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I’d Buy the Motorized Surfboard

September 30, 2009 in surfing, the interweb - a system of tubes | Tags: ROBOTS! | Leave a comment

…since I’m physically pained by paddling for waves. That and other dubious-in-retrospect inventions here. I also wouldn’t mind seeing what Xzibit would do with illuminated tires.

My vote for dumbest is the speechless phone answering robot.

The Machines Are Taking Over

May 16, 2009 in the interweb - a system of tubes | Tags: judgement day, wolframAlpha | Leave a comment

Stephen Wolfram, who I’ve heard is really smart and really arrogant, has a new website that looks pretty cool. I’m assuming he didn’t make it by himself, but you never know. The screencast gives an idea of what it can do. The basic idea is it sucks in all the information it can, much like Google, but then it analyzes the results and gives you its answers.

The example shows it doing some calculus and giving some decent summary statistics for different data sets, so I tried to get it to give me some maximum likelihood estimators and it didn’t know what I was talking about. Back to work Steve!

After a few questions I got the following screenshot, and I’m not sure if it means I’ve asked as many questions as I get to ask, or if I happened to be on the site when they shut down their test run:

WolframAlpha Has Had Enough of Me

WolframAlpha Has Had Enough of Me

The screencast this links to says they hope to have the site fully operational Monday. Soon after it’s sure to realize that human’s are it’s biggest threat (I wish I’d asked it for the probability that WolframAlpha destroys humanity).

I Read & Enjoyed…

Caplan on Education November 10, 2009
How much does increasing college-going rates matter to our economy and society? Caplan: College attendance, in my view, is usually a drain on our economy and society. Encouraging talented people to spend many years in wasteful status contests deprives the economy of millions of man-years of output. If this were really an "investment," of course, it […]
Alex Tabarrok
Dolphin markets in everything, Gresham's Law edition November 4, 2009
I enjoyed this story: Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fi […]
Tyler Cowen
How to improve basketball October 29, 2009
Tim Miano writes to me: I am a longtime MR reader. I have a hypothesis about how basketball could be much more exciting, and I can't for the life of me figure out why people who are into sports haven't widely considered it (as least as far as I know).Here is my simple thought: games should be played as best 4 out of 7 periods -- perhaps 7 minutes e […]
Tyler Cowen
The coin toss: not 50-50 after all October 25, 2009
Using a high-speed camera that photographed people flipping coins, the three researchers determined that a coin is more likely to land facing the same side on which it started. If tails is facing up when the coin is perched on your thumb, it is more likely to land tails up. How much more likely? At least 51 percent of the time, the researchers claim, and pos […]
Chris Blattman
Motorcycle helmet externality of the day October 13, 2009
Our estimates imply that every death of a helmetless motorcyclist prevents or delays as many as 0.33 deaths among individuals on organ transplant waiting lists. Here is the paper and I thank Brent Wheeler for the pointer. So should we mandate or tax the use of such helmets?
Tyler Cowen
Sobering Reality September 28, 2009
From Bill Easterly's, Can the West Save Africa.Hat tip to for the link and table to Hit and Run.
Alex Tabarrok
The McFarthest spot September 27, 2009
Strange Maps reports:Somewhere in South Dakota is the McFarthest Spot, the place in the US geographically most removed from the nearest McD’s...If you started out from this location, a few miles north of State Highway 20 (which runs latitudinally between Highways 73 in the west and 65 in the east), you’d have to drive 145 miles to get your Big Mac (if you co […]
Tyler Cowen
Teacher Absence in the United States September 24, 2009
Yesterday I looked at teacher absence in the developing world, highlighting India where a quarter of teachers may be absent on a given day. Teacher absence isn't that high in the United States but it is still shockingly high. On a typical school day, 5-6% of teachers are absent, i.e. equivalent to an absence once every 20 days!Bearing in mind that the […]
Alex Tabarrok