Where Is Joel?

I ran across this website recently. The idea is that you upload “looks” that you tend to rock and then the community give you feedback on them. It doesn’t seem to have a very widespread audience, the concept seems ok though. Different people look good in different clothes, so to have a community where people can give you feedback on the styles you wear seems like not a horrible idea. I’m know often surprised by the clothes that people say they like on me.

So I signed up and put up a look. The picture looked very… Zoolanderish. LOL It’s kind of unnerving knowing that there are probably some jerks out there who would just tear into what you put up… So I don’t really know where this post is going, but here is the picture I put up of pretty much what I normally wear. Maybe I just felt like I needed some pictures on the blog. Check out trendmill and let me know what you think. It seems Montreal dominated right now, and I can’t see it catching on too much with all but the most fashion obsessed, but maybe many of us could benefit from putting a few outfits up and learning what people really think of what we wear?

Me as a model...

“I’ve searched ALL day for a blog about “Where is Joel” and I finally found one! I am very interested in your content, please write more.

…

haha. Does anyone ever ever search all day for a blog about “Where is Joel”??

Although when it comes to sports I live and breathe football. As a canadian I can’t help but appreciate hockey. Every since I was a kid and it drove me crazy when my Calgarian friends would cheer for the Gretzky led oilers I have been a Flames man. This season the Flames have, thus far, the third best record in the league at 7-2-1 as well as the highest scoring offence in the league. Prognosticators seem to believe that this might be the year. I should be overjoyed right??

Not so much… There are some concerning factors regarding the Flames run that I would like to point out.
- The flames have the 6th most goals per game scored against them this year.
- The flames have the 3rd least goals per game and only score as much as they do by having the highest scoring percent in the league. This may not be a sustainable situation.
- Despite Kiprusoff playing better than previously he still has a middling save percentage.

I’m not too sure how people keep claiming this is the best defence in hockey. My question comes back to my recent football post. How bad can this team be and have accumulated this record? Let’s say we believe the current record to be within 2 standard deviations of how many points this team should actually have. They currently accumulate points at a rate of 0.75 * possible points or rather have won 7.5/10 games. Lets just say they’ve won 8 games for argument’s sake. Were they a 0.45 team, or rather 22nd in the NHL then winning 8/10 still falls within a 97.5% confidence interval. What this means is that at this point all we can say with “confidence” based on the results so far is that the flames are in the top 2/3 of the league. Hopefully they make me proud and play the rest of the year like the 0.75 team they’ve been, but I’m feeling nervous!

Like most other people in North America who are both a) interested in interesting things and b) read at a grade 6 level, I read and enjoyed the book Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and some other dude. Lemon Jello and Orange Jello. Classic. The sequel has been released, it is called Superfreaonomics, and it has caused an enormous stir in the world of climate change scientists. I’ve been following the action and I think both sides are being ridiculous so I thought I’d weight in on the debate.

For starters I’d like to clarify my position on global warming.
a) There is very strong evidence that the world is getting rapidly warmer and is doing so because of human influence primarily in the form of Carbon Dioxide release. (See my earlier post on why people who don’t agree with this are *likely* wrong.)
b) Unlike many alarmists I firmly believe that even if we do nothing right now science will eventually fix this problem for us. I’m not convinced that will happen before a lot of human suffering occurs however.

Now on to the argument made by Mr. Levitt and his friend. They believe that we can solve this problem by “geo-engineering” the planet. The premise is if we release huge amounts of pollutants to the upper atmosphere they will act as a sort of umbrella and cool us down. Soon after this was released climatologists and bloggers everywhere demonized the authors. The main issue people seem to invariably point out is *one* botched quote and some questionable arguments about solar panels. I don’t really take issue with either of these things too much, and the fact is that geo-engineering would be a very rapid way to cool the planet down. This doesn’t mean that I think they are on the right track or have done the right thing by publishing this however.

