balls!

amazing. apparently truckers like to hang large plastic testicles off the back of their trucks.

probably not work safe

I took it upon myself to visit the website of one fake testicles supplier, and I now present you with the following image:

aptly named: BallnChain.jpg

I am also quite fond of the "support your troops" balls:

so the week started out with scrota and ended with balls. that's awesome.

grammar

I know the fact that I actually care about this makes me an asshole, but:

Masculine: singular= alumnus & plural = alumni
Feminine: singluar = alumna & plural = alumnae

I actually don't care if you just use "alum" and "alums" because whatever, we're speaking English, not Latin, and the language changes over time.

That being said, I do care if you say "alumn" because if you're going to butcher the language, it should at the very least be in the service of making it more pronounceable.
I also care if you decide "alumna" is plural. Because that's dumb. I guess if the singluar was "alumnum" you'd be on to something, but it's not.

googe

google's valentines logos:
'01:

'03:

'05:

'07:


hmm. it seems they only have special v-day logos on odd numbered years. unless the other ones are stored with some other naming scheme.

also, this year's artist had some spelling problems. as the veteran of many a chalking mishap ("swing dance: friday nigt!" "vote in the sga elctions!" etc.) I find that eminently understandable. still, I'm saving that logo in case it goes away/gets fixed.

mmm chocolate covered strawberries.

edit: okay so there are different naming schemes. it seems 02 and 06 don't have special logos, possibly because there were winter olympics in those years and google decided 2 special logos in 1 month was overkill.

2004's name had an extra s:


2000 was the 1st year of a special valentine's logo, so there's no year.

social mobility

today I was reading a blog on the economist. specifically, this post.

At first I thought it was really smart, because I think people's gut negative reaction to income inequality has to do with how much people "deserve" their outcomes in life. As in, "It's not fair that he's poor! He's worked hard his whole life." or "It's not fair that he has so much more money than I do. Everything's always been handed to him on a silver platter." And at its heart, discussions about social mobility are about people "getting what they deserve." if you work hard, you get rich. If you don't, you won't.

and so a line like:

I would prefer to live in a world where the children of Bill Gates, and an average welfare mother, have the same opportunity to succeed.

sounds appealing.

Then one of the commenters made me think again.
The thing is, with the possible exception of Warren Buffett, I think one of the reasons you work to become rich is so you can provide for your family/make life easier for subsequent generations. Beyond just making money, a lot of how parents with the necessary means spend money (buying houses in good school districts, enrolling kids in enrichment programs, etc.) is aimed at giving kids an advantage in life. We might be for equality of opportunity as a general principle, but on a micro level, we want to have more opportunity than others.

I think this becomes even more clear when you realize that "equality of opportunity" or "social mobility" means opportunity to succeed -or- fail, to move up -or- down in class. And the thing is, there will be successes and failures. Unless you actually expect an efficient economy where everyone makes the same amount of money, there will be some "winners" at the top of the income distribution and some "losers" at the bottom. This is mitigated by the fact that potentially even the "losers" could be quite well off, but what it comes down to is this: no one wants his kid to be worse off than he is. With actual equality of opportunity, that would happen.

Today in religion...

So Ted Haggard's straight now. And he's going to get a psychology degree. One more "ex-gay" "expert" asshole in the world. God help us all.
[insert totally inappropriate joke relating the word asshole to sodomy here.]

Also, according to the Chinese, all Jews are money-grubbing business people who've been so successful that they now control society. But they're okay with that, because they just want to learn our secrets. [link]

nerdiness

I just came up with the most baroque way possible to format arguments at the command prompt for my computer program: Gödel numbering.

Also, I am a big nerd because I'm so attached to the umlaut in Gödel's name that I looked up how to make an ö in html.

Finally, yay for css! I've figured out a somewhat crappy way to post "behind the fold." once I play around with javascript, this should get better.

maybe I'm wrong

So I've been thinking.

The vaccine thing isn't as obvious as I made it out to be yesterday.
Things you have to consider:

• how serious are the disease's symptoms? in yesterday's post, I just talked about cancer. That was a mistake, because HPV has other symptoms, and maybe some of them aren't supposed to be discussed in polite society, but they're still worth preventing. It's especially important to think about in this case, because while I don't feel like looking up the article, I've read that HPV can increase the incidence of AIDS transmission. The more damaging a disease is, the greater impetus there is to fight it. On the other hand, if a virus leaves almost everyone totally asymptomatic, but once every 4 million cases gives someone a rash or something, maybe it's not worth developing a vaccine.
  
