Radley Balko argues that Virginia’s Anti-Gambling Crusade is a Bad Bet:
Last month, police in Fairfax, Va., conducted a SWAT raid on Sal Culosi Jr., an optometrist suspected of running a sports gambling pool with some friends. As the SWAT team surrounded him, one officer’s gun discharged, struck Culosi in the chest and killed him. In the fiscal year before the raid that killed Culosi, Virginia spent about $20 million marketing and promoting its state lottery.
Carl Bialik, the Numbers Guys, explains the astronomical odds of Picking the Perfect NCAA Bracket:
Filling out a perfect bracket means predicting the outcome of 63 games. If each game were a true toss-up, that would mean your chance of perfection is a mere one in two to the 63rd power, or one in nine million trillion (yes, million trillion — there are no tidy terms for numbers this large). Put another way, you are about 60 billion times more likely to win the multistate Powerball lottery.
[...]
Of course, you can do better than just flipping a coin for each game. Some teams are better than others. I spoke with a half-dozen statisticians and mathematicians to get their best guesses about how well an informed picker could theoretically do. The most generous estimate for the chance of a perfect bracket: about one in 150 million.
It sounds like this urban coyote won’t be waking up in the city that never sleeps. Wily Coyote Captured in Central Park:
A wily coyote paid a visit to the big city, leading dozens of police officers on foot and in a helicopter on a loping chase through Central Park before being captured Wednesday.‘For a coyote to get to midtown, he has to be a very adventurous coyote,’ said city Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. Officials said the animal may have wandered into the city from suburban Westchester County, or perhaps crossed the Hudson River from New Jersey via a bridge, a railroad trestle or a passing truck.
Officials said the tawny-colored animal, nicknamed Hal by park workers, was about a year old and weighed around 35 pounds. Hal proved quite adept at avoiding capture, jumping into the water, leaping over an 8-foot fence, ducking under a bridge and scampering through the grounds of a skating rink.
Hal was caught near Belvedere Castle, close to 79th Street and Central Park West, after being shot with a tranquilizer gun at close range by a police officer.
If you’re a hipster-geek fan of Jackson Publick‘s Venture Bros., you should be happy to hear that “the DVD project is all in the can and everything.”
If you’re an übergeek and know who Bill Sienkiewicz is, then you’ll be especially happy to hear that he “turned in a supercool painting, as expected, for the inside packaging.”
China From Red to Green quotes Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto on China’s water supply:
For most Americans, it is unimaginable that the great Mississippi River would one day dry up and not reach the ocean. Yet between 1974 and 2000, China’s Yellow River….ran dry 18 times. In 1998, the Yellow River failed to reach the ocean mouth for more than 250 days. With 1.3 billion people to feed, such water shortages are not just a major agricultural problem but a serious threat to China’s economic and political stability.
I’m not the least bit surprised that Zimbabwe is going through hard times, but I am surprised by this quasi-metric. No Coke a sign of Zimbabwe’s tough times:
It was the first Coke drought across the country for at least four decades, shop owners said. Throughout the seven-year guerrilla war that ended white rule and led to independence in 1980, Coca-Cola was available in rural stores in the heart of war zones.Traditionally, it has been the country’s best-selling soft drink, and its absence underscored the nation’s worst economic crisis since independence.
Why was England first to industrialise?:
Why was England first? And why Europe? We present a probabilistic model that builds on big-push models by Murphy, Shleifer and Vishny (1989), combined with hierarchical preferences. Exogenous demographic factors (in particular the English low-pressure variant of the European marriage pattern) and redistributive institutions – such as the Old Poor Law – combined to make an Industrial Revolution more likely. Industrialization was the result of having a critical mass of consumers that is “rich enough” to afford (potentially) mass-produced goods.Our model is calibrated to match the main characteristics of the English economy in 1780 and the observed transition until 1850. This allows us to address explicitly one of the key features of the British Industrial Revolution unearthed by economic historians over the last three decades – the slowness of productivity and output change. In our calibration, we find that the probability of Britain industrializing before France and Belgium is above 90 percent. Contrary to recent claims in the literature, 18th century China had only a minimal chance to industrialize at all.
In The Girls Next Door, Joan Acocella looks at The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds — and, by extension, at Hugh Hefner:
Hefner said from the beginning that he was not producing a girlie magazine; Playboy was a “life style” magazine, of which sex was only a part. He was put off by the men’s magazines of his youth, with their emphasis on riding the rapids and fighting bears. Why did virility have to be proved outdoors? Why couldn’t its kingdom be indoors? “We like our apartment,” he wrote in his editorial for the first issue of Playboy. “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”
Hef has a peculiar set of vices — beyond the obvious:
Hefner is addicted to games: pinball machines, electronic games, board games. He likes to do forty-hour Monopoly marathons, fuelled by Pepsi (of which, it has been said, he used to consume three dozen bottles a day) and Dexedrine.
