Via Kottke here is a (two-week-old) Wall Street Journal article about how sports strategy improves relentlessly.

Considered more broadly, Constructal Law may be the closest thing to a grand unified theory for the evolution of sports. In a sports context, the river is the relentless search for the easiest way to score or win more often. In soccer, there is the indefensible through-ball, passed between two defenders to a striker sprinting into open space. In basketball, the two-handed set shot eventually gave way to finding the tallest, fastest players who could jump the highest and dunk.

I've had this thought before; I think that the worst teams that play today could beat the best teams from twenty years ago. Teams adjusting to a rule change resemble a new marketplace; some try out outlandish new things, evaluate their success and the best solution emerges quickly. This is why every team at the Olympics almost exclusively used the pick & roll; when you have shooters and good ballhandlers it's close to impossible to prevent a team from getting a good shot. Furthermore this is why the referee's decision to award penalty kicks has taken on an increased importance in soccer, and diving has become such a problem; free goals are few and far between, so it's worth taking a risk to earn one. Sometimes the efficient outcome in a sport makes the resulting game pretty ugly. That's when rulemakers have to step in and change things. Twenty years from now I hope people will be embarrassed at how many football coaches punted and kicked one-point PAT's, and how many baseball teams used sacrifice flies and sacrifice bunts.

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I've started reading books in the middle, rather than at the beginning. When you have a lot of books it's a quicker way to get to interesting material. Daniel Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. If you enjoy learning, you're not a typical student. Willingham surveys child psychology and teaching literature to come up with seven arguments. Along the way he demolishes the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory of learning. I never really understood how kinesthetic learners were supposed to grasp philosophy anyway. Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). This has been covered by other people, but it's still good. Vanderbilt uses traffic as a launching point for a host of interesting discussions, like coordination problems caused by real-time traffic software and how to make people pay more attention to the road. Recommended reading for Southern California drivers. Tyler Cowen, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. Finally, the library delivered a copy. Cowen defends autism and explains that the autistic cognitive style is prized by our society; he points to nobelist Vernon Smith, for example, who has come forward as a self-diagnosed Asperger's child. Like David Gordon I wonder if Cowen is painting too wide of a brushstroke. Cowen also jumps from argument to argument, rarely spending too much time on any one topic, which may be a blogging tendency but which I don't like too much in a book. All in all I thought it was very good. Steven Skiena, Calculated Bets. Skiena is a computer science geek who has had a lifelong fascination with jai-alai; in this book he shares details of his quest to make money betting on jai-alai. In short, yes you can make money, but you can't make very much, as only about $15,000 gets wagered on any game and if you bet too much you start changing the odds. Unfortunately his strategy involved making bets on specific trifecta combinations, which means that although horse racing is also a pari-mutuel game, the techniques don't cross over. Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. I was fairly disappointed by this book. Although I don't know what a travel book should say besides, "Start traveling." Benoit Mandelbrot, The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence. Mandelbrot is a Nobel prize winner who thinks that modern portfolio theory is not a good model to explain market movements. Check and check. The first half outlines the history of modern portfolio theory and the problems with the model, and the second half explores his neat work with fractals and market price movements.

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Often when someone delivers a devastating critique of an industry or particular policy issue, like healthcare, the immediate follow up question is, “Well, you seem smart, what should we do about it then?” From my experience most of the time this question is asked like a layperson would to a shaman, but the answers generally lack insight. And this strikes me as a very tribal, ask-the-wiseman approach to the issue. Now that the speaker’s presented the analysis, we should all be equally likely to implement the correct solution. Or should we?

If you think you have an excellent solution, how would you display your bona fides? One way would be to present a great diagnosis of the problem. But I think good solutions are few and far between.

From this post on government expansion by Robert Higgs.

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Last night Matt Steinglass tried to put the outrage over the execution of apparently innocent Texan Cameron Todd Willingham in perspective.

