Seven straight Tour de France titles

Lance Armstrongs seven straight Tour De France titles have to go down among the alltime great athletic achievements... It started making me think of other great individual streaks that are comparable. Here are a few.

1) Joe Dimaggio (Baseball) His 56 game hitting streak of 1941 has to be the most amazing individuals streak in sports history. This is statistically SO amazing that math it remains a subject of discussion among math professors to this day

2) Wayne Gretsky Seven straight Scoring titles... eight straight Hart Ross (Hockeys version of the Most Valuable Player) titles between 1980-1987.

3) Don Budge. (Tennis) Winner of six consecutive Grand slam events between '37 and '38

3) Tiger Woods (Golf) Won all four of golfs majors in a row between 2000 and 2001, the only man to ever do this.

4) Barry Bonds. (Baseball) Three straight MVPS. No one else has won more than three over an entire career. He has six.

Bias and the News

Wow...

I read a fantastic article on the New York Times website concerning the topic of media bias and the impact of blogging on the information sphere. This is the most fairminded analysis of the core issues I have ever read. Posner shows that the media portrayal of issues has ALWAYS been linked to market forces. The old veneer of objectivity was linked to the need to compete for market share rather than any higher journalistic quest for "Truth." The growing partisanship of media outlets we are witnessing in the current era is a result of an information explosion in which individual outlets are catering to ever narrower slices of the demographic pie.
The whole debate regarding impartiality (in the print media at least) is interesting to me because, having lived in Britain and the US, I have seen the British media in which the print media wear their partisan colors very openly and newspaper bias is seen as a matter of course and the United States in which newspapers legitimacy is linked to at least the pretense of neutrality in how issues are covered. The fiction of objective news coverage is reserved in Britain for the state owned BBC.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31POSNER.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1122271298-jaLLsQ0wD5jOOVgvnVR/sQ

This article is SUPERB. THE NYT site requires registration but it is definitely worth it.

I read some responses of muslim religious authorities to the London bombings.

Daud Abdullah, assistant general secretary of Britain's biggest Muslim lobby group on radical Islamists.

"We know these groups are out there. It's up to Muslims, non-Muslims, the police and the media alike to isolate them, contain them and make sure their message is not heard."

Sheikh Anwar Mady, imam of the London Central Mosque, urged families to help ensure children did not turn to radicalism.

"The family has got a large responsibility in supervising the way their children should behave," he told Reuters.
"Our youths should understand that making decisions regarding big important and public issues should only be the task of the scholars and leaders of the community."

These people fundamentally DONT get it... They honestly passionately believe that the best means of combating terroism and terrorist groups is errecting trade barriers against dangerous ideas.. They do not understand the way in which the growth of technology and the democratisation of information will continue to subvert topdown hierarchial power and value structures of the kind they cling to.

The way forward for Islam according to these minds is a tighter monopoly on information.. More mindless deference to the great bearded authorities is the solution these individuals have to offer. Its a lame solution. Closed mindedness is a part of the problem but NOT part of the answer.

An unsurprising discovery

I read this in the Baltimore Sun

" Praying for someone who is ill and preparing to undergo a risky medical procedure appears to have no effect on the patient's future health.
That's the finding of one of the largest scientific investigations of the power of prayer conducted to date. Scientists said the study, published today in The Lancet, will undoubtedly renew debates over whether prayer has a measurable effect on illness and even whether it's a suitable subject of scientific inquiry.
For the study, researchers at Duke University recruited nearly 750 people undergoing heart-related procedures. Religious groups of different denominations were then randomly assigned to pray for the health of half the volunteers. The other half received no organized prayers.
Researchers found that the prayers, offered by representatives of Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist faiths, had no effect on whether patients experienced post-procedure complications such as heart attack, death or readmission to the hospital."

How shocking! Who would have thought? Im sure that now, after having the efficacy of their methodology so thoroughly debunked the major religious organisations of the world will rethink their position on prayer.

Great to see the folks at Duke pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge. Maybe now we can send them to Africa to research the effect of tribal dances on weather patterns or to Vegas to see how the possession of a rabbits foot affects Roulette wheels.

Game Theory and relationships

Game theory is a branch of mathematics popularised in recent years by 'A Beautiful Mind' the bestselling biography of mathematican John Nash and the movie of the same name starring Russell Crow

Game Theory is a field that is difficult to summarise. I guess you could say it is a study of the interaction between multiple self interested rational agents.

