I Passed the (Not Harvard) Typing Test

John Phipps linked to a site that offers a typing test. I won't embarrass John by repeating his score but I scored 39 words per minute. Not bad, though I used to be faster. My elder sister told me I needed to take the typing course in high school, because college papers had to be typed and she earned some money by typing them for male students. So I did, being one of the few male students in the class. It was difficult for a few weeks, but then suddenly the neural network got rewired and the link between recognizing the word on the page and hitting the proper keys to type the word became automatic and natural.

Although taking the course meant lowered my high school grade average by enough, I think, to drop my class standing, typing and typing reasonably fast has always helped, so I should thank my sister for her advice.

I Failed the Harvard Face Recognition Test

Freakonomics linked to a series of puzzlers from a Harvard research project. Being an impatient sort, I opted for the shortest-- a face recognition test. Simply put, they display a face (face only and a bit "off" from a normal portrait of the subject), you type the name (or say you don't know), they display the correct answer and you say whether you're familiar with the person.

Anyway, I did very poorly, only recognizing 25 percent of the people with whom I was familiar (I got Obama and George Clooney and Scarlett Johannsen :-). I've always been poor at facial recognition (and sometimes, more now, at remembering the name which goes with the face I recognize) which has often made me awkward in social events. Or, possibly it's because I've had below average exposure to social events that I never developed the neurons needed to recognizing and distinguishing faces. That's what some of the latest brain research might indicate, if you believe Malcolm Gladwell.

Great News from Harvard

Via Greg Mankiw the senior class at Harvard is going much less into finance and much more into teaching and health care than they were 2 years ago.

Supreme Court Speculation

I find it fun to speculate how Ms. Sotomayor's confirmation to the Court might work out. We know Ginsburg and Scalia are the best of friends, which is totally surprising and counter-intuitive, so let me guess:

• Sotomayor and Thomas might well get on. He seems shy, she seems not, they share a background in that their opponents diss their appointments and careers as affirmative action babies.
• Roberts, Alito, and Sotomayor are of an age, so there might be a generational divide. It might be hard for Sotomayor to show Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer the deference which they might expect from their seniority. Sotomayor, Roberts, and Alito might form a "new boys [sic]" club.
  
• Obviously Ginsburg and Sotomayor would share the gender experience.
• Alito graduated from Princeton before she did, and didn't like the idea of women undergrads, but old alums might share a bond.
• There seems to be little common ground between Sotomayor and Stevens or Kennedy, which might be bad news for us liberals.

Of course, the other lesson from the Ginsburg/Scalia bond is that justices can perfectly well separate their opinions and their personal feelings.

Should the World End in 400 Years?

Or rather, what proportion of your income would you spend to help ensure the world wouldn't end in 400 years? That's the nugget buried in the economics discussed at this blog.

Somehow it seems very important to me, even though the economists tend to say I shouldn't worry my head.

Wingnuts and Open Gov

Federal Computer Week has a piece on the open.gov episode. The optimistic ending: do more open gov and the "birthers" will lose their zeal. In other words, you gotta outlast them.

Pork = Fat = Lard = Good

I'd guess, because I'm too lazy to click the mouse, that using the term "pork" in connection with government programs had some relation to the idea there's lots of "fat" to cut out, and we all know fat is bad, except for Slate, which has this article praising lard. And I remember mom cooking with lard.

The Realities of Rural Life

Yes, Montana is rather extreme, but still. See Erin's latest vacation

Wisdom and Sex and Race, and Age

Many on the right have attacked Judge Sotomayor for a quote from a 2001 speech. I was going to blog on it, then stumbled on the "whole thing", which I finally read. Here's a link. I like it. And recommend it.

But for anyone too lazy to check it out, here's the infamous quote, which the White House says is poorly worded: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Let me rephrase it: "I would hope that a wise old man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a wise young man who hasn't lived that life."

My point: I hope I'm wiser now at 68 than I was 20 years ago, much less 40. I'm sure I'm losing brain cells and slowing down. I've probably developed new blind spots and am less able to judge some things (like current popular music) than I was 20 years ago. But on the whole, I think I'm wiser. And that's because of added experiences, experiences which a wise Latina wouldn't have, but which I didn't have 20 years ago. And I'm willing to stipulate a Latina operating in a white male's world is likely to have a broader set of experiences than a comparable white male. So, given that logic, I'd concede my hypothetical Latina twin sister would be wiser than I.

Federal Employees Have No Imagination?

One possible interpretation of the failure of employees to take advantage of a new website. See this story in Politico.