Well, okay — say the guy was innocent, and Texas put an innocent guy to death this one time. And let’s even grant that it’s not the only case. In fact, imagine for the sake of argument that 50 percent of the people Texas puts to death were innocent. Texas executed 423 people between 1982 and 2008, so let’s call it 212 innocent people killed by the state. Now, look at all the time, effort and money being spent on trying to get Texas to reform or eliminate its death penalty practices. It must be millions of dollars, not to mention all the media attention. If all that money were being devoted to ending malaria in Africa, isn’t it obvious that it would save thousands and thousands of innocent lives?

The difference, of course, is that we know for certain that the Texas state government ended Willingham's life, whereas lack of investment by Western governments is only one cause of malaria deaths in Africa. Furthermore, we as a society are terrible at putting a price on life. Imagine the following hypothetical situation. We launch a rocket to Mars, but the ship suffers damage on the way there and does not have enough juice to make it home. The two astronauts have a year to live before they run out of resources, and rescuing them will cost $400 million. Furthermore we know for certain that the rescue money will be taken from foreign aid which will go to various health and aid measures and is estimated will save 2000 lives, although we'll never know for certain whose lives we're saving. This is akin to the trolley problem. For another thought experiment, replace $400 million with X and try to figure out the value of X where the government agrees that rescuing the astronauts will not be a good idea. $1 billion? $1 trillion? If I'm a senator, I'm holding these poor astronauts lives in one hand but I am holding a sort of intangible, expected value of lives saved in the other. The choice is pretty easy; vote to effect the rescue. When we know for certain we are the cause of death we'll go to unbelievable lengths to save a person; when we have the power to prevent a lot of death, but we are not the main cause of death it's easy to dodge the moral bullet. I think the only way we decide that we can spend the money in a better way is if we create some automatic decision rule which says that if it'll cost less than $X million to save a life then we should do it but if not then we shouldn't. Or if we destroy all rocketship technology, so that it becomes impossible to save the astronauts. This of course is the root of the healthcare problem in the US. Advances in medical technology in recent decades have allowed for amazing new treatments in every field of medicine, that save countless lives. The problem is that these treatments are massively expensive, and may end up making the whole country bankrupt. If a dying loved one looks you in the eye and the doctor says they need the new treatment to live, and you're not even going to pay the cost for the procedure but your insurer is, then you say yes to pretty much any cost (use the same procedure as above - a new treatment costs M dollars - at what number M should we decide that the treatment is not cost effective? $20 million per life saved? The problem is that we have to come up with the money somehow, and we haven't found a way to stop Medicare from eating holes in the budget yet. If we don't find a solution the country will go bankrupt; already, most of the increase in wages from now until 2030 is expected to be eaten up by increased medical spending. Once the life is in your hands, it's too late; you're going to pay any price to save it, or get labeled a cruel automaton, someone who values money more than human life. The fact of the matter is that if we're willing to pay $1 billion to save every life, then we're going to run out of money very quickly. Maybe you disagree, but I think that if we only have two ways to spend $1 billion we should fight disease in Africa instead of rescuing the astronauts. But if I'm a senator can you imagine attaching your name to a "No" vote? The current approach of politicians is to dodge the issue at all costs, but we don't have much room for error anymore.

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I sat next to this guy on the train who was blasting heavy metal incredibly loud out of his headphones (and sleeping). Maybe he was having a bad day, but he was playing it so loud I feel like it had to be for everyone else's benefit. He wanted to share his music with the world but more tell the world that that music is part of his identity. I wonder if there would be a market for reverse headphones - headphones that only project music outward, for those people who want to project a certain self-image without listening to the music itself. One could listen to Coltrane or Vanessa Carlton's "Thousand Miles" while the world thinks they're listening to Black Eyed Peas or someone equally bad. You could also use reverse headphones as a way to ward people away from the seat next to you; Brotha Lynch and Andre Nickatina are perfect for that purpose. Would expand on this idea but I have three midterms tomorrow.

