How about some perspective

Is it me, or are today's politicians and media people more prone to exaggeration than they used to be some two decades ago or so? My favorite recent example: the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), called the misconduct of Secret Service agents in Cartagena, Colombia "the worst moment in the history of the Secret Service."

Seriously? If I remember correctly, there was once a crew of Secret Service agents who allowed the President to be shot dead on their watch. I really don't think that has been topped yet. 

A lighthearted prank with a dark side

The video below is a funny little prank that, on second viewing, is much less funny. Watch the slow motion part, and keep in mind that these girls are friends and roommates. The first girl out the door is desperately trying to shut it in her friends' faces. The second girl pushes the third one out of her way to get to the door faster. Female friendship.

Like taking candy from a kid

If you haven't felt homicidal fury in a really long while, watch this video.

Like French

Evaluating the Design of the R Language is the first paper about R aimed at the academic programming language community. Memorable one-liner:

As a language, R is like French; it has an elegant core, but every rule comes with a set of ad-hoc exceptions that directly contradict it.

Lie out

A word of wisdom from a long-ago engineering colleague: "Whenever I see an outlier, I’m never sure whether to throw it away or patent it."

--Berton Gunter (R-help mailing list, December 2009)

Nature actually found a third solution: Let outliers have a bunch of little outlier babies and then expose those to selective pressures.

Famous quotes that get things wrong: Einstein

Albert Einstein is generally credited with the following thought:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

I'll prove that the quote is wrong by counterexample. Texas Hold 'em is a zero-sum game, which means it has at least one minimax strategy profile. Due to the fact that the outcome of any particular hand is determined not only by players' strategies but also in part by chance, it is possible for any player to lose a hand while playing his minimax strategy. The quote above advises a player to change his strategy in such an event. Since, by assumption, the player's strategy is optimal, this advice is absurd. QED.

Penalty kicks and the handicap principle

Few hours ago I caught the first half of a soccer game that my team won 3-0. Coincidentally, the first goal of the game, scored off of a penalty kick by the team captain, was a good example of the handicap principle in action. If all you're doing is trying to maximize the probability of scoring, this is a dumb way to take a penalty, because it's needlessly difficult. But if part of your utility function is showing off, this makes sense: by taking an unnecessary risk of looking really stupid if you fail, you're signaling supreme confidence in your skills.

Fourteen years and a funeral

The newly elected coalition governing Poland is planning to pass legislation increasing retirement age from 65 to 67. Some guy named Krzysztof Feusette, who writes for the second-largest Polish daily newspaper, is protesting against this in an op-ed Four Years and a Funeral, in which he attempts to show that Polish men will, on average, enjoy retirement for only four years. He compares this figure with its counterparts in other European countries, showing that it is generally much lower.

In order to fully appreciate how much of a goddamn idiot Mr. Feusette is, let's look at the method he uses to arrive at the average length of male retirement. Here's how he does it (make sure you're sitting down when you're reading this): he subtracts retirement age from life expectancy at birth for men. You read that right: at birth. AT BIRTH. Could we make a one-time exception in retirement law for Mr. Feusette, so that this idiot could retire right the fuck now? (Also, when I check the source he cites, I see life expectancy at birth for Polish men to equal 72.3 years and not 71 years.)

For those of you who want to know what the truth is, I'm not sure exactly, because I couldn't find life expectancy data for each age. But it sure isn't even close to four years. In 2007, life expectancy for Polish men at the age of 65 was 14.6 years.

Empathy

No one is a villain in their own narrative. In your own mental model of the universe, your actions are always justified, or at the very least make sense. Whenever you see anyone do something that to you seems so despicable as to not have any possible justification, you can be sure there is a world in which that action actually is justifiable: The internal world of the person who did this. Think about it: Heinrich Himmler lived in a world in which his actions made sense and were justified. I'm not saying this is karma or poetic justice, or that it was in any way a "just punishment" for what he was doing. But it could not possibly have been a pleasant world to live in.