Neil Pasricha: The 3 A’s of awesome

Ze Frank’s web playroom

Let’s talk parenting taboos: Rufus Griscom + Alisa Volkman

Tony Porter: A call to men

John Hardy: My green school dream

However I’ve had a bad experience.

For a trade to be fair, it has to be fair in both directions. The source producers need to be paid a fair price for the product the produce, but I too need to pay a fair price for the item I’m purchasing. This price is, understandably, normally higher than the price you pay for non-fair-trade items — so that’s not my problem.

My problem comes from the product I take from the supermarket shelf compared to the product I find inside the container. Here’s my problem:

This is the second container of Republica Drinking Chocolate I’ve purchased, and I made sure the batch numbers were different. Both were just over half full. Even accounting for ‘air’ and ’settling’ during transport, there’s no way you can call that a fair trade. It’s deceptive.

Though to be fair .. it is the best hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted.

Republica: Change your packaging to match what you’re selling
Fairtrade: Change your licence to mandate a fair trade on both ends of the transaction

(I have contacted both companies for comment, and if I get a response, I’ll update this post)

h = √( a² + b² ) or you might know it as a² + b² = c²

I was a bright math student. To brag, in year nine I was one of 18 students in the Geelong region selected to participate in Deakin University’s advanced student program. But I was a pain in the arse to my teachers. I’m sure the phrase “could do better if only he applied himself” was coined specially for me.

One particularly annoying thing I did was insist on knowing how something worked. Or why it worked. I disagreed with teachers when they were wrong (Galileo didn’t prove that a feather and a rock dropped from the third-floor science wing would hit the ground at the same time. If he did, skydivers are all screwed)

Pythagoras Theorum was one of those things I needed to understand. Remembering the formula was a cinch, but I wanted more. And I got more. Here’s what a teacher said when I asked:

It’s called Pythagoras Theory because it’s only a theory. Every triangle that it’s ever been tested on works, so there’s no reason to doubt that it will continue to work on every triangle we ever find. But until there’s a way to prove it, it will always be called a theory. If it’s ever proven, it will be called Pythagoras Rule. (OK that was 20+ years ago, so it’s just a paraphrase)

About five years ago I was reading the book Fermat’s Last Theorum when I discovered to my astonishment that the Pythagorean Theorum had been proven in many many ways for hundreds of years. Just because it was called a “Theorum” didn’t mean it couldn’t be proven.

I went to a number of high-schools, so unless you were in that back row of math-nerds with me, you won’t know where it was. But that doesn’t matter. You can’t change the past, only the future.

Today I discovered the Khan Academy (via Reddit) and now I want you to discover it too. Especially if you’re a teacher who has students that want to know more than you have time to give them. Or who want anwers to questions you’re not really qualified to give.

Here’s just one way to Capital-P-Prove Pythagoras Thorum:

If you’re  a teacher, get the Kahn Academy site on your school’s whitelist. Then follow my simple plan for teaching regular, slow, and advanced students:

Regular: Here’s the theorum, learn it so you can write the formula from knowing the theorum.
Slow: Here’s the formula, remember it and learn where the [√] and [²] buttons are on your calculator. Write it on you scrap paper before you even look at the test so you don’t need to try to remember it after you’ve started.
Advanced: Here’s the theorum, and here’s a video that proves it works for all right angled triangles.

If you’re a parent and your kids are asking for help (or need help they’re not asking for) then send them to the 1600+ videos that Salman Khan has put together on an amazing range of subjects.

Our banks are businesses. They exist to create a profit for their shareholders. They were deregulated to drive competition and the federal and state governments sold the banks they owned. So we can’t really question their desire to increase profits — even if we’re horrified by how high those profits are.

[Possibly in another post I'll talk about how just four banks won't lead to competition and so allowing them to acquire smaller banks is counter-productive, but not here]

What we must question is that banks are effectively raising the price of a service after it’s been purchased. In no other industry is this legal and it must not be allowed to continue to be legal in the credit industry.

When we take our a mortgage, we understand that interest rates fluctuate. After all, even banks can’t plan for the next 30 years. The maximum fixed term is 10 years.