• how (easily) is the disease spread? Certain diseases are super communicable. so the marginal societal benefit of 1 more vaccination is measurably higher than someone's personal benefit from being disease resistant. Other diseases are not spread person to person. (maybe they're spread through the water.) So the benefits of getting vaccinated are confined to the people who get the shots. For a non communicable disease, your own personal cost benefit analysis is the only relevant one, so we should probably let you make it in peace. HPV is spread person to person. But maybe it's more cost effective to stop the disease from spreading than to develop a vaccine. If condom use cuts transmission significantly, make people wear condoms, not get $200 shots. Assuming you could make people wear condoms. yay for privacy invasion!
  
• how much does the vaccine cost? a super effective vaccine for a highly communicable disease might still not be worth administering if each dose costs an obscene amount to produce. Or if it costs a lot to administer--let's say you *had* to have trained doctors make the trip on nonexistant jungle roads with refrigeration units containing glass vials of the vaccine. This cuts the other way too: if production costs per unit go down with a high enough volume, maybe the government *does* want to mandate vaccination that it wouldn't otherwise.
  

I suspect mandatory HPV vaccination still makes sense. I still think the whole "The DC schoolboard is being racist" argument is idiotic. I find a lot of the "let people choose" rhetoric unconvincing. But I might be wrong.


In other news, I've got to figure out how to post parts of entries "behind the fold" because I'm wordy.

stupid

2 things that seem so obvious to me that I can't understand why smart people (like my parents) don't get them:

1. things like this are mostly empty rhetoric. I am a democrat. I like democrats. The only reason democrats are talking about helping the middle class is because this is perhaps the most uncontrovertial policy position it is possible to hold. You want to know why? Because *everyone* thinks they're middle class. Either you're poor, in which case you're aspirational and call yourself middle class, you actually are middle class, or you're rich, but not the richest person you know, so you feel middle class. Besides, it's kind of gauche to actually call yourself rich, so at most, you're "upper middle class."
   
   My parents think they're middle class, yet they were able to send me to a fancy prep school whose semiannual glossy alumnae magazine features little blurbs on what "Teensy" '54 and "Muffin" '61 are up to these days. (man I love those names. can you imagine being 70 years old and named Teensy?) I felt middle class at that school too, in part because *my* bedroom wasn't two stories tall, and *I* didn't own any horses or get a brand new BMW on my 16th birthday. But guess what? The horse-owning, two story bedroom-having, BMW drivers thought they were middle class too. *They* didn't have private jets or second homes in the south of France. *They* had to rent when they went to "the vineyard" for the summer. It's just like how Joe Lieberman painted himself as middle class compared to Ned Lamont. *He* didn't grow up in a family compound and have buildings in New England colleges named after his grandfather. Just kindly ignore the fact that he's in the top 1% of incomes in one of the wealthiest nations in the world.
   
   So chances are, when the dems talk about helping the middle class, they're not really talking about my parents or the rest of the coastal "latte liberal" elites who actually pay attention to more than which candidate has the nicer smile. So why do we all think they are?
   


2. How is there any debate at all about this? This columnist thinks it's racist and wrong to force DC schoolchildren to get the HPV vaccine. Because why aren't vaccinations voluntary anyway? Increased education and awareness will solve all! (Let's ignore the obvious fact that DC is actually terrible at anything education related.) I actually think there's a convenient game theory term to explain this, but I can't remember what it is. (something like the opposite of the tragedy of the commons?)
   
   The basic idea is that if people all act in their own rational self interest, a lot of people won't get vaccinated. Vaccines are expensive, and the chance of actually getting cervical cancer from HPV (for example) is actually pretty small. I have no numbers, but lets say it's like a 2% chance of getting cancer at some point later in life when who knows? cancer treatments might have improved appreciably. (even this number seems high) So many rational actors will decide to spend the $500 on something else.
   
   Here's the thing, rational actors consider only their own interests, but there are additional societal interests to consider. My getting vaccinated doesn't only reduce my risk of cancer, it reduces the risk of anyone I sleep with, as well as anyone they sleep with, as well as anyone the people they slept with sleep with. So if I get vaccinated, even if no one else does, the chances of anyone else getting cancer have just dropped from 2 to 1.9999999999%. Each additional vaccination drops their risk more. And while it's not a big deal to you personally if your risk of cancer is 2%, it's a HUGE deal to society of 2% of the entire population is going to get sick. (okay, okay, I know men can't get cervical cancer. but apparently HPV is also linked to anal cancer in gay men. so we're not just talking about women here.)
   
   So, in an instance where it's in society's best interests, but not individuals' best interests to get something done, of course society should intervene. Incidentally, my arguments also lead to the conclusion, compulsory voting: thumbs up. But of course the opp to that is a bunch of lofty rhetoric about the social contract and the value of voluntary everything to a free society. This rhetoric is a lot less convincing when people's lives are at stake. Especially when most of the rhetoric is tied up in these absolutely absurd accusations of racism. So, in conclusion, mandatory HPV vaccination: thumbs up.