Half Sigma

Great music video

I really enjoyed watching this.

Does anyone still drink regular beer?

All of the Superbowl ads were for light beer. Do so few people drink regular beer these days that no one wants to waste money advertising it?

Another NY Times article about alleged gender imbalance at colleges

Yet another NY Times article on this subject.

The NY Times has historically shown little or no concern over the fact that the vast majority of students at engineering schools are men. But suddenly it’s a big problem that liberal arts colleges are 60% women and 40% men.

The overall gender imbalance among all colleges is predominately at community colleges and open admissions state schools, with a lot of the surplus women being older women, either married or divorced. I’m fairly certain that the overall male/female ratio among traditional college-aged students attending schools you wouldn’t be embarrassed to put on your resume is pretty close to even. And there is also a preponderance of men at bogus schools like DeVry Tech (the one in Queens has 977 men and only 455 men, worse than the 60/40 ratio at UNC Chapel Hill profiled in the NY Times article).

More signs of global cooling

Biggest snowfall ever recorded at both BWI and Dulles airports. 32" of snow at Dulles is a heck of a lot of snow. This storm is said to be comparable to the historic Knickerbocker Storm of 1922.

In Manhattan it was plenty cold, but I didn't see a single snowflake.

It's not "unethical" to walk away from a mortgage

From an article in today’s NY Times about people who walk away from mortgages:

Walking away, he knows, is not without peril. At minimum, it would ruin his credit score. Mr. Koellmann would like to attend graduate school. If an admission dean sees a dismal credit record, would that count against him? How about a new employer?

Most of all, though, he struggles with the ethical question.

“I took a loan on an asset that I didn’t see was overvalued,” he said. “As much as I would like my bank to pay for that mistake, why should it?”

That is an attitude Wall Street would like to encourage. David Rosenberg, the chief economist of the investment firm Gluskin Sheff, wrote recently that borrowers were not victims. They “signed contracts, and as adults should also be held accountable,” he wrote.

Of course, this is not necessarily how Wall Street itself behaves, as demonstrated by the case of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. An investment group led by the real estate giant Tishman Speyer recently defaulted on $4.4 billion in debt that it had used to buy the two apartment developments in Manhattan, handing the properties back to the lenders.

Moreover, during the boom, it was the banks that helped drive prices to unrealistic levels by lowering credit standards and unleashing a wave of speculative housing demand.

There’s the old adage about business ethics being an oxymoron, and it certainly applies in this situation. Financial institutions themselves care only about making money. I know someone who recently left a job to take an allegedly better position with a bank. A month later, the bank decided to cancel the project they hired him for and let him go. Now he is unemployed. The bank could certainly afford to keep paying his salary, but the bank decided it had no legal obligation to do so and it was better to save money (thus creating more money with which to pay the bank bigwigs multi-million dollar bonuses) rather than live up to any non-legally enforceable promises made when he was hired.

If banks were stupid enough to lend money in a non-recourse mortgage state without requiring a sufficiently high down-payment, then it serves them right.

The last paragraph of the NY Times quote is especially poignant. Had the banks not irresponsibly lent money to homebuyers, then there wouldn’t have been a housing bubble in the first place, and there wouldn’t have been a subsequent sharp drop in prices causing those same borrowers to be underwater.

* * *

Steve writes:

Any lawyer (or even first semester law student) could tell you that a contract is defined as "a promise to perform OR to breach and pay damages." There is nothing unethical about breaching a contract, especially a non-recourse mortgage. You walk away, the bank gets the house. Indeed, this is spelled out in the contract itself.

And it has nothing to do with the banks being wolves; it's simply that they took a risk of giving a loan to someone to buy a house and it didn't work out. Besides, the bank already assumes that a certain number of borrowers will default and figures in this information when determining interest rates (i.e. those with poor credit scores pay higher rates).

And after I attended a day-long bankruptcy CLE program, I learned that bankruptcy lawyers feel the same way about bankruptcy: it’s not a moral decision; it’s just something for which you should weigh the costs and benefits. One of the topics was how to advise the client for whom bankruptcy was in his best interest, but who didn’t want to proceed because of misplaced moral feelings.

Alexa Ray Joel, like father like daughter

Alexa Ray Joel tried (but failed) to commit suicide in December. It was revealed earlier this month that she was depressed after a romantic breakup.

Billy Joel also tried commit suicide when he was in his early twenties. I wonder if there’s some sort of genetic link between the two suicides? Did Alexa inherit some personality trait from her father?

When I first listened to the album Cold Spring Harbor in the 1990s, I thought that the album was about painful unrequited love, leading up to thoughts of suicide in the song Tomorrow is Today. Now, thanks to the internet, I learned that he did indeed try to commit suicide in his early twenties, and the lyrics of the song Tomorrow is Today was actually based on his suicide note. I guess my initial impression of the album was correct.

