Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray63 [at] hotmail.com (Be patient, I don't check it often.)

Interesting presentations. We had a meeting at work today that was intended as a look at recently developed technologies and interesting things other people are doing.

This video was played as sort of a thought-provoking piece (which I believe was its original purpose for a conference).



The other thing I liked was this explanation of the credit crisis.

Labels: learning

posted by Paul Murray at 11:06 PM | permanent link |

Random facts. This is a collection of unrelated facts that I've stumbled across in my recent reading:

"More than 90% of federal defendants plead guilty; the vast majority who go to trial are convicted; four of five convicted defendants serve jail time." (LA Times)

"The F-15, the backbone of America’s air power for more than a quarter century, may just be the most successful weapon in history. It is certainly the most successful fighter jet. In combat, its kill ratio over more than 30 years is 107 to zero. Zero. In three decades of flying, no F-15 has ever been shot down by an enemy plane—and that includes F-15s flown by air forces other than America’s." (The Atlantic)

"The general expectation in sports is that performance improves over time. Future athletes will surely be faster, throw farther, jump higher. But free-throw shooting represents a stubbornly peculiar athletic endeavor. As a group, players have not gotten better. Nor have they become worse.

'It’s unbelievable,' Larry Wright, an adjunct professor of statistics at Columbia, said as he studied the year-by-year averages. 'There’s almost no difference. Fifty years. This is mind-boggling.'

There are measures in other sports that have shown similar consistency, like golf scores or batting averages, but none of them are as straightforward as lobbing a ball toward a basket." (New York Times)

Labels: random facts

posted by Paul Murray at 12:24 PM | permanent link |