Lobster Diving

Underwater hunting scares me. I suspect I will be ultra-conservative about it in the future. Here is an example of why.

Census data.

The Census releases all sorts of interesting numbers. While poking around it, I found this graph that I thought particularly interesting:


(clicking on it makes it bigger)

The degree that the increase in family income over the past few decades has been from women working more is really quite impressive. Male income has really been stagnant. Although since you can get a lot now that you previously couldn't get at any price it isn't all that bad in any absolute sense for men.

We made it?

For some time I have been predicting that 2000 prices were where home prices would settle. I just ran into this quote:

"In America the Case-Shiller index of national prices is back to where it was in the fourth quarter of 2000. And, despite the falls, the ratio of average prices to average incomes, a measure of the affordability of housing, is still nearly 20% above where it was in 2000, a few years into the house-price boom."
The Economist

I guess I hadn't been paying close enough attention to Case-Shiller index, so I went and downloaded the numbers. The current Case-Shiller numbers there are listed as 144.23. This is what home prices were in 2003, in December 2000 the index was at 111.58, it wasn't until August 2003 the index hit 144. So I feel the economist is a bit confused.

Maybe the Economist is including inflation and Case-Shiller isn't? So far as I can tell that isn't what is happening, but the economist usually doesn't make big mistakes like that.

Worst decade ever

the S.& P. 500 is on track for its worst decade ever. I still think this is a sign that this is a great time for me to invest in stocks! Typically when demand for stocks is low returns are high, and when demand is high returns are low. People are definitely afraid enough of stocks right now for demand to be low(then again I thought the same thing a year and a half ago, so my crystal ball is pretty muddy).

What this did do, is convince me that stocks should never be invested in for less than twenty years. There is a risk of their value falling over this time scale, so other investments like bonds make the most sense.

Speaking of bonds, I am becoming more and more convinced of two things: Most investors buy too few of them when investing in retirement, and now is a horrible time to buy bonds. The first I am convinced of from watching how much worse investors with primarily stocks did in the last two years. The rule that bond % should match age in retirement savings makes a lot of sense to me. You want to trap gains made in stocks over the long-run into bonds. The second makes sense for the same reason that I think stocks are a good bet. Demand for bonds is really high. This is pushing returns for bonds down, right when there is a nice rally in the stock market.

Science vs Psychologists

I have long noticed a disconnect in psychology. There seems to be a combination of some really clever scientists with very interesting experiments, and some absolute nuts with one of a few dozen whacko ideas that simply aren't supported by evidence.

Anyways, ill pass on an article arguing that point.

I am fairly convinced that science education needs to spend a whole lot less time teaching facts, and a whole lot more time teaching philosophy. For example too few people understand what a double blinded experiment is, or why it is so necessary. People can delude themselves into believing just about anything if they don't understand how easily we are fooled. Even highly trained scientists have fallen into believing into incorrect things such as N Rays when they have not used such rigor.

Tricking little kids

I ran into the following quote in a fairly interesting article in the NY times.

Bodrova and Leong drew on research conducted by some of Vygotsky’s followers that showed that children acting out a dramatic scene can control their impulses much better than they can in nonplay situations. In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than four minutes. In another experiment, prekindergarten-age children were asked to memorize a list of unrelated words. Then they played “grocery store” and were asked to memorize a similar list of words — this time, though, as a shopping list. In the play situation, on average, the children were able to remember twice as many words.

That seems an awful good thing to know. Now to figure out how to make up lots of games that involve being quiet.

Humpback Whales

Humpback Whales might leave the endangered species list. The current population is up to around 20 000 up from about 1400 in 1960.

This shows a pretty common trend in modern times, which explains why many environmental trends won't be as bad as we expect. First we hunt something almost to extinction, not realizing that there is even a real chance of us doing so. Then we realize what we have done, make reasonable laws, than the species comes bounding back. Just off the top of my head I can think of a whole bunch of examples of this: White Tail Deer, Elephant Seals, American Bison, Wild Turkeys, American Alligators, Mountain Lions, Grey Whales, Wolves in Yellowstone. All were brought to low numbers, many almost brought to extinction and now are quite common. Of course we always take the risk of creating another passenger pigeon when we do this. But a lot more species will bounce back than is generally acknowledged.