Jonah Lehrer - not the worst!

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Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault;
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

- from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Among the three-dozen-or-so people in the US that care about things like pop-science reporting and who’s a New Yorker staff writer, Jonah Lehrer has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons of late.

I don’t normally take time out to put in notes on behalf of people who have admitted to making false quotes, but the uproar over this strikes me as pure Schadenfreude. I mean, really, tablet [who broke the story] thinks they’re getting DDoS’ed?

It is funny when someone you knew becomes famous. I have 3 people in my life who have become famous after I met them (I am in touch with none of them). I’d like to think that a run-in with someone nearly a decade ago gives me a special insight into who they are. I’m obviously an idiot for thinking that, but I can’t help it. The other two famous people have public perceptions that match up with my experience of them perfectly. But Jonah’s public persona (which I think can be summed up by the word ‘douchebag’) is totally different from the guy I met.

I met Jonah in 2003: he had just won a scholarship you have probably heard of and I had won one a smaller one you probably haven’t. We and the two other winners had lunch together at a place just off Columbia’s campus.

I remember Jonah extremely well from this single meeting: he was far more polished than the rest of us and had already done so much (he had graduated early I think, and was researching for a Nobel Prize winner while working as a line chef at a famous restaurant on the side). I was in awe of him.

At the dinner celebrating the fact he won a Rhodes Scholarship, I think he could have been forgiven for being a little bit of a douche. But he wasn’t at all: I remember him being funny, modest and graceful. 

So while others are burying Jonah, I’m remembering that he’s written some good stuff, some bad stuff, but that he was a good guy when I met him and I hope he can come out of these mistakes stronger than before. 

Denying Pension Math and the Coming Zombie Takeover

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cutezombie

(image)

A few weeks ago I posted over at the Lumesis blog about the first public pension bankruptcy in US history. In short, a small US protectorate owes retirees about $1 Billion and has about 30% of that. So they are filing for bankruptcy.

This was a big deal because there is a huge pension problem in the US right now. Municipalities are a trillion dollars in the hole on this, and it is likely that other cities/states will consider bankruptcy. Numerically this is similar to what is happening in Europe now,

Except… the ruling two weeks ago was that the pension fund can’t declare bankruptcy. It’s against the law.

Now I certainly support the pensioners right to petition, and that they should be paid. But it is clear that there isn’t enough money to go around.

Governmental agencies that aren’t able to pay and aren’t able to restructure become zombie cities, similar to zombie banks. Somewhere between dead and alive, they stumble around aimlessly. Harrisburg, which tried to file for bankruptcy, had its receiver quit in frustration and the new one is threatening to sue the city council, and it’s unclear who is legally in charge. The city has been seeing it’s unemployment rate spike compared to the rest of the state. It’s unclear if any governing is actually happening. Harrisburg is a zombie.

There are good reasons for bankruptcy laws: allowing people and organizations to fail and start over fresh is crucial to making them productive. There’s a shrinking pie and pensioners shouldn’t be the only (or even primary) people impacted. But judges cannot deny the insolvency of these institutions forever.

How Closely Related are European Languages and a New Geekery Page

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As some of you saw today, I posted some work I did on European Languages. To memorialize it on the blog, the link is here.

After finishing a second geeky little project this AM, I’m adding a new page to the blog for any side-project I work on. You can see them at the projects page. There’s a link at the top of the page as well. I don’t have any plans to add to this in the short term but should a new idea catch my fancy, you’ll see it there.

Our New Pet: a Very Hungry Nematode

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I have been playing around with d3.js, an amazing library by Mike Bostock. I am strictly at a script-kiddie level of knowledge, but while I was playing with some variables, the lady-friend noticed that the object looked a little like the very hungry caterpillar. I actually think it looks more like a little nematode.

Since I refuse to buy a dog, I am calling this our new pet: Snuffy the Nematode. You can meet Snuffy here.

Unemployment Stats on the Lumesis blog

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I put together a quick blog post last week on the Lumesis blog about unemployment. You can see it here. It’s a joy to play with some of the data on the platform: now that I’m more heavily involved in development I have more respect for the guys who built the platform. Doing the analysis is still tough though: I feel like there’s still more here I’m not getting. I need to find a better way to implement machine learning algos that will alert me to outliers in that set.

You can read about my relationship with Lumesis here.

Redemption Song

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In late 1994, following a tradition based on an oblique interpretation of Genesis 34:25, I performed the mitzvah of becoming a man in the Jewish faith.

Immediately following, my neighbors, in the timeless suburban tradition of acknowledging your neighbors’ childrens’ accomplishments, gave me money.

In addition to (what seemed like at the time) boatloads of cash, I received a few other things. Someone gave me a pair of binoculars. Someone else gave me a globe. And I got a bunch of fountain pens. I’m now in my thirties and I still don’t understand why anyone would ever use a fountain pen, but maybe that’s just me.

I also received a bunch of US Savings Bonds. I found them when I went back to Chicago recently.

The bonds have my old address on them, which I covered up with a ticket for a free hug. Unfortunately the ticket is totally separate: John Adams is not actually offering hugs at this time.

Anyways, I thought these were the lamest things ever, so I was figuring our how to redeem them at the US Treasury’s site. I put in the info on my bond and this came up:

My $75 bond is worth more than $75!

I figured this was wrong, but after playing around online, it’s true: Savings bonds were marketed as being worth double their face amount (note this one was bought for $37.50, half of $75), probably because that’s a lot easier to understand than ‘x% per year’. But really, they can be worth MUCH more than that: some old ones with higher interest can be worth 5x their face. Talk about surprise and delight!

Sadly, you can’t buy savings bonds with this face value any longer: the Treasury discontinued them last year. I’ll be following the public debt report to see if this has an impact on the number of bonds issued. I bet it does.