prior probability

Today (Sept. 8) is the feast day of Our Lady of Charity, the patron saint of my beloved Cuba. May my brothers and sisters on the Island be free one day soon!

I just discovered via Ms Megan Turner, a student journalist at my university, that the president of the university, without any prior notice or meaningful discussion, recently adopted an emergency “student behavior expectations policy.” (Here is a link to the nine-page emergency policy.) Putting aside its Orwellian-sounding title, this new policy purports to apply to student conduct off campus. Among other things, and I quote, “students must avoid hosting or attending gatherings or events of more than 12 people, either on or off campus, that a reasonable person would conclude demonstrate a woeful or willful disregard for university policy or expectations as it pertains to COVID-19 precautions ….” For my part, this utterly misguided and poorly-worded policy creates more problems than it solves. Why 12, for example, instead of 50? What is reasonable? What about public protests or campaign rallies? What about sporting events, including college football games? What about faculty? Etc., etc. Furthermore, emergency or no emergency, this policy is not only of doubtful legality; it is also deeply un-American. (Also, the supreme irony of prohibiting student gatherings of 12 or more and at the same time allowing 11,000 spectators to attend college football games at our university stadium is not lost on me!)

This map purports to show which presidential candidate is most likely to win a given State based on public opinion polling from the last two weeks. Let’s put aside the fact that these polls are pretty much worthless–just ask Hillary Rodham Clinton! What I like the most about this map is how the size of each State is weighted to reflect its number of Electoral College votes.

You may have already seen some variant or snippet of the video clip below in which Ander Christensen, a resident of Lincoln, Nebraska, asks his local city council to ban the misleading and deceptive term “boneless chicken wings.” Although Mr Christensen’s plea may sound trivial, I wholeheartedly agree with him, for as I see it, he is making a deeper philosphical point about truth and language. See here, for example. In brief, when we use a word or phrase to describe x, those words or that phrase should accurately reflect the contents of x, right?

Will the interstate highway system be the last major public works project to be built in the United States, or should we re-start the Cross Florida Barge Canal or the Big Cypress Swamp Jetport? I first learned about these two ambitious but ill-fated Florida public works projects in one of the books I was reading this summer: Drying Up: The Fresh Water Crisis in Florida (University Press of Florida, 2019) by John M. Dunn. The Cross Florida Canal would have connected the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, while the Big Cypress Jetport would have been the largest and most modern airport in the world, capable of handling supersonic aircraft. Alas, both projects were eventually cancelled due to their environmental impacts. In any case, I finally found a map of the proposed canal and am posting it here.

I am totally serious. In honor of the upcoming Labor Day Holiday Weekend, allow me to pose the following (non-rhetorical) question: Why do we still allow the federal government (and many State governments) to tax our physical and mental labor, which is what an “income tax” basically amounts to? Go ahead and tax my capital gains, or my leisure activities, or my property, or my inheritance, or my wholesale or retail purchases, but for goodness’ sake, stop taxing my labor! Simply put, I don’t need a bunch of fancy jargon to obfuscate the self-evident truth that taxing people’s work is regressive and unjust–the moral equivalent of theft or forced labor. At the very least, the first $100,000 of one’s earnings should be tax free. What am I missing here? (PS: If you Google the phrase “abolish the income tax,” some very interesting things will pop up!)

“I am so sorry, but …” Although the “random excuse generator” pictured below (play around with it here for yourself; hat tip: @pickover) is quite crude–awkward even–it does a fairly decent job of coming up with good excuses! Maybe if this random excuse generator combined forces with an online writing assistant like “Grammarly” it could revolutionize the business and academic communities, where so much time is wasted in unproductive meetings.

Via Kottke: “MIT’s biology department is offering a new online class this fall called COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and the Pandemic. The class will be led by Richard Young and Facundo Batista and will include guest lectures by several leading authorities on Covid-19, coronaviruses, epidemiology, and immune systems like Anthony Fauci, Michael Mina, and Akiko Iwasaki. Here’s the course description and syllabus.”