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Folks: Weather permitting, I’m heading down to New York on Thursday, September 13 to hear Brian Keating present a lecture on cosmology and his interesting book for laypeople, Losing the Nobel Prize. The lecture is free and at the National Museum of Mathematics (5th Avenue and 26th; registration link). Refreshments (and conversation amongst ourselves) at 6:15 pm. Lecture at 7. I would love to get together with readers. If that doesn’t work, maybe coffee on Friday morning? Happy also to meet at Teterboro on Thursday morning or Friday around noon.

Related:

• Losing the Nobel Prize
• Losing the Nobel Prize: on careers in science

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Back in 2017 I did some analysis for an inter-partes review ( IPR2017-00886) at the U.S. Patent Office. The patent in question, 7,480,694, covers a way to make a slide show of web pages. The decision was recently issued and I thought that readers might be interested to see it. (All of the documents in any IPR are public, incidentally, and available for free download via the Web.)

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I recently attended a wedding of two best friends from high school. They met on their first day of high school… in 1975. In a society with strong social pressure to marry it seems likely that they’d have gotten married shortly after completing high school or college, presumably to the most compatible person they’d identified at that time. As members of the Me Generation, however, they were entitled to pursue a search for self-actualization with no time limit, including a search for the ideal partner. As it happened in this case, the 40-year delay didn’t result in finding anyone more compatible than they’d already identified in high school.

Would they have been happier if they could have spent their core adult years together? Married at an age when it was still biologically possible to have children?

Musicologists say that Mozart did better work because he operated within constraints established by Haydn. Is it possible that Americans would do better with a few more constraints?

[Scorecard on the two most recent weddings that I’ve attended, both within the last couple of years… One wedding was in Paris. The couple remains together. One was in Massachusetts. The wife sued the husband a year later.]

Separately, this wedding was held at a Colorado ski resort, with events at 10,200′ and 9,400′ above sea level. At least one third of the guests who had flown in from sea level were suffering from altitude sickness (not me, though; I spent three nights in Denver before heading up to nosebleed territory).

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At Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) we talked to a 55-year-old MIT graduate who’d been fired from his engineering job (he mentioned this in the context of a multi-week cross-country trip with kids in a light airplane; he said that he was glad that he didn’t cancel the trip after he’d been fired). His camp site was organized as well as a typical Hilton hotel.

Another member of our merry band works at one of the world’s largest HR consulting firms. Asked “How could someone so qualified and so obviously competent be fired?” the HR expert responded “stale, pale, and male.”

Happy Labor Day to all of the young replacements!

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“The Gender Divide in Preschoolers’ Closets” (nytimes) has a subtitle explicitly referring to #MeToo:

I buy my daughter boys’ pants because even in an age of female fighter pilots and #MeToo, boys’ clothes are largely designed to be practical, while girls’ are designed to be pretty.

In a paragraph adjacent to “#MeToo” the following sentence:

I scoured the internet for girls’ pants with capacious pockets and reinforced knees, and found maddeningly few options.

A close reading of the article makes it clear that the author writes “girl” to mean “young children who happen to be female,” but the reader who skims and parses “girl” as “a young unmarried woman” (Merriam-Webster definition #3) may be a little shocked that “pants with reinforced knees for young unmarried women at work” is the latest demand from self-described gender equality advocates.

The editors are too busy reviewing each others’ old tweets to look for stuff like this?

Related:

• “Pink Wasn’t Always Girly” (Atlantic): “In the 18th century, it was perfectly masculine for a man to wear a pink silk suit with floral embroidery,” says fashion scholar Valerie Steele, director of The Museum at the Fashion Institute Technology and author of several books on fashion. Steele says pink was initially “considered slightly masculine as a diminutive of red,” which was thought to be a “warlike” color.

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From an Atlantic magazine article on an analysis of the database of an online dating site:

Bruch and her colleagues analyzed thousands of messages exchanged on a “popular, free online-dating service” between more than 186,000 straight men and women. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January 2014.

The key, Bruch said, is that “persistence pays off.”

In the study, men’s desirability peaks at age 50. But women’s desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.

