The Filter^

The Beautiful Game

It's funny reading people coming from a non-football-playing country talking about football (I guess they would've called it soccer instead of football...) Take this, for example:

In soccer, the off-sides [sic!!!] rule...acts as a speed break. And speed breaks help slower, less talented players...In short, the difference between the best players and the worst players is structurally minimized in those sports.

I guess the author of the above quotation and the one who quoted him haven't watched the Leeds United defense ripped apart by Thierry Henry's speed, or in fact, any football at all, ever...the existence of the off-side rule actually became advantageous to the speedy players! BTW, slower does not mean less talented...Should I name some talented but slow footballers? Oh, never mind.

Can one argue that football is "too boring on television", judging by the money television companies are willing to pay for the rights to broadcast matches in Europe? Is it fair to say that football is "too hard to describe on radio" considering a large number of football fans across Asia and South America follow the sport exclusively on the radio (and if football is so hard to broadcast on the radio, please spare your thoughts on the poor fans who follow cricket on the radio or ball-by-ball text update on the web) Even if Freddy Adu turns out to be the greatest player of all time, he might even take the US to a World Cup victory, he is not going to make football any more popular in the US.

"Why is soccer not a major professional sport in America?" - Football isn't popular in North American because it's not easily summarised in statistics. Americans might be satisfied with Shaq O'Neal being reduced to tables upon tables of statistics, but how can statistics capture the flicks and tricks of Roberto Baggio?

Reading the post I linked earlier, maybe it's just a wind-up...surely it's a wind-up???

Represent something with 1024 dots

Annie Vallotton might be the "best-selling" artist, but I think Susan Kare is far more relevant. Susan who? Here's a short bio:

Susan Kare received a B.A., summa cum laude, from Mount Holyoke College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in fine arts from New York University. In 1989, she was a founding partner of Susan Kare LLP. She is a 2001 recipient of the Chrysler Design Award.

Still confused? I'm sure you interact with her works everyday, after all, she has designed icons and fonts for Apple, Microsoft, Intel, AT&T...the list goes on! Check out her portfolio, here.

But my favourite work of hers is a "portrait" of Steve Jobs, on a "canvas" of 32x32 pixels, see it here.

Forecasting the Housing Market

I've talked about risk previously, in a post about shock absorbant lamp posts. Whilst I appreciate the intention of government attempts to remove risk from our lives, I fear that in doing so you merely disrupt people's ability to gage it for themselves.

Faith's house is now up for sale, and such a gamble requires as much understanding of risk as possible. The soaring UK housing market has people remembering the tech bubble, and wondering if lessons were learnt. Will it crash?

Firstly, the question isn't "will the housing market slow down?" because it will. We have enough economic knowledge to know that the current growth rates are unsustainable. The important question is when will it peak, and how will it end.

Economist Robert Shiller is famous for predicting the dot.com crash, and uncovering the frailties of the boom. However he was advising to pull out long before the crash, and forefitting a lot of expansion. Michael Walters lost his job at the Daily Fascist Mail for not tipping shares during the boom, because he anticipated the crash too early. Of course people remember losses, but not "imaginary gains I'd have made if I'd stayed in the market longer".

So its tough to judge - economists can't agree when the market will fall, or how. We can improve our estimations by looking at key indicators, for example interest rates. With cheap access to capital, (via low interest rates) and a "bricks and morter" reaction to the tech crash, house prices have largely been inflated by people buying second homes to let. This is why rents are so low at the moment. Interest rates have gone up recently, and the more they do so the less profitable these investments are, making it more of an incentive to sell up. Other indicators of a crash might be DIY TV shows - the speight of property programmes are a direct consequence of the housing boom, and might emerge as a useful indicator. There's also an element of "cabbie wisdom" - i'd imagine odd job men have a better gage of the market than an economist.

So we know it will end, but we're not sure when. How will it end? Here, I'd claim 'self-fulfilling prophecy' - if people expect a crash, as soon as prices dip they'll put theirs up on the market to cash in, and in doing so produce a crash. If people are more confident of houses holding value, then they will. This is the importance of economics education. And the importance of exposure to risk.

Dare I forecast? I think it's the right time to sell.

Note: I apologise if you'd expect a more substantial exploration, but the intention is to discuss underlying notions of risk and bubbles, rather than a detailed survey of the UK housing market.

Suffering while Surfing

You don't have to suffer in silence or wait for the EU (the anti-trust has had its chance!) to bust up Microsoft - there are already very credible alternatives out there! For a good web browser, go and download Firebird from Mozilla. Free, stable, highly useable and pop-up free, you will soon forget about Internet Explorer.

Randomness

Some people believe that computers are Turing machines and are only capable of generating numbers that are "pseudo-random". It is a common misconception.

Jef Raskin writes:

The essential difference seems to be a small one: a Turing machine does not have access to a number selected at random (an NSAR) from some range of numbers. Real computers do.

