Quote of the Day

Posted on by David Wright

I wish there were a macho way to admit you didn’t know something, so people could understand that admitting uncertainty isn’t equivalent to being wishy-washy.

I mean, sometimes I want to bust out and say, “I don’t know that, and neither do you, motherfucker!” but I’m not sure how well that would go over. Some people get touchy about profanity.

That’s Cathy O’Neil, the Mathbabe, whom I am listening to on Econtalk and is now firmly on the blogroll. It’s been a while since I’ve had a new entrant I’ve been so excited about.

Buffett Buys Heinz

Posted on by David Wright

“This is my kind of deal and my kind of partner,” Mr. Buffett told CNBC on Thursday. “Heinz is our kind of company with fantastic brands.”

In many ways, Heinz fits Mr. Buffett’s deal criteria almost to a T. It has broad brand recognition – besides ketchup, it owns Ore-Ida and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce – and has performed well. Over the last 12 months, its stock has risen nearly 17 percent.

That’s the NYT. I don’t know, this seems to be an odd deal to me. Sure the brands are great but quickly flick through Heinz’ financials and you see a company with a terrible balance sheet: 4.5bn of intangible assets and only 2.8bn of equity. 4bn of debt, about equal to the treasury stock deficit.  This is a company that has borrowed heavily to buy back its own stock for some reason. Why add the risk?

Well it’s about to get another pile of financing (3bn more by my math):

Berkshire and 3G will each contribute about $4 billion in cash to pay for the deal, with Berkshire also paying $8 billion for preferred shares. The rest of the cost will be covered by debt financing raised by JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

Everyone’s getting pumped up for deals deals deals but I’m scratching my head.

The Guy That Killed OBL Describes The Mission

Posted on by David Wright

She asked me why I was so calm. I told her, We do this every night. We go to a house, we fuck with some people, and we leave. This is just a longer flight.

About 7000 more words here. Recommended.

-=-=-

Here’s another good quote:

“One of the tests is they make you dive to the bottom of a pool and tie five knots,” the Shooter says. “One guy got to the fifth knot and blacked out underwater. We pulled him up and he was, like, dead. They made the class face the fence while they tried to resuscitate him. The first words as he spit out water were ‘Did I pass? Did I tie the fifth knot?’ The instructor told him, ‘We didn’t want to find out if you could tie the knots, you asshole, we wanted to know how hard you’d push yourself. You killed yourself. You passed.'”

Thoughts on Pacquiao vs Marquez IV

Posted on by David Wright

I hate Pay-per-Views and it’s not just the 70 bucks. The bigger the fight the later the main event: the biggest of all don’t really get into the ring before midnight. Most of the time I’d rather have been asleep for two hours by then. Every time I’ve skipped buying one I’ve been glad I did the next day.

Until Pacquiao Marquez 4, anyway. Oh, man did I wish I had stayed up: what awesome live TV that would have been.

ESPN re-aired it last night so I’ll do a write-up. This match touches on many interesting and controversial topics in boxing:

  1. Up until and including the knockout this fight was, technically speaking, a marvelous display of skill.
  2. We see a reversal of roles from their previous fights: Manny, once the one-armed power merchant, is now the skilled technician and got knocked out.
  3. And, generally speaking, aren’t knockouts just… horrifying? They often make my stomach turn.
  4. Is Manny, one of the most popular athletes in the world, done?
  5. Is Marquez on drugs? He wasn’t so big-looking before and never came close to this kind display before.

Here’s Bill Simmons making the point better than me:

My favorite recent look-the-other-way example: Juan Manuel Marquez couldn’t knock down Manny Pacquiao for 36 solid rounds over three of their fights. Before their third fight, the 39-year-old Marquez aligned himself with a disgraced strength-and-conditioning coach named Angel Heredia (Google his name and PEDs; it’s a fun 10 minutes), arrived in Vegas so ripped that he weighed in four pounds under the 147-pound limit, knocked Pacquiao down early with a vicious power punch, then coldcocked him a few rounds later with one of the single greatest knockout punches ever thrown. What did we do? We bought the fight, gathered in our living rooms. We oohed and aahed, tweeted our disbelief and forwarded the YouTube clip around. And when Marquez passed the bogus post-fight drug test — for the record, Keith Richards in 1978 after a night at Studio 54 could pass one of boxing’s drug tests — everyone let the moment go.

