Many high end newspapers charge something like $10 a month to subscribe, just to the digital edition. But most people who use digital editions of newspapers scan several, pick and chose what to read, and end up reading them all for free because they don’t reach the limit of number of articles provided to a certain web browser per month.
But sometimes, one runs into that limit and suddenly can’t access articles for the last several days of the month. This hurts readers. (In some cases it hurts the papers. There are a half dozen items in the Washington Post right now that I’d like to blog about, sending thousands of readers to that paper, but I cant’ because I ran out of freebies early. Or they got stricter. Not sure.)
One can get around this by clearing cookies, switching web browsers, switching computers, etc. But this is unethical and defeatist in two ways. First, the writers and other staff actually do have valuable paid jobs, and ripping off the paper is ripping them off. Second, related but at a different scale, these are companies that may annoy us in various ways, but that we actually want to exist.
Due to new media and other considerations, newspapers, which may often be annoying but are still important, are facing an existential crisis. They have to make some money somehow. It simply is not true, though this philosophy arose during those heady days of the Time of Napster, that IF something can be downloaded from the internet, by any means, it IS therefore free, and any attempt to charge for it is IMMORAL.
One can also get around this by subscribing to the damn newspapers! And, if you have a fave, and that is the paper you generally read, do that!
But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the user scenario where several newspapers, not one, are roughly equally important to someone. For me, it is the Star Tribune, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and some subset of papers from Saint Paul, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco, and London. This is because I read and write about topics that are covered by all these papers. I do this to write a blog that does not make me enough money to subscribe to half dozen papers to the tune of $600. But, for personal pleasure and blogginess, I’d pay ten or even 18 bucks a month for a service that gave me all of this, or a choice of several.
So, I have a proposal, which is embodied in the headline of this post.
Netflix for Newspapers
Not necessarily run by Netflix, not necessarily restricted to newspapers. But mainly a paid monthly subscription to … to what? To all the newspapers? To your choice of six? To your choice of X for Y dollars, where the incremental increase per X of Y decreases until a point where you get them all for a hefty but not absurd cost, but allowing regular people to have easy access to, say, a half dozen or so of their favorites for the current cost of one or two subscriptions? Something?
Am I missing something? Is there already something like this out there? I doubt it, because if there was, someone would have tried to sell it to me by now. Why does this not exist? Can someone please arrange for this to exist?
Ever year about 23,000 people die of infections from antibiotic resistant bacterial.
Here is a film of bacteria evolving from regular old bacteria into killer superbugs. On a coffee table size Petri dish.
You can get the story at NPR, where you will learn that
“Getting more people to understand how quickly bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance might help people understand why they shouldn’t be prescribed antibiotics. The drug resistance is not some abstract threat. It’s real.”
Diversity and opportunity. And freedom. Lots of freedom, freedom is great. I can tell you, I know freedom and I know we have lots of it, more than any other country. And diversity, we’ve almost got that under control too.
But seriously …
If you are like me, the tirade eventually given by the protagonist in the following clip was already formulating in your head for the first two minutes of this scene, and when it spilled out (in a form better than you or I would have managed), you were like “Yeah. Go baby!” (Or words to that effect.)
It is a tirade that is always running in my head, along side another one. The other one has to do with an issue also dealt with during the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom (which is now streaming on Amazon Prime, by the way, in case you’ve not see it). That second and related issue is fairness, and how it is a bad thing in journalism.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you well know what we are talking about. False balance. This is where one position is expressed, and a second opposing position is expressed, and therefore (as in, because these two positions were expressed) the press treats them as equal no matter how idiotic one or both may be. Indeed, it is often the case that there are not two legitimate positions related to a given issue. Hell, there are almost never two positions on a given issue, even though the press always insists that there are exactly two positions. Five. One. Three. Seven. Almost never two.
Anyway, have a look. It is about eight minutes long but worth every second, if you’ve not seen it:
I want to spend a moment looking at this problem of the press doing almost everything they do wrong almost all the time.
Why? Because this problem has become the most important political problem of the modern era.
