Muttroxia

We watched The Lion King on Broadway last night. It was exactly as good as advertised. The costume and set design was incredible.

It also reminded me of one of my annoyances with the plot. Nala is a better fighter than Simba. She pins them when they are children and then pins him again as an adult. Why doesn’t Simba have her fight Scar!? Let’s face it, he stinks at it. In the whole story, he never beats anyone at fighting! Nala should have done the dirty work.

Mrs. Muttrox also points out, where are the other male lions? Besides Simba’s family, there are no males at all in the whole pride!

I also wonder if Scar goes up to the stars like the other kings. All the lion kings are supposed to be there, and Scar was a king. Maybe Simba and Nala’s kids will turn to Scar for advice. Ooo, that’s the plot to the sequel!

After weeks of asking, the vendor finally sent me the deck on the product they were trying to sell us. Here is Slide 2.

Not a good impression…

Great clone cover of Killer Queen

Terry Pratchett is beginning suicide. Sadly, this is not a joke link.

Japanese home at sea (after earthquake)

Salad is funny

Fight the power

Water and Chemistry

Real endings to fables

Clever pickup approach

Let’s flip a coin

Cookies are a hell of a drug. Meth is even worse.

Great flying carpet picture

What’s waiting for Osama Bin Laden. And the government finally hunts down and kills the leading terrorist

This is highly inefficient

The Japanese soccer team takes on 100 kids at once.

Stealing home

A few reasons Johnny Depp is awesome

Physics is just beautiful

A clever tattoo

Behind the scenes at the movies

The retirement calculators you find all over the web are good. But they never seem to answer the questions I want answered. I created my own. It is designed for someone who is out of debt, actively saving for retirement, and trying to figure out if they are saving enough.

Click here to download the calculator.

How does it work?

1. What do you want?: How many dollars do you want to get per year when you retire? Subtract off what you will already get from Social Security, pensions, or annuities to see how much you need each year generated from your personal retirement savings. This assumes that you want to leave the principal untouched. Then you don’t have to worry about living too long for your savings, and you will have a generous pot of money to leave to your heirs.
2. Calculate the goal: The model uses simple rates of return, inflation, and tax rates to figure out how much money you will need. (This number is usually overwhelming. But remember, to leave the principal untouched takes a lot of money. It also includes decades worth of inflation.)
3. What do you have so far?:
4. How do you get there?:The model figures out the average annual rate of return you need to get from where you are to where you want to go.
5. How much do you need to help it?: Say you need to average a 20% gain every year to get to your goal. Compound interest and the market will take care of some of that for you (you can adjust exactly how much). The difference is the amount you need to contribute every year. This is expressed as both a percentage and dollars.
6. How are you doing?: Put in how many dollars a year you are contributing and compare it to how much you need to put in. This is the answer.

There is also a tab called “Simpler Version”. This was made by made one of the commenters here. It is a much simpler way of looking at the issue. It has a row for each year. Each year it figures out how much inflation has increased the goal, how much your savings grew via contributions and market growth, compares that to how much money you have, resulting in a simple “Keep Working” or “Relax” statement.

These models make all kinds of simplifying assumptions. The answers they give are crude. But they are good approximations. You should be able to figure out if you are doing a good job saving for retirement or not.

It is also rewarding to play with the inputs. What if the market does really well? What if I inherit some money? What if I push off retirement by a few years? What if I can’t contribute for a year or two? What if I subtract my pension off the future dollars? What if inflation gets severe? Etc., etc. Playing with the inputs is what really helps. It lets you know how robust the findings are. If you play with a lot of different inputs and the answer is always you are doing okay, you are really doing okay. If no matter what you put in you can’t get to your goal, it’s time to do some hard thinking.

Click here to download the calculator.

Retirement Calculator by Muttroxia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The Heat proved they were the better team. They beat the Celtics fair and square, and LeBron got the monkey off his back. Even if they lose in the next round, they’re a different team now.

The Kendrick Perkins trade just destroyed us. Before the playoffs I said that we wouldn’t get very far without a healthy Shaq. And we didn’t. Consider the difference. By the time of the playoffs, our starting center (Perkins) was gone. Our backup center (Shaq) was injured. Our backup-backup (Jermaine O’Neal) played very well, but with injuries. Moving from your first string to injured third-string center does something to your team, and it showed. Fair is fair, but there’s something very frustrating about not having a healthy team. Rondo was not Rondo after the injury, you can make a good argument that with a healthy Rondo or a healthy Shaq that some poor Miami blogger would be writing their version of this post right now.