The problems with their argument are:
- We solve global warming without reducing atmospheric carbon. This leaves 50% of the problem with atmospheric carbon which is that it is acidifying the ocean which will eventually destroy much of our planets photosynthetic ability (ability to create energy for animals from the sun) as well as the coral reefs. That’s a pretty big oversight!!
- We have NO idea what the repercussions of this plan are. At least global warming is a devil we know. Imagine living under a planet wide cover of smog. It would reduce the amount of useable energy from the sun that reaches our planet. It would totally change weather patterns by changing the temperature gradient in the atmosphere. Who knows what else it would do!!! It could be a disaster much worse than just the warming of the planet.

Of course Levitt and _______ are within their rights to publish this. It’s a valid argument for how to cool the planet. It is however irresponsible for people in a position of trust with such a widespread audience to insinuate that we can solve this problem without making changes to our carbon emissions. As far as we know we can’t and in the current atmosphere of declining public belief in global warming it is more important than ever that people are told this. All Levitt and John Doe’s chapter does is increase the tendency toward apathy.

That having been said, what was in my opinion completely out of line was the reaction of the carbon reduction proponents particularly Joseph Romm. They reacted with extremely strongly worded angry replies that were so steeped in science most normal people would never spend the time trying to figure them out. All this accomplishes is alienating the public by visibly yelling all sorts of things we don’t understand and acting like lunatics. Secondly instead of opening dialog with Levitt and his little buddy which would be very visible on the widely read freakonomics blog it puts them on the defensive criticizing the carbon reduction movement. Lastly all the hype will just help with Superfreakonomics sales, further spreading the word they wanted stomped out. it mystifies me how environmentalists can’t behave like normal humans and are always tying themselves to trees and blowing up pipes. THAT IS NOT HOW YOU MAKE FRIENDS!!! If we hope to solve the global warming problem before it becomes too severe what is needed is open dialog and public education and less histrionics. That goes for you Joseph Romm, who as far as I can tell just printed that post to get more attention. What chance do we have when those campaigning for change do all the wrong things all the time??

Joel out.

-Someone in the locker room today was putting deodorant on their forearms… Is this really necessary? Have I been missing out on this crucial deodorant location?
-Please, if you are at your locker and the person beside you wants to change don’t linger, check your hair, mess with your phone and ponder the meaning of life. If you do expect that person to ignore the no standing naked less than 20 cm from another man and be prepared to accidentally have naked man bum rub on your nice new Rock & Republic jeans. (Yes, this is to the dude next to me in the locker room.)
-To all overweight people in the world: If you want abs, stop doing sit ups and spend those 20 minutes on the treadmill doing intervals. You will get abs way faster by losing weight than doing countless lazy sit ups then having those abs hidden under fat.
-If a cute girl in the gym blatantly checks you out is it appropriate to talk to them? What to be saying?
-Yes, I do wish my biceps were larger than those of an average 15 year old girl…
-I stretch in the shower. I do it in a private shower stall however. Please please please do not poke your head into the shower stall while the shower is on and I am clearly in it. That’s really creepy. (I’m pretty sure I complained about this once before on here.)
-To those people who spend 40 minutes on the 20 minute only drop in treadmill. I will ask you to leave followed by rudely asking you to leave. Don’t be a jerk, if you want to spend 40 minutes on the treadmill sign up. Some of us would like a chance to run for a while as well.

So there has been a ton of hub bub lately over this article in “Trends in Ecology and Evolution”. The premise being that women make different mate choices while on their pill and while off of their pill. I read over it, and while quite interesting it seemed to ultimately be much ado about nothing. It just so happens to be an article easy to sensationalize by the media. I did learn something very interesting however that I had been up until this point unaware of with regards to women’s menstrual cycles and their sexual behaviour.

It has for a long time been understood that women are more attracted to men with high levels of testosterone during their most fertile periods and more likely to have a one night stand with these men, whereas during periods of low fertility women are attracted to men with low levels of testosterone and are more likely to establish a relationship with these men. Testosterone levels are evident when looking at men judging by their jaw line etc. and often their level of competitiveness. The assumption is of course is that during periods of extreme fertility women are attracted to high testosterone men because these men are most likely to confer upon their child the ability to survive while in low fertility periods women want low testosterone men as these men are more likely to stick around and care for said child. (The unfortunate implication here is that we possibly have an evolved tendency to cheat as cheating men and women both find ways of increasing the chance of perpetuating their genetic material… This is off topic however so I won’t delve into it any further.)