This explains why Cold Spring Harbor has a raw emotion about it that’s absent from all of Joel’s later works. And it explains why, for most of his music career, Joel hated that album. Maybe thinking about the songs on the album caused him too many painful memories?

* * *

I'm still trying to figure out if the song Falling of the Rain from Cold Spring Harbor has some sort of deeper meaning to it within the context of the Album, or if it's just some silly song written by a 21-year-old kid. This is a mystery which has bugged me for the last 17 years. Do you think the guy who made this creative music video of the song understands it?

DTNBP1 again

I’ve appended the following to the DTNBP1 post which made the front page of reddit this weekend:

UPDATE 2/1/2010

I already admitted I was just over-exuberantly playing around with the HapMap project and I’m now aware that the method was flawed. At the blog Gene Expression, you can read a more detailed explanation of why this specific analysis doesn’t prove much.

But once again, the bigger point of it all is that (1) there are SNPs associated with brain function; and (2) these genes have a very different distribution in different racial gene pools. This demonstrates that there’s a sound basis for the theory that IQ differences and other behavioral differences between races has a genetic explanation.

Half Sigma space shuttle prediction comes true

In 2005 I predicted that there wouldn’t be a next generation space shuttle by 2010.

In fact, based on the article in today’s NY Times, it will never happen at all:

the [Obama] budget calls for a complete stop in NASA’s Constellation program, the rockets and spacecraft that NASA has been working on for the past four years to replace the space shuttles.

Half Sigma is right about so much stuff. A big corporation should hire him and pay him a lot of money to predict stuff like this. I could steer them away from disasters like the Palm Foleo.

Massive HBD-related blog traffic today

There have been more than 25,000 hits to my blog today, because an old post about the DTNBP1 gene suddenly appeared on the front page of reddit. You may read the hundreds of comments on reddit. I've previously responded to the most common HBD-denialist comments.

The iPad is a really big and expensive PDA

The iPad seems to me like an oversized PDA. Remember PDAs? Once upon a time, people thought they were going to be the Next Big Thing, pocket-sized computers with a touch screen. It turned out that nobody wanted a pocket-sized device for anything except making phone calls and reading emails (or “texting” if you’re under 18).

The iPad is a really big and expensive PDA.

(Maybe it will be a big seller if they can get World of Warcraft to work on it. Or even better for Apple, some really addictive multiplayer game which only runs on the iPad.)

* * *

A reader informed me that I presciently predicted the demise of the Palm Foleo back in 2007:

So this makes me wonder, what kind of morons are running Palm? Why are these guys getting paid million dollar salaries for being so stupid? I'd work for them for a mere $200,000 year, and I would have told them to junk this stupid Foleo project and instead concentrate on improving the products they already have. Why hasn't a new PDA been introduced in nearly two years? Sure, the market for those things is dying, but I guarantee that Palm will sell many more PDAs during the next three years than they will sell Foleos. The Foleo will probably sell so badly that it will be canceled before three years have passed.

I’m not so quick to predict the demise of the iPad. Apple seems to be resurrecting the idea of the PDA with the iPod Touch and now the iPad. And Apple has a lot more marketing momentum behind it. Palm was a dying company when it introduced the Foleo. Apple is hot, and a lot of fanboys wil buy the iPad because it’s an Apple product.

I was serious about the World of Warcraft remark. Apple needs to put some application on the iPad that people really want but which won’t run on any other device.

UK schools don’t teach Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims

It’s a two-and-a-half-year-old article, but I just read it today:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

The Holocaust makes Europeans look bad, yet Europeans fear teaching what happened because Muslims would be offended by it.

$11 million love nest

What was she getting out of the relationship? Well, he let her live in this $11 million estate.

Rainbow Republicans

Standing behind Republican Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell is a nerdy Asian man and a cute black woman. This random slice of the Republican Party demonstrates how the Republicans are the more racially diverse of the two parties; a white man and a white woman were sitting behind Obama.

I knew her

Not in the Biblical sense, but she worked as a receptionist at the same place where I worked for a year in the 1990s. She was a nice girl. She liked sushi. She wanted to be an actress. She has a unique ethnic background: 1/2 Mexican, 1/4 black, 1/4 French-Canadian. She had a very perky personality. She's about 5'10" and very thin (although she looks a little heavier now than she was 15 years ago).

The mystery is where she got $250,000 to pay for the billboards. There's no evidence that she ever had any job that would have enabled her to save up that much money.

Does Republican Andre Bauer support HBD?

AP article:

At a town hall meeting Thursday, Bauer, who is running for governor in his own right now that Sanford is term-limited, said: "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that."

He seems to understand that the poor lack future time orientation, and that they pass on this trait to their children.