Across all four cities, men tended to use less positive language when messaging more desirable women. They may have stumbled upon this strategy through trial and error because “in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages.”

“The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation,” the study says. This is “equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month.” Yikes.

The last part is what seems to suggest an opportunity for software. Wouldn’t that young lady be a lot better off if she had a robot to screen out and/or reply to these 1504 monthly messages? Or at least highlight the ones to which she should consider replying?

Related:

• “For 13 Days, I Believed Him” (nytimes); author discovers that new boyfriend has no job, savngs, or apartment (result: “You ain’t got no money, you just ain’t no good”, just as in the Percy Mayfield song “Hit the Road Jack”, made famous by Ray Charles)
• Whitney Cummings: I’m Your Girlfriend (HBO streaming), in which the comedienne says that, were she to become pregnant by a lower-income man, her lawyer would come over to her house and do the abortion himself
• “Is it possible to build an app whose job is to use another app?”

 

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“Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Affirmative Action Win Justice Dept. Support” (nytimes) is kind of interesting for the reader comments. Now that Trump is against Harvard, most readers are confident that Harvard is in the right (see Inside Higher Ed for some data on just how much higher Asians have to score in order to get into Harvard, roughly 400 points higher than the most desired racial group).

Some of the readers want the current system of race-based admissions torn down in favor of family income-based. They want Harvard to give preference to children of low-income families. But if you read

• The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications
• The Son Also Rises: Tips for Optimizing Your Life
• The Son Also Rises: Policy Implications

the take-away is that Harvard’s best statistical chance of turning out a group of highly successful graduates is to select from children of highly successful parents (where “highly successful” need not be “rich” but probably isn’t “low income”). In other words, to preserve its prestige Harvard should actually select preferentially from high-income families and/or families where parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents are highly accomplished.

How about a straight sort on standardized test results? Wouldn’t the class then be almost all folks from foreign countries? The U.S. does not have a monopoly on smart English speakers who are willing to study for a test. This would really get the NY Times readers upset. Quite a few of the comments are of the form “Asians are not creative or especially intelligent; they just cram for exams because their parents make them. Therefore a university with mostly Asian students would never be an interesting learning environment.” (I’ve noticed this attitude among elderly Hillary voters. One reason why they support an infinite expansion of U.S. government spending is that they think that the U.S. has a monopoly on creativity and therefore an entitlement to high economic growth rates. The Chinese can build stuff, but they can never invent stuff (your typical 80-year-old is apparently not aware of DJI!).)

One idea: Accept some age diversity (right now the passionate diversity advocates insist that everyone starting at Harvard be 18 or 19) and insist that anyone who wants to come to Harvard has to accomplish something in the real world. Harvard already has a lot of students coming after a gap year. So if someone is going to study English literature, that applicant needs to get some stuff published and positively reviewed. If someone is going to be a nerd, that applicant has to develop something that gets adopted and used. If someone is going to be a scientist, that applicant has to work in a lab and get the mature scientist to say “This person did useful work.” Mix that in with a minimum standardized test score and now there is a class full of people who can actually do stuff, albeit maybe the age shifts from 18-19 up to 19-21.

[Olin College of Engineering (higher median SAT score than MIT, last I checked) does something slightly related. Applicants come to the school for a weekend and work on projects so that faculty can get a sense for their real-world capability. Admission is partly based on performance during that weekend.]

Readers: What should Harvard do if the court system orders the school to tear down its race-based admissions process?

Related:

• Ivy League colleges thinking like Einstein?

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The other day I bought a watermelon at a small supermarket in Cambridge. The market used to give away super thin plastic bags so I was about to ask for the melon to be double-bagged. The clerk then pulled out a bag that was at least as thick as a “contractor” garbage bag for disposing of 2×4 fragments. Probably 25-50X as much plastic went into the new-style bag as had gone into the old one. What changed? The city has made it illegal for merchants to give away bags. They have to charge 10 cents for each bag by law. Apparently this grocery store doesn’t want to be seen as ripping consumers off so they have laid in a stock of the world’s thickest and strongest plastic bags. Unless at least 95 percent of customers actually bring their own bags to the store, then, the effect of the law will be to increase the use of plastic.