There are many ways for a computer to obtain NSARs, for example, to get a random digit at a given moment, look at one of the low order digits of:
- number of people active on some very large network;
- the output of a light sensor pointed toward a fireworks show;
- the digitization of the amplified sound of your own breath;
-the interval between detected decays of radioactive nuclei (which, according to quantum mechanics, cannot even in principle be predicted).

A Computer without I/O is like a Newtonian world with no friction and an economy without transaction costs - interesting to a point, but rather unilluminating.

Jef Raskin is the original creator of the Apple Macintosh. His website provides many insightful articles on Science, Technology and Philosophy - I especially recommend Effectiveness of Mathematics.

Beautiful & Damned

Flick to the back of your copy of 'The Great Gatsby', and indulge in those final, drifting words:

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further..... And one fine morning -
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"

Many versions have the word "orgiastic" instead of "orgastic", and it's a good test to make sure you've got an accurate edition. Fitzgerald's reputation for sloppy prose belies a scholarly attention to detail that's been doctered by the myths of celebrity.

According to Matthew J. Bruccoli:

He [Editor Edmund Wilson] subsequently explained: “The word orgastic, on the last page I took to be Scott’s mistake for orgiastic - he was very unreliable about words.” But Fitzgerald’s intention is certain. Perkins had queried orgastic, and Fitzgerald replied that “it expresses exactly the intended ecstasy". Wilson’s emendation to “orgiastic future” became the standard reading in later editions of the novel.

Bruccoli (lender to middle initials of aspiring romantics) is a renowned authority on Scott, and soothed me immensely when he told me that with regard to a glitzy Hollywood biography he'd heard "no dope".

I've always felt there's enough biography within the fiction, to warrant vulger penetratation into the privacy of a hero.

But I was dazzled to read about a new production set to hit the Lyric, in London, called The Beautiful and the Damned. Although I try not to suffer from the 'Persuasion' syndrome (where non-experts attempt to demonstrate a preference for a relatively obscure text of a literary giant), I often tell people that 'The Beautiful and the Damned' is my favourite Fitzgerald; it captures the poetic fluidity of his early, optimistic works, whilst developing a more structured form and mature theme. The play, however, centres on Fitzgerald and Zelda themselves, using the fiction as the canvass for the reality.

I'm intrigued, and can't wait to see it.

Picasso@Kirkby Gallery/Library

Picasso: Histoire Naturelle is a National Touring Exhibition from the Hayward Gallery and it will be on show at Kirkby Gallery/Library from 29 May. From the press release:

This set of 31 prints is considered by many to be one of Picasso's most important graphic productions. In them, the artist depicts animals, birds, insects and other creatures. Begun in 1936 for the picture dealer and publisher, Ambroise Vollard, Picasso created these images to accompany the classic 18th century text, Histoire Naturelle, by the eminent French naturalist, George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. Combining a wide variety of techniques, including lift-ground aquatint, etching and drypoint, Picasso produced images of great clarity, immediacy and beauty.

Find out more here. Thanks very much to Mark for the pointer.

Who let the Dogs out?

Go to Google UK and search for "poodle", specifying "Search: pages from the UK" then click on "I'm Feeling Lucky"...? Thanks to Greg for the pointer.

If you are bored, try "I'm feeling lucky" on "weapon of mass destruction" - more relevant then ever.

Amateurishly Great

Al Oerter won four gold medals in Discus in the Olympics. Even in an era when amateurism was the norm, it is still astonishing that he won all his medals without any professional coaching! In an interview with Radio Five Live this morning, he said that he was told many times that his throws were not technically sound, but he carried on regardless except for one time - the BBC's Steve Ryder retells the story:

While most multi-medallists think of their first victory with most fondness, Oerter says he will never forget how he won his second in Rome four years later.

Oerter was having a bad run of throws in the final and the gold seemed to heading to his American rival Rink Babka.

But in a remarkable act of sportsmanship and team spirit, Babka offered Oerter advice, telling him that he was carrying his right arm too low.

On his next throw - his fifth - Oerter made his personal best which was enough to take the gold and consign Babka to silver.

Nowadays, Oerter is a painter ("“I hesitate to say artist, I’m a painter.”) and once again, he is self-taught. Using medias like canvas and discus, he creates abstract pictures which echo the works of Kandinsky and Pollock. The image above comes from his "Impact series", you can see (and buy!) his works here.

CornerSolution.com

The rumours were true, and the new blog by my fellow graduate economics students at George Mason University has arrived.
They've called it CornerSolution and claim "the only blog you need to read…
except, of course, for the ones that we explicitly recommend".

There are some insightful and engaging contributers, and I'm looking forward to reading their ideas. In fact, there's 14 of them! I hope that the site will develop into a forum for students with very similar philosophies (although with different approaches) to debate some important issues. Hopefully the comments boards will become packed, and a real internal debate will emerge to refine not just understanding, but actual research. It's an excellent platform to distribute works in progress, and encourage critiques.

Whilst the jury stays out, Steve Miller links to a photo essay about Chernobyl. The typically Russian-esque folk-narrative works charmingly with the barren photos; it's like returning to a youth which no longer exists.

It's also incredibly relevant with the anniversary falling next week, and the recent "incident" in North Korea.