But the interest rate I pay should remain steady against the RBA rate for the life of the mortgage. Otherwise it’s not just profiteering, it’s a very strange arrangement whereby I’ve agreed to buy something at a given price and then I have to pay more than I agreed, just so the seller earns a higher profit. As I said earlier, in anything other than the credit industry this would be highly illegal.

Banks should be required by law to charge interest that is in line with the RBA rate on the day I sign my mortgage. If the RBA lifts by 0.25%, then mine goes up by 0.25%.

If they want a higher profit, then they increase the difference between the RBA rate and their rate for new purchasers of credit.

What do you think? Should we include credit in the laws that require a business to charge you the price they contracted to sell it for?

There’s a push on to ‘return’ to the idylic times where a man would work the farm chatting to his cows while his lovely wife baked a loaf of bread (probably with a dab of flour on her nose) while a pail of milk (direct from the aforementioned cows) stands on the bench beside her.

There’s a push on to do-it-yourself. To be handy around the garden and home. To plant one’s own vegetables and to bake one’s own bread.

But is that really good for the environment? I doubt it (though I haven’t done the research to prove it)

See, if I run my oven for long enough to bake a loaf of bread it would use N units-of-energy. But the oven has just a single loaf in it! It’s big enough for four such loaves, and while it will take more than N units-of-energy to bake four loaves, it wont take as much as 4N units-of-energy.

But at the evil factory down town, you can be absolutely certain that they maximise the number of loaves in each oven to reduce (dollar) cost to the lowest possible value. Reducing dollar cost means saving energy where you can, and that’s good for the environment.

Factories are really good at saving costs. The milk factory that takes the raw milk from all today’s cows pastuerises the milk in enourmous vats, again carefully calibrated to steralise the milk at the lowest possible cost. If every farmer was to do their own pastuerisation, the cost would go up. Not to mention the cost if everyone had their own cow and had to do their own pasteurisation, homogenisation, skimming, churning, curdling and every other process milk goes through before we consume it.

Let’s think back to our idylic couple. Was it really that good? Of course not. The guy out in the fields is using a hand-plough behind a couple of flea-bitten old horses that don’t want to work at all, let alone go in straight lines. He’s blistered and tired. He doesn’t come in at the end of the day all pleased with himeself for his “hard day’s work”. He comes in expecting a meal then goes to bed, just to wake up before dawn the next morning just to do it all over again. Day after day.

She’s in the kitchen making bread with one hand while keeping an eye on the boiling kettle full of clothes and nursing the new baby on the other hand.

So where should our environmental desires be focussed if not at the factories?

I’d suggest the farm. While there’s been incredible change on the farm in the past century and even the past hand-full of decades, there’s still a long way to go. Imagine if we brought the full impact of modern technology to the farm rather than praising it for it’s rustic past.

Let me design just a couple of machines that could be used on every farm. Maybe they exist, but somehow I don’t think they do. Or at least they haven’t been taken up yet by farmers. Their sons or their grandsons will be the ones ready for the next major shift in farming.

First invention is the automatic weeder. Think of it as a Rhoomba for the farm. The “Weeda” hangs above a crop, is powered by solar panels and travels up and down the crop day-and-night doing the weeding: removing weeds increases yeilds. However the device doesn’t spray chemicals onto weeds (though it would have the precision to do so) instead it carefully plucks the sprouting weed before it gets a hold. We have this technology. A camera and pincer would travel up and down, back and forth, scouring the ground for weeds. The camera would know what was a sprouting weed and what was a crop. We have this technology already — we use it to stop terrists at airports and known-to-be-felonius-teenagers at shopping centers. So we’ve removed all the weeds, and done so using the power of the sun.

Next invention could even be mounted on the same boom arm, but it does the totally opposite job. This device finds the crop and waters it. At the moment, we water crops using massive irrigation sprinklers that spray water in unmeasured, uncontrolled relatively random patterns. But why not use our recognition systems to identify plants we do care about and use sensors to determine the exact amount of water each-and-every stalk of wheat needs? We can measure the stalk density to determine if the plant is too dry, and check the ground to see what water the plant has available. Now we stop wasting any water whatsoever. Every drop is used to make sure each individual plant is the healthiest it can be. And we stop watering weeds.

