Age of top chess players

I heard in a book I recently read that Chess is dominated by young people. I couldn't find a good source to check this though. So I went ahead and looked at the top ranked players in America:


Born 1987Born 1974Born 1975Born 1983Born 1975Born 1960Born 1991Born 1962Born 1970Born 1956

1	Nakamura, Hikaru (12641216)
2	Kamsky, Gata (12528459)
3	Onischuk, Alexander (12625186)
4	Akobian, Varuzhan (12740522)
5	Shulman, Yury (12741541)
6	Seirawan, Yasser (10509459)
7	Hess, Robert L (12749774)
8	Ehlvest, Jaan (12514557)
	Stripunsky, Alexander (12715435)
10	Christiansen, Larry M (10460921)

The youngest player in the top 10 is therefore 19 years old, the oldest is 54. This is a much wider range than I actually expected. A 35 year range between the youngest and oldest player is pretty impressive.

Old Japanese

While I am not entirely sure I believe that Japan is doing as bad as is generally portrayed, it is pretty clear that they did hit a brick wall. What was going to be the big scary country surpassing America in every way reached a certain level than peaked.

While I am pretty disconnected from Japan, the impression I get is they had a great generation. The generation after World War 2 built the country up from the rubble and created a world class economy. The generation after never stepped up to continue the growth.

The New York Times has the best description of why this happened that I have ever seen. Asian countries just have too much respect for old people for their own good. Most big ideas come from people in their twenties, thirties, and forties. To really make progress a country needs as many of these people as possible working as much as possible. When an older generation gains too much power to block younger people from competing with them disaster is likely.

This is a common problem in democracy. Old people get to vote, while those under 18 do not. Because of this the government spends a lot more money supporting the elderly, than it does helping young people. This really can make progress difficult if the older generation gets too large. I expect to see it during the next twenty years in America unless the baby boomers eat themselves into shorter retirements.

An easy solution would be give the parents of children too young to vote an extra half vote per kid. I am willing to bet that schools would shape up real quick if we did.

18.8% of Asian girls

America has been such a mix of different races for so long that it really is slowly becoming impossible to define the race of many Americans beyond mixed. I know several Americans who have ancestry from four continents. In a hundred years it will be the norm. Most Americans of European ancestry already identify as white instead of English, Irish, German, Greek, Italian, or any other nationality. This is amazing considering how much trouble early Irish and Eastern Europeans had when they first moved here. Now that interracial marriage is so common though soon it will just be possible for most to identify as American. Being American will imply being multiracial.

The New York Times has a decent article on this subject. Of particular interest is the graphic in the article. Almost twenty percent of Asian girls are marrying white guys! American Indians are quickly losing their racial identity. Almost half marry white, any many marry other races. I suspect the same is true of American Jews, although the graphic does not show this.

Still, only 5% of white or black women marry outside their race. So while this is happening quickly by historical standards, there is still room for a lot of interracial conflict.

Cherokee?

Apparently I am an Indian, or Native American, or whatever the heck they are called these days.

I always thought that to qualify as one you needed to be a certain percentage Indian. Usually this is true. However it just happens that in the Cherokee tribe this is not true. You only must be able to trace ancestry to someone who was registered as a member of the tribe a hundred years ago. I can. Well, at least I am assured that I could if I went and researched the subject better.

So then the question is, would this be worth my time to do? The actual benefits of tribe membership are pretty minimal. Perhaps when starting a business I could declare myself to be an under-represented minority. I really don't think I could do it with a straight face though. I am about as far from being a stereotypical Indian as you can get.

Still, it would make for an interesting conversation piece so I might go through the trouble of doing it.

Not so bad.

Americans are quite over dramatic. We have one of the highest standards of living in the history of the world then act like it is the end of the world when a little recession comes around. Sure, things might have been better than today for ten or fifteen years in our history but that still leaves us on top of the world.

Anyways, it always makes it happy to see articles like this:

Life expectancy for a baby born today is 78.3 years, a number that has consistently gone up, regardless of economic downturns... Median household net worth today is about $104,000, 3.3 times what it was in 1970, after adjusting for inflation. And it's about $17,000 higher than in the early 2000s... In 1970, each resident of a home occupied 478 square feet, on average. Today, each person occupies 996 square feet...The rate of motor-vehicle fatalities is one-fourth what it was in 1970, a huge, if unheralded, success story... The percentage of adults over age 25 with a college degree has gone from 10.7 percent in 1970 to 29.5 percent today. And the percentage with a high school diploma or equivalent has risen from 52.3 percent to 86.7 percent over the same time period.

Wikipedia lists

Wikipedia never ceases to amaze me with some of the lists it has. I helped quite a lot on the list of marine aquarium fish, apparently I am not the only obsessive researcher though.

Here is a list of just about every edible fruit by geographic origin, type of plant or climate it grows in.

Less well put together, but still impressive: list of culinary herbs and spices, list of culinary vegetables, list of culinary nuts, and list of edible seeds.

Other randomly chosen lists from wikipedia:
List of countries by GDP
list of countries by GDP per capita
List of languages by total number of speakers
List of the official language of every country
List of birds in the state of California
List of the 25 most endangered primates
List of U.S. states and territories by population
List of the tallest buildings in Los Angeles
List of Dinosaurs
List of surviving veterans of World War 1

No oil data?

Apparently the EIA has decided to stop issuing International Petroleum Monthly, the nice excel files it has sent out for many years. Before it was simple to make graphs of the oil production of any country in the world, or the world as a whole. You would go to their site, download more than a decade of data and graph it.

It sounds like the data itself will still exist, it will just not be in an easily usable format. In honor of the death of this source of data, here is the final graph of oil production, taken from another blogger. It shows quite clearly that the dramatic increases in the price of oil have not resulted in more production since 2004 when prices averaged under $40 a barrel.




















Supply not increasing after such clear price signals either implies real limits on supply, or OPEC finally learning to control supply after decades of failure.