One of the most famous problems of of game theory is a situation known as the prisoners Dilemma. Here is a Summary taken from the University of Stanford Website.

"Suppose that the police have arrested two people whom they know have committed an armed robbery together. Unfortunately, they lack enough admissible evidence to get a jury to convict. They do, however, have enough evidence to send each prisoner away for two years for theft of the getaway car. The chief inspector now makes the following offer to each prisoner: If you will confess to the robbery, implicating your partner, and she does not also confess, then you'll go free and she'll get ten years. If you both confess, you'll each get 5 years. If neither of you confess, then you'll each get two years for the auto theft."

In any close relationship, whether that of parent to child, boyfriend to girlfriend or husband and wife, there exists the opportunity to exercise emotional leverage to gain some personal advantage. This is analogous to confessing in the above situation... The penalties of having your trust betrayed are comparable to the person who must serve ten years in the above scenario. I think MOST longterm relationships tend to produce situations and powerdynamics similioar to the prisoners dilemma in which the guiding considerations of action becomes strategy rather than fairness. A successful mutually beneficial relationship is ultimately based on both parties leaving the potential advantages on the table... (Neither "Confesses" in the above scenario)

I have GREAT respect for people who have the confidence and trust in me to apologise for something they have done. Apologising for past actions and admission of error more than anything else leaves you open to the exercise of emotional leverage by another party.

I have been in situations in the past in friendships and relationships where I have felt myself to be in the wrong on a particular issue BUT also didnt have the trust or confidence in the other party to apologise for my actions. I was not willing to give up leverage.

If one person in a relationship wants to make strategic moves, the other person has three choices. A) Conceed the game B) Try to win the game C) Walk away from the game/relationship.

Gameplaying in MANY walks of life interests and fascinates me.. In relationships it bores and fruistrates me and I wish I knew of a way out of such dilemmas.

Is boxing done?

Sports Illustrated recently released its list of the highest paid athletes in sports last year the (earnings are calculated as salary plus endorsements)
The Worlds Top Earners
1) Tiger Woods (Golf) $86 Million
2) Micheal Schumacher (Autoracing) $81 Million
3) Andre Agassi (Tennis) $45.5 Million
4) Shaquille Oneal (Basketball) $41.5 Million
5) Oscar De La Hoya (Boxing) $40 Million
6) Micheal Vick (Football) $37 Million
7) David Beckham (Soccer) $30 Million
8) Kevin Garnett (Basketball) $30 Million
9) Peyton Manning (Football) $29.5 Million
10) LeBron James (Basketball) $28 Million

Notably absent from the list is a heavy weight boxer.. Apart from the charismatic De La Hoya only one other boxer is listed in the top 50, is middleweight Bernard Hopkins . How did heavyweight boxing slip so far off the mainstream radar...? "The richest prize in sports" has slipped so far that there are motorcycle racers (Valentino Rossi) and a football offensive lineman (St Louis Rams tackle Orlando Pace) earning more money.

In the US particularly, Heavyweight boxing has lost so much ground in popular culture that I would rank it behind pro and college football, pro and college basketball, baseball, golf, tennis, autoracing and hockey. Even The Ring magazine, the selfproclaimed "bible of boxing" admitted in a recent issue that boxing is now a cult sport.

It is a far cry from the days of Ali, and Frazier or even Tyson and Holyfield...

I guess to blame is both the alphabet soup of titles and the selfimposed ghettoisation brought about by pay per view boxing, which essentially made many of boxings flagship events invisible to the general public. Heavyweight boxing has slipped to the point where the major US networks no longer consider it a sufficently lucrative proposition to be worth their time.

Can it be saved? I dont know.. I think that the sport badly needs an icon, a Tiger Woods/Micheal Jordan/David Beckham to lift it out of the doldrums. At this point even a charismatic leading man might not be enough...

Forming opinions as a non expert

An issue that has interested me for some time is the following. On many issues, from the economy, to the environment, from foreign policy, to scienctific research there are highly intelligent, highly informed experts who disagree. How do I form opinions on subjects in which there is stark disagreement between experts? Do I read all their books? Where will the time come from? Often the arguments will be of a subtlety and complexity that is impossible for someone without a very thorough understanding of the subject matter to grasp. Equally there will be times when I am intellectually outgunned. The experts whose opinions differ are simplky smarter than I am.

