An interesting concept, somewhat marred by an essential flaw

Recent list work: #5 (done), #9 (done), #32, #42 (done), #44 (done), #69, #70, #83, #85 (done).

Slate has an interesting article about color/racial bias potentials in professional athletics. It discusses some cases of white athletes getting higher pay than black athletes with comparable stats, whether that's economically justified based on the effects racial makeup of the team has on ticket sales, whether baseball umpires alter their calls on ball v strike based on the race of the batter/pitcher (and how omitting an important variable such as time of day can lead noise to be mistaken for signal), etc.

But there's a big flaw in the article.

The hook of the article is that the Celtics are going to be playing the Lakers in the 2008 NBA finals. On paper, the Celtics are a better team--better win/loss record, better point differential, long winning streaks against teams the Lakers themselves were playing. The Vegas oddsmakers have, on the other hand, favored the Lakers on the point spread. The article attempts to discuss whether Vegas has caught on to referee racial bias which tends to operate on the whole in favor of white players. Most likely no, but not for any reason discussed in the article. Fundamentally, oddsmakers are not really concerned with whether team A will beat team B by 5 points. They are concerned with whether 50% of the betting dollars will be on team A if you give team B an artificial boost of 5 points. Gambling establishments essentially want an equal amount of money on each possible outcome, so they can minimize their risks and make their profit from the house taking whatever cut it takes. It frequently amazes me how many people don't recognize this distinction.

2007 In Review

New Year's is a relatively arbitrary time point. Still, it has its uses. Large numbers of people take advantage of their inability to remember what number to date checks with as a chance to improve themselves. As anyone who reads this blog knows by now, I'm not working for a standard set of New Year's resolutions, but am in a multi-year plan of accomplishing things. I should be at roughly 36 of the items completed by now. Let's see where I stand:

Things definitely completed:

#4. My committee has been formed, and even met with.
#6. I had a poster at this year's Gordon Research Conference on Microbial Population Biology.
#7. I'm not required to take any more classes for my PhD. I might sit in on a few more, but no more are required.
#10. I'm hoping to make this an even more permanent habit, but the lab notebook was followed rigidly for a month.
#12. The Army ROTC requirements are done. Easily the hardest were the 42 pushups.
#13. My best mile is now 5:59.
#14. A 5 mile run is unpleasant, but has been done. Only once, thus far.
#15. I've bench pressed my own weight repeatedly, but the first was 155 when I weighed 152.
#17. The website fitday.com allowed me to track everything I ate for a week. I realized I needed to start eating more. Not what I was hoping to hear, but oh well.
#20. I feel I know how to play racquetball now. Jeff is once again beating me regularly, in large part due to having a better racquet than his old one, but I no longer feel incompetent at it.
#22. Yay for handiness, I now have a nice soft black scarf.
#38. I had a very pleasant date with a guy I hope I'll be seeing again, if he's not too upset with me.
#41. I saw the sunrise the night/morning I was reading the 7th Harry Potter book.
#45. I got to see the Perseid meteor shower while visiting my Dad in southern Canada, well out of any major light dome. There's something to be said for lying down in a hot tub at the beach watching meteors.
#59. By buying a book of NY Times crossword puzzles and looking for one that didn't require me to know many proper names of celebrities and/or athletes, this wasn't too onerous.
#62. A cousin's wedding in MA this summer filled the travel requirement.
#64. Yeah, yeah, it'll increase my risk of skin cancer, etc. I didn't burn, and actually getting tan meant a lot of time out in the sun, reading. It was enjoyable.
#65. I've started getting my hair cut at the training studio for the local fancy place. I go in and tell them I want something shorter than it is while being cut while also being very low maintenance. They've consistently given me a very well-done version of...the same hairstyle I've been kind of sporting since I was 10.
#67. Origami flowers are flowers nonetheless.
#68. There are several possible calls for this one. I'm now considering it to be the Julie Moffitt CDs I gave my Dad for Christmas, as he loves her music and I know her from college and thus want to support her music career. Win-win.
#73. I watched a live-action version of Wind in the Willows on Masterpiece Theatre. It was annoying watching British men in suits pretend to be toads and rats and whatnot, but part of the annoyance was probably due to my not liking the story line.
#78. I again reference the Julie Moffitt CDs.
#81. The Summer Circle Theatre had some fun plays, and were free to boot. Woot.
#84. There have been several high school friends I'd lost touch with who I've written to this year--primarily Mike D, Kathleen, and Anna.
#86. My IRA is now a real investment vechicle.
#87. The first jigsaw of the year was a circular undersea fantasy.
#88. Being practical is sometimes good, so the basement's organized.
#89. I didn't eat any of the chocolate chip cookies I made at Christmas.
#90. My brother now has even more financial motive to kill me beyond merely not diluting his inheritance from my Dad.
#94. I'm past the 30 mark in blog entries, though admittedly not by a lot.
#95. The verdict: silly, but not as silly as I expected to look with facial hair.
#101. Yay for good credit.

