Month: September 2009

I need more test posts to see if I have fixed the problem. And this old one attracts spam, so I’m deleting the original and pasting the text below (from 11/29/2007).

I was listening to NPR today, and there was a story about the arrest of some people who were allegedly plotting to blow up the Sears Tower. The report, after giving the basic facts, went on to say that “The Administration conceded that the scheme was only in the planning stages.” Note the use of the words “conceded”. To concede means you are giving in, that you have lost a point in an argument. But NPR didn’t tell us what the argument was. They didn’t even say there was an argument, only that the Administration had lost it. It’s a very odd way to state facts. It’s as if I told someone that you had conceded you read Muttroxia. It’s not a concession unless you unsuccessfully deny my assertions.

So why this phrasing? Liberals like myself believe that the Administration’s arrests have mostly been ludicrous PR campaigns that bear little reality to any real terrorist threat. Viewed from this context, a reporter would want to find out if the plot was serious or not. If the Administration said that no action had been taken, it supports that viewpoint, and may be seen as a concession.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Would you rather have these people blow up a building!? Of course not, you want to arrest them before anything happens! You could equally well say “Reporters conceded that no harm had been done to innocent civilians”.

And that’s bias goes in the media. Supposedly objective journalism that really isn’t. I happened to pick on NPR here, but there are a thousand examples every day.

There are certain words that trigger my skepticism (that’s why I remember one lone sentence in a news report). Conceded is a new one for me. Also notice the use of the word “only”. “The Administration conceded that the scheme was only in the planning stages.” Is that word needed? What does is add? More bias!

The worst offender is the word “just”. I am guilty of it myself (see here, here, here, and here for starters). I sometimes make people repeat sentences without using the word “just” and when they do they realize they aren’t saying anything important.

2009 Update: For some odd reason, the spam merchants have focused on this one post exclusively. So I’m editing a few phrases in the hopes it will help. If not, I’ll try removing links, or maybe even removing the post altogether.

Let me know if you follow this blog with any RSS feed, particularly Google. I got hacked somewhere along the way. I am looking for more information about the hacking.

Among other measures I just deleted a bunch of weird user accounts. If you can’t log in, that’s why. Just set up a new account, or let me know via email and I’ll set one up for one.

There’s some more steps I need to take, but they are a technical challenge to me, so I’ll see if the basic first steps I’ve taken.

• Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It)
  by William Poundstone: I have always been interested in the mathematics of voting. It is not a simple problem to figure out the best way to select a winner based on a group of preferences. What you think of as the “normal” way (the person with the most votes wins) is about the worst there is. See the 2000 election the Bush, Gore, Nader dynamics for example. But it’s worse than that. Nobel-prize winning Kenneth Arrow proved that in any ranking voting system (I like him better than him) it is impossible to have all the basics of fairness. (It’s more mathy than that, but by basic I mean things like “If one person is favored by all voters, they ought to win” or “in comparing candidate A to candidate B, it shouldn’t matter if candidate C is there or not”.)

  This book walks through many real life cases that illustrate the problems with voting systems. It then shows you some of the options. You’ve probably never thought about it much, but there are other voting systems. (Order all the candidates, check all of them you approve of. etc.) In my book group, I changed our voting system to approval voting, which is a much stronger system.What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are their chances of ever being used in the real world?

  The book was written in 2008. The author lists three politicians who are supporters of voting reform. Two of them are John McCain and Barack Obama.

• Nudge: (Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein)

You’ve probably heard about this book already since Cass Sunstein got a job with the Obama administration. This books shows how in many areas of life, the way choices are presented can nudge people towards certain outcomes. They call it paternalistic libertarianism, in that the state influences what you do for your own good, but doesn’t mandate or dictate what you do. The perfect example is 401(k) accounts. Very few people opt-in to these even though 99% of workers should be. A very simple change to the choice architecture is to make the default opt-in. Workers are automatically enrolled, but they can easily opt-out anytime they choose. The outcome is much higher rates of worker savings. The book is filled with examples from all walks of life how institutions (usually the government) can do a better job getting to the outcomes it wants without truly infringing on liberties.