One last thought comes to mind:what if we pluck the weeds and put them in a special hopper. As the sun hits the hopper, it bakes the weeds. We then capture the escaping moisture and feed it back to the plants. (OK, I’ll admit that the cost of this reclamation scheme would probably well outweigh the reclaimed moisture, but we do need to kill those weeds somehow, right?)

That’s my two-and-a-half inventions. Have I sparked any in your head? Do you agree that farm life wasn’t to idylic and that baking bread at home isn’t as environmentally responsible as it feels?

It’s been said* that “Lotteries are a tax on the stupid”. The premise being that anyone who spends money on a lottery ticket is just wasting their money are, therefore, stupid.

I’d like to refute that.

Here in Australia, our Tattslotto lottery requires the player to select 6 numbers from 45 to win division one. That gives you one chance in 8.1 million¹. This is approximately the same odds as tossing a coin and getting ‘heads’ 23 times in a row².

So what other forms of gambling can we think of to compare it to? Roulette has one chance in 38 (or 37) of winning ‘the big one’³. Blackjack has approximately one chance in 41 of getting a ‘natural’ blackjack⁴. The chance of getting a royal flush in poker is approximately one in 650,000⁵.

But not all forms of gambling are equal. In some, the house pays you: In roulette, everyone who bet on that single number wins 35 times their wager no matter how many people are playing. On the other hand in poker, everyone who gets a royal-flush has to split the pot between them. Tattslotto is like poker in this sense. If 20 people all pick the correct 6 numbers, then you each get one-twentieth of the first division prize.

And of course, not all forms of gambling have the same payout. Roulette pays 35:1, but the other examples all vary. Poker varies depending on the number of players and how much they’re all betting. Tattslotto varies depending on how much the promoter wishes to pay out.

So if lotteries are truly a tax on the stupid, then surely the return on investment must be so truly microscopic that any sane person would laugh and walk away.

Next Saturday, Tattslotto has a $30 million ‘megadraw’. This means that first division is $8.4 million⁶. Each ‘game’ costs $0.60 and as we said earlier, each game has a 1 in 8.1 million chance of winning. To be ‘certain’ of winning would thus require 8.1 million games at a cost of $0.60 each. An investment of $4.86 million.

Now, if I took that same $4.86 million down to the casino and spread it among the 38 ‘number’ squares I’d also be ‘certain’ of winning. But I’d just win $4.47 million.

Now, let’s flip it around. What if we put our money on a single square in roulette? Our chance of winning is one in 38. It pays 35:1, so to win $8.4 million we’d need to bet $249K on the single square. In Tattslotto, to get a one-in-38 chance of winning, we’d need to play about 213,000 games, which would cost us $128K — about half the investment for the same risk and for the same reward in roulette!

Of course, I’m ignoring that ‘difference’: In roulette, it wouldn’t matter how many other people bet on the same winning number, I’d still get my $8.4 million. In Tattslotto, we all have to share the $8.4 million. It’s impossible to calculate the number of people that will pick the winning combination, so I’m going to ignore it for now except to say that if you shared it with one other person, your $4.86 million investment would get you a $4.2 million return — which is only slightly less than you get for the same investment in roulette. Can you truly call that a ‘tax on the stupid’? Depends on the individual’s definition of ’stupid’.

However, given all this, there’s one more argument against the ‘tax on the stupid’ theory. And it’s one that can’t be refuted by anyone: What are the odds of winning if you don’t play at all? By playing a single game, your odds of winning decrease from infinite to finite.

* NOTE: The best attribution I can find for this quote is a chapter title in James Walsh’s True Odds : How Risk Affects Your Everyday Life published in 1996. It the quote really that recent? If you have an older reference, please let me know.