North Korean nuclear arms and ISIL might be the most immediate problems in the news. Climate change might be the most important existential problem the planet has ever faced. Education, jobs, the economy, and all that might be the key perennial issues that come up in every election and affect people at all levels of government. And so on. But the mixture of jingoism (willful avoidance of thought) and the balance and fairness fetish are the reasons that those issues will only ever be dealt with in a half-assed and ineffective manner. It is the reason that people like me, who believe that taxes pay for civilization and the government can do good work, are fed up and are about to turn into full fledged anarchists. Or at least, that is how if feels sometimes. And by sometimes I mean almost all the time.
And this comes to a head because Donald J. Trump is a legitimate and respected candidate for President of the United States.
Did I just say “respected” and “Donald Trump” in the same sentence? Yes, yes I did. I did it because it is true and not true at the same time. Trump is either only barely respected, or simply not respected at all, by almost everybody, including his own party elite. He is seen as a lose cannon, a threat, a huge problem, an enormous mistake. But every single day the press, which consists of people who can’t believe that they are in a position where they have to cover Donald Trump as though he wasn’t a joke, treats him with the respect he deserves as a presidential nominee. They do this at the very same time that they treat Hillary Clinton — who was a family and children advocate, the designer of our first stab at a 20th century health care system (a century overdue), a very effective and highly respected Senator from New York, and an accomplished Secretary of State, and a few other things — like a child that is always acting badly and requires constant admonishment.
Let us pause for a moment and blame the Patriarchy
Let me digress for a moment, to underscore this point. Hillary Clinton is a woman and Donald Trump is a man. Hillary Clinton is a highly accomplished and qualified candidate for President of the United States who is being treated, as I just said, like a child whom you expect to constantly be in trouble, and that you are constantly ready to correct or punish. And by “you” I mean that awful fourth grade teacher who was always picking on that one kid who never seemed to get a fair break. And by the awful fourth grade teacher, I mean Matt Lauer. And I’m using Matt Lauer to stand in for All Of The Reporters.
This is a picture of peaceful female protestors being pepper sprayed by the patriarchic police state.Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the man running for president, is a clown.
A joke. A rising dangerous fascist. A crook. A liar. A person with a weak grasp on reality.
A litigious bastard. (So I’ll add that these are all things Trump has been accused of, who really knows?)
Trump represents everything that is bad about a bad political philosophy. He is the perfect product of the willful ignorance and the calculated walling off of reality that have become central to Republican philosophy and tactics. He is absolutely the last person in the world that should be allowed anywhere near the White House. But he can lie, cheat, bully, incite violence, and generally do things that individually would instantly end a political career, again and again, several times a week, and continue to be “respected” by the press. As I’ll explain in a moment, Trump’s respect from the press is not because he is a man. It is for a different reason, and that is the focus of this post. But the difference between the way Clinton and Trump are treated is because of their different genders, and this is sexism in the Fourth Estate (by all sexes of reporter, producer, and editor, with only a very few exceptions) demonstrating itself to be shockingly ingrained and intractable. We have a seemingly unfixable patriarchy in this country.
Fisher’s Principle of Sex Ratio and Why the Press Is Stupid
And now back to the main point, the answer to a question I know many of you have been asking yourselves, in one form or another, for a long time. Why are the two main political parties so close in representation in government? Why are most elections so close? Why are opinions on various issues, even when one side is clearly utterly bogus and the other side so clearly correct, almost always close to 50-50, or at least, in the 60% to 40% range? Why is the balance of opinion about policy or candidates so near the middle so much of the time?
Fisher’s Principle.
Fisher’s Principle is an idea that was initially applied to explain the apparent fact that sexual reproduction produces a 1:1 ratio of males to females. Never mind that fact that most species, it turns out, probably don’t do this, and that the ones that do, do so because they are physiologically constrained to do so. It was still a good idea because it works in some cases, and is internally logical. The idea is also related to, and probably intellectually basal to, some very important game theory. And, for our purposes, it explains a lot about why the press is essentially incapable of doing its job, and why civilization is, at this moment, teetering on the edge of collapse because of that.
Here’s the idea. You are an organism concerned, rightfully, with your Darwinian fitness. You are about to have an offspring. You can have a male or a female.