• The Way we Shop (Paco Underhill):Have you ever thought about why the milk is in the back of a supermarket? How the endcaps are arranged? How you are guided throughout a store? How the cash registers are set up? Underhill is a researchers who by chance got involved in these questions and has since made a career out of it. How do humans interact with a retail environment? The writing is only so-so, but the information is fascinating. You’ll never look a store the same way again. (It also has the anecdote I referenced (badly) in the bathroom flower post.
• Tall Tales (Terry Pluto): An oral history of the early days of the NBA. If you are a basketball fan like it has loads of great anecdotes to entertain you. My brothers father in law was on the Minneapolis Lakers, he gets a couple paragraphs. (My oldest son says, “AWESOME!!!”) It seems he had unusually dark skin and got involved in a racist incident even though he’s white. It was a different world back then, hustling owners, two-handed set shots, Wilt Chamberlain, Celtics dynasty, racism, and fights fights fights.
• The Chris Farley Show: Chris Farley has never appealed to me every much. I don’t like comedians with one basic joke. After seeing the fat guy fall down a few times I got the point. Nevertheless, I read this book because the Sports Guy said it was good. He was absolutely right. This is a biography, told in bits and pieces by the people who knew him best.

  Chris Farley is fascinating subject. His rise to fame took more twists than most. You get an insiders view on trying to make it, and making it, in comedy. You get great portraits of Farley’s character. Turns out he was a nice guy. A genuinely naive nice guy, character traits that often held him back. And the addiction. Wow. There are addictive personalities and then there are addictive personalities. Farley was the latter. From the very first sip of beer he ever took, he was a goner. He was practically doomed from the start, it just took a few decades to play out. By the time the book comes to it’s inevitable conclusion you may have just misted up a few times along the way.

  As a Who fan, I couldn’t help but see the obvious parallels with Keith Moon’s life. Both were crazy for public attention, and would do anything to get it. Too often the “anything to get it” meant bigger and bigger jokes at their own expense. Both felt they had to play the outrageous comedian role to succeed. And both had no self-control with drugs, unable to stop the lifestyle they had lived so long. And of course, both died young. (Although Moon was clean and dry at the time, and was ironically killed by anti-alcohol pills.)

Fingernail clippers are concave, to fit the curve of your fingernail. Why would a toe clipper be different? I don’t understand this. My toenail still curves outward.

I just don’t understand this.

Update: Ole ole convinced me I’m being a whiner. At the bottom I’m adding in some of the mistakes and good plays I made last night. I remember a lot more of the hands the day after then I did that night when I was cheesed off.

Very frustrated. I played the whole night very well. I didn’t get many cards, but I got the most of what I had. I got caught bluffing twice, but it set a later play for me to double up because the other guy thought I was bluffing.

I have 4,400. Blinds are at 300-600. I have played one hand in the last 35 minutes. The blinds are raised to 1,800. I have A-Q. This is against the same guy who knocked me out with A-Q a couple weeks ago. (I just flipped through the poker posts. I didn’t write that one down. Anyhow…) I call. The flop is A-7-6, so I have top pair and a very strong kicker. He bets 600. 600? That’s a weird bet. But he’s a weird guy frankly, hard to figure out what he has because his bets are often non-standard. It doesn’t even matter. If I fold I’m down to only four big blinds. I am sure he doesn’t have A-A, pretty sure he doesn’t have A-K. He might A-7 or A-6, but I have to take that chance. I go all in. He turns over pocket 7s, he hit his set.

So I am annoyed. Why else am I annoyed? When I get a small pair (7s or below) I rarely raise, but I almost always call. The odds of flopping a set is about 8-1. If I do flop the set I should be able to get a huge pot of it. If I don’t I may be able to bluff the pot, I may have the best hand anyhow (no other made pair), or I may give up on the hand. I have called with a small pair about 25 times in the month or two and I haven’t hit a set once.

This is why I’m extra annoyed. I haven’t gotten this particular break in a very long time and despite a night of good playing I got screwed by someone else getting it. Oh yeah, and this guy got knocked out twice during the night because he went all-in with terrible hands, so against me is when he happened to get lucky, and it’s part of what makes him hard to read.

On the other hand, my reading is getting better. I don’t always trust my reads, but I am concentrating much harder on reads and gradually getting some the right feelings about some key hands. Twice tonight I called the exact cards someone had in their hand.

How I ruled:

• I had A-J, an ace came on the flop. Me and another guy both bet fairly heavily on all the rounds. I had him figured for Ace with a lower kicker. It turned out he had A-10. I was proud of that read.
• I got pocket Jacks again just as the blinds had gone to 150-300. In the small blind I raised it to 850. The big blind thought for a while and went all-in. The big blind player has cashed 9 weeks in a row (a very impressive streak). And he does bluff but in big pots, he usually has the goods. He isn’t the type to normally go all-in with less than premium cards. Nonetheless I instantly called him. His A-10 didn’t hold up and I doubled-up through him.