That's 32 definite completions. Now let's take a look at some arguable ones:

#1. I need to have written a scientific paper. I've done a lot of work updating an article for the Encyclopedia of Evolution for the new edition, adding some new studies to it, reworking some of the old ones. I'll get an authorship credit for this, in addition to my advisor (who wrote the first edition of this article and has also done a lot of editing for it, both on his old work and on my additions).

#27. This site isn't for a class, but I've done very little on the building end of it. So maybe?

#37. There is no official Boggle association. I've been playing on Facebook, where I got myself into the top 1% of players. Some people I've talked with about this call that a good enough substitution; others disagree.

#44. Some friends and I drove an hour and a half to go to a David Sedaris reading. Is that far enough to be a road trip?

#97. I've added information to several Wikipedia articles, but never written one from scratch.

So, that's 5 more arguable ones. I've also got some large ones partially done, so I think overall I'm pretty much on track.

Immigrations and schools

Recent list work: 9 (done with stats. Whoo!), 38 (yay), 37 (arguably)

This piece from the NY Times caught my eye today. It concerns the educational challenges of illegal immigrants. As the article points out, since a 1982 Supreme Court case, public schools have had to accept and educate illegal immigrants through high school, but that requirement stops at college.

Let me start off by saying that I call a spade a spade. I don't like the term "undocumented", because it glosses over the face that people who do not have visas or citizenship are in this country illegally. If you immigrate to a country without following that country's laws on becoming a citizen or leaving by the end of your visa, you have immigrated illegally. Hence, you are an illegal immigrant. That does not make you evil, it does not necessarily make you a bad person, but it is a description of your legal status which isn't euphemistic.

That being said, I have a lot of sympathy for individuals who immigrated as children, regardless of whether that immigration was legal or not. At the age of 6, no one should be expected to understand international law. If we agree that you're not old enough to be legally responsible for crimes like murder and theft, which are generally pretty obviously wrong, it is not reasonable to expect you to responsible for moving somewhere with your parents or aunt or whatever. This seems like common sense to me.

I dislike that the federal Congress has passed a law barring states from offering in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants. This does not seem to me to be the job of the federal government. I don't believe states should be required to offer such tuition discounts, but I don't think they should be barred from it either. I applaud the states which have found ways around this, most notably by basing in-state tuition on having graduated from a school in that state rather than a legal residence.. The only problem I foresee with that is for people who take time off between one graduation and the next enrollment, and potentially move across a state line in the interim. I imagine there must be a way around this.

Fundamentally, I think something needs to be done about giving children who were brought to this country illegally a path to citizenship. I'm not sure what the best plan is, though. Making a bright-age-line is the immediate idea, whereby you could gain citizenship if you immigrated illegally before age X, but not if you were older. The problem with that is that the most logical age, legally, is 18, and I find that troublesome. It seems like that would encourage a lot of 17 year olds to sneak across the border, as they'd be old enough to realize the tremendous advantages that come with US citizenship. But what age would be fair? 14? 12? 16? I don't know.

Then there are issues related to the effects this would have on legal immigration. As it is, for instance, it's easier to gain legal immigration rights if you have close relatives who are citizens--most notably, spouse, parent, or child. If we grant citizenship to children brought here illegally, we would be increasing the probability that their parents would then be granted citizenship, so we would in effect be giving an advantage to someone who broke the rules for others as well as themselves. You'd be more likely to be allowed to stay permanently if you smuggled additional people across the border. That's not right. But, at the same time, I like the idea of equality before the law for all citizens. It would strike me as very much against the notions of equality to say, for instance, that legal citizens who earned their citizenship after being brought here illegally as children are *not* allowed to use their citizenship to help bring their parents in, which other legal citizens are.

