Regruntled.com

A few weeks ago, Intrade had Obama at 60%.  Believers in the efficiency of prediction markets see the Intrade price as  the best estimate of the probability that Obama will be elected.  At 60%, I think that’s reasonable.  Now Obama is at 85%, McCain at 15%.  Is this still a reasonable prediction?  Is there really a 15% chance that McCain will do something mavericky in the next two weeks and turn the campaign around?

We know that Intrade is inefficient at the extremes.  The reasons are partly structural and partly psychological.  For example, the “Hillary for President” contract held at 5% for a few months after Obama locked up enough delegates to win the nomination.  Even after the convention, I was able to sell Hillary short at 3%.

I’m not interested in flipping a fair coin.  I’m interested in the free lunches, the inefficiencies.  If Obama-McCain is anywhere near even odds, I don’t want either side of the bet.  However, this looks like a one-sided election, and at some point, McCain will be trading at X percent, where X mostly represents delusion.  The closer the election gets, the less time for mavericky surprises, and the more delusional the long odds.  The problem is recognizing X when I see it.  Is X 15%?  How delusional are Republicans?  Ron Paul got close to 10% delusion.  It’s hard to say, but somewhere between 5% and 10% I think I will short McCain.  This stuff is always more obvious in retrospect.

There is a whole web site devoted to these.

This site has some disturbing pictures of Homer Simpson.  I didn’t play with dolls, not even G.I. Joe.  I guess I just didn’t see the point.  When I look at this picture, I don’t see a Homer doll, I see Homer Simpson.  I feel like I know Homer Simpson.  I know what he sounds like, I know his personality.  And here he is, on a giant slice of bread,  on a giant plate, covered with giant beans.  It could happen.  I don’t see a tiny Homer covered with life-size beans, I see a life-size Homer covered with giant beans.  Somehow that seems more likely.

Detailed closeup of magnetic structures on the Sun’s surface, seen in the H-alpha wavelength on August 22, 2003.

Does an astronomical photo like this qualify as art?  We have an image rather than the object itself, but one can argue that the image is “found art“, in that that it was selected from thousands of existing photos rather than composed deliberately.

Found art derives significance from the designation placed upon it by the artist.

Found art, however, has to have the artist’s input, at the very least an idea about it, i.e. the artist’s designation of the object as art, which is nearly always reinforced with a title. There is mostly also some degree of modification of the object, although not to the extent that it cannot be recognised. The modification may lead to it being designated a “modified”, “interpreted” or “adapted” found object.

The image has gone through several selections and modifications.  First, the scientists who designed the instrument decided what wavelengths to capture, and at what resolution.  Then they processed the data into an image suitable for humans.  They selected some images and discarded others, and blew up selected portions of those images.

The Boston Globe selected 21 photos for publication, and no doubt did some additional image processing.  Finally, I picked one image and reduced it to fit in the blog.  All that’s missing is a pretentious title like “Heartburn”.

If this is art, at what point did it become art, and who is the artist?  If it’s not art, what is it?

According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama is proposing a welfare program disguised as a tax cut.  The trick is that the tax credits can be claimed by people who don’t pay taxes.  Fill out a form, receive a check.  It’s a transfer payment.

The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.

The genius of this is that the transfer payments stay “off the books”.  The books show net revenues on the income side instead of total revenues on the income side offset by the welfare program on the expense side.

Instead of a bureaucracy with case workers, the New Welfare will be administered by the IRS.

A graphic commentary on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

Somehow I had “sudoku” and “poetry” in my brain at the same time.  I was going to take nine words and rearrange them into a nine-line poem according to a sudoku.  But which nine words?  When the going gets tough, the tough start googling.  You just never know what you’ll find.

KoolAid Report has a haiku:

Cursed sudoku!
Vile number matrix from hell!
Addict me no more!

Julian from Sydney tells a great story about delivering this poem at an open-mike night:

“Sometimes it feels like you are trapped in a cell, bound by constraints…
surrounded by squares.

You can almost feel the eyes watching you, scrutinising you with care…
working out your position…
your value…

It may help you to know that there are others out there like you -
equal to you.
Oh, sure, they are kept away from your vicinity,
away from your line of sight…
but they are there, and they indirectly influence you,
just as you… indirectly influence them.

Every day there is a new problem!
Every day… a new solution to be found.”

Rob Mackenzie from Edinburgh published this one:

Girl Playing Sudoku on the Seven-Fifteen

I sit down opposite. She doesn’t blink

or cough, her pencil-scratch the only noise

beyond the train’s dull chit-chat. Teenage boys

slouch up the centre-aisle, unleash the stink

of Lynx. She keeps on scrawling to the brink

of suffocation. I admire her poise,

open windows, plumb my brain for ploys

to start a conversation. I can’t think.

Our eyes squint out of sync. Although I stare,

I don’t dare interrupt her concentration

and when she finally completes the square

I focus on the floor. One hesitation

begins a chain. I set up solitaire.

The train heaves on, already past my station.

FM Vorassi at Deviant Art took a sudoku and replaced the ones with one-letter words, the twos with two-letter words and so on.

Butcher’s bloody cleaver hangs high on a varnished peg;
Here am I: primitive; pierce and sever, decimate, debauch
Carve and subjugate, leaving a bloodied bovine or lamb.
Yet I rekindle broken lives; resurrect mangled dead, or
Recompose, mincing.  Do they see, I cleverly create steak,
Shanks, chops – meat! - an abattoir maestro and I transcend
‘Artisan’.  Thickhead cattle I up – prime beef now triumphs -
A conquest!  Ruler and unequaled King of farmer’s market;
To them, who provides quality, brings exquisite taste?  I.

Oulipien Dax Bayard-Murray uses sudoku as an aid to generating poetry.

Colored Heart from Quezon City has a poem  about Sudoku Fever.