Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in shagbark's LiveJournal:

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Friday, October 30th, 2009
9:10 pm	Today the White House announced the results of a study showing that $159 billion of the stimulus money they spent so far has created 640,000 jobs. They estimate that another $189 billion in tax relief has created at least 350,000 jobs. That's $350,000 per job. About half of the 640,000 jobs from the $159 billion were as teachers, who earn a little over $40,000/yr. That means that about 11.4% of the stimulus money found its way into the hands of people who otherwise would have been unemployed, before taxes. The argument against giving money directly to unemployed people is that then they wouldn't have an incentive to find jobs, resulting in inefficiency, as a large percentage of the unemployed-but-employable would remain idle. Assume that the cost to society of a worker choosing not to work is about $40,000/yr in lost productivity. In order for distributing $348 billion directly to the unemployed to have less than 11.4% efficiency, it would need to motivate 7.7 million people to stay unemployed who otherwise would have found jobs. As there are currently only 15.1 million unemployed people in the US according to the US Dept. of Labor, I find this unlikely. (This isn't a fair comparison, because the money "lost" by giving it to business owners is just redistributed, while the productivity lost by people not working is really and truly lost. But let's follow this idea through anyway.) In fact, you could guarantee that this wouldn't happen, by giving the money to fewer than 7.7 million people. Give 3.48 million unemployed people $100,000 each. Once you've given them enough to motivate them to stop working, you don't lose any more productivity by giving them more. Giving people much more money than they are accustomed to, increases the percentage of it that they will spend. And if they don't spend it, they put it into a bank, where someone else will spend it. Either way, the stimulus money still flows to the business owners; it just goes through the unemployed first this way, causing a little inflation in exchange for giving a much larger share of the benefits of the stimulus to its alleged target population. You'll have provided a higher standard of living, for 3.5 times as many people, on top of your business stimulus. Of course, instead of better schools, police forces, and road systems, you'd end up with an extra $348 billion worth of Playstations, movies, concerts, and internet porn. (Comment on this)
9:09 pm	Life of a Pumpkin (Comment on this)
Monday, October 26th, 2009
1:06 pm	A lucky bug, and evolution Last Friday, I finally packaged up the quarterly release of JCVI's automatic prokaryote functional annotation pipeline, which looks at genes found in newly-sequenced genomes and guesses what they do; and distributed it to the other 3 sequencing centers for the Human Microbiome Project. As always happens when I release a new version, several minutes afterwards, I discovered a major bug that had been hiding in the code for years. The program takes each new gene and runs BLAST against a database of known genes, and produces a list of identifiers of genes resembling the new genes. It then takes these identifiers, and calls a program to look up all of the synonyms for these identifiers used in all the different gene databases. This lookup step takes 90% of the program's runtime. I found that the database lookup usually failed, because most identifiers didn't match the regular expression used in the lookup program to retrieve identifiers. Nobody had noticed this, because nobody had checked the database log files. I fixed the program so that the database lookup would always work correctly, and re-ran the program. It produced exactly the same output as before, but took five times as long to run. So instead of going dancing, as I'd planned, I spent Friday evening figuring out why this happened. It turned out that the class of identifiers that failed to match the regular expression were a subset of the set of identifiers for which the lookup didn't have to be done, because the previously-cached results would give the same results. Once I realized this, I was able to speed the program up more, by excluding more such identifiers, and avoiding the overhead of about a million subroutine calls that would eventually fail when the regular expression failed to match. A bug in a program is like a mutation. Bugs in a computer program are almost always bad. But this was a beneficial bug, which had no effect other than to make the program run much faster than it had been designed to. I was delighted to see this proof of the central non-intuitive idea of evolution: A random change can sometimes be beneficial. (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
11:50 am	From Zooillogix: (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
2:44 pm	The sanctity of marriage ... explained at Sore Thumbs. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
4:55 pm	Another child murdered by the FDA Today I heard a heartbreaking story, in a recorded presentation by Roscoe Brady of the NIH, made at SENS 2 in 2005. He had a patient who was a little girl with Gaucher disease; and he had a treatment for the disease, which seemed to be safe in animal experiments. But the FDA wouldn't let him treat her until the primate experiments were done. By the time the primate experiments were done, her brain had been irreparably damaged by Gaucher disease - as everyone involved had known it would be. Somehow the FDA decided it would be better to ensure her death, than to take the risk that she might have a bad reaction to the treatment. The treatment works, by the way. (Comment on this)
Friday, September 11th, 2009
2:20 pm	You heard it here first Rock Band: The Beatles came out 2 days ago. I predict that this will bring about greater respect for Ringo's drumming. That is, if they actually mark the beats where he played them. I'm a fan of late Beatles, but early Beatles must have been a lot more fun for Ringo. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:17 pm	Only in America Today I heard some Muslims interviewed on NPR comment on how much more sensitive government has been to the Muslim community since 9/11/01. All other neglected minorities in America, take note. Or, er, don't. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
