Bluematter.

Multicolored: Build your own flag such as the United States of China

Kitchen and style tips from the Bible (hilarious!)

Now, that's an office!

StaTetris is mixing aspects of the popular game 'Tetris' and US. geography

Various objects in an experimental environment

This blog has had visitors from every single State in the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii) - except from Wyoming!

Would you like to give me a helping hand here? If you know someone living in Wyoming, email them with a link to this blog or a specific post. If you are a blogger that can spare a couple of lines, post a link to this blog simply saying 'If you are from Wyoming, click here'.

This is a little experiment. I am curious to see how long it will take for the first visitor from Wyoming to arrive following this plea, and then observe the dynamics and report back to you. How far can Wyoming climb in the States' visitors rankings?

Your help is greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: Mission accomplished! Thanks Tim, thanks to all who sent out those emails and thanks to the Wyomingites who dropped by.

You all of course know about Erdős numbers. You might even be familiar with Bacon numbers.

But Erdős–Bacon numbers? This takes it to a completely different level. There are 23 people for whom the number is defined, including such luminaries as Bertrand Russell, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan and Natalie Portman.

I wonder if one of those will ever be up for sale...

Zimbabwe's chief statistician has said it is impossible to work out the country's latest inflation rate because of the lack of goods in shops. "There are too many data gaps," the Central Statistical Office's Moffat Nyoni told state media. Many staple goods are often absent from shop shelves after the government ordered prices to be halved or frozen in a bid to stem galloping inflation.

September's inflation rate was put at almost 8,000%, the world's highest. Other reports suggest the rate could be at near 15,000% and the International Monetary Fund had warned it could reach 100,000% by the end of the year. [...]

Maize meal, bread, meat, cooking oil, sugar and other basic goods used to measure inflation largely disappeared from shops after Robert Mugabe's government ordered prices to be slashed.

Manufacturers have said they cannot afford to sell goods at below the cost of producing them. Most basics are intermittently available on the black market at well over the official prices.

Last month, the central bank offered loans, known as Bacossis, to businesses at 25% interest to restore supplies to shops, AP news agency reports. "We hope the situation will improve, especially with the availing of Bacossi funds," Mr Nyoni said.

From BBC News. Given the inflation rate, a loan at 25% interest is free money - but make sure you spend it fast! And sadly for Zimbabwe, even free money won't change the fact it doesn't make sense to sell below cost...

How low is low enough for regime change?

Open Secrets has the full list.


The numbers are based on contributions from PACs and individuals giving $200 or more to federal candidates and parties as reported to the Federal Election Commission. All the numbers are for the 2008 election cycle and are based on data released by the FEC on Monday, September 24, 2007. Source: Center for Responsive Politics.

Andrew Gelman quotes this paper (free access) by Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons:

In five studies, we found that people like their names enough to unconsciously pursue consciously avoided outcomes that resemble their names. Baseball players avoid strikeouts, but players whose names begin with the strikeout-signifying letter K strike out more than others (Study 1). All students want As, but students whose names begin with letters associated with poorer performance (C and D) achieve lower grade point averages (GPAs) than do students whose names begin with A and B (Study 2), especially if they like their initials (Study 3). Because lower GPAs lead to lesser graduate schools, students whose names begin with the letters C and D attend lower-ranked law schools than students whose names begin with A and B (Study 4). Finally, in an experimental study, we manipulated congruence between participants’ initials and the labels of prizes and found that participants solve fewer anagrams when a consolation prize shares their first initial than when it does not (Study 5). These findings provide striking evidence that unconsciously desiring negative name-resembling performance outcomes can insidiously undermine the more conscious pursuit of positive outcomes.

The explanation? (Keep in mind this is a paper published in Psychological Science)

People like their names and initials (Nuttin, 1987). In fact, this name-letter effect (NLE) is influential enough to encourage the pursuit of name-resembling life outcomes and partners. [...]

Do people consciously or unconsciously pursue name-resembling outcomes? Do a few people named Jack deliberately move to Jacksonville for its Jack-resembling appeal, or are they driven by an unconscious desire? Researchers have certainly argued that the latter is true. The NLE is described as an indicator of implicit egotism (e.g., Koole, Dijksterhuis, & van Knippenberg, 2001; Jones et al., 2004; Pelham, Carvallo, & Jones, 2005; Pelham et al., 2002; Sherman & Kim, 2005), as own-name liking is thought to indicate unconscious self-liking.

I'm not convinced. To refer back to one of the quoted studies, how about students whose surnames start with 'F'? Shouldn't they be performing much worse than the C's and D's?

Two potential explanations here:

1. Omitted variable bias. For example, say that names that start with C or D are way less frequent in the population of Asian students compared to Anglo-Saxon surnames. Further, assume that Asians are discriminated against when it comes to college admission, perhaps due to uncertainty about the quality of the schools they attend. That way, the average Asian in college will be a better student than the average Anglo-Saxon, and he will also be less likely to have a name that starts with C or D.

2. There are an infinite number of hypotheses, and a finite but very large number of original datasets. In other words, datamining - or if we want to be somewhat less harsh on the researcher, pure luck.

And talking of names, here's Levitt and Dubner approaching the issue from a completely different angle.

Paul Krugman says (via Mark Thoma):

All of the world's advanced nations have to compete in the same global economy. Yet America's combination, of soaring incomes at the top and stagnant wages for most workers, is unique.