So you do a marketing study. You find out that all the organisms in the next generation, into which you are about to launch your offspring, will be seeking a mate. Marketing theory tells you that if one sex is rare, it will be more valuable. So, you estimate the sex ratio of the next generation. The only way to do this, of course, is to assess the current sex ratio. You find out that a particular sex is more rare, and thus, individuals of that sex are more valuable, and that is the sex of offspring that you produce.
But, of course, all the other organisms of your kind are doing the same thing, so that rare and valuable sex is now flooding the market. So, the other sex becomes more valuable, and individuals start producing them. So the market shifts back the other way.
Owing to overlapping generations, some randomization of timing of information flow and decision making, and all that, the kind of organism you are, as a result of following Fisher’s Principle of producing the sex of higher value, ends up with about a 50-50 sex ratio.
Now, you are a newsroom producer or an editor. There are many stories out there, and for every story, there are multiple points of view. For a political story, things are simple. There are two points of view: left vs. right, or Democratic vs. Republican, or whatever.
Think of it more precisely. There aren’t just two points of view, but there is a population of sound clips or quotes reflecting those points of view that you can use. You note that the general consensus is starting to move towards a particular point of view. It makes sense that we implement a certain policy, and more and more opinons are shifting that way.
So, now, you have two choices. One is to mainly report that one policy is being converged on by almost everyone, and is likely to become the policy guiding future legislation and action. Then you move on to the next story. But anyone in news will tell you that is not a story. Hell, anyone in fiction will tell you it is not a story. There is no conflict, no gap between obvious outcome and what actually happens, in that story.
To make this a story, you need to do something other than the obvious. And that is easy to do. You pull out the sound bites or quotes or position papers that reflect the shrinking minority view, and lead with that. You appear to give equal time to two opposing views, but really, you are not being fair. You are placing the emerging consensus view, the smart view, the correct view, and the shrinking everbody-knows-this-is-nowhere view, next to each other and treating them with the same level of attention and respect. You treat the emerging consensus unfairly by pretending it is not an emerging consensus, and you give the bullshit view an unfair break by pretending it is not bullshit.
But by doing so, you are producing an offspring that is more valuable because it is more rare.
And, at the same time, you are telling a better story. Never mind that it is bordering on fiction, never mind that it involves unfair treatment of the truth, never mind that there could be real world negative consequences of this selfish strategy, never mind that this treatment of the news demonstrably slows down or reverses the progress of civilization. Never mind that people suffer and die. The important thing is, you protected your ratings or your readership, and if you played it well, maybe improved them. And that is your job. Good job. Never mind the consequences.
So that explains why we can have two political parties, one relatively smart and thoughtful and often ready to govern (I don’t want to sanctify the Democratic Party, but they are better at all these things these days) and the other stupid, mean spirited, and wrong on almost every single issue, and not just wrong, but Michele Bachman level wrong. Sarah Palin level wrong. Donald Trump level wrong!!
Elections are a special, and cleaner, case. Elections have numbers, polls, that tell the press two things. First, what are the genders of possible offspring? Normally the two genders are Democratic and Republicans, but occasionally a third option shows up and can be a factor. Then, within the contest among the worthy opponents, the press can keep track of the relative worth of stories benefiting each of these entities. Which side should be pushed forward from behind, which side should be knocked down a bit, to keep both close to the middle, near an optimum value, so that the overall story (who is winning a race, is the new health care plan legal, should we had off to a particular war) remains commercially viable?
There are two major negative consequences that arise from this behavior, other than trampling on and killing the truth and all that. First, a candidate that should never win has a chance of winning. The only reason Donald Trump has any chance of winning this year’s election is because major media benefits from the race being close. Remember that, if he wins. Remember who to blame.
The other consequence is actually more insidious. In order for the press to keep a bogus candidate in the running, they have to report bogus positions and bogus policies with a straight face, and this in turn, shifts the window of credibility for those policies into the realm of reality. Over time, people can say things that they could never say before and remain credible, and positions can be put on the table that our civilization left behind decades or centuries ago. We could not talk about rounding up people with a certain physical appearance or religion because of the lessons we learned from the Nazis. Now we can talk about these things again. We can pretend that criminal misconduct by a candidate is not important, or that another candidate broke the law many times when she never actually did.
That is Andrea Mitchel’s fault. And Chuck Todd. And the rest of the reporters.
