This video is pretty fun to watch. Some guy climbing a 400 foot vertical face with his bare hands and no safety equipment in 4 minutes and 25 seconds. I wonder what the death rate for these type of people are – surely if you do this sort of stuff too many times you will eventually take a fall.
The warm weather is approaching and with it comes the barbecue grill. I know one friend in particular that likes their steak incredibly rare, and fortunately for him, I stumbled upon this article which confirms that rare steak is “safe”.
This isn’t surprising considering that the bacteria is on the surface of the meat. Making sure that you don’t use the same utensils to handle raw meat and cooked meat at the same time (without sterilizing the utensil itself between handling) is the most vital part of the procedure.
Other than that, all you need to do is stick the steak on for a couple minutes on each side and you’re pretty much set. Of course, this leaves the issue of whether you’ve got the stomach enzymes to digest the nearly raw meat, but at least it won’t have to fight E.coli.
This article sums it up better than I can – basically when you have too much internal corruption you create the conditions for a huge collapse in the economy when enough confidence is eroded. These sorts of things usually happen in a flash when people suddenly want to call in on these loans which of course can’t be paid.
I wouldn’t stick any of my capital in either Chinese debt or equity simply because there is no transparency in that country. Statistics and accounting statements have no credibility, and there is no punishment for anybody if they turn out to be complete hogwash. From the standpoint of a small investor, there is no point in gambling in that country when you have all of the regulatory safeguards that the US Securities and Exchange Commission or the respective provincial securities commissions in Canada provide.
I can point to many stocks of Chinese companies that have tripled or otherwise gone up massively in value, but without having the ability to investigate deeper into these firms, there’s no point in gambling without information.
This also is a potential explanation that despite record deficits (trade deficits and fiscal deficits) in the USA, international investors continue to plough their capital in US treasury bonds. They’re not willing to risk their capital in Chinese paper as I think they learnt their lessons during the Russian bond default in 1998 and the southeast asian currency crisis of 1997.
I just so happened to catch on television the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire while flicking the channels. The person on the floor was working his way up through the questions from $2,000 to $8,000 without a lifeline and got to the $16,000 question.
The $16,000 question was the following:
Which of the following squares is the sum of two smaller squares?
A:16 B:25
C:36 D:49
As soon as I saw this, I thought to myself “Let’s try 16… 3 squared plus 2 squared doesn’t get you close (13). 3 squared plus 3 squared is too high (18). Then let’s work on 25… 4 squared plus 3 squared equals 25, so the answer is B”. It so happens that was the answer, but the contestant was mathematically challenged (it could be due to the pressure of having to answer this on the spot, although there is no time pressure on the show) and struggled and finally used his first lifeline: ask the audience.
The audience was polled and the results came up with A:50%, B:30%, C:19% and D:1%. The web poll had similar results, and at that moment I was thinking of coming up with some social commentary as to the deficient state of math skills in our society. The contestant answered A and of course got the question wrong.
I bet you the audience was thinking “2 squared times 2 squared (four times four) equals 16″, but the question was to add the squares, not multiply them. Either that or the audience just chose the smallest number, which would explain why “D” polled so lowly.
I am surprised they don’t ask mathematical questions at higher levels of the game. At this very moment, I’m not exactly sure how this mathematical dysfunction in society will eventually end up costing us, but I’m sure it does. I doubt anybody will have to quickly compute which numbers add up to the squares of others for any real commercial applications, but I’m pretty sure the methodology of solving number problems can be extrapolated to other issues of economic significance.
I don’t know how the audience results would differ from having an audience based in a different country – for example, if this question was asked in Canada or in Europe, would the results differ? Or is this strictly an American deficiency of average people having some mathematical talent? It would explain why lotteries are so popular.
I have a follow up from my previous post on the taste (or lack thereof) of strawberries.
At the local grocery store closest to the hotel I am currently staying in, I noticed the same types of California strawberries (which are presumably just as tasteless as the ones that we get up in Richmond) and they were selling for US$3 for a pound. They were also selling 4 pounds for US$8. I also noticed on another part of the refrigerator they were selling half-pound portions of organic strawberries for US$4. Half a pound of strawberries translates into about 8-10 strawberries. They looked to be the same colour and size as the regular ones. I have no idea how they tasted.
Although I wasn’t looking for strawberries that day, the thought went through my head that if I was looking for them, organic strawberry producers have priced themselves out of the market. They are nearly three times as expensive as the regular strawberries and I don’t think most consumers will go for it unless if they are incredibly flavoured. Since I have no assurances that they will be if I buy them, I decided to pass.
This creates a negative feedback loop – organic strawberry makers can’t sell enough volume since nobody wants to buy strawberries at such an inflated price. This will cause production to drop which will lead to a higher price until equilibrium is hit. It appears that the equilibrium between organic and regular strawberries at this particular supermarket is at an 8:3 ratio in terms of cost per pound of weight.
The funny thing is that I’m in southern California right now and it shouldn’t be too difficult to find some sort of farmer’s market where I could find fresh organic strawberries or so you’d think! Unfortunately even if I did manage to find organic strawberries that actually taste like real strawberries, I would have an extremely tough time trying to fly them back north over the border. But at least I’d be a little more confident buying organic strawberries at the supermarket since the word “organic” clearly means you’re getting more value in the strawberries that you’d purchase.
For other commodity vegetables and fruits (e.g. lettuce), I’m not sure the value differential between price and taste is sufficient to justify increased prices for the produce. There may be other readily unquantifiable characteristics to buying organic (such as reduction in pesticide use), but since I’m a fairly economical consumer when it comes to purchasing, there has to be a fairly rational argument to justify the extra cost.
