Author: Muttrox

How does this sell? You can buy chocolate, or vanilla, or strawberry, in any proportions. But instead, you choose to get exactly equal portions of each, all shoved in the same container, why? Why would you limit yourself like that? You can’t even eat your favorite flavor in isolation. You eat vanilla, some strawberry’s gonna get in. That’s just how it is.

And strawberry. Strawberry? What the heck is strawberry doing there? Who, at any time, would rather eat strawberry than chocolate or vanilla!? This was meant to be rhetorical. But informal polling has convinced me that there’s an awful lot of strawberry weirdos out there. To all of them I say, you are seriously weird. Seriously.

Growing up, my father would occasionally purchase neapolitan, just for kicks. And our family would destroy the chocolate and vanilla in about, oh, 35 seconds. The strawberry would just sit there. And sit. A few months later, my father would get a strange urge to buy another carton of neapolitan, and it would repeat. Eventually there would be three or four boxes of ice cream left, each with one carefully sculpted strawberry third remaining. Once in a while, my father would see these and begin to lecture us about waste and how much things cost.

How did strawberry even get in there? Rumor has it those were the most popular flavors when neapolitan ice cream was invented. I think there was just a really good strawberry salesman somewhere! (That’s a ripoff of Brian Regan’s cranapple bit by the way.)

It’s hard to believe they are still the most popular flavors. And indeed, they are not. Per the International Ice Cream Association, here are the top 10 flavors.

1. Vanilla, 29%
2. Chocolate, 8.9%
3. Butter pecan, 5.3%
4. Strawberry, 5.3%
5. Neapolitan, 4.2%
6. Chocolate chip, 3.9%
7. French vanilla, 3.8%
8. Cookies and cream, 3.6%
9. Vanilla fudge ripple, 2.6%
10. Praline pecan, 1.7%

(Isn’t it funny that neapolitan is counted as it’s own flavor?) So it seems that the strawberry should be replaced with butter pecan. Which just sounds sickening, honestly.

That site has other gems. We all know the “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” song, right? Well, they have the complete lyrics!

…Iceberg, Lindberg, Sol Berg and Ginzberg,
Ice cream Cohen.
I scream, you scream, everybody wants ice cream.
Rah, rah, raaazberry!

No, they really don’t write ’em like that anymore. They’d get picketed.

Update: This is from 2019. Neapolitan is now at number 10. This is a good trend. Cookies n’ Cream is the best flavor ever invented, and has moved all the way up to number 3.

1. Vanilla
2. Chocolate
3. Cookies N’ Cream
4. Mint Chocolate Chip
5. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
6. Buttered Pecan
7. Cookie Dough
8. Strawberry
9. Moose Tracks
10. Neapolitan

Weightlifting has many benefits. The obvious one is increase of muscle mass. Most people don’t realize the real work of the body is not during the workout, but after. In a really good workout with weights, you work the muscles to failure. That means actually killing off many off the fibers and tissue. Over the course of the next few days, the body works to repair the muscle, and make it better. This is why you alternate body sections — the idea is to give any given muscle a few days to recuperate before killing it off again. (Note that many people don’t work out this way, you still get plenty of benefit even if you don’t work all the way to muscle failure.) The re-creation of the muscle is what burns the calories, it takes a lot of work and energy.

Likewise, when you suffer any kind of injury, your body needs energy to recuperate and rebuild it’s systems. Many of us have lost those few key pounds when we have a virus. When you run a fever, your body is literally cooking itself. Fighting disease takes energy, and recuperating afterwards does also.

Blood loss is one such injury. When you give blood, your body needs time to recuperate. That’s why you’re supposed to take it easy for a few days afterwards, your body needs time to rebuild. This logically leads to an obvious weight-loss strategy.

Donating blood five times a year not only is the right thing to do (go here for more info, or just get in touch with me directly), you can lose weight while doing it! Now that’s a win-win! And if you can’t give blood, at least get sick every so often.

(P.S. No, I’m not serious about this as a real weight-loss strategy. You really should give blood though.)

This is a piece of marketing material I got recently from some stupid company. It abounds with poor reasoning.

Does your [system metric] surpass a 70% succes rate (outperforming the industry average of just 30%)? Does your [other system metric] exceed 25% (putting the industry’s 5-7% average to shame)?