Footnotes

1. Odds of winning at Tattslotto are calculated by the number of balls that you’re happy to get divided by the number of balls available. For the first ball, you’re happy with any of 6 balls from a pool of 45. For the second ball, you’re happy with any of 5 balls (you already have one of your picks) from a pool of 44 (the ball that was drawn first isn’t re-entered, so you only have 44 left in the pool).This means that the chance of winning is one in (6 ÷ 45) × (5 ÷ 44) × (4 ÷ 43) × (3 ÷ 42) × (2 ÷ 41) × (1 ÷ 40) = 0.0000001228 = 1 ÷ 8145060.
2. The odds of throwing a ‘head’ when tossing a coin is 1 in 2. So as above, we divide the results we’re ‘happy’ with (heads) by the results possible (heads or tails). That is 1 ÷ 2 = 0.5. If we flip twice then we have (1 ÷ 2) × (1 ÷ 2) = 0.25. If we flip 23 times we get 0.0000001192.
3. There are two roulette wheels in common use: The European wheel has the numbers 1 to 36 and a ‘zero’ and the American wheel has 1 to 36, a zero and a ‘double zero’ (and recently, in some casinos in Australia). Despite the lengthened odds of the American wheel, the payout remains the same. So if you really have enough money to be putting $249K on a single square, fly to Europe first.
4. To get a ‘natural 21′ in blackjack you need to draw an Ace and a 10 or picture card. As the order of drawing them doesn’t matter, there’s a 4 ÷ 52 chance of drawing an ace on the first card and a 16 ÷ 51 chance of drawing a ‘ten’ card on the second. The other way around and there’s a 16 ÷ 52 chance of drawing a ‘ten’ card on the first and a 4 ÷ 51 of drawing an ace on the second. No matter which way around that is, it’s the same (remember BODMAS, PEDMAS, BOMDAS or whatever your school called it?). Of course, if you’re actually playing Blackjack then there’s at least a dealer and that changes the odds.(4 ÷ 52) x (16 ÷ 51) = 0.0241327300 = 1 ÷ 41.44
5. A royal flush is 10, J, Q, K, A of a single suit (hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs). The suit has no relevance other than it has to be the same. So for the first card, there are 5 happy cards in each suit. Each suit has 13 cards, so a successful first card is 5 ÷ 13. However after that first card, we do care about the suit: it has to be the same as the first card. So the second card can be one of the other four cards we need out of the 51 cards left in the deck: 4 ÷ 51.This means the chance of a royal flush is (5 ÷ 13) × (4 ÷ 51) × (3 ÷ 50) × (2 ÷ 49) × (1 ÷ 48) = 0.0000015391 or 1 ÷ 649740.

   Now, at this stage some of your are going to get itchy commenting fingers and want to point out that in poker, there’s at least one other person playing. This means there’s (4 ÷ 51) chance that he or she would get the second card you want and so the chance of getting your second card is (1 – (4 ÷ 51)) × (4 ÷ 50). What does this mean for the chance of you getting a royal flush? Bupkis. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. You might find out that you failed earlier, but they don’t change the odds of you getting a royal flush. Don’t believe me? Here’s a google-doc to show that while the distribution of the odds changes, the final result doesn’t. He takes a card, which might be yours, thus decreasing the chance of your flush. But he also takes a card that might not be yours, which increases the chance of your flush. (I’ll admit that I was surprised by the result, so I checked with the boffins in #math on the freenode IRC network and they agreed with me).

6. This may surprise some of the folks who have seen the advertisements for the “$30 million megadraw” but they’re not talking about first division. They’re talking about the total prize pool. First division is 28% of the total prize pool.

But now it’s news again. Art Monthly Australia have decided to run a picture of a nude child on their latest magazine cover to protest the censorship of nude children in art. And KRudd has decided to jump back into the issue.

“… frankly I can’t stand this stuff,” he says to the ABC Insiders program. “How can anyone assume that a little child of six years old, eight, 10, 12, somehow is able to make that decision for themselves?” Well that’s a good question, and one I answered last time this was an issue: it’s called responsible parenting.

Read on to see the cover and introduction to Donald Brook’s article “Art and (not or) Pornography”, or read the Editorial and notes on the cover at Art Monthly Australia

03 Art and (not or) Pornography DONALD BROOK
Issue 211, July, 2008
From time to time there is a great fuss made about whether some object is a work of art or pornographic. Experts are invited to testify, and mostly ridiculed for their trouble. Witnesses with no expertise at all are treated more courteously; often being commended for their assistance in establishing a community standard. This manoeuvre is prejudiced in two ways. First, those without expertise are not invited to testify in statistically significant numbers, and their opinions are mainly selected and filtered through the calculating minds of lawyers. Second, and perhaps more importantly, no conservative judge and jury seriously believes that a change of mind will ever be the appropriate response to evidence that a more radical opinion than their own is the community standard. (Or vice-versa, for more a radically minded judiciary and a more conservative community standard). All these good people are determined to do the right thing, and no evidence that in the domain of nutrition (for example) eating beef is the community standard will persuade a vegetarian to approve of it.