Know this: Every boxing fan I know believes that Marquez enhanced his chances that night.

Well, clearly Bill and I aren’t friends because I don’t agree. Here, read this awesome interview with Marquez:

Sanchez: You practiced that counterpunch a lot. Many people think it was a lucky punch. How did you decide that it was the right moment to throw it?

Marquez: We were waiting for the right moment. Manny Pacquiao always makes a fake move that I know too well. He fakes a charge forward and then looks like he is going to follow with a one-two. That’s a common fake he has. What I do is, I wait for the moment, he fakes the punch … that one-two. Then I go for his right hand as he throws it as a jab — I go toward his right hand. He comes forward with all his weight, and that’s why the fall becomes more forceful and spectacular — because he is coming straight to me and I make my body twist and turn, and the right hand wasn’t in a straight position. I believe that this movement made the hand even stronger. … The clash of two body masses full-on makes the punch even stronger.

Sanchez: You didn’t even have the chance to finish that punch; you were left hanging in the middle. If you had stretched out your hand, the punch would have been much more violent.

Marquez: He didn’t give me the chance to stretch out my arm because he was charging forward. That’s what helped me finish the fight by KO, and it helped make the punch even stronger — because he was charging forward. I seized that opportunity, because after three fights I know that any changes made by the other fighter, however slight, are very important. That’s why we worked on that, waiting for him to make that fake move that I know so well. And when he made that move right then, I wait for his jab and then I jump right into his punch, and that’s how I did it. A strong punch. A very strong punch, which wasn’t completely straight; it was sort of between a straight right and a hook. That made it even stronger.

Marquez didn’t knock Manny out with illegal muscles, even if he had them. He used weight, leverage, technique and, most importantly of all, strategy. None of these things are enhanced by drugs, only by hard work.*

It’s an amazing punch, have a look.

And if you get to watch the full replay you can see that Manny made that same fake two times before moving in for real. Marquez never bit. He knew to wait until Manny followed the fake with a jab. The patience and skill are astonishing.

He talks of speed in his interview but the fact is that he was the slower man all along in this fight, which he normally is against Manny. But this time he was also getting outboxed. He was losing.

There was probably a 15% chance that this fight would end this way: such a perfect shot is extremely uncommon at this level, which is why it didn’t happen in any of their other fights.

So my view is that the result was as dependent on chance as anything, but stories about randomness are incredibly unsatisfying (see this superbowl recap by Bill Barnwell). We ask why the outcome was deserved or inevitable, which doesn’t make sense unless all actions are deliberate. Response: Marquez is on PEDs.

For what it’s worth, I do think this is a career-ending loss. Knockouts scar fighters. They make them more susceptible to concussions, to be sure, but they also blunt their mental edge. The term for this is “shot”. Shot fighters are unpleasant to watch, too commonly there only to cash in on their name, fight tentatively and get knocked out some more.

I hope, for the sake of Manny’s family and himself, that he hangs ’em up.

*Incidentally, notice Marquez’ use of the plural first person “we” when describing the fight. There is no more individual sport than boxing yet he thinks in terms of his team.

What Do Humans, Bats, Cats, Whales and Mice Have In Common>

Posted on by David Wright

The blue whale—190 tonnes in weight and beautifully adapted for swimming—is a placental mammal. The mammal bit means that mothers nourish their babies with milk after they’re born. The placental bit means that mothers nourish their babies via a placenta before they’re born—an organ that allows them to exchange oxygen and nutrients without also swapping blood.

The bumblebee bat—1.5 grams in weight and beautifully adapted for flying—is also a placental mammal. So are you. So is a bear, an anteater, a giraffe and a squirrel. Also: armadillos, rhinos, rabbits, manatees, and pangolins.

All of these creatures, in their wondrous array of shapes and sizes, evolved from a small, unassuming, scurrying insect-eater that lived a few hundred thousand years after the apocalypse that finished off most of the dinosaurs.