Right now I’m sitting in the Vancouver airport US departures lounge. I’ll be heading to Los Angeles for the week. I had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on how you want to look at it) of flying more than 35,000 miles in 2005 and that qualifies you for a bunch of perks. The most important one, in my opinion, is the ability to have free access to the airport lounge. Normally it would cost about $400/year if you were to buy a separate membership, which is quite steep to purchase on its own.
Anyhow, the lounge is a part of the terminal which is overlooking the taxiway between terminal E of YVR and the Fairmont hotel. As it is very sunny and clear at this time, there is a lot of natural light flooding the area. There is also free internet access and a bunch of goodies available for consumption, including cookies, chips, a soup, hot (coffee, tea) and cold drinks. Right now I’m sipping on a latte and eating a chocolate chip cookie. I could use one of those fancy coffee machines at home.
Since economy class flying is much like the proverbial sardines in a can analogy, the lounge at least buffers the shock of transitioning between a spacious and relaxing atmosphere to a compact and dense one. I would have no idea how claustrophobic people would ever fly. The Vancouver to Los Angeles run is only 2 hours and 50 minutes so thankfully, by the time that you’ve put down your book that you’re reading and looking for snack food, you’ve already landed.
I recently bought a pound of strawberries which were imported from California. While California farmers have been awfully good at producing strawberries that have the nice deep red colour and have been good at producing strawberries in size, why the heck have they been so piss poor at producing strawberries that actually taste like strawberries? The strawberries that come out of California this time of year have the texture of apples and are completely tasteless.
Eventually the farmers will get smart and realize that they will get better sell-through of their inventory when they find a way to select seeds for flavour in addition to size and colour. Unfortunately there’s no good way to analyze taste by just looking at a strawberry unless if you put it in a million dollar chemical analyzer.
Right now, I highly recommend everybody to stay away from the current batch of California strawberries. Maybe so-called “organic” strawberries might be better, but I have my doubts.
The full document (approximately 300 pages) can be found here. Since I actually enjoy reading these types of documents, I went through it all. In theory you can just read page 249 to 315 to read the proposed changes to legislation. The rest of the document simply provides justification for the changes proposed.
Most of the information contained in this budget was telegraphed in advance, mainly in the last election campaign and in the preceding week from the finance minister himself. Thus, not too much of it was surprising.
The general thought is that since the Conservatives are in a minority government situation (in fact, the existing government has the least percentage of the seats in parliament), they can’t hammer anything that would cause a block-veto by the other three parties. Considering the polling numbers, if the budget fell and there was another election, it would be highly probable that the Conservatives would be able to form government again with possibility a majority (my intuition suggests a better than 50% chance of a majority government in the event that the budget is voted down) so there is considerably more latitude in the budget than back in 1979 when Joe Clark got booted out of office.
The big complaint from Liberals and the NDP will be about child care, and the $5 billion in money that was pledged by Paul Martin to the First Nations that will not come down the pipeline. The NDP will also complain about the cut in corporate income taxes and lack of environmental provisions (i.e. anything of substance on the Kyoto Protocol). Both of those parties will likely vote against the budget, while it is likely that the Bloc will vote for the budget.
Note that all the page references in this post are actual budget document pages and not “PDF pages” from the PDF document.
Here are some random thoughts that caught my attention:
When I look at my own wallet, in 2006 I will be down about $68 due to the increase of the lower tax bracket, but I will be up about $54 due to the $250 employment tax credit and up about $50 bucks via the GST cut when I look at my spending patterns in the last half of 2005 and assume the same for 2006. The dividend tax credit will also give me a few bucks (literally).
The big winners in this budget from tax measures would be parents, students, businesses (after 2008) and people planning purchases after July 1, 2006. Oddly enough since I’m not in any of those categories, I don’t personally benefit from much of it other than the GST cut.
I will leave arguments for the spending side (or lack thereof) for the many other blogs out there that will be blasting the Conservatives. I don’t think it’s any secret that the Conservatives aren’t fans of the Kyoto Protocol and also I think you can count the number of First Nations people on my hand that voted for the Conservatives in the last election (and the next one) which probably explains the lack of 5 billion coming their way via a pledge that Paul Martin made.
It’s my impression that this budget is hardly a radical change and is clearly a post and pre-election budget at the same time. If you take out the provisions for defence spending and child care, and apply that to the environment and First Nations, you could almost confuse this budget for being a Liberal one.
Another book which I recently read was Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, written by Dava Sobel.
The book is about John Harrison and his quest to win the Longitude Prize. Back in the early 18th century, Captains aboard sea vessels did not have an accurate way of measuring their east-west coordinate (Longitude). Measuring latitude was easy – you can look where the sun is highest in the sky and then measure the angle from the ground.
Eventually the British parliament established the Longitude Commission and they offered 20,000 pounds (adjusted for inflation, that would be a few million dollars today) as a prize to anybody that could solve the problem. Most of the people on the commission thought that the problem would be solved through astronomical methods, but Harrison developed a timepiece that was very accurate at sea.
There was also the political issue of people on the commission that were against seeing or believing that a precise clock could be invented, so they stalled awarding of the prize until eventually King George III had to get involved.
The book was a quick read and well written. I truly wonder with all of this modern technology if GPS and our information aids were to disappear how quickly we would be able to “rediscover” things such as the fine art of navigation.