How I sucked:

• I was in the big blind, one player and the small blind limped. I decided not to look at my cards for the sheer fun of it. The flop was A-x-x. Small blind checked. I still didn’t look at my cards and checked. The last player threw in a few hundred. Small blind folded. “Guess it’s time to look at my cards!” I had pocket Jacks. A great hand, but there was already an ace on the board. I thought the raisers play was consistent with A-8 through A-10 – a limp and then a stab at the pot. Guessing he had the ace, I folded. He later told me he did not have the Ace, or any card over an 8. (It came out because the next two hands in a row he had pocket jacks, so we were talking about my hand also.) If I had looked at my cards like any jackass should I would have raised preflop and won the hand easily.
• On hands where I had a strong but not the nuts hand (for example, Q-J suited and the flop is Q-x-x) I was betting pretty big. I wanted to get other people out of the hand. Which worked. And it was consistent with my actions when I bluffed at the pot. However, it set up a bad dynamic. My good hands didn’t get much money because I took down the pot right there before it could grow. My bluff hands either took down the small pot or I eventually had to fold or lose a big pot. My good hands made me a little money and bad hands lost me a lot of money. I realized this about an hour in and tried to switch it up a little. When I had A-9 and the flop was A-x-x, I checked, and checked again when a third ace came on the turn. Then my big river bet was called. That showed a weakness in my game – I think I have to have the courage to take good-but-not-great cards a little further in the hand so I can get more money out of them. I think, what do you think?

  (Maybe this is whining also. Because I never had the hand where the other player had Q-9, or some second best hand that would keep them betting with me. But if they did have that second best hand and raised big I would have to make a good read to call them. Avoiding the difficult decision is a good thing also.)

• Missed a few opportunities to steal blinds because I was too passive and just didn’t feel like making the stab at them.
• On the very last hand I should have gone all-in preflop. I was gun shy because the exact same move against the exact same player had knocked me out a few weeks ago when it turned out he had pocket kings. But that shouldn’t have mattered. Putting 4400 into a pot of 2200 might not have been enough to get him out, in which case I would have lost anyhow. But it might have been enough to push his pocket 7s out. With only 7 big blinds to my name, A-Q is good enough that I should have forced the issue.
• I had pocket jacks twice, A-K once, A-Q once, plenty of A-high and K-Q cards, low pocket pairs three times – I had enough cards tonight. I am still cheesed about the last hand but I can’t complain about the cards overall. It should have been enough for me to win, or at least have a big chip stack that could absorb the unlucky hand.

For no good reason, the Muttrox family gives charity in lumps. At some point in the year we sit down and figure out how much we’re going to give, pick out our favorite causes for the year, and write a few checks.

If you want to do good, there’s always a tension. There are two main ways to do good.

• Relieving symptoms: Giving money to a begger, giving a meal to hungry people, adopting, helping out at Meals on Wheels, etc. You can only help a few people at a time. You have an immediate direct impact on lives, but their problems will probably come back the next day or year and your efforts are a drop in the bucket.
• Attacking root causes:Giving to human rights, political causes, overpopulation, curing diseases. You go after the core issues that you think cause a lot of the problems of the world. You think your money could conceivable help the entire world. But if it does it will be in years or centuries and you never get the immediate payoff of concretely fixing something.

There aren’t many causes that span the gap. Microlending perhaps. I tend to favor the “root cause” approach. It fits well with my personality. It doesn’t call for personal involvement or ever meeting the beneficiary of the charity, but I believe it’s more effective in the long run. This also seems like the approach of the Gates Foundation.

How about you? Where do you send your charity funds? Or do you give at all?

This year the Muttrox family gave to four causes. I have two causes that go firmly in the “root causes” category: Human rights and literacy. I firmly believe that if you took any of the worst countries on earth and gave them governments that couldn’t torture them to death arbitrarily, and the populace was literate enough to learn about the world, there would be dramatic improvements. I give to Amnesty International. Literacy is harder, I haven’t found quite the right organization for me yet. In the meantime I gave to Literacy Action, who provides adult literacy programs in Atlanta. Can you believe it costs $2,000 for one adult for one year? Wow.

The other two are more in the symptom relief category. Solidly in the symptom relief camp is the Atlanta Food Bank. Their donations have plummeted and their needs have skyrocketed, both driven by the poor economy. We stepped in a little bit.

The last two years the majority of our charity money has gone to The Innocence Project. This group is dedicated to freeing wrongfully convicted people. Reading a sampling of the people they have helped is eye-opening. How would you like to spend the rest of your life in prison because of bribed witnesses, incompetent lawyers, corrupt judges, etc.? Maybe like this guy in the news this week. You have DNA evidence that will prove your innocence, but the system won’t let you take the test. Or you’ve already proved it but you still can’t get sprung. I am very glad to be a supporter of this group.