From buying a home to purchasing stock to planning for the future intelligent decision making is impossible without at some point deferring to authority. The difference between an open society and a totalitarian one is that in an open society there are many- a market place- of authorities. The question is how do I from my position of relative ignorance and stupidity decide which authority to defer to? My only choices seem to be an evaluation of the expert and/or the opinion of other experts about the same claim.

Some ideas...
The popularity of the claim. On the whole, ideas which enjoy popular support in their field are probably true more often than those which enjoy less support. But how often is this the case. To what degree should the popularity of a claim bias us toward accepting its truth?

The personal desirability of a claim: Do I or the expert have a personal stake in whether the claim is true or not? If there is a lot of incentive to believe that a claim is true, wishful thinking may bias us in this direction.

The popularity of the expert. How much extra weight should be given to the opinions of an expert who enjoys a high standing and reputation in his field?

The age of the expert. What difference does the age of an individual play in evaluating the probabilistic likelihood that a given claim is correct? I have no idea but it is something I intend to research and think about in the future.

Evidence of flexibility of thought: Has the expert shown an ability to change his mind in the past on other issues.? To me an individual whose track record shows little change in his opinions over a lengthy timeframe must have ALL his claims viewed with an extra dose of caution.



The personal attractiveness of the expert. Given our preference for the beautiful the articulate and the charismatic, it seems to me that many opinions expressed by experts strong in such qualities are probably overpriced in the ideas market. Should we consciously discount the probability that the claims of charismatic experts are true? If so by how much?

All of us already factor a lot of this stuff in when making gut level judgements about whether something is true or not....
But I think it important to think about this stuff explictly rather than implictly. In evaluating experts intuitively our evolutionary biases are likely to impair our judgemnt considerably. We will be overly swayed by the experts personal charisma for example.

I still need to think about this stuff a lot more but this is my opening shot at it.. Comments from friends and family are appreciated

One of my favorite columnists is Ronald Bailey who writes for the freemarket liberatarian webjournal/magazine Reason. He has just written a great article on the clash of civilisations... I find myself agreeing with every word of his analysis.

http://www.reason.com/links/links071105.shtml

The London attacks

I havent posted to my blog in a while because I felt I had to articulate a response to what has occurred in London

I realise I really dont have one.

Here is what globalisation does.

1) Relentlessly crush cultural practices and values that are incompatible with the dominant American-led free market system of trade and thought

2) Empower individuals and allowing groups to have a disproportionate impact on the world.

Jihadists are using the very fruits of western civilisation to strike at it. Cell phones and the internet
What the multiculturalists consistently miss is that cultures are not varied and beautiful things to be admired and idealised on the national geographic channel or preserved like beautiful pieces of period architecture.

Cultures have a practical use in that they are toolsets for dealing with the world that we live in. The primary value of cultural institutions is not aesthetic but utilitarian. In an increasingly interconnected world the playing conditions are being progressively leveled.　
In the game of global competition, the players that employ a suboptimal strategy will continue to lose.
I am reminded of the book Moneyball about Oakland As general manager Billy Beane. Billy Beane was able to establish a culture of objective analysis within a sport in which most personel moves and ingame startegy were governed by instinct, traditional wisdom and convention. He relied on the work of amateur baseball researchers such as Bill James to decide which factors were the important ones in determing the usefulness of a baseballplayer toward the end of winning games. The results (On base percentage as a far more important statistic than batting average, the worthlessness of Wins in evaluating pitchers) cut deeply against the grain of traditional baseball culture. However the As culture was more effective. It more accurately described the (baseball) world as it actually is. The result: Billy Beanes As won more games per dollar of payroll than any other team in baseball. They got more bang for the buck. Slowly and inexorably baseballs hidebound culture has changed to take these discoveries into account but the immense inertia and weight of the received wisdom was almost immensely difficult to overcome. People had a huge emotional investment in incorrect ways of doing things.
If it is immensely difficult for people to accept changes in baseball strategy even in the face of evidence how much more difficult will it be for them to accept changes in social organisation, changes in working life changes in social protections changes in government institutions? Real life outcomes are immensely more important than baseball penant races.