This is a feedback system. More extreme candidates engender more extreme policy excursions, which in turn allows more extreme candidates to throw their sombreros over the wall.
There are cracks forming. Mainstream news reporters who actually would lean towards a Republican candidate (or enjoy participating in bashing Clinton) are suddenly dropping their jaws and rolling their eyes, or just pointing out that they are fed up:
But it may be too late for the press to redeem itself now. They have placed Donald Trump very close to the White House, for their own self interest, and in so doing, are dangerously close to burning the house down. People talk these days about the collapse of the Republican Party. Fine. But what we really need is a tear down and replacement of how the Fourth Estate conducts itself. Mostly, the press is good at patting itself on the back, giving itself awards, and throwing huge collective tantrums when their integrity and freedom are questions. But now, those very people who would normally defend the press are increasingly less likely to come to their defense, and are starting to demand reform.
Not really. But it is World Suicide Prevention Day. And, one way YOU can help prevent suicides is by keeping your gun locked up, separate from the ammo, and keeping the ammo locked up as well.
Why?
Here’s why:
Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death among teens and young adults and the 10th leading cause of death among all Americans.
On average, 4 teenagers and 118 total Americans complete suicide every day.
90% people who survive a suicide attempt do not go on to die by suicide.
Many suicide attempts occur with little planning during a short-term crisis.
50% of suicide deaths in the United States are by firearm.
Access to firearms is a risk factor for suicide.
Firearms used in youth suicide usually belong to a parent.
Reducing access to lethal means, like firearms, saves lives.
A gun in the home is 22x more likely to be used in a suicide, homicide, or unintentional shooting than for self defense.
If there is a gun in your home, keep it unloaded and locked up or with a trigger lock. Store the bullets in a different place that is also locked.
If there is a gun in your home, do not let children and teens have a key to the places where guns and bullets are stored.
If a household member becomes depressed or has severe mood swings, store the gun outside the home for the time being while you seek help!
Laborers generally do their jobs, because if they don’t they get fired. But there are entire professions where people are not doing their jobs and the rest of us suffer.
Jacob Wetterling was abducted and murdered two and a half decades ago. The guy who did it was known to the cops then, and he had done things like this before, and those thinks were known about. There are all kinds of reasons they should have busted him even before Jacob was murdered, but they weren’t doing their job. Turns out that when you look across the country and across decades, you can find FAR more examples of cops not doing their jobs, either being outsmarted or just being lazy or who knows what, than you can find example of them doing their jobs. This Labor Day is not for them.
The press. We all love the press, and respect the press, and wouldn’t know what to do with out the press, bla bla bla. But we now understand that the wars in Iraq would have likely been avoided had the press been doing its job then. The press is now grading Donald Trump on a curve, treating his presidency in such a way that it legitimizes racism and white supremacy. That is the press not doing the sacred job they seek reference for. I suspect that if you look across history you will find lots of great examples of the press doing a great job. But there will be more examples of the press falling down on the job. If the press was really doing its job with respect to Donald Trump, Trump would have been in prison decades ago. This Labor Day is not for them.
Weather reporters. So many of them have been for so long in denial of climate science, passing on doubt to the average American, using their position of trust to spread lies. We have had a harder time pushing people and institutions in the general direction of reality with respect to climate change because of weather reporters not doing their jobs. This Labor Day is not for them.
There are exceptions to all these cases. You know who you are, and you don’t need lip service from me. You are in the game already, criticizing your colleagues. Or should be. This labor day is for you, a little. But mostly it is for the people who have jobs that if they fail at, even a little, they get fired, demoted, or abused.
So here it is. An extra day off. Use it well. Do something fun. Then get back to work or you’re fired!
Using executive power, Governor Mark Dayton, recognized as one of the best governors in the US, has laid out protections for pollinators in Minnesota.
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture is ordered to implement recently developed recommendations related to neonicotinoid pesticides. Potential users must demonstrate a real need for the products, and use them properly. This and other state agencies will coordinate and develop a Pollinator Protection Team to develop and implement statewide goals, and keep track of things. The Governor created a Committee on Pollinator Protection to advise the Governor and state agencies, including experts on conservation, agriculture, etc.