12:07 pm	Bad idea of the day: GPS Dylan I heard Bob Dylan on the radio today - not singing, but talking. He's trying to license his voice out to give instructions on the GPS navigation units in cars. And 40 more years of cigarette smoking hasn't made his voice any clearer. So, someday soon, you can have this conversation in your car: GPS Dylan: Tuurr werrf gorn, at the marn way shun. Driver: Tour worth going? What? Passenger: I think he said, "Turn left soon at the Penn station". GPS Dylan: Froom! Werble in ferglesuh. Driver: I think I was supposed to turn there! Passenger: No, he said "soon!" Turn soon! GPS Dylan: Howduz it fheil? Ti be hon yor hohwn? Wid no derekshun hoome? Driver: I don't think he's giving directions at all. GPS Dylan: Laka rawhlin schtone! Passenger: You're making Dylan angry, man! I know one of the only people to co-author a song with Bob Dylan - my late friend Bernie Statland. He went to summer camp with Bob Dylan when they were kids (only Dylan was Zimmerman then). Somebody was supposed to write a song for their cabin, and Bernie and Bob volunteered. So Bob wrote the first version. Bernie ripped it to shreds: "Bob, this song kind of wanders, and some of it doesn't make any sense. And it doesn't even rhyme right!" So Bernie fixed it up for him. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 17th, 2009
11:35 am	McMarine I recently started buying a McLatte on my way to work, to give me enough caffeine to negotiate the beltway. One of the McDonalds on my way to work has a guy working the front counter who is remarkably cool. I don't mean "cool" like The Fonz; I mean that he isn't disturbed by the mayhem around him. Some servers manage to stay polite and smile at the customers, but this guy is levels above them. You can tell that he's not making an effort to act undisturbed; he's genuinely calm and unstressed and has a genuine smile, greeting everyone and taking every order as if it were the first one of the day. I said to him, "It's remarkable that you stay so calm working here." And he said, "Sir" (he calls everyone Sir or Ma'am), "after a few weeks on Parris Island having drill sergeants scream in your face from six inches away, it takes more than McDonalds to get to you." And then added, "You make your attitude yourself." He was a Marine. (Comment on this)
Friday, August 14th, 2009
6:51 pm	Things I've learned from fmylife.com Never prepare expensive surprises for anyone. If you live with siblings, parents, or housemates, password-protect everything. If you have children or animals, you will eventually be pooped on. People have no sympathy for fat people or vegetarians. Married With Children is not over-the-top. It's not even near the top. Sex and relationships cause people more distress than everything else combined. Men are idiots. Things that cause more distress than public speaking: Sex, nudity, romance, feeling fat or ugly, being mistaken for someone of the opposite gender, kids, animals, underwear, poop, pee, vomit, farting, being robbed, and falling down. Old people still have sex. Parents are horrified to think of their children having sex. Children are horrified to think of their parents having sex. Women will eagerly give a random man their phone number if he asks out of the blue and they think he's cute. Facebook is the greatest invention ever made for humiliating and embarrassing yourself and others. About 1% of people will say "you totally deserved it" to anything that happens to you, including getting cancer. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 9th, 2009
12:43 pm	Neighbors Ever notice that you never meet most of your neighbors, but the assholes go out of their way to meet you? (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
7:23 pm	Strangeness within strangeness About that video you've probably seen of prisoners in orange jumpsuits dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller, from CNN: "Every able-bodied prisoner must dance. If they refuse, they lose privileges, mostly conjugal visits. According to Garcia, the dancing occupies up to five hours a day. However he rejected claims he's abusing the prisoners' rights by forcing them to dance so many hours a day." Being made to dance to Michael Jackson's music 5 hours a day?!?! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
11:45 am	Sex offenders How come convicted sex offenders can't live near a school, are on a public list, and have to tell their neighbors that they're sex offenders - - but convicted murderers don't? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
6:15 pm	Elsevier for sale Elsevier is possibly the most important publisher of scientific journals in the world. And they published a fake journal for Merck for pay. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
5:08 pm	User interface simplicity! Apple believes that having more than one button confuses people! Hence the simple interface on their iPhone earbuds: Phone:     Press once to answer a call.     Press twice to send the call to voicemail.     Press once to hang up. Call-Waiting:     Press once to hold the current call and switch to new call.     Hold for 2 seconds and release to ignore the new call. When listening to music:     Press once to play or pause a song.     Double-click to skip to the next song.     Triple-click to return to the previous song. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 1st, 2009
1:38 pm	Stupidity roundup I heard an "expert" on child care on NPR asked about parents being abusive by leaving their children unsupervised. She said that it was probably acceptable to leave children unsupervised once they reach the age of 13. Thirteen?!? What kind of pampered attention-hungry wussies will the next generation be made of? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
8:05 pm	Stupidity roundup A commentator on NPR representing an insurance agency said that it was too expensive to hire guards for all of the 30,000 ships that pass by Somalia every year. Instead, he suggests we add to the 20 warships already patrolling the area. Everything's cheap when somebody else pays for it! (Comment on this)
Monday, April 6th, 2009
2:16 pm	Demotivator of the day WW2, Liberation of Paris: whites only (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
6:04 pm	Great allies think alike In case you thought only the American government was batshit crazy: British government wants to monitor not just everyone's email, but also their Facebook messages (Comment on this)