I don't know what's to be done. Moreso than most political hot-buttons, I feel this issue is inherently complex. On the one hand, fully open borders are not a viable solution, as feel-good as that solution might seem; the prosperity of our country would simply attract more people than we can truly afford to let in, and our quality of life would drop by too much for that to be feasible. On the other hand, our quality of life would also drop if we sealed all of our borders entirely. Our country attracts many highly educated and skilled workers from India, China, South Korea, and the industrialized world. We bring in a lot of hard workers from Latin America, many of whom are unfairly branded with stereotypes about lazy Mexicans. Our agriculture depends in large part on unskilled migrant farm labor, and many of our unpleasant service jobs in food service, sanitation, meat packing, etc are filled by immigrants because few citizens are willing to take those jobs for what they pay. For the most part, immigrants come here to stay, and people who are willing to travel long distances in search of a better life are the sort of people you want to have on your side. It's clear to anyone thinking about this issue rationally that a balance needs to be struck. What I'm unclear on is where that balance should be.

Morality

Recent list work: #9, #13 (I did it today. Whoo!), #22 (finished!), #39 (work in progress), #69 (Jean seemed inordinately pleased with some chicken and potatoes I brought her while she was on crutches), #69 (Catch 22 is finally done. Also, Fathers and Sons, which I liked), #90.

Time has a very interesting poll about morality at the moment. Please go look at it first; it will take you less than 5 minutes to answer it.

(waiting for you to go answer the poll questions)

(no, really, go do so)

(Please?)

I'd heard about this poll before, but this time I get to see the exact scenarios laid out. My answers, for those who are interested, are: yes, yes, yes, no, no.

In the first scenario, the baby's crying will lead to not only my death, but also to the deaths of others, including itself. Obviously, you try other means to quiet the baby first: give it something to suck on, rock it, change its diaper, whatever. But the scenario states that the baby can't be quieted in any other way. If that baby continues to scream, it's going to die very soon no matter what. Better that it be just the baby that dies, and not take me and the other refugees with it. I'm smothering the baby.

In the second scenario, if someone isn't kicked off the lifeboat we're going to capsize and all die. If one individual is already grievously injured and bound to die soon anyways, and killing him just a little bit sooner preserves my life and those of others, I'm pushing him out of the boat. I've got a strong survival instinct.

In the third scenario, we have a group of 5 idiots on one train track not paying attention to oncoming vehicles, and 1 individual on another doing the same. They're all equally stupid, and none of them are guaranteed to die soon if I don't send the train at them. I therefore bow to the notion that 1 death is better than 5 deaths, and send the train at the lone individual.

In the fourth scenario, we have the same 5 idiots unaware of an oncoming train, but I'm on a bridge over the track with a stranger, and if I push him off the train will stop before it hits the 5 clueless. In this case, the idiots on the track are more culpable than the guy on the bridge with me, who is entirely blameless. I'm not going to make him pay the consequences of the idiots being idiots. I'll yell for them to get out of the way and maybe throw rocks at them if I think I have a chance of getting their attention, but I'm not going to kill an innocent bystander to save them.

In the 5th case, the guy in the catapult is just as innocent as the guy on the bridge. So, I won't kill him to save 5 idiots. I'm assuming he's not been sentenced to sit in the catapult as payment for a crime, nor is he being an idiot and playing in a catapult which has obviously been constructed to fling people at oncoming trains.

Of the people who had responded when I wrote this, 70% agreed with me in the first case, 56% in the second, 79% in the 3rd, 60% in the 4th, and 52% in the 5th. I'm surprised more people are OK with killing the baby than the presumably adult lifeboat passenger, but maybe they care that the baby probably won't really understand its coming death while the lifeboat passenger will.

What are your answers?

Halloween

Recent list work: 9, 13, 22, 47, 68 (possibly), 70.