Taken from the Art Monthly Australia website.

If you’re still with me, you’re probably going to leave after the next confession: We’re watching Australia’s Next Top Model on Fox8: “Ahh! We got Jody mail!”.

Still with me? OK, that’s the end of the confessions for now, but feel free to leave your own confessions in the comments section.

What’s disturbed me about these two ‘unscripted television’ (there’s nothing ‘reality’ about it really now, is there?) is that they both show bullying between participants. Of course the hosts, producers, judges and commentators all feign horror (as well they should) but the problem is that it makes it to the TV. If they’re really so horrified, why do they show it? Apparently because it’s ‘real’. It’s ‘what’s going on’. They don’t want to hide any of the ‘journey’ (puke!) from the audience.

I had to laugh at the absolute cynicism of Jhodi Mheares when she started a program with a studio direct-to-camera piece a week after a group of girls taunted another participant until they got a reaction. She wanted to assure us that she was horrified also and that we should call some organisation or another if we were the victim of bullying. All of a sudden we’re supposed to laud them for ‘talking about it’ rather than pretending it didn’t exist.

On Big Brother, we’ve seen the constant bullying of Travis-of-the-squeeky-voice. The so-called Spa Mafia enjoy picking on him and leading him to the point where he makes a fool of himself. They then claim they’re trying to ‘educate’ him and that they’re really his friends.

We’ve seen this same group of bullies decide that blonde bimbette Bridgette should not receive any of her clothes back from Big Brother as some sort of punishment for being upset that he took them in the first place. Hello? What sort of moron-logic is this? She was upset she lost them so she doesn’t deserve to get them back? Dixie put it well: Whatever Bridgette’s reaction, Dixie would rather see someone happy than sad.

Now on Friday, the Spa Mafia broke into the toilet where Travis-of-the-squeeky-voice was having a poo and doused him with shower gel. Apparently this sort of bullying is called a ‘Poo Party’, like a few years back the bullying was called a ‘Turkey Slapping’. Travis ended up in the hospital overnight with an eye infection, and the Spa Mafia just shrugged it off.

Enough is enough! If society shuns bullying as much as they’d like to claim, then it needs to be stopped. In all these cases producers were watching it happen, cameramen were filming it, editors packaged it, directors approved it and television channels screened it. I first lay the blame at the feet of the producers who told the cameramen to just keep filming. Bullying must be stopped at the very first instance. It is not acceptable in any situation. I then lay the blame at the television stations who chose to air it: how dare you use bullying to make your television shows interesting?

So do we tacitly approve of bullying after all, so long as it makes for ‘good television’? If it happens on the television, are we so used to thinking of the world-in-the-box as being constructed that we lose sight of the fact that on these shows, they are real people being bullied by real people?

It’s time to enforce some rules: Bullying is out, or you’re out. There’s no second chances or forum for excuses. If you’re bullying someone in one of these unscripted television programs, you’re evicted, eliminated, kicked off the island, handed a rose or whatever. Zero Tollerance. ZERO.

Anyway, I’m off to watch Gordon Ramsay lambast some poor shmuck on Hell’s Kitchen.

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post entitled “What is art: I’m right, you’re wrong.” But it’s a difficult one to write. Basically I think there’s a lot of ‘art’ produced today that is better filed under ‘decoration’ and even ‘rubbish’ and a lot of the time ‘wank’. So I have a carefully built up ‘art meter’ in my head that has been working for years on a definition of art. However writing it down in plain English has so far been an elusive task, despite several aborted attempts.

But now Bill Henson’s photography has given me cause to skip that post (for now) and talk about an actual, controversial case.

Bill Henson’s use of nudes is not new.

Several years ago Fatima and I went to the Ian Potter Center at Federation Square to see one of his exhibits. There were nudes in that collection. I tell you this so that I have at least some credibility. I’ve actually seen some of the work. I’m not just hearing about it on the radio or hearing it from a friend of a friend over a latté.