That’d Ed Yong. And more from this piece:

After an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs — save for those that evolved into today’s birds — a small, furry animal scurried through the forest in search of insects. Its unassuming looks gave little hint that its descendants would one day rule the planet.

A team of scientists in the United States and Canada has now reconstructed the appearance and anatomy of this creature — the forebear of all ‘placental’ mammals, which give birth to live young at an advanced stage of development — in unprecedented detail, using a record-breaking data set of anatomical traits and genetic sequences.

The critter turned out to be a tree-climbing, furry-tailed insect eater that weighed between 6 and 245 grams. It gave birth to blind, hairless young, one at a time. Its brain was highly folded, and it had three pairs of molars on each jaw.

Superbowl Lighting

Posted on by David Wright

For the kind of coverage geeks can find nowhere else:

The default configurations in a country where legal settlements can be substantial tend towards the conservative side. We don’t know if that was a factor in this event but we do know that no fault was found and the power was stable for the remainder of the game. This was almost certainly a false trigger.

Because the cause has not yet been reported and, quite often, the underlying root cause is never found. But, it’s worth asking, is it possible to avoid long game outages and what would it cost? As when looking at any system faults, the tools we have to mitigate the impact are: 1) avoid the fault entirely, 2) protect against the fault with redundancy, 3) minimize the impact of the fault through small fault zones, and 4) minimize the impact through fast recovery.

And, oh yes, much, much more at this link, including discussion of $1m backup generators and how many TV commercials it would take to guarantee the safety of Superbowl lighting.

Assume Driverless Cars, Watch Everything Change

Posted on by David Wright

If you assume that driverless cars will work, this is a neat perspective:

If you live in a big city, go outside and look up and down the street. You can see hundreds of autos just sitting there doing nothing. Some of these cars move less often than once per week. I don’t live in a big city and my car moves 2 hours a day on a day of heavy use.

Now envision 5-10 years from now…you go out on the street and there are no cars…because there’s an Enterprise rent-a-car parking garage with hundreds of self driving cars two miles from where you live. They have a smartphone app that you press a button for what kind of vehicle you need and it shows up out front in five minutes.

There’s more here on the efficiency gains when humans don’t need to operate cars (we’ll need less of them). And trucks, too.

Here’s a Fad Diet For You

Posted on by David Wright

His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds.

But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so.

Haub’s “bad” cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his “good” cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.

That’s from this article on Mark Haub, a nutrition professor who spent two months eating… junk food:

For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.

…Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.

I got that link from this SBM article that debunks a lot of crap folk wisdom on diet (and endorses some of it), for instance:

Avoid chemicals, preservatives, and artificial sugar. This simply an appeal to the naturalistic fallacy. It’s not possible to avoid “chemicals” in your diet; chemicals ARE your diet. The same can be said for preservatives. Salt is a preservative. Added ingredients need to be evaluated on their own merits, not avoided wholesale. The same can be said for artificial sweeteners. Reno demonizes sugar substitutes claiming they “work against you just as much as white sugar does.” Yet here is no persuasive evidence to demonstrate that artificial sweeteners are harmful, or will compromise dietary goals. The same cannot be said for sugar.

Avoid all over-processed, refined foods, especially white flour and sugar. Here’s where we finally get into some specific dietary advice. This is largely reasonable, as heavily processed foods tend to be higher in salt and calories, and may also be less nutritious. There is is very little scientific debate that whole grain products are superior to those that contain mainly white flour, which is missing the most nutritious parts of the grain. There’s also good evidence to suggest many people obtain an excessive number of calories from sugar, and from refined carbohydrates in general. However, advising that all white flour and sugar be avoided is very difficult, and there’s no reason they cannot be consumed in moderation. What matters is the overall caloric balance.

Depend on fresh fruits and vegetables for fiber, vitamins, and enzymes. Fruits and vegetables are good sources of nutrients, fiber and vitamins. but so are other foods, such as grains. Insisting on “fresh” produce is unnecessarily restrictive, as frozen or canned versions can offer the same nutritional benefits.  Enzymes are large proteins that act as catalysts for biochemical reactions throughout the body – but our body produces what we need, and digests the ones we consume.

There’s more at the link.