At “the end of the sixties, one-fourth of all American college men were buying his magazine every month,” so things have dropped off quite a bit — but not as much as they could have:
As for the magazine, the surprise is not that it has lost fifty per cent of its readers but that, outdated as it is, it has lost only that many, and that the faithful are not all in nursing homes. (According to a 2005 market study, the readers’ median age is thirty-three.) A good comparison, made recently in Time, is with Mad, which was launched a year before Playboy and was as much a product of the fifties as Hefner’s publication. Mad is still in print, but with one-tenth the circulation it had in the early seventies. Next to that, Hefner’s half a loaf looks pretty good.
Business 2.0‘s “Browser” column claims that Nokia aims to kill iPods, camcorders:
Last year, Nokia became the world’s largest camera maker when it shipped 100 million cameraphones. Top Nokia executive Anssi Vanjoki took credit for driving Konica-Minolta out of the camera market, noting that the company first predicted the demise of the camera business in 2000. Now the company is setting its sights on the music player and camcorder markets, by adding those functions into its phones. One development that may help cell phone makers like Nokia push music players on to cell phones: NEC has developed a new chip that allows cell phones to play music for up to 50 hours. That would be a big improvement over the iPod, which claims a battery life of up to 20 hours.
There’s a new way to bet on real estate:
On Tuesday, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Tradition Financial Services, together with Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss and Standard & Poor’s, announced the launch of S&P CME Housing Futures and Options.These derivatives will enable investors to take a position on the direction of home prices either for the nation as a whole or for 10 major cities to start, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Mortgage bankers will be able to hedge against falling markets, but even ordinary consumers may get into the act:
This hokey “news” story, Me-Ouch: Cat Survives 80-Foot Fall, describes a fairly common phenomenon:
Piper the cat may have used up a life or two but was unharmed after falling nearly 80 feet from a tree.She had been in the tree for eight days when a rescuer started up to save her Monday. But a scared Piper crept away until the limb underneath her snapped.
She fell 80 feet, twisting and turning in the air before slamming onto the ground. It looked like a catastrophe, but Piper wasn’t even dazed, scampering off before her owner Rodney Colvin could catch her.
Piper was found a few minutes later under a vehicle. Her owner said she had no broken bones and was only a little dehydrated.
Cats routinely survive long falls, because they have a nonfatal terminal velocity:
The truth is, after a few floors it doesn’t really matter [how far the cat falls], as long as the oxygen holds out. Cats have a nonfatal terminal velocity (sounds like a contradiction in terms, but most small animals have this advantage). Once they orient themselves, they spread out like a parachute. There are cats on record that have fallen 20 stories or more without ill effects. As long as the cat doesn’t land on something pointy, it’s likely to walk away.
I remember hearing about this 1987 Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association study:
Two vets examined 132 cases of cats that had fallen out of high-rise windows and were brought to the Animal Medical Center, a New York veterinary hospital, for treatment. On average the cats fell 5.5 stories, yet 90 percent survived. (Many did suffer serious injuries.) [...] When the vets analyzed the data they found that, as one would expect, the number of broken bones and other injuries increased with the number of stories the cat had fallen — up to seven stories. Above seven stories, however, the number of injuries per cat sharply declined. In other words, the farther the cat fell, the better its chances of escaping serious injury.The authors explained this seemingly miraculous result by saying that after falling five stories or so the cats reached a terminal velocity — that is, maximum downward speed — of 60 miles per hour. Thereafter, they hypothesized, the cats relaxed and spread themselves out like flying squirrels, minimizing injuries.
Of course, there’s an obvious — and literal — survivorship bias here. Cats that fell 20 stories and did not land just right were no longer recognizably cats and did not get brought in for veterinary care.
It looks like we have yet another story leaving guys wondering, Where was she when I was in school?:
Debra LaFave, a Florida teacher, seen here leaving a Tampa court in 2005, who admitted having sex several times with her 14-year-old student was freed after prosecutors dropped sexual abuse charges to avoid calling the boy to the witness stand.
Witness The Decline of France:
The right to assemble is a pillar of free society. But in France it’s the only pillar its citizens seem to take seriously. So much so that any public debate of import gets conducted in the streets rather than through the ballot box or institutions of a purportedly mature democracy.In less enlightened societies, as opposed to the birthplace of the Enlightenment, that’s usually called mob rule. But the violent street demonstrations roiling France’s cities today, and the unhappy career prospects of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, are the latest symptoms of an ailing democracy.
I must admit, baby predators can be pretty damn cute. This five-month-old polar bear cub is hunting a bird in his cage in the Moscow Zoo.
How A Man Makes Over 2 Million Dollars A Year… Chasing The Geese Away:
David started Geese Police in 1986, as the solution to driving away unwanted geese from town parks, corporate properties, golf courses, or even front lawns. Using trained border collies, they drive away the geese without harming them. Today, Geese Police has considerably grown and expanded, earning just under $2 million in 2000. David has also begun to franchise his business to a highly selected group of individuals.