Why, no it doesn’t. You have me interested. Pray, continue.

These are the results our top-performing clients are getting

You have lost my interest. I have not bothered to work out the statistics, but if the average is 30%, out of the 5,700 clients you quote later, the fact that some of them might get very high metrics, simply by chance alone, seems rather… obvious. Furthermore, all clients are different, there are always those that by the nature of what they do get higher scores at any given metric.

yes, even ones who [do a lot of this].

No, really? You think there might be a little cause and effect confusion? Maybe they do more because it works? Or maybe they do more, so they spend time making sure it works?

And [our company] is one of the reason why.

One of the reasons? Boy, you’re really going out on a limb there.

It bugs me when people say statistics is just lies. It isn’t, it’s a technique that can be used or misused. Jackholes like this companies’ “Sales Manager, Strategic Marketing” don’t help.

I was just listening to a cool song, “Jack gets up” by Leo Kottke. It has a line in it,

If you look in the mirror,
it’s your fathers face,
and the thin grin, and the thin grin…

I’m at the age where I’m starting to see my fathers face in the mirror. But this made me think, why my father? Why not my mother? Do I just have stronger memories of my father from this age? Do boys instinctively compare themselves to their father, and girls to their mother?

What about you? Whose face do you see?

Brothers and Sisters: The Dad dies to start it off.
Six Feet Under: The Dad dies to start it off. And then someone new dies at the beginning of every episode.
Desperate Housewives: The neighbor dies to start it off, and then becomes the narrator.
The Shield: An undercover Internal Affairs investigator is murdered in cold blood by the protagonist in the first episode, setting up the (a)moral context for the show.
Party of Five (?): I know the premise is the dead parents, but do they actually die to start the show?

Any others?

NYT’s Ethicist column last week talked about blogging. Not surprsingly, he got it completely wrong.

Here’s the question:

I interview high-school seniors who apply to my alma mater. I routinely Google these students and discovered that one posted information on his blog that reflects poorly on him. May I ask him about the blog? May I mention it to the university? Should it affect the score I give him?

The answer features a couple of doozies, “You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly.” Um, sure. Except a diary is usually kept locked away somewhere, not published for everyone in the world to see. And the answer presumes that a blog is a diary. I humbly submit Muttroxia as a counter-example — I sincerely hope no one thinks these ridiculous posts are my deepest darkest secrets and feelings.

What did the university think? “[He] checked with the university and was told not to ask the student about the blog but to include its URL with his report.” Sure, that’s ethical. It’s not OK for an interviewer to get a full picture of the student, but it is for the university? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, as Aristotle opined.

For what it’s worth, I think it is not only fair for the interviewer to look at the blog, but admirable. The interviewer is not a formal official of the college. Their job is to get a fuller picture and a subjective portrait that overworked officials might not be able to. Examing the public record is fulfilling that duty. (Mrs. Muttrox, who actually does this, disagrees.)

P.S. Although his column is good Sunday morning entertainment, you should know that Randy Cohen is not a real ethicist in any way. He’s a bright guy who found a good niche in the newspaper advice field. If you disagree with him, you have just as much formal training as he does, which is to say, none.

No matter how hard you try, you will never be one hundredth as cool as this. And oh yeah, I was in a little band called Queen.

OK, OK, My readers don’t have Times Select. Brian May is one of the contributing authors to their new cosmology blog. How cool is that?

The New York Times had an entertaining article on why playing the lottery is worth it. It agrees with my point of view. One dollar now and then is a cheap price to play for the fun of dreaming about winning.

But it also included this gaffe:

Large rewards make most people reckless, whether they’re on the winning or losing end. A 2003 University of Vermont study found that lottery players who said they preferred to receive potential winnings in annuity payments — generally thought to be safer than receiving the money all at once, in a lump sum — often changed their minds when they actually won. And the higher the jackpot, the more likely people were to prefer a lump-sum payout, the researchers found. (Mr. Nabors chose a lump sum.)

Yes, people change their mind. They should. Taking the lump sum is a smarter thing to do. It’s not being greedy, it’s being prudent.

