The one taste they agree on is "Yuck"??

I have a stack of GAMES magazines from the 80's, and what's most striking is the sheer volume of deathstick and hard alcohol ads.  A lot of them are deadly dull, but this one, from the back cover of the October 1985 issue, has high quality 27-years-in-retrospect horror / amusement value, from the awful puns, to the awful clothes the guy is wearing, to the inclusion of the fur coat (because if you don't give a damn about your own body, you sure as hell won't care about some stinky weasels), to the size of the guy's hardware.

I think I'd like to see an update (not for cigarettes) with one person "into software" and another person "into hardwear".

The Princess Frog; 2009

Ukulele-playing layabout prince falls in love (for unclear reasons) with poor-but-hardworking Tiana; she, in turn, falls in love with the prince... apparently solely because he's in love with her..?!?!!  Seriously, Tiana shows no initial physical attraction to the prince, and during the time they spend together, he shows no redeeming qualities.  We thought the hero's character flaws in Tangled made him unlikeable, but Flynn Rider is sadly an improvement over ukulele prince.

In the end, this felt like a less-funny Emperor's New Groove with a poorly developed romance tacked on.  Meh.

Why couldn't ukulele prince have a motivation to mirror Tiana's?  Make him a lover of music whose desire to play jazz/blues trumpet** was quashed by his parents (he won't have time to be a musician once he's king), so he runs away to New Orleans with a new identity and a sack full of his parent's money.  He's a very good technical player, but never seems to manage to stick with a band because his playing lacks the feeling needed to be a great jazz/blues player.  He hasn't truly lived, loved, or suffered.  He and Tiana know one another, and there's a spark of attraction, but it has never gone anywhere because they have their own separate goals.  Maybe someday they could get together once they've reached their goals, but for now...  So he goes on playing, living reasonably comfortably until his seed money runs out, and *now* he has a hard choice: go home to his parents, starve in New Orleans, or declare his identity and marry money.  Once he declares his identity***, the debutantes come out in force, the royal parents descend on New Orleans, and the fun begins.  I think you could even remove the magical element from the story and have the "frog prince" be a metaphorical transformation****.


** Get rid of the alligator; or, if you keep the fantastical elements, keep the alligator and add a number of other swamp animals who all want to play jazz, and the prince forms his band with them?  One way or another, the freakin' ukulele goes.

*** Or, the better to build his character, he could choose to starve, and we twist Roman Holiday a little, and Tiana discovers his real identity and has to choose whether to "out" him a) because she doesn't want to see him starve, and b) in the hopes of securing a reward that would enable her to buy the space to open her restaurant.

**** That might not fly in a Disney movie, but I'd love for them to try, rather than leaning on magic all the time.  Missed opportunities.

Wind power in VT

GMD had an interesting post and good following discussion On Wind Power and "Destroying Vermont".  What's simple is that the large-scale wind farms appear less destructive than mountaintop removal.  What's missing from the discussion, and not clear at all to me, are the relative amounts of energy obtained by each method per area "destroyed", plus the costs of obtaining that energy.  I also suspect, but have no proof, that distributed wind and solar systems are cheaper and more efficient, but don't bring profit to "big energy" like large-scale installments, and so there's little will to pursue distributed systems.

The future of statistical journals

Larry Wasserman's Rant on Refereeing comes hard on the heels of Karl Rohe's excellent Tale of Two Researchers in the latest Amstat News.  

What's interesting to me is that the journals stopped being useful for keeping up-to-date on cutting edge research long ago; 15+ years ago, technical reports were readily available for download (in postscript format!) from departmental websites, and e-mail chains kept people within a field apprised of new work that was ready to be published.  By the time an article was actually published in a journal, everyone who "mattered" had already read it and weighed in on it, even if they weren't referees.  Things like arXiv are simply the natural evolution of this process.

So why hasn't the vestigial journal apparatus finally fallen away?  Presumably because it takes more than a couple of decades to change something that has been around for a few hundred years.  (duh)  Again, I think even 15 years ago, your fellows should have already known whether you're doing good work, regardless of where you've published**.  So is the real problem the administration, which only has where and how often you've published to go by when determining whether to give you tenure?  Even then, things like CiteSeer make it easy to count citations, even for unpublished work.

So... it's the researchers themselves who will finally have to kill the journals by refusing to submit papers to anything but arXiv (or equivalent)?

** then again, I've been out of academia for 14 years, so maybe I'm totally wrong about this and the field of statistics hasn't progressed in that time

"Human Nature" was written by Toto?! (things I was not meant to know)

I used to agree with Jeph Jacques that "Africa" was the best Toto song, but then, for reasons I no longer remember, I looked at the Wikipedia page for "Human Nature" and discovered that the best song on the Thriller album** was co-written by Steve Porcaro of Toto.

Sure, sure, the song desperately needed John Bettis' lyrics and Jackson's superior voice talents, but this is one of those things I can never unlearn.


** I will accept "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" as an alternative; these are the only songs on the album that I still really enjoy 30 years later.

Frigidaire introduces the latest innovation in cooking

It's a husband who gets dinner ready.  He doesn't even need potholders to handle the serving dishes right out of the oven!