some fascinating economic information, courtesy of Google. They've been tracking the frequency of certain search queries since 2004. The results are publicly available.For example, the graph at right shows computer and electronic related queries. An industry rule-of-thumb for many years has been that consumer electronics make a quarter to a third of all their sales in the last six weeks of the year. On the graph you can clearly see that exact trend, including two big peaks at Thanksgiving and Christmas. You can also see the generally downward trend of the past few years.
On the other hand, look as the graph at left to see how the current recession affects queries about unemployment benefits. Obviously we're not out of the woods yet (on the current recession)!Dig a little deeper into that unemployment graph and you'll see small peaks of activity every January (when extra holiday season retail workers are laid off), and dips every mid-November (when extra holiday season retail workers are hired). There's a small peak in the summertime, I'll speculate because of high-school and college kids trying to find jobs.
Fascinating stuff, updated every day. Unlike government-supplied data, this is raw data – not “adjusted” in various ways with often political motivations. It's also near-realtime, so you don't have to wait a month or more to see what's happening. Personally, I'd trust my own interpretation of Googles raw data on unemployment queries much more than I'd trust the government's opaque unemployment numbers. I'll be watching this site...
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