Adam Wheeler lied his way into Harvard College. Along the way, he applied for an internship at The New Republic, which declined, but kept his resume.
The resume looks ridiculous, but if you cribbed bits and pieces of it for your own CV, it would be undoubtedly improved.
A couple of years ago I applied for a Marshall Scholarship and, in the application, there was a section that asked you to detail the languages you speak. This is what I wrote:
They say if you speak three languages, you’re trilingual.
If you speak two, you’re bilingual.
And if you speak one, you’re American. I am an American.
Cherie, my good friend from Singapore, told me that this one joke probably sank my application, because the British don’t laugh during working hours.
A few days back, the NY Times did a slideshow about Chinglish, which I wrote about here. They did one better with a collection of reader pictures of signs from the world over.
My favorite? Number 23, from Khobar, Saudi Arabia. Fishing prohibited in toilet.
UPDATE: Apparently, lots of these signs have been recycled from sites on the internet. NY Times doesn’t do its fact-checking like it used to…
In the third century B.C., the Greek stoic philosopher Chrysippus died of laughter after giving his donkey wine, then seeing it attempt to feed on figs.
Classic. We’ve reached the Internet’s apogee.
A couple of episodes of 60 Minutes will corroborate a few recent posts.
Firstly, about AIDS in Uganda:
And here’s one with Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, along with Michael Burry:
Part II, which reflects exactly my opinion of the whole fiasco (Finally! Someone understands the consequences of interest-free loans):
Lit Drift discusses the angry writer. In the words of Mark Twain:
I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Vanity Fair has posted an entertaining feature/excerpt about Michael Burry, medical doctor AND hedge fund manager. It’s a unique angle from which to explore the sub-prime mortgage crisis (Burry was one of the few who made money on that play), and explains in simple terms how Burry gamed the big players on Wall Street.
This ability to work and to focus set him apart even from other medical students. In 1998, as a resident in neurology at Stanford Hospital, he mentioned to his superiors that, between 14-hour hospital shifts, he had stayed up two nights in a row taking apart and putting back together his personal computer in an attempt to make it run faster. His superiors sent him to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed Mike Burry as bipolar. He knew instantly he’d been misdiagnosed: how could you be bipolar if you were never depressed? Or, rather, if you were depressed only while doing your rounds and pretending to be interested in practicing, as opposed to studying, medicine? He’d become a doctor not because he enjoyed medicine but because he didn’t find medical school terribly difficult.
Apparently, I’m not the only one in the world that can say Oster is flat-out wrong:
And, most devastating of all, old-fashioned prevention has flopped. Too few people, particularly in Africa, are using the “ABC” approach pioneered here in Uganda: abstain, be faithful, use condoms.
For every 100 people put on treatment, 250 are newly infected, according to the United Nations’ AIDS-fighting agency, Unaids.
The real problem is that the ABC approach was a fad. It was popular because the bzungu were into it and became unpopular when the bzungu left and the millenia-old tradition of polygamy took over once again.
It’s these cultural factors, invisible to so many, that I believe drive the AIDS pandemic today.
That last post was probably unfair to TED, which I think is generally awesome. There are some great talks I’ve looked at recently, and I want to let you know about a few of them here.
The first is by Simon Sinek, who has a really clever concept about how to think about life and meaningfulness in general:
Saul Griffith and his kites:
And Richard Dawkins, always a favorite to listen to amongst men of the book:
See! Not so bad…
So I’m taking a break, eating my Waitrose pesto pasta salad, feet up on the table, and decide to watch something on TED.com. Emily Oster’s talk, about “flipping” our thinking on AIDS in Africa catches my eye and, I have to say, it was hard to keep myself from gnawing at my keyboard.
She’s wrong. Oster sounds like someone who has never been to Africa, yet conducts epic analyses with data presumed to be accurate, then claims to know much more about the continent than Africans themselves. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.
A huge problem here is that she’s making lots of assumptions about the data. AND SHE’S TAKING CORRELATIONS TO MEAN CAUSATION. Just because one data set looks like another when you plot them on a graph DOES NOT MEAN THEY ARE RELATED. It only means they’re correlated. Correlations might suggest predictive ability, but they DO NOT PROVE predictive ability.
This is science at its worst.
This is economics at its worst.
Emily Oster, if you want insight into African crises, move to Africa. Live there. Not forever, if you’re not inclined, but at least a couple of years. Long enough to learn things, like how people don’t die when they get malaria (there’s an immunity developed amongst most locals, which is actually the reason for its prevalence), and how disparate beliefs and contexts play a massive role in HIV infection rates — a role that easily confounds your assumption that Egyptians and other Africans differ only in that Egyptians don’t die early from AIDS.