What has happened here is that the Ridiculous Right has gotten wind of his work (How did it take so long? Where have they been all this time?) and decided that any depiction of a nude teenager is child pornography. There can be no discussion: the girl is naked, thus is child porn. They then reported child pornography to the NSW police department, who had no option but to investigate. The police then went to the gallery that was about to open a Bill Henson exhibit and removed his photographs, pending investigation. The Ridiculous Right’s media soapbox — early evening ‘current affairs’ type TV programs — reported on this with all the moral outrage they could muster. Calls for jailing this ‘dangerous pornographer’ rang in the streets. One thing I’ll give the Ridiculous Right: They’re great at sound-bytes.

“It wasn’t OK for a 14-year-old model fully dressed to be on the catwalk for Australian Fashion week, [so] it’s definitely not OK for naked children to have their privacy and childhood stolen in the name of art.” – New South Wales Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell

Even the Prime Minister was able to get in a good “revolting” in a TV interview, “Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected,” he said.

Child protection advocate Hetty Johnston says, “It’s child pornography by any name you want to call it.”

But then the tide began to turn. The arts world did a double take and said “whuh?” Unfortunately of course, a more moderate view doesn’t come in nice sound-bytes. But still, the Media began to turn. Even the bastion of the Ridiculous Right here in Melbourne, the Herald Sun, was able to see the argument enough to run a full page cover story dedicated to Prime Minister Rudd’s apparent close association with the “arts world” at the recent 2020 summit.

So let me amongst the voices with no sound bytes: this is not pornography.

Henson’s work is amazing and not in the slightest bit erotic or titillating. His images are provocative in that they show people truly ‘raw’.

If we’re to ban his work because it depicts naked children, we’ll need to go back to a lot of earlier work by the renaissance artists and paint some pants on them. The images are as titillating as a Michaelangelo statue.

Anyone who ‘gets off’ on these images, despite Henson’s intent, is already finding a lot worse on the interweb. They don’t need tasteful nudes, by a respected artist, hanging in a gallery, to get them all excited.

When considering publishing this piece, I had to answer one question that stumped me for a minute: Would I let Jack, as a teenager, pose nude for Bill Henson to exhibit?

But it only stumped me for me for a minute. If I believe in the photographer; If I believe Jack wants to do the modeling; If I believe Jack to be mature enough to make such a decision; If I believe Jack could understand that these photographs would be available to his school friends and work colleagues for years to come and he was OK with that; then there is absolutely no way I would stand in his way.

The pointlessness comes in the confusion over why this is a good idea.

Turning your lights off for 1 hour will save approximately zero energy. Though, for a lot of people, this seems to be their reason for participation. In fact, even Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, seems to think this is the point of the excercise. Their article proclaims “Energy use dimmed during Earth Hour“. That’s right, during “Earth Hour” we saved about 10% of the electricity we’d normally use — 24 tonnes of CO₂ wasn’t expelled.

It’s the equivalent of taking 48,000 cars off the road for an hour. Sounds a lot right? Hang on, let’s do some math: 48,000 cars divided by 8,784 hours in this year = 5.4. Yes! That’s right .. earth hour last night was the equivalent of taking less than 6 cars off the road for a year.

Of course, the organizers do know what they’re talking about. They do know that taking 5.4 cars off the road for a year is pointless. According to EarthHour.org, the point is “to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming“. That’s right. It’s an awareness campaign.

Now if everyone is turning off their lights in order to keep those 5.4 cars on the road, Earth Hour has been a monumental flop. Totally pointless. Most people who participated thought they were helping to save the planet simply by turning off their lights.

At least The Age (an official press-partner of Earth Hour) acknowledges that the immediate environmental impact of the ’switch off’ will be little to none:

Given the complex auctioning process that determines the different energy sources that are fed into the national electricity grid each day, there may not be a cut at all.

So if there’s going to be Earth Hour 2009 (and I’m guessing there will be) then lets try and make sure people aren’t of the notion that Earth Hour has any sort of immediate affect on the environment. If you’re going by candlelight for the hour, use that candlelight to send a handwritten letter to a politician or business demanding some sort of specific change.

If you turned out your lights last night, don’t stop there. Make sure you take notice of the real reason for the event. Now you’ve made the statement, make sure you now do something about the environment.