The use of pesticides on public land will be reviewed and adapted to be more pollinator friendly. This also applies to landfills, transportation related lands, and other state government run properties. There will be no neonicotinoid pesticide products of an kind used in certain state facilities, and other uses will be seriously limited.
The objective is to cut down on pesticide use in a way that does minimal damage to agriculture, and to enhance pollinator health.
“Bees and other pollinators play a critical role in supporting both our environment, and our economy,” said Governor Dayton. “This order directs state government to take immediate action to alleviate the known risks that pollinators face. It also will create a new taskforce to study the issues impacting pollinators and recommend long-term solutions.”
I note that some of the press coverage goes ahead to make the claim that there will be opposition to this plan. But there isn’t any visible opposition to the plan. Perhaps it would be better to wait until some materializes before reporting that it exists. Looking at you, Star Tribune.
We recently sold our old house and bought a new one, and moved.
The main reason we did this: to get closer to Amanda’s place of work. We managed to turn a commute that ran from 35 minutes to 1.5 hours (on really bad winter days) each way to one short enough that Amanda will usually bike, with about a five or six minute drive on non-biking days. Probably a ten minute drive on the worst winter days.
The main reason we did this now rather than a couple of years ago: our house was under water thanks to the GB Economic Crisis. In fact, we weren’t sure if we could sell the house at anything but a loss now. And, since we were trying to move into what is at present the best school district in the state (where Amanda happens to teach), the chances of finding a place to move to were somewhere between slim and none. And slim just left town after killing none.
But, we had excellent real estate agents working with us, and that made a huge difference. This blog post is, in fact, part of my thanks for and endorsement of Erik and Toby Nordin. They generally work as a team, and Erik was at the time the licensed agent (though Toby just became one as well), while Toby was the marketing guru. The Nordins work for Engle & Völkers, an international company that has recently moved into the Twin Cities area, and for which Amanda’s sister, Alyssa, works.
Erik and Toby gave us advice on what to do to get our house ready for sale. We followed their advice carefully, and rather than having to lose money on the sale, we walked away with a nice bit of cash. We sold the house in just over 24 hours after putting on the market, though it is a bit unfair to say that; the eventual buyers actually saw the house just a few hours into the process, but there was a bidding thing among the six or so offers we got.
Erik took us out to look at houses a few days after we sold ours. Twice. We found the house we wanted to buy with two bouts of searching. We know a few other people in our area that have moved recently, and most took weeks or months. One could argue that we are not picky, but see above: we were looking for an affordable place a bike ride from the top high school in the state, in a very fancy suburb.
(It turns out that Plymouth Minnesota has a sort of workers neighborhood right by the City Center. Erik knew about it, and showed us a couple of places here.)
Erik and Toby provided or organized all the necessary services and held our hands through every step. Their management of MLS data was excellent. They had great advice on anything you can imagine an agent can provide advice on. You need to know that I’m a person who normally does not like, trust, or have a whole hell of a lot of respect for most real estate agents. I was, after all, raised by one, and I’ve seen the sausage being made. Erik and Toby (and S-I-L Alyssa, and I suspect Engel & Völkers generally) are real professionals. If all agents and brokers were held to their standards a lot of people in the business would have to be looking for work elsewhere.
I’ve told our story to a handful of people who either just did the same thing, or who were in the process, and nobody has had an experience that went as smoothly, as successfully, and as quickly as ours. I attribute this to three things. A bit of random luck (maybe 10% of the outcome accounted for by this), a lot of hard work on our part, getting our place ready to sell (though it was fundamentally in great shape), and a huge amount of excellent work by Toby and Erik
So, thank you Toby and Erik.
I should also mention that Engel & Völklers, in the tradition of many European countries, is both a great place to work (so I hear) and does a lot to “give back” to the community. For example, they are a major supporter of the Special Olympics.
I had been utterly unengaged with with TV about the time that I met this particular cute girl, and she told me that she love the West Wing and watched it every week. There was, if I recall correctly, one more episode showing in the penultimate season, and we watched it together. I liked it.
We then watched, mainly via Netflix DVD rental, but also, borrowing her parent’s Season Five DVD’s, the entire rest of the show prior to the beginning of the final season, Season 7. Then we watched Season 7 together. It was great.