The real purpose of this post is that I went to a pair of Halloween parties last night, and I wanted to post pictures of the two stages of the costume. I was not creative this year, and completely ripped off a television character's Halloween costume from last year. I was Clark Kent. Overall, not a very uncomfortable costume. I managed to shrink a Superman t shirt through repeated high heat dryer cycles, despite the fact that the shirt was allegedly a children's large (I just couldn't bring myself to try on the children's medium), so it was tight enough without being uncomfortably so. Dress pants and shoes, and an unbuttoned shirt and untied tie aren't too bad. The least comfortable part of the whole costume was the pair of pure red briefs which I had poking up from my waistband--to get them to poke up that high without being loose at the waist, I ended up having to buy smaller underwear than I normally wear and pulling them up as high as they would go, which was less than fun by the end of the evening. Anyway, pictures:

List update 070816

Recent list accomplishments: #45, #64, #88
Other items which have been worked recently but not finished: #4, #9, #36, #69, #70, #94

At the moment, I'm happy about my phrasing with organize the basement. The basement's not entirely clean--I have about 3 garage bags' worth of stuff to throw out (but no garbage bags at home), and I'm still working on getting all the dirt out of it, but everything else is organized and it looks a lot better than it has since, oh, right around when I moved in. It'll be even better within a week, when my current renter takes all his stuff off to the dorm and I can move the shelving units I bought for it down to the basement and therefore not have things stacked quite so tightly.

Number 9 I still lag some on for having read and annotated some papers which I haven't stuck in EndNote yet. I need to do that soon.

Outside the realm of the list, things are going quite well. I spent a week and a half at my Dad's place on the lake, which was extremely relaxing. I've got a fairly good draft of an encyclopedia article in to my advisor, waiting for his feedback on it (which I might count as a scientific paper--it's going into an Encyclopedia of Microbiology and is 12,000 words long). I have a committee meeting schedule for next week, so it probably makes sense to not do a huge amount in the lab until then. And I have a new renter moving in today, who from what I can tell I'm going to get along with quite well.

List update 070729

Recent list accomplishments: #6, #10, #41, #62, #65, #81, #84. Further progress has been made on #9, #13(6:20 a few weeks ago, since then I've slacked), #64, #69, #83, and #94.

At this point, I'm 210 days into the list, and should therefore have completed 21 items. At the moment, I've only completed 20, so I'm slightly behind. Still, there are several which are very close to being done (notably the form a committee one), so I'm feeling pretty good about it.

List update 070514

Recent list items: #73, #86, #9, #13 (most recent mile: 6:58), #100 (I bought a cookbook), #94.

Thus far, I've completed 13 items, and we're 134 days into the list. Therefore, it turns out that I'm just barely on track. Whoo!

OK, this post has no substance. I'm having a hard time thinking about the moment. I blame the gorgeous weather.

List progress 070403

I've been meaning to post this for a few days, but I've been lazy. Oh well.

Recent list work: 9, 17, 22, 70 (Forest Gump), 94, 98 (health insurance taken care of), 101.

We're about 100 days into the list, which means I'm supposed to be 1/10 of the way through the list. I've fully completed 11 of my 101 items, so I'm on track. Go me!

Fun with school laws in Utah

Recent list work: #9, #12 (completed! Most recent 2 mile run was 15:54), #59, #94.

The weather this past week has been interesting. Last Tuesday it was 73 degrees, and it was uncomfortable wearing long pants. Later in the week we were in the 30s again. Yesterday was warm, bright, and sunny. I woke up this morning with snow on the ground--though it was up in the 50s later on in the day. If this turns into The Day After Tomorrow, I claim dibs on the main character whose father is a climate change researcher.

To prevent this from being a completely meaningless post, I link now to an article I read recently in the NYTimes (warning: link will probably eventually expire). Utah has decided to enact really strict rules about what school clubs are allowed to do, which seem quite clearly to be targeting gay groups. However, these guidelines are a bit crazed. For example:

Under the new Utah law, every club will have to complete an activity disclosure statement that itemizes what it will do, and discusses how many members it will have, and whether tryouts are required. It mandates that any student joining any club needs a parent’s signature — though most public schools in Utah require that already — and specifically bans any discussion by any club of “human sexuality.”

The law defines that term to mean “advocating or engaging in sexual activity outside of legal recognized marriage or forbidden by state law,” and “presenting or discussing information relating to the use of contraceptive devices.”

Let's leave aside, for the moment, the fact that unless there are tryouts, it's extremely unlikely that any club can say how many members they'll have ahead of time. I know I couldn't have done so with regards to the math team, for example, despite being the president of that. This legislation would mean, for instance, that high school chapters of Amnesty International would not be able to protest compulsory intrauterine devices as a form of population control. I'm thinking the religious right who are backing this legislation won't really like that outcome. This ends up being an example of the dangers of trying to censor speech you don't like--that which you do gets thrown out as well.