The deeply entrenched african cultural practise of nepotism has led to immense levels of corruption in africa. Despite its debilitating impact on African society the obligation
Africans feel to extended family members have proven impossible to shift.
African and Middle Eastern culture are both WRONG in key aspects. The outcome is is more losing. In baseball losing is reflected in the standings, in real life, in GDP and per capita income.
How does this tie in to the London bombings? Terrorism is a response to losing. Blow up the playing field. Disrupt the game by any means neccessary since you cant win without changing your strategy to　which your sense of selfworth is anchored. . Terrorists are pissing into the wind. It is the natural result of creating a mental link between your penis and your adherence to an objectively incorrect course of action. But in an age of the hyperempowered individual, their capacity to disrupt becomes ever greater.
As the losses mount and technology empowers small groups and individuals ever more, the temptation for the losers to be disruptive grows ever greater

it is a scary time

I saw this great advert for a Japanese camera phone on the subway last night and HAD to take a picture!

London and the Olympics

Was amazed to hear that London edged Paris for the Olympics... I guess it is cool, but I have always been skeptical about cities like London Paris and New York gaining much from the Olympics... It seems to make much more sense for cities like Atlanta or Seoul that have the infrastructure to support this kind of event but can still benefit from worldwide brand exposure and the increased tourism that it can bring. I think in the case of London or Paris their international profile is already so high that I'm not sure what they stand to gain other than the opportunity for some good old fashioned civic/nationalist chestbeating. Of course Bureaucrats will get to bureaucrate (is there a correct verb for what these people do?) and government will get to meddle and muddle. Its a great opportunity for civil servants and tax supported fools of every stripe to strut and fret their hour upon the world stage. I REALLY hope that Ken Livingstone is gone by 2012. I do not want this chump embarassing me or my city in front of the world with the garbage that is sure to spew from his mouth on this occasion. I am also worried that hosting a world event of this magnitude will send the multiculturalists and priests of political correctness into overdrive and new heights of absurdity
We shall see.

war of the Worlds

The latest apocalyptic alien invasion movie to hit hollywood. This is actually only the second time HG Wells novel has been oficially adapted for the screen. (The first time was in the 1950s)It just feels like the 20th. The aliens out to conquer the earth thing has been done so many times that for me the idea really needs to be allowed to rest for a couple of decades or so.
Apart from the wellworn premise however, the execution here simply didnt grab me. It is an essentially silly movie with a ludicrous alien invasion plan.... Tripod killer vehicles are buried under the earth for thouands of years until the aliens decide to invade... then little alien pilots are inserted to steer them via lightning bolts. The alien tripods run amok causing lots of havoc and destruction. It seems a VERY inelegant invasion method for such presumably advanced aliens.. I think part of the problem is that Spielberg has kept the most dated elements of the original war of the world story but updated the setting. By transposing the story from its original turn-of-the-century setting into the modern day he has highlighted that datedness still further, regardless of heavy heanded september 11 alegories.
A final problem for me is the lack of fun. Silly material is no obstacle to a great movie... Speilbergs own Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park are wondeful in this respect... But here the silliness is handled with such gravitas and sobriety that the whole thing becomes dull.

Tokyo Jewelry

This is the shop front of a tokyo store.... Beautiful isnt it....

A list of bad ideas

A while back for an online forum I made a list of ideas i believe to be false but very widely held.....

In future I think I will go into more detail about why on this site.

For now, here is the list...
1) Decreasing the gap between rich and poor is a good worth pursuing for its own sake.
2)The government is a good vehicle for ensuring a fairer world.
3) Sexual behavior, particularly women's, is an excellent indicator of an individuals moral worth
4) Suffering and poverty are inherently ennobling.
5) Extreme poverty is morally superior to extreme wealth.
6) Changing your mind is a sign of weakness and an indication of a weak or indecisive character. 7) Truly great leaders make decisions from their heart. They rely on their gut. analysis is for dorks.
8) Government has a duty to protect domestic jobs from foreign competition
9) All means of reaching conclusions are equally valid. Its all a matter of perspective.
10) There is no such thing as better or worse cultures they are simply different. We must suspend all judgement in these matters.
11) To assert the superiority of one culture/socioeconomic model over another in clearly a sign of entrenched bigotry/racism
12) The best road toward moral excellence is a set of clear rules, rigidly followed.
13) Religion is neccessary for the living of a moral life.
14) All religions contain great truth. To criticise the religions of others is a sign of arrogance/ignorance.
15) Some people have a duty to readdress the wrongs committed by their ancestors on the ancestors of other.
16) The physically strong and imposing are also morally ethically and intellectually more substantial

Sake Containers 

A Shrine 

Some pictures from yoyogi Park in tokyo 

Most iconic venues in sports

Was watching a little tennis earlier and starting thinking about sports venues... Specifically which are the most iconic.... Here is my preliminary (World Wide) list....