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I happened upon a few tweenage girls in Harvard Yard, closely supervised by some adults. The tweenagers were wearing full Islamic covering, with only faces and hands exposed. To this traditional outfit they had pulled over additional T-shirts reading “Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History”.

(The adult women were also fully covered, but not wearing add-on T-shirts.)

Was there a contradiction here? Being modestly covered would be considered “behaving well”, I think. A Harvard graduate friend said that there was no contradiction: “Muslim dress is superior. Men can’t objectify women so easily. She will be assessed more fairly on characteristics other than her appearance.”

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“Cuomo and Nixon Spar in Debate: ‘Can You Stop Interrupting?’ ‘Can You Stop Lying?’” (nytimes) is a lot of fun. In “NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo says America ‘was never that great'” (CNN) nominated himself as champion for Americans who identify as female:

“We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great,” Cuomo, a Democrat, remarked at a bill signing event in New York City. … “We will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping of women, 51% of our population, is gone, and every woman’s full potential is realized and unleashed and every woman is making her full contribution.”

His campaign of redressing female victimhood, however, won’t start until after he completes the installation of a glass ceiling over Cynthia Nixon’s head. From the latest nytimes:

Mr. Cuomo said Ms. Nixon lives in “the world of fiction.”

For Ms. Nixon, the actress and activist undertaking a long-shot challenge against a two-term incumbent, the debate offered her biggest stage yet in the race, and she used the spotlight to rip Mr. Cuomo as a “corrupt corporate Democrat” while promising an array of progressive policies she said he had bottled up in the last seven years.

“I’m not an Albany insider like Governor Cuomo, but experience doesn’t mean that much if you’re not actually good at governing,” she accused.

Mr. Cuomo sought to raise doubts about Ms. Nixon’s qualifications — she has never held elected office — to serve and succeed as governor, while simultaneously burnishing his own credentials.

“That’s the art of government. I can get it done,” he said at one point. At another, he told Ms. Nixon that “you don’t snap your fingers” and simply make things happen.

[Certainly under Cuomo’s leadership, New York State has reached the #1 position in terms of the percentage of residents’ incomes that is taxed away by state and local government (Tax Foundation; 12.7 percent versus 7.6 percent in Texas; i.e., the state needs 67 percent more in taxes to operate than Texas does, as a percentage of total income). Aren’t Cuomo’s statements about how he runs a sort-of-functional state government weak in light of what he spends? If I tell you that I was able to purchase a working 5-seat sedan for only $50,000 would you call me a hero of consumer prudence?]

These two Democrats can’t even agree on the right way to hate Donald Trump (their fellow New York Democrat for most of his life):

“No one has stood up to Donald Trump the way I have,” Mr. Cuomo said.

Ms. Nixon dismissed that idea entirely, quipping, “You stood up to him about as well as he stood up to Putin.”

To beat down this born-female member of the LGBTQ community that he champions, Cuomo takes a confusing position on accounting and taxation:

But Mr. Cuomo came determined to attack Ms. Nixon for her own finances. He hammered her for how many years of personal taxes she has released (five), and for routing her income through an S corporation, which he decried as a “loophole.” He returned to the topic over and over.

S corp profits flow right through to the individual taxpayer and are taxed at individual rates, so how is this a “loophole”? (Actually, though, maybe Ms. Nixon will get a big tax reduction under the 2017 tax bill that President Trump signed? That will enable some of her pass-through income to be exempt? She should interrupt her hatred of Donald Trump for long enough to send him a thank-you note?)

Readers: What do you make of this? Will voters notice the apparent contradiction between a cisgender male politician claiming to be working tirelessly to advance U.S. residents (not limited to “citizens” I hope!) who identify as “women” while simultaneously trying to prevent a cisgender female from taking his (unearned if he is a white male) place?

Related:

• Should Republicans run only black women for Congress and Senate? (only loosely related; the above-described dispute is between two virtuous Trump-hating Democrats)

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