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What is it about being a tourist that makes you want to do crappy tourist things? I lived in Philadelphia for a year and a half and never went to see the Liberty Bell, or take a horse drawn carriage ride around the Old Town. I live (near) San Francisco and I've never been to the MOMA, taken a cable car ride (in 12 years), or hung out on the Golden Gate Bridge. 1. Being a tourist makes you want to do things that are "unique" to the area even if you don't derive much pleasure from them. 2. Without knowledge of the area, a tourist's activities are limited to touristy things. Most locals don't want tourists blending in so they are deliberately unfriendly. This is being mitigated somewhat by websites like Couchsurfing 3. When you live somewhere the opportunity cost of visiting the Fisherman's Wharf this weekend is lower. 4. It's easy to do what the pamphlets in the lobby and your Rough Guide tell you to do. I'm not too convinced by these reasons. When I'm somewhere new I inevitably spend most of my time walking from place to place, checking out the parks and main drag, or hiking to the top of a big hill nearby. After midnight is an especially good time for sightseeing.

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The story has lots of potential but I thought the execution could have been much better. "Telling the truth" in this movie means two things; one, you say whatever's on your mind all the time, and two, you believe everything people hear all the time. Even before he starts lying, Ricky Gervais's character is blessed with a sort of super-awareness that everyone else seems to lack; they take direct remarks in stride, while he reacts like a normal person would to being called fat, or grimacing when someone else is verbally abused. Anthony Lane is correct that this movie is about Gervais lamenting the one thing that he can't change; his physical appearance (this is also a theme in Extras). Even when he becomes rich and famous, the girl he loves turns him down because, as she tells him, she wants her children to be fit. To be honest, most of the truth-telling in here doesn't make it past the subconscious. Women would tell a fat guy no, but they might not be consciously aware that their reason for doing so is an evolutionary stable strategy. Similarly, if you fear another person in real life, it will show up in your mannerisms and choice of conversation, which is telling the truth in its own way. Many times people do things without being aware of why they're doing them. We might tell ourselves we bought a shirt "because it looked good," when in reality the mere act of purchasing makes us feel better and signals to those around us that we're being cared for. I wish Gervais would take this movie a bit more seriously; the subject lends itself to humor, and it's great to get some laughs out of it, but it's possible to do so in a way that's not over the top, or reliant on visual sight gags, like rolling out of bed with a beard and sandals, and with the bedsheet still on, resembling Jesus. The soundtrack is awful and the all-star cast (with cameos from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Bateman, Jonah Hill, Tina Fey, Jeffrey Tambor, Stephen Merchant and Barry from East Enders, among others) is sometimes wasted. Gervais is trying to make points about theism, and the relations between men and women, but sometimes throws them away for a cheap laugh. The "truth," as Gervais shows, is that we want to be lied to. We want lies that comfort us, that insinuate that the world is within our control. For instance, the idea that a woman would decide at the end of the night, or the next morning, whether or not she likes a man, when most evidence shows that women know within about thirty seconds of meeting someone whether they want to sleep with them.  Or that handing your resume to the HR people at the career fair counts for anything, that average guys can get beautiful women, like they do in movies, or that we'll go on to heaven after we die; I could go on and on. How do we know those people are being honest? Most of the time, we don't. We lie to comfort others, or rationalize to comfort ourselves, and they do the same for us. Lies pervade our culture and make living more pleasant. I wish they'd gotten a more thoughtful treatment.

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Just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, my friends and I came across Oink!, a small restaurant with a simple business model. They are very successful as a restaurant by making the one item they sell perfectly. Here's how they lure people in: Here's their menu. You can order a Hog Roast Roll or a "Crackling" Hog Roast Roll. If you want to get something else, try a different store. One pig, two items on the menu, three possible condiments. That's it. And it was delicious, as you'd expect in a 1-item restaurant. When they sell only one thing, they're forced to do it well. If they're not getting repeat customers, they know exactly why.

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