I had always assumed that high testosterone men were good genetic fathers as the male children would also inherit the high testosterone characteristic and be stronger and more capable of providing for himself. He would also of course be more likely to be selected to be the genetic father of the next generation, although there is no reason this behaviour would initially have been selected for before this trait existed. This paper presents the postulate that as testosterone is actually an immunosuppressant, being able to survive high testosterone levels are a good indication of genetic quality as the subject survives even with a weakened immune system. I’ve never heard this before and am going to have to think about it. It seems counterintuitive that women would want to pass a weakness like immunosuppression on to their male offspring even if that male offspring had a higher chance of genetic quality.

Thoughts??

I think the majority of men, or at least a lot, have some kind of sporting crush. I love the NFL. NFL football wastes hours of every week and love it when I have Sundays free so I can watch. That being the case I was recently pondering teams that have been excellent in the past and wondering how good they actually were?

We have has the 2007 pats, the 1998 vikes, the 1997 broncos etc. How good did the 2007 pats actually have to be to go 16-0?? When two NFL teams meet it is a sample over what would occur over two teams meeting an infinite number of times. Team A might have a 0.6 probability of winning against team B in a given day, but still lose the game. Let us make the assumption that some team, team X, has some probability x of winning each game. Obviously this is an oversimplification, different teams will have a different probability of beating team X and schedule strengths will affect x. That aside what does x have to be such that team X would have a reasonable chance of going 16-0?

Lets say x was 0.75, or in other words good enough that we would expect them to go 12-4. We would expect team X to go undefeated one percent of the time. The NFL has been playing 16 games per year for 28 years now and we have seen one team go 16-0. Or rather there should be just under 4 teams where x=0.75 per year. Of course a team that where x < 0.75 could also go 16-0 so realistically there are probably more in the general area of at most 3 teams every year that are legitimately 12-4 good. This also fits with the fact there have been 4 15-1 teams and 16 14-2 teams. So disappointingly statistically it looks like most seasons where a team performed better that 12-4 it was due to variance and not the fact the team was in fact the team was stunningly good. In fact it seems very unlikely the NFL has seen many teams where x>0.75.

Worse news yet, in any given year there is roughly 0.2 probability that a 12-4 team will do worse than 10-6 putting them in danger of missing the playoffs. This means that roughly once every 5 years one of the best 3 teams in the league will miss the playoffs. Let’s look at roughly what we would expect records to look like if every team in the league had x=0.5 or rather every team were even and we expected them all to go 8-8.

Now obviously there is more variance in real life than if all the teams were equally as good. This is good, at least we’re not watching a league of coin flips. This should be obvious as we see the same teams do reasonably well every year and the same teams do poorly. The fact is that it would not be unexpected for an 8-8 calibre team to go 10-6 and make the playoffs while our 12-4 calibre team misses.

My point in this post is that really there isn’t that much difference in skill between most NFL teams. In fact in any given season luck comes into play a significant amount. This is particularly true due to the short schedule as compared with other sports like hockey or baseball. It’s kind of sad that when it’s all over we don’t really know who was the best. Obviously the 14-2 team was excellent, but there is no compelling evidence that the same team was better than a 10-6 team, particularly when strength of schedule comes into play. The 10-6 team of course also does not demonstrate any compelling evidence of being that much better than a 6-10 team, just a few lucky plays. In fact every year it would be expected that some x=0.5 teams go 10-6 and are lauded as excellent teams and that some go 6-10 and the coaches are fired and the team derided. (Of course, the 14-2 teams demonstrates compelling evidence it should be in the playoffs and is better than the 6-10 team).

The fact that luck plays such a huge factor in a sport that I consider to be sacrosanct is actually a little disconcerting to me. Either way I’m pretty sure I’ll continue watching and loving football. So eat that statistics.

One of my favourite weekly columns to read is Tuesday Morning Quarterback by Greg Easterbrook. The dude is really interesting and offers up interesting, often contrarian and generally compelling viewpoints on football and often a variety of other topics. This week though he talks about something ridiculous. He argued cheerleaders are being exploited because they are paid 100$ish/game and represent a prominent marketing facet of a 8 billion dollar per year industry. The argument is their pay is not proportional to their contribution to the industry and that the NFL forces them to stay in this situation because many other people would gladly take their place should they complain.

