Undead Astronauts

marginal revolution points to an interesting search result from google. if u do a search for unemployment rate, u get pointed to a wonderful chart of public unemployment data and they plan to put more of these charts out.

notably, madison county has 3% lower unemployment than the rest of the state. defense and gov’t work is king during war & recession. my company is currently in a hiring phase, which is completely counter-cyclical to the wider economy.

anyways, wired had a story on the trend towards greater access to vast amounts of data leading to a change in the way science is conducted. the story argued that w/ enormous amounts of data available to ppl, everyone could just mine the data for correlation and disregard the process of coming up w/ a theory to test against.

razib points out that even economists are taking note. to date, there’s been a rather large gap between economic theory and empirical results (e.g. the equation of economic death), but w/ all the data we have available today, maybe that’ll change. maybe in the future, we’ll have all the data we need to correctly value all the variables in that equation and so avoid the mess that poor correlation creates.

Dumplings

For the next episode of delectable delights, we venture our inspiration from the continent of Asia. Tired of the corruption by pre-fab and frozen poisons, we set forth to find the freshness, the succulence, the satisfaction of the real deal. Some ingredients included in this version are napa cabbage, shitaki mushrooms, ground pork, shrimp, ginger root. Once all were bathed and prepped, they enjoyed an icebreaker in a large bowl, before being wrapped up. From that point they either enjoyed the fate of simmering in the boiling pool of water or dancing on the frying pan floor. As mentioned before, I will continue in my attempts to document these adventures. Attempt to enjoy. (more…)

u read that right, zimbabwe’s currency, which at times was inflating at 230 million percent, is now worth some money. but not how u might imagine.

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Speed Dating

Last saturday I went to a speed dating event with Manuelo and another female friend who was Dutch Chinese from Holland (“dc girl”). The event rules stipulate that you have 8 minutes to talk to a girl, after 8 minutes, you rotate to the next girl. from 7:30 to 10, you should be able to talk to about 20 girls. I got there at around 7 and met my dc girl to first have a light drink while waiting for Manuelo to show up… (more…)

You'll never see cosplay like this from american shows.

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A video explaining how mathematics dictates that coincidences happen more often than we might intuitively think they should.  What do you guys think? (more…)

The Oh-So Good Burger. 4/20/09.

Time for some food.  The missus decided on making some burgers.  I decided I still need much practice/learning with the camera.  So here it is, the beginning of the “Foods”.  We will see where it goes from here. Hopefully both, the food and the camera work, continue to improve.