List update 070316

Recent list work: #9, #12 (last week's time: 16:12), #22, #69 (boy I dislike Catch 22), #94, #95.

The facial hair experiment is over. It seemed to have worked out pretty much as well as it could. I did feel I looked silly, the main friend who thought I'd look better with facial hair agreed with me that I didn't, and yet I didn't look as silly with it as I thought I would and I did receive some compliments on it. But it's gone now, and my that feels better. Here's the before and after:




Note the complete lack of photography skills inherent in this. I probably could have used the timer function on the camera, but that would have involved finding someplace to rest the camera, and really, I just wanted the dang facial hair gone as soon as I could. To the amusement of all, that represented 2 weeks of facial hair growth. My brother gets to that level of beardedness in 3 days.

List update 070227

Recent list work: #9, #12a (most recent time: 16:42), #22, #87.

I've realized a few of my items are debatable. For instance, I did drive an hour to spend time with a friend. Does that qualify as traveling to visit someone? I'm currently going with no. The reestablishing good credit history is always potential, but I've not gotten a credit report recently, so it's not yet clear that's been completed. And I'm definitely working on finishing up with classes, but that will take a while.

However, of items which are unequivocal, I've currently finished 6. This means I'm completely on pace, as I need to average 1 every 10 days. And I've even done it without relying on the sunrise and sunset ones yet. Yay me!

Musings and list update

Recent list efforts: #9, #12a (most recent time-- 16:56), #87, #94.

So, today after my workout there was a bit of a commotion in the locker room. A guy I will say was obviously substantially disabled apparently wanted to go swimming, and was banging against the locked door to it. His aide (aide? attendant? I don't know the correct term) was repeating firmly and calmly "The door is locked. I don't have a key. We can't get in. Let's go sit down by your locker. The door is locked." The guy who caused the commotion continued to bang against the door, moan, and occasionally say the word "key". When he did, he just repeated it continuously.

I checked on my way out, and it turns out that this was not a time in which the pool was listed as being open to the public. Therefore, I can come up with two scenarios: 1) He wasn't aware that this was not a time when the pool was normally open. 2) The pool is normally open to him at this time, but for some reason was locked today.

I'm not sure what to think of my thoughts on this--if that isn't too dadaist of me to say. Pragmatically, I think it makes good sense to have a time for the pool to be reserved for those with severe disabilities. From my selfish perspective, behavior like this guy's is some stressful to be around. I wasn't angry at him about it, as it seemed clear to me that he's not of a mental capacity to know any better, but it's along the lines of a screaming infant on an airplane--loud and stressful. I can try to justify it by saying that it might be less stressful for the severely disabled to exercise together as well, as they'd be less likely to be ridiculed for being themselves in such a setting, but I can't be sure that it's all that altruistic of me. On the other hand, I wonder about what this says about my levels of compassion, and whether I'm advocating for sweeping people like him under the rug.

I think this is also all somewhat complicated by the fact that my gym is a university gym. From the language skills on display, I would be very surprised if this guy was a student here. Is it reasonable that I take that into consideration? I can only guess that he might be the child of a university employee, and this is why he uses this gym, but I view the dependents of the faculty/staff/students to have a lesser claim on the facilities than the faculty/staff/students themselves.

Reports of my death have been mildly exaggerated

Recent work on list: 9 (not sure how many are relevant at the moment), 12 (15 inches and counting), 20, 22, 67, 69, 94.

As is not terribly surprising, I've gotten bad about updating this thing, in the midst of my general unproductive laziness. This term's class structure basically prevents me from getting the sort of research done that I normally do, so I'm just working on things like an article I'm supposed to be writing--and thus I feel bad not knowing how far along I am on item number 9. However, it's now been a month. To stay on track to get this list completed on time, I need to average 1 item completed every 10 days. It's been just over 30 days, and I've made 4 of them (and, arguably more--last racquetball match against my instructing friend was 15-14, 15-14, 15-11, for example. So I could claim that I've learned to play racquetball, despite wanting to hold off until I beat him). I haven't even resorted to the really simple ones yet. I'd make some comment about which ones those are, but I do plan to build my snowman soon. Possibly even in the next few days.

Anyway, I'd post something actually thoughtful, but that would require too much effort at the moment. I just needed to post something so that I didn't let it go yet another day without doing so.