Professor of psychology Paul Bloom (Yale) describes his wife’s (Karen Wynn) research in the NY Times magazine.
But the current work I’m involved in, on baby morality, might seem like a perverse and misguided next step. Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings?
Fantastic accompanying video. What’s particularly fascinating, however, is that Wynn’s research seems to point to a genetic basis for morality (some forms of morality, at least). As if to say there may be a genetic marker that might predict preferences for social and anti-social behavior.
Tiger Woods uses this joke as a pick-up line:
“What’s this?” he’d ask, rubbing the tips of his shoes together. “A black guy taking off his condom.”
Which reminded me of the Coolidge Effect, which is where mammalian males and females engage in lots of sex if presented with new, willing partners.
The term comes from an old joke, according to which U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and his wife allegedly visited a poultry farm. During the tour, Mrs. Coolidge inquired of the farmer how his farm managed to produce so many fertile eggs with such a small number of roosters. The farmer proudly explained that his roosters performed their duty dozens of times each day.
“Tell that to Mr. Coolidge,” pointedly replied the First Lady.
The President, overhearing the remark, asked the farmer, “Does each rooster service the same hen each time?”
“No,” replied the farmer, “there are many hens for each rooster.”
“Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge,” replied the President.
As a side note, let me mention the Bruce Effect for a moment. This is seen in lab mice, where a pregnant female will abort or reabsorb the embryo when exposed to the pheromones of another male. Nitric Oxide (NO), if you didn’t know, will counter this effect if administered before exposing the foreign pheromones — as if to say (mouse) sex can be replaced by an injection.
Andrew Jacobs at the NY Times does a wonderful and entertaining piece on China’s struggle with Chinglish.
I found the accompanying slide show unreasonably amusing.
In May 2010’s Nature Neuroscience, Meyer et al. claim that watching videos that imply sound (e.g., coins being dropped in a vase) but are actually silent activates the auditory cortex.
The problem with this study, as I see it, is that we might be looking at a suggestion effect. Simply, watching a car accident without sound, for instance, suggests crashing and gnashing sounds which might lead to an auditory illusion. What you would have to do to preclude this, then, is show silent videos of things which imply sound but you might not know what those sounds are — e.g., someone using a dead snake as a baseball bat.
Intriguing to me is that this might also point to some kind of ‘readiness potential’ in conscious processing, meaning you are prepared to hear the sound ahead of time so your brain doesn’t have to do so much computing when creating a seamless conscious experience.
NOTE: our brains break down incoming data then put it all back together again into a seamless experience involving vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. How it does this, we don’t know, but this points to a possible clue.
Democracy, as we know it today, is mathematically impossible:
The anomalies of a plurality voting system can be more subtle, though, as mathematician Donald Saari at the University of California, Irvine, showed. Suppose 15 people are asked to rank their liking for milk (M), beer (B), or wine (W). Six rank them M-W-B, five B-W-M, and four W-B-M. In a plurality system where only first preferences count, the outcome is simple: milk wins with 40 per cent of the vote, followed by beer, with wine trailing in last.
So do voters actually prefer milk? Not a bit of it. Nine voters prefer beer to milk, and nine prefer wine to milk - clear majorities in both cases. Meanwhile, 10 people prefer wine to beer. By pairing off all these preferences, we see the truly preferred order to be W-B-M - the exact reverse of what the voting system produced. In fact Saari showed that given a set of voter preferences you can design a system that produces any result you desire.
In the example above, simple plurality voting produced an anomalous outcome because the alcohol drinkers stuck together: wine and beer drinkers both nominated the other as their second preference and gave milk a big thumbs-down. Similar things happen in politics when two parties appeal to the same kind of voters, splitting their votes between them and allowing a third party unpopular with the majority to win the election.
Remember in Office Space, when the protagonist’s friends decide to pilfer tiny amounts of money from accounts under the company’s control into their own accounts? That’s similar to the scheme Comptroller Liu is saying he’s uncovered at the Economic Development Corporation — and they’re not exactly denying it.
In a detailed two-page rebuttal, the development agency defended its practice of keeping certain money, citing a supportive opinion from the city’s Law Department. The rebuttal belittled the comptroller’s findings, noting that the audit had found a “tiny fraction” of imprecise accounting by the corporation by amounts like 0.2 percent, 0.03 percent and 0.34 percent.
That means there’s plenty of unscrutinized money going around — the kind of money that goes towards things you want paid but not accounted for (like strippers and first class flights).