Eventually, two things were to happen. One is that I re-watched the entire series from beginning to the end. The other is that I married that girl. Not necessarily in that order.
I know that if you are reading this, and you are not a Turkish hacker, or a science denier come to harass me, you also love the West Wing.
My daughter Julia and I typically quasi-binge-watch (it takes us months) a particular TV show. We had finished off The Walking Dead, and Bones, and old favorite, had gone stale on us. (No deeply disturbing psychotic killers on the horizon, as far as we could tell.) So I tried out the West Wing on her, and she liked it. We plowed pretty quickly through the first couple of seasons, but there has been very little TV watching lately.
Then, I heard about The Wet Wing Weekly. This is a podcast by Joshua Malina and Hrishikesh Hirway. Josh Malina played Will Bailey on the West Wing, and has done a number of other famous roles in productions such as Sports Night and Scandal. Jrishikesh Hirway is a super fan of The West Wing, who is a musical artist and expert podcaster.
Warning: So far, at least two of the Podcasts have not been about a specific episode. These were great podcasts, but if this is your first time watching the West Wing, avoid them for now because they are full of spoilers. The main episodes of #TWWW do not include spoilers. They are very careful about that.
Malina and Hirway analyze and discuss the episode you just watched. Malina has worked extensively and intensively with West Wing creator Alan Sorkin, and Hirway carefully researches each podcast, so their commentary is penetrating, interesting, and apt. Also, the podcast is expertly edited so it is very smooth.
The West Wing Weekly Podcast often, nearly weekly, has a guest, often a star of the show, or someone else involved. Sorkin may someday be a guest on the podcast.
The conversation on #TWWW is cumulative. Ideas and concepts are developed over time, and terminology evolves. You could jump in any time, but to get the full effect, start at the beginning. And always watch the episode, then the podcast.
There is a web site, here, and comments are allowed on each podcast. Interesting information (AND SPOILERS SO BE ALERT) pops up in the discussion section, including corrections or expansions on what was discussed. You’ll see some of these comments coming. For example, in one episode of The West Wing, The President notes that “The era of big government is over.” The moment I heard that on the show, I was reminded of President Clinton saying the same thing, and also, that this was a reference to President Reagan, almost a bit of pandering to his supporters in Congress, and yet another demonstration of Democrat’s fruitless efforts to pretend like the two parties can talk to each other. Malina and Hirway noted the phrase, seemed perplexed by it, and clearly did not remember Clinton’s words. But the commenters fixed that!
One of the things Malina notes that I should pass on now, is that he watches the West Wing episodes with closed captions turned on. He does this for various reasons, but the result is that sometimes you pick up on dialog that one might otherwise miss, like in the case shown in the image above. If you are listening only, the words shown here in the CC are overtalked by another actor, and easy to miss. In other cases, the words that come out of the actor’s mouth and the words on the screen are simply different, in a way that really does look like a change in the dialog has happened, some last minute editing of the script.
Hey, if you are going to rewatch, or re-rewatch, or even re-re-rewatch, a TV show then listen to a podcast about each episode, then you are operating at a level where these details matter.
And, if you are interested in what your grandmother was up to when she was little, pick up a copy of When My Grandmother Was a Child: 9. If you can find it.
This is a blog rant. But first, a bit of blog appreciation to the select number of individuals who suggested to us that the Shark was the best vacuum cleaner for us, in a recent Facebook Discussion.
I have to say, that when I saw S.H. suggest the Shark, I figured that the chances were pretty high that we would end up with a Shark, S.H. has always given me the very best advice on everything.
Anyway, the main point of comparison for us was between various models of the Dyson and various models of the Shark. Side by side they ended up being pretty similar but the Shark actually has some better specs, and is way way cheaper. I’d rank the following vacuum cleaners in order as specified:
I should add that we had ruled out a canister, but the Shark that we got actually can be a canister if you want it to be.
Now, where to buy it? On line would be smart, and the links above actually go to Amazon. But we decided to get the machine at a nearby store for various reasons. So we went first to Sears, then to Macy’s, and here is how they compared:
Exploding Kittens is a card game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats.