Ever wonder how the exact payout amount is determined? It’s pretty straightforward financial calculations, figuring out the present value of those annual payments. As always, the key input is the interest rate. And for this, they use a very conservative number. Why? Because the lottery has to invest in state bonds and other very conservative investments, so from their point of view, that is appropriate. However, you as a private investor, can do better in the market (in most cases). You have investment options available to you that the state does not. Therefore, you can generate a higher rate of return. Which means you get more money by taking the lump sum up front and investing it wisely.

Happy birthday to me — thanks for the wishes all! To celebrate, I officially started wearing glasses today. Gads. Combined with just a tinge of grey hair on the temples, there is no doubt I have been graduated to the next phase of life.

And to cap off the fun, when I came back from lunch I left the keys in the car. Running. *Sigh*

God I love getting older.

We recently bought a new refrigerator. Things have changed in the refrigerator industry, I’ll tell you that. For all the gimmicks, most of the modern refrigerator designs are clearly worse.

Freezers ought to be on the bottom. That’s common sense. Heat rises. Therefore, the cold stuff goes below. Yet, new refrigerators have the freezer area on top or on the side.

Side by side is another bad design choice. Ideally, the interior of the refrigerator is just open space that you can configure to meet your needs. But a side by side design puts a big vertical barrier in the middle. This reduces how you can arrange items in there.

The problem is compounded by building in all kinds of specific compartments for specific kinds of food. Here’s the milk area, and here’s the vegetable area, and here’s the fruits, and the butter, etc. You know what, why don’t you let me put my food where I feel like putting my food. It’s all the same freakin’ temperature, what’s the difference?

The biggest gimmick is the ice and water dispensers. If you look inside the refrigerator, it’s shocking how much room the machinery takes up. On some models, 20% of the total space is taken up getting the water and ice to the outside. And what do you get for that? The water never tastes good. The depression is never big enough to fit a normal glass. Oh, but you save a miniscule amount of energy by not opening the door. Whoopee.

Stainless steel is another one. What is the point of stainless steel? It makes your kitchen looks industrial. It gets dirty instantly, and you can’t even clean it with a normal cleaning solution. Why would anyone get stainless steel? They would get it because now everyone has stainless steel, so that’s how you have a “nice” looking kitchen, where “nice” is what all the other people have.

And the price… the cost of any refrigerator above the basic block model is incredible. When my friend told me how much he paid for his, I practically laughed in his face. Then we went shopping, and I ended up spending even more.

You’re usually right, that’s what happens.

Assuming is usually correct. You save a lot of time and energy and keep yourself from looking like an idiot. If you go more than ten minutes without assuming something, you have severe brain damage. That’s what separates you from an infant, you’ve been in the world long enough to make good assumptions.

Also, there’s no “we” in team. Unless you turn the M upside-down.

(This one’s been sitting around for a while. It’s in response to a November 6, 2006 editorial, so it’s not very timely at all. But what the heck.)

This op-ed demonstrates why sociology is not considered a “hard” science. The errors abound.

1) 99% is not the standard significance threshold in science, 95% is.
2) It’s easy to count penny jars accurately. It’s called being careful. It’s especially not hard to count penny jars when you have million dollar budgets.
3) He spends some time stating how four different counts produce four different numbers, and suggests averaging them. Three paragraphs later, he ignores all this to say that in Washington’s 2004 race, 1,373,361 votes didn’t beat 1,373,232 votes by enough, so it shouldn’t count.
4) While it’s vaguely true that recounting may get you slightly different numbers, that’s not where the issues lie. The issues are not implementing a counting methodology, but having an agreed upon counting methodology. Do hanging chads count or not? Are absentee ballots with insufficient postage valid or not? If someone waited 12 hours to vote and couldn’t because of broken machines, should they get to vote? If someone was incorrectly purged from the voter polls, does their vote count? If they voted in the wrong precint, does it count? If they were confused by a butterfly ballot, can their vote be re-assigned to who they obviously meant to vote for? If a voter doesn’t have the correct ID, even though they are a legal voter, does it count? etc. Those are the questions that lead to recount after recount.
5) The proposed remedy of do-it-again is just plain insane.
6) I’m a statistics person, but statistics are not the way to hold elections. A 99% certainty level (or a p=0.01) means that about 1 in 100 times, you get the wrong answer and are OK with it. 99% is not enough here.

The answer is agreed upon counting methodologies. Execution may not be easy, but it is staightforward and auditable. Given reasonable time and money, the counting will always be accurate.