Month: September 2011

Gravity without air resistance

I am glad someone actually went out and did this:

Among other things, it shows how our intuitions are often based on the limited range of conditions experienced by our ancestors on Earth, and thus reflective of only a subset of what is true about the universe generally. We expect air resistance to exist everywhere, despite the airless character of many stellar bodies.

Of course, science fiction authors seem to expect all moons and planets to not only have atmospheres, but have atmospheres that Kirk and company can breathe unaided, but that is a different misplaced assumption.

Constancy

There is a real sense in which this site has been the most constant part of my life since 2005. During that time, I moved from Vancouver to Oxford to Ottawa to Toronto. The group of people who I spent time with shifted several times. I moved from school to employment – from shooting using a Canon A510 point and shoot digital camera to using a 5D Mk II – from exploring the British isles by minibus to exploring North America by Greyhound.

The content has shifted somewhat, the banners have changed, but this is still basically the same thing it was six years ago – a way to stay in touch with friends around the world, discuss ideas, and generally think things through by writing them down.

Consider a career in butlering

For those struggling in today’s super competitive job market, The Economist suggests becoming a butler:

 The time-poor new rich are generating demand for household staff, and this sort of work can be very well paid. A private secretary and general factotum can earn up to $150,000 a year nowadays. Salaries for standard butlers range from $60,000 to $125,000 and a head butler can make as much as $250,000, according to the website of the Butler Bureau.

You already help out the rich by absorbing their pollution, giving sweetheart loans to their companies, and bailing out their high-risk schemes when they fail. Why not make them breakfast Bloody Marys to combat post-party hangovers as well?

Playing the lottery is not necessarily irrational

People sometimes describe lotteries as a tax on those who are bad at math. The tickets are worth less than their face value, given the size of the payout and your odds of winning.

That is all true enough. At the same time, it bears remembering that we each get to live a single very finite life. Used well, the winnings from a lottery could improve that one and only life a lot – particularly if the money is used to advance a particular cause that is important to you, rather than used hedonistically.

Losing the cost of a bunch of lottery tickets is irrational if your aim is to maximize how much money you are likely to have in your life. At the same time, betting on a long shot can be rational in the sense that there is a large amount of upside that you have no hope whatsoever of capturing if you do not play.

Expressed another way, the problem with lotteries is that you basically pay $5 for a one-in-a-million shot of winning $1,000,000. The ticket is overpriced and the money is probably wasted. At the same time, there is probably no other way in which you are going to get $1,000,000. At least playing the lottery gives you some chance, however infinitesimal.

The logic is similar to that of buying insurance against your house burning down. If you had a huge number of houses, you would be better off not paying premiums and just dealing with the cost of fires yourself. Because you only have one house, however, you overpay on premiums in order to avoid a catastrophic outcome.

All that said, and as I have argued before, I don’t think lotteries and casinos should be allowed to advertise. It is better for the state to keep gambling legal and regulated, rather than allowing it to become one more racket for organized crime along with drugs and prostitution. At the same time, neither the state nor private companies should be permitted to take advantage of the weak understanding of probability in the general public through advertising a profoundly false promise that winning is likely. Casinos also should not be allowed to serve alcohol.

To sum up, winning the lottery is an extreme long shot, but when you only have a single chance to try something it can be a rational strategy to accept a set risk (the near certainty that the money spent on a ticket is wasted) in exchange for a chance at a large benefit.