Wait ’til next year!

I really enjoyed this thoughtful look at how having access to secrets changes the way you see the world.

The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.

Did you miss me?

Someone was repeatedly stealing a particular .mp3 file I posted. Strangely, it was the single worst .mp3 around, that was the whole point of the post. Go figure.

This may be the worst graph I’ve seen in my professional career.

• From a distance it looks like all the lines are heading down. I saw this on a dim screen. I initially thought the takeaway was that all the scores were going down.
• It is 3-dimensional for no reason. There is no extra information, only graphics for graphics sake.
• There is no reason to have a legend, since there is only one kind of thing being graphed, but one is present. And the labeling doesn’t match the title of the slide.
• Differentiation of horizontal scale is essentially even – they all have the same score. That fact is not emphasized. Instead, the horizontal scale is manipulated to emphasize the difference (doesn’t start at zero), but the stretching isn’t enough to show a difference. The manipulation didn’t even help. This leaves the labeling in non-intuitive numbers, 5, 7, and 9.
• There are horizontal axes guidelines for no reason. And worse, the lines go right through the labeling of the individual values, making the graph cluttered and hard to read.
• There are axes guidelines on the vertical axes, when the values are just the classes. Just horrible.
• The values are in no order. They are not sorted by results, they are not alphabetical. There should always be some logic to the way values are stacked.

Mainly, the graph serves no purpose. It gives no actual information. I have no idea what I, as a consumer of this information, am supposed to get. Perhaps it was “All classes are high value to participants”. That information could have been given by writing that exact statement, perhaps with “(all were in the 8-9 out 10 range as judged by participants)”. Since the biggest difference was 0.15 out of 10 points (a piddling 1.5%), perhaps the point was “Our survey showed that no matter what we teach we get the same scores.”

Or perhaps the key takeaway is, “Human Resources should never try to present analytic information.”

I’ve been playing a lot of Rush Poker at Full Tilt Poker. It records statistics for you. It doesn’t actually log the hands in detail, but gives you some gross metrics. Here is a sample from a recent session:

The problem is, I don’t know what to do with this information. What is good, what is bad? I can only see two patterns:

1) I play a lot of hands. 15 out of 89 is a lot, just over every one in six hands. This is true, I’ve been playing a more aggressive style lately.
2) The percentage of hands won goes up as the hand goes on. This seems like a good thing. You have much more money invested at the later stages of a hand, those are the ones you want to win. I don’t mind losing several small pots pre-flop if I can get one big payoff on the river.

Readers – what do you think? What other patterns or indicators should I be keeping an eye on?

Another TSA outrage

Your brain on meth. But seriously, Meth can mess you up good.

Joke book for math people

The good old days

Marching band win

How did I ever miss this? Jerry Seinfeld rips an ignorant Larry King

This is TV

Stealth fighter

We’re not in Kansas anymore…

If Ikea made instructions for other things

Now we finally know, who was on first

The laughing makes me laugh too.

Now that’s acting

Inception, done in real-time

Perspective from Harry Potter

The perfect obituary

It’s a trap!

Lost

Child stars: Then and now

Meteorology

Camping invite

The dead bodies of Everest

I came out of the shower. I was drying myself. The eight-year old says, “Daddy, you should always dry off your penis last.”
“What? Why?”
“You should always do it last so the towel doesn’t get the rest of you.”
“You mean because it’s dirty?”
“Yes!”
“Even right after a shower?”
“Yes!”
“You mean, because the penis is somehow always dirty and filthy?”
“Yes!”

There is a long pause. Then the five-year old chips in.
“Not if it’s made out of candy!”

A common trope in movies is the suitcase full of cash. Sometimes it’s the protagonist stumbling across it (No Country for Old Men, A Simple Plan). Sometimes it’s for ransom.

But whenever you see it, the suitcase is full of cash. A briefcase is filled right to the brim, in neat piles that all happen to add up to the correct amount. A duffel bag is bulging. Have you ever found a scene where the briefcase is filled most of the way, but not quite? No, it is always filled up 100%. Whoever is filling that briefcase must go through a lot of math to get it figured out. “Let’s see, my suitcase has these dimensions, a packet of $100 bills takes up so much space, I need to get this much total money… maybe if I replace 3 packs with 20 dollar bills instead… or get a bigger suitcase… Argh, I wish I had paid attention in Algebra II, I’m sorry Mr. Koetke!”