We're told that unions, once a key support for wages, have become obsolete in the modern world. Yet the collapse of the union movement in America hasn't been matched elsewhere in the advanced world, even in our neighbor Canada. About 30 percent of Canadian workers are union members, compared with only 12 percent of workers here.

Back in June, I said: (and there's more where this came from)

Many economists suggest that the declining fortunes of unions are the main driver behind the increase in income inequality over the past few decades. While I agree that decreases in union membership and increases in wage inequality go hand-in-hand, I believe the standard narrative is somewhat misguided when it comes to causality. Rather than declining unions leading to increased wage inequality, it is the increasing variance of individual worker productivity that lies behind both. [...]

The fall in the power of unions was not a random event that then led to the increase in wage inequality we observe. This development should be attributed to the changing nature of production and the subsequent increase in potential wage inequality: unions were merely a short-run obstacle to achieving that new equilibrium.

I'm not aware of any empirical study looking into this potential endogeneity, and no suitable instruments spring to mind. In any case, Herb Gintis, approaching this from a somewhat different angle, seems to agree.

And if you do follow this last link, for the record, I think the bonobos will not only survive, but they will prosper too. What keeps the pig coalition together is not a love for free markets or opposition to redistribution, it is common social values (anti-abortion, pro-Jesus and the like - so much for 'only caring about what's in their trough'). The bonobos will eventually compromise on these - a process already underway - and the redistributive hand of the state will start moving more boldly once again.

This is the story of an upward slopping demand curve in the absence of information, and one of my favourite anecdotes from childhood:

Ioannis Kapodistrias (in Greek Ιωάννης Καποδίστριας, in Italian Giovanni Capo d'Istria, Conte Capo d'Istria) (February 11, 1776 – October 9, 1831) was a Greek diplomat of the Russian Empire and later first head of state of independent Greece.

On his arrival [to Greece], Kapodistrias launched a major reform and modernisation programme that covered all areas. He re-established military unity, bringing an end to the second phase of the civil war; re-organised the military, which was then able to reconquer territory lost to the Ottoman military during the civil wars; introduced the first modern quarantine system in Greece, which brought epidemics like typhoid fever, cholera and dysentery under control for the first time since the start of the War of Independence; negotiated with the Great Powers and the Ottoman Empire the borders and the degree of independence of the Greek state and signed the peace treaty that ended the War of Independence with the Ottomans; introduced the phoenix, the first modern Greek currency; organised local administration; and, in an effort to raise the living standards of the population, introduced the cultivation of the potato into Greece.

The way Kapodistrias introduced the cultivation of the potato remains famously anecdotal today. Having ordered a shipment of potatoes, at first he ordered that they should be offered to anyone who would be interested. However the potatoes were met with indifference by the population and the whole scheme seemed to be failing. Therefore Kapodistrias, knowing of the contemporary Greek attitudes, ordered that the whole shipment of potatoes be unloaded in public display on the docks of Nafplion, and placed severe-looking guards guarding it. Soon, rumours circulated that for the potatoes to be so well guarded they had to be of great importance. People would gather to look at the so-important potatoes and soon some tried to steal them. The guards had been ordered in advance to turn a blind eye to such behaviour, and soon the potatoes had all been "stolen" and Kapodistrias's plan to introduce them to Greece had succeeded.

Esquire has an interesting list of monuments to megalomania (via Peter Klein). Make sure you check out this abomination from North Korea, easily the ugliest thing I've seen in my entire life.

(but if you a relatively new Bluematter. reader you should also see this video from Arirang in North Korea, a truly daunting exhibition.)

Via the Big Picture.

A little something to cheer you up :)



[embedded video]

UPDATE: Youtube removed the video, but found it again.

From the Economist (November 15, 2007)

A Boy or a girl? That is usually the first question asked when a woman gives birth. Remarkably, the answer varies with where the mother lives. In rich countries the chances of its being a boy are about 5% higher than in poor ones.

Strange as it might seem, the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 shed light on the enigma. Studies noting the sex of babies conceived in New York during the week of the attacks found a drop in the ratio of males to females. That is consistent with earlier studies, which revealed a similar shift in women who became pregnant during floods and earthquakes and in time of war.

Dr Obel suspects the immediate cause is that male pregnancies are more likely to miscarry in response to stress than female pregnancies are, especially during the first three months.

While there are many factors that could potentially influence the gender of a child, the most accurate tool may after all be the ancient Chinese birth chart.

Think about what passes for a “tough” question on the Sunday talk shows. It’s not “Senator Bomfog — you say X, but the statistics show that it’s actually Y. How can you explain this discrepancy?” In fact, I’ve never seen that happen. In political reporting, being wrong means, at most, that your claims are “in dispute.”

The excerpt is from his NYT blog, via Economist's view.

Paul is spot on. For some reason (misguided notions of unbiasedness? journalists and politicians that don't know their left hand from their right?) bringing reality to a political discussion is bad manners. Everyone is entitled to their own preferences and opinions, and their own facts too.

iPhone heads this year's best inventions

Nice places to relax: Houses with a view

The world's first laptop

What to do with a big apartment, a lot of time and great imagination

Change your car colour with the flip of a switch

Bluematter readers loyal and occasional, thank you ever so much. You deserve all this and more. (Make sure the sound's on!)