1. Yankee Stadium (Baseball)
2. Maracana (Soccer)
3. Madison Square Gardens (Pro Basketball, Boxing, Hockey)
4. Wembley stadium (Soccer)
5. Old Trafford (Soccer)
6. Wrigley Field (Baseball)
7. The Oval (Cricket)
8 Fenway Park (Baseball)
9. Center Court at Wimbledon (Tennis)
10. Augusta (Golf)
11. St Andrews (Golf)
12. Lambeau Field (Pro Football)

What I am reading

I have started reading The Gunslinger, the first volume of Stephen Kings mammoth Dark Tower series...

The best way to describe it is as Lord of the Rings meets The Good The Bad and The Ugly. Steve Kings big magnum opus, he has spent longer writing this thing than I have been alive. I believe the first installment was published when I was around three years old and the last one came out last year. I have been meaning to read this book for ten years now but I have deliberately held off until King got the damn thing finished.


Stephen King stories have notoriously weak endings. The last time I plowed through a King book with a four figure page count was the The Stand. Incredibly gripping right up to the second to last chapter... then it just fizzled. In this King has a LOT in common with his beloved Red Sox.
But since they won a championship last year maybe King can also break his weak ending jinx..

The Dark Tower epic is orders of magnitude longer than the stand and if he cant deliver after several thousand pages, and almost 30 years I will never read another King book.

male pattern baldness

Some Random Speculation.Is male pattern baldness an evolutionary adaptation? It occurred to me that male pattern baldness may have actually had utility of sorts to our hunter gatherer ancestors. Given that the human sex drive outlasts his physical prime, baldness in males may have been a mechanism for reducing the attractiveness of older males and therefore steering them away from contesting more desirable females with younger stronger males. Avoiding such confrontations would have definite survival value and make it possible for the aging male to continue reproducing with females further down the desirability ladder in his declining years....Just a thought.

My original intro

This is actually my second attempt at creating a blog having characterisitcally run out of gas during my first attempt. I had almost completely forgotten it. Recently I came back across it.
My intentions now are almost the same as the first time I attempted this so it seemed worth reposting...
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As reflected in the name of my blog I intend to use this place to explore ideas that are occupying my mind in a fairly random stream of consciousness fashion. I am not aiming for consistency or coherence. Many of the thoughts I intend to express here are embryonic. It is sort of a view into the engine room of my mind. a 'worldview-in-progress' that will never be complete. Therefore readers may find much which is less than elegantly thought out and even contradictory. While I won't fall back on Whitmans excuse that 'I contain multitudes' I do think it is true that unless you play with many ideas, take em apart and look under the bonnet it is next to impossible to truly grasp them or to come to informed opinions. I intend to write these entires FAST. That leads to more spontanaeity and generates more ideas.
So what kind of topics do I expect to find myself rambling about here? A pretty broad cross section. I like to think about most things. This is partly a reflection of genuine intellectual curiousity/restlessness and partly that of personal egotism. I have always admired the polymath, and aspire to be one myself. The notion of competence in multiple fields is one find immensely fascinating, whether intellectual as in the case of writers such as Asimov who wrote vast amounts covering history the bible, art and science or physical in the case of athletes such as Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, guys who just plain won whether smacking baseballs or catching footballs. Probably the greatest polymath of alltime is Leonardo Da Vinci who stands out to my mind as the most complete example of excellence in multiple fields in human history
The benefits of such interdisciplinarity may be open to question. Fitzgerald, through the mouth of his hero Nick Carraway mocks the desire to become "...that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded-man' "commenting that "-life is much more successfully looked at from a single window after all."
There is a very good argument that the leveraging of individual aptitudes by focusing on those areas in which they produce the most efficient results is a far more rational way of achieving personal excellence.
MBAs talk about the 80/20 principle ('80% of the output flowing out of 20% of our actions) and a number of business bestsellers have recently been written arguing that 'strength building' is a far more successful paradigm than the development/minimising of weaknesses.
Of course it can also be argued that the ability to fully grasp the life lessons of multiple fields of inquiry leads to the ability to make a far broader range of mental connections and avoid the 'boxed thinking' inherent in the single-lens world view.
In the end personal aspirations are as much, an issue of life experience and and temperament as they are of rational thought.The passions that drive us are seldom wholly rational. The bottomline is that I am far more interested in the wood than the trees. There may be a distict disadvantage to nongeniuses such as myself spreading themselves too thinly, but I am too stubborn in my interests to care.
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