prior probability

Ana Swanson asks: “Have you ever observed that time seems to be going by faster as you get older?” Well, have you? Check out this website by the Austrian designer Maximilian Kiener, which visualizes the passage of time as one ages. In words, when you are one year old, a year is 100% of your life. But the proportion falls sharply as you age. As you become older, each year takes significantly less time to pass by than the first. By the time you’re eight, for example, a year is only 12.5% of your life. By the time you reach 18 (the legal drinking age in Puerto Rico, by the way), that proportion has fallen by half again: one year is now 5.56% of your life. As Mr Kiener writes, your summer vacation in your first year of college feels as long as your whole 76th year. After you reach 30, the proportion begins to level off, and each year of your life is similarly short. By the time you’re 35, one year represents just 2.86% of your life …

Dr Marilyn Wedge writes: “In the United States, at least 9 percent of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than 0.5 percent. How has the epidemic of ADHD—firmly established in the U.S.—almost completely passed over children in France?” You probably already know the answer to this question, but here’s a link to Dr Wedge’s post on this subject just in case.

Why won’t the United States and her allies stand up for the territorial integrity of Ukraine? (Right, Ukraine, unlike Kuwait or Iraq, doesn’t have any major oil reserves.) By the way, note the red border line. That is the part of Ukraine’s border that is not under Kiev’s control.

Hat tip: shahanye (via Twitter). More here.

Congress isn’t the only corrupt public body in Washington, D.C.  Check out Andrew Ross Sorkin’s most recent “Dealbook” essay in the N.Y. Times exposing corruption in the United States Supreme Court. Here is an excerpt:

In 2014, Justice [John] Roberts, Justice [Stephen] Breyer and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. ruled on five cases in which they owned shares in companies that filed amicus briefs. In all five cases, the justices ruled in favor of the company filing the brief in which they had a financial interest … From 2009 through 2013, they ruled that way 68 percent of the time — or in 19 cases. It appears that only Justices Roberts, Breyer and Alito own substantial stakes in individual stocks. The other justices, according to their disclosures, have investments in mutual funds and other instruments that would not be as likely to be affected by a particular ruling.

We’ve blogged about amicus briefs before. (Amicus briefs are self-serving legal briefs that are filed by “friends of the court” in a given case, i.e. private parties with axes to grind, and such briefs often contain many factual errors.) Federal judges must recuse themselves if they own a stake directly in a company that is a named party in a case, but at the same time, judges are not required to recuse themselves from cases in which they have a stake in a company that files an amicus or “friend of the court” brief. Talk about loopholes …

Credit: Paul Resnikoff. (Via Randy Picker’s new course on Internet Giants: The Law & Economics of Media Platforms. We strongly recommend Prof. Picker’s course.)