This is silly. Cheerleaders are
a) in a position that many women wish to be in. They go into the position understanding the financial compensation virtually doesn’t exist. You don’t pay people because they join a dance club.
b) more importantly they are easily replaceable. There are tons of gorgeous dancers who would kill to be a cheerleader and are fully capable. This is what differentiates a cheerleader from a star quarterback, everyone also wishes to be the Quarterback, but very few people on this planet would be willing. I would be the starting quarterback for an NFL franchise in a second and I’d do it for free if I had to. The glory and fun of it would be awesome if it was something I could do on the side away from my normal job. I am simply not capable of being a starting quarterback.

These women are able to quit at *any* time with no negative economic consequences. In fact quitting would offer them more free time to actually make money. The fact of the matter is if someone is doing something without any economic incentive or any bullying then chances are they are being compensated in other way. People who participate in charities feel good about themselves and their actions, people with hobbies like what they do etc.

This is economics 101. What Mr Easterbrook is arguing is that a group of happy women in enviable positions who are paid amounts of money in line with normal economic principles are being exploited by their poor pay. The argument is silly and just seems like something he added to meet word count requirements with another contrarian argument. I would have expected more of you TMQ.

There has been a ton of chattering lately about how “Global Warming” is not in fact real. The chatter has been inspired by the fact that recent data has shown that the world has actually not been warming itself up over the last ten years but rather cooling itself down. Pretty much all the real scientists and people who understand statistics have said two things.

1) The data is not necessarily in fact representative of that actual situation as it ignored the polar regions, the regions that are warming the fastest.

2) The slight cooling effect is well within the tolerable variance of the chosen trend line and only people who don’t understand Statistics (aka 99.99% of people, including generally myself. See this article to prove you don’t understand statistics, then also reference the fact that you believe that teams and players go on hot/cold streaks in sports often.) would ever attribute any importance to it.

The media has of course sensationalized the whole affair and the people who aren’t scientists but style themselves have such are asking for for the scientists heads on a stake. What this come down to is the entire affair is ridiculous and no matter who you believe it shouldn’t change anything. We should be motivated to reduce carbon emissions even on the off chance that global warming is real. If it is real and we fail to do so we may be condemning generations to a painful process of rehabilitating our planet. Even if global warming does not exist there is very little chance that tons of extra carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is actually a good thing so we probably aren’t destined to hurt much by trying to solve the “problem”.

What this demonstrates to me is the extreme danger in sensationalizing real problems. When Al Gore (Aka Dr. Hypocrite) and company went out and proclaimed the sinking of cities etc. it became the face of global warming. When things Al Gore said turned out to be true, but not as sensational as he made them out to be it opened a door for people to criticize the existence of Global Warming. It’s important we understand the problem is very likely real. It’s important to understand that if we do nothing it’s still very likely fixable in the future, but not without most likely a large hardship. Then it is important that we set about to do something and stop flagellating. This was a bit of a rant, sorry all. I’m a little bit irritated by the whole affair right now.

ps. We should also note that the sun has been oddly cool for the last little while and the planet is still warming up… Just sayin’.

I really feel like I spent an overly large portion of my life watching TV last year. I light of that Id like to cut back on the TV hours this time round and just watch shows that I really enjoy. That being said I’ve cut a few shows and some have been added, I think this is my TV diet for the year:

1. Gossip Girl. … Yeah… I’m not really the target audience for this show. I get that. I find it really addictive though. … I feel really uncool right now admitting this.
2. Glee. Dang those kids can sing.
3. Californication. Because who doesn’t like a show that totally unreasonably glorify being assholes who have too much promiscuous sex.
4. Lost when it comes on. This show is just too awesome to live without.

So that’s different… Mostly I usually watch a bunch of really nerdy sci fi shows, and this year my tv watching habits look a little bit more like a teenage girl. No BSG. No Stargate. No Enterprise. No Heroes. … I wonder how this reflects on me?