Kournikova on wheels

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Chris Isidore calls Indy car driver Danica Patrick Kournikova on wheels:

Danica Patrick is set to start her third Indianapolis 500 this Sunday in the third row. But she’ll still be far ahead of the other drivers in the race in one important way: marketability.

Patrick has appeared on front pages, not just sports pages. She’s been in a Super Bowl commercial for GoDaddy.com, as well as spots for Procter & Gamble’s (Charts, Fortune 500) Secret deodorant and the Honda (Charts) Civic coupe. Her lead sponsor this year is cellphone maker Motorola (Charts, Fortune 500), a big step up from the subprime mortgage lender Argent that she had her first two years.

A survey of consumers conducted for Los Angeles-based entertainment marketing agency Davie Brown Entertainment found that 47 percent of those surveyed knew who she was.

That’s not only far above the 3.7 percent who were aware of last year’s Indy 500 winner Sam Hornish, it’s above some of the more successful drivers on the far more popular NASCAR circuit, such as Tony Stewart and Michael Waltrip, who are both recognized by about a third of those surveyed.

Among race car drivers, only NASCAR’s Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr., both with better than 60 percent recognition, are better known than Patrick, and neither of them have her appeal.

Davie Brown’s celebrity rating index gives her an 80 appeal rating, the fifth best of any athlete it includes in the survey. That not only tops Gordon and Earnhardt, it’s slightly better than superstar pitchmen Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan.

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gaikokumaniakku: >One could protest that for every disgruntled student who cuts class, there’s an enthusiastic student sucking the marrow out of college. >what, if anything, is “the marrow of college”? The marrow is the culture that values the knowledge that can be preserved in books. Colleges still have some of their old books of knowledge, but I question whether the people in charge of the colleges are teaching students to engage with the knowledge. It seems the desire to learn things that are...
gaikokumaniakku: >“Science!” Has died and been buried. …46 years of my life… It is better to struggle for a worthy vision of truth discovery than to surrender and willingly embrace ignorance. This gives us a small measure of cold comfort as we endure the collapse of civilization. The *spirit* that moved Galileo is not dead. We may not live to see it manifested. We may die in the smoldering ruins of decadence, but the spirit will prevail even if we might not live to see it.
gaikokumaniakku: So bankers trick young people into getting loans in order to chase useless diplomas. But Caplan does not suggest hanging the bankers. Why does Caplan love bankers so much? Perhaps he should be persuaded to write a follow-up book titled _The_Case_Against_Usury_ .
Isegoria: That Onion piece is from 2003, so The Simpsons beat it by three years.
James James: “The Simpsons” made the same joke in 2000: President Lisa Simpson: As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump. How bad is it, Secretary Van Houten? Milhouse: [shows a chart] We’re broke. Lisa: The country is broke? How can that be? Milhouse: Well, remember when the last administration decided to invest in our nation’s children? Big mistake.
Bob Sykes: Combined with the replication crisis, it appears that “Science!” Has died and been buried. Vox Day’s anti-science diatribes are beginning to sound like the centrist, moderate position. 46 years of my life…
Bruce: State education fills the niche of a state church. Patronage for bossy verbal loyalists. Like a state church, it may fulfil higher functions as well.
Phileas Frogg: “Many Americans imagine public education operates on a shoestring budget. Private education, in contrast, looks so pricey it’s implausible government does much to make it affordable. Both perceptions are wildly at odds with the facts.” I can confirm this by direct personal experience. Calculating the cost per student for the local public school district for which I serve as a board member, you get $30,000/student annually. The local Catholic school I taught at managed to spend...
Wanweilin: Bounded freedom, it’s called liberty.
Jim: Phileas Frogg: “No, just start at Wikipedia, move onto google, try archive or project Gutenberg, and finally, just buy a book from Amazon on the cheap.” In other words, what, if anything, is “the marrow of college”?
Phileas Frogg: A guy standing there lecturing, even a highly entertaining and captivating lecturer, is competing with the internet, both from an information efficiency and entertainment standpoint. He’s screwed. Best I can tell it looks like auditing rates have dropped by around 40% since 2005, and I can imagine they were higher even before that if we go further back. Add in the fact that college education has been, “democratized,R 21; and universalized, and it’s no wonder fewer...
McChuck: It’s hard enough to figure out what classes are even being offered by the average university. Learning who teaches them, along with where and when the classes are held, is generally a secret more closely held than most military plans.
Phileas Frogg: Raw ability vs Signals about ability Some disassociation is inevitable as per Goodhart’s Law, but total alienation is practically impossible (despite some of our best efforts).
Bob Sykes: Which degree you get is far more predictive of future income than mere levels of degrees. Degree field is also an indirect measure of IQ. It requires substantially more native intelligence to earn a mathematics or physics degree at any level than to get a Ph. D. In the humanities or social sciences.
Felix: “I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time.” The key word is “our”. Schools, world-wide, certainly teach a shared culture. Out in the sticks there may be a few unenlightened, deplorables of the lower orders who have issues with that shared culture. But, pfft.
Gaikokumaniakku: “In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 randomly selected Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL).” Of course, these must have been 18,000 randomly selected white Americans, to make a reasonable comparison with the historically white population of the majority of America, right? … right? The ghost of William Shockley is hovering silently over me and shaking his head from side to side in a manner I can only interpret as ominous.
Phileas Frogg: Every educational concern or observation in the modern world comes down to this: “Unless and until we finally accept that people are no more equal in their educability and intelligence than they are in their ability to sprint 100m, dunk a basketball or stand 7 feet tall, we will continue to waste limited time, energy, and resources on solving a problem without a solution: men are not equal.” God needs all sorts. And yet, every class of person projects their narrow measure of...
Jim: The labor market pays you for what you know now… The “labor market” is a centrally planned, authoritarianly organized corporate economy, a free market for employers as against employees, not a free market for employees as against employers. Fortunately, the Singularity is poised to render mutational load a thing of the past.
Isegoria: Caplan’s response would be that almost no one uses any of those skills, and those skills don’t generalize or transfer, at least not for most people most of the time.
Gaikokumaniakku: Geometry can be taught in many ways. Knowledge of proofs might be more useful than knowing the volume of a sphere. A bigger problem is that school is intended to reinforce the social order. If schools taught students how to resist cops and lawyers, government would find maintaining power to be more difficult. Another angle is skills versus facts. I probably don’t need to know the year in which Shakespeare wrote (a fact) but I certainly do benefit from understanding how Shakespeare...

Isegoria

Kournikova on wheels

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