In this highly-strategic, kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette, players draw cards until someone draws an Exploding Kitten, at which point they explode, they are dead, and they are out of the game — unless that player has a Defuse card, which can defuse the Kitten using things like laser pointers, belly rubs, and catnip sandwiches. All of the other cards in the deck are used to move, mitigate, or avoid the Exploding Kittens.
Created by Elan Lee (Xbox, ARGs), Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal), and Shane Small (Xbox, Marvel), Exploding Kittens is the most-backed Kickstarter project ever, and the most-funded game in Kickstarter history.
Manga is the Japanese sounding but not used so much in Japan term for a form of cartooning art that has its roots from before World War II but that emerged in its common form during the post war Occupation period. Early used in political cartooning, Manga style drawing is now used for a wide range of expression, and has a place in illustrating a wide range of products, read by Japanese citizens of all sorts and ages. Outside of Japan, Manga is the starting point for the wildly popular Anime style of expression, which of course brings us to…
Pokeman go
But, we are not here to talk about Pokeman go. We are here to talk about Regression Analysis.
No Starch Press has been producing Manga Guides for some years now. They cover many area of math, science, and technology. (I’ve provided a list below.)
This book presents the story if Miu, a young woman who is having some trouble understanding regression analysis. But she has a love interest to inspire her, and a brilliant coworker to guide her, and with these motivations and tools embarks on a learning journey to grasp such concepts as how to calculate the regression equation and check it’s accuracy, how to use correlation coefficients, test hypotheses, conduct analyses of variance (and analysis of variance is mathematically identical to a regression analysis), predict odds ratios, and do a few parametric statistics to boot.
This is the book that a graduate student who needs to know regression, but is not in a highly mathematical field and skipped college Statistics, will read, learn from, and later claim belongs to his younger brother. Or, that a science-oriented non scientist who is tired of glossing over the statistical parts of the science she reads can use to get up to speed. Or, that a business person or political junkie who wants to use basic regression tools to spot trends or predict primary outcomes might find helpful.
I think that Manga is a medium that many people relate to and find comfortable, and for such individuals, all of the Manga guides, to various math and science concepts, are great. If you have a high school student in your life who is facing a stats course, this is a good gift. Even though the book focuses on Regression, you should know that regression analysis incorporates, or in some way relates to, the vast majority of statistical techniques. When I’ve taught or tutored graduate level stats, and I learned this from the famous Mark Pagel, I’ve always focused on regression because it is very intuitive, yet powerful, and touches on everything. In other words, if you are going to learn one advanced statistical technique, make it (multiple variable) regression.
Interestingly, The Manga Guide to Regression Analysis is a great introduction, but it is not confined to basic regression. The material in this book takes you through a number of different ways to do regression, and will bring you to the point where you should be able to understand and swap in any of the numerious alternative modeling approaches that are out there and available in various statistical packages.
An appendix provides a guide to using Excel to do regression analysis.
Other Manga Guides
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Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau and Enrique Peña Nieto, have made a joint announcement. As reported by NPR:
President Obama and his counterparts from Canada and Mexico are preparing to unveil an ambitious new goal for generating carbon-free power when they meet this week in Ottawa.
The three leaders are expected to set a target for North America to get 50 percent of its electricity from nonpolluting sources by 2025. That’s up from about 37 percent last year.
Aides acknowledge that’s a “stretch goal,” requiring commitments over and above what the three countries agreed to as part of the Paris climate agreement.
The news reports and press information about this event note that the US currently produces about a third of its energy from non fossil fuel sources. Mexico produces less than 20% of its power this way, and Canada is at about 81%. A big part of this shift will involve shutting down coal plants and expanding wind and solar. However, this mix, as well as the proposed 50% of “clean energy,” may include biofuels, which are very limited in their effectiveness in combating climate change, Nuclear, which is diminishing in its importance, and possibly “carbon capture” which is not an energy source and not likely to have much impact because it essentially doesn’t work at any meaningful scale because of physics.
So, we will need to see some clarification in this area.
(which is now streaming on Amazon Prime, by the way, in case you’ve not see it). That second and related issue is fairness, and how it is a bad thing in journalism.
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by Shin Takahashi and Iroha Inoue.