Tony K's Blog

Ranked Choice (RC) vs Instant Runoff (IRV) vs Approval RC and IRV are technically different. RC is a way of expressing preference, IRV is a method of tabulating votes from RC ballots. This is an important distinction. IRV, which seems pretty good can solve one problem (e.g. Gore v Bush) but introduce others. Technically IRV is nonmonotonic. That is, a shift of public opinion toward a candidate can cause that candidate to lose, and a shift of public opinion away from a candidate can cause that candidate to win. A different and probably superior method is one called Condorcet. It eliminates most of the IRV issues but introduces a few other, but less likely, issues. IRV is to Condorcet as single elimination is to round robin. Superior to both of them is Approval voting, in which you select all candidates that would be acceptable to you. It’s simple to tabulate and does not have the issues of either IRV or Condorcet. There’s a  website that has wonderful graphics of how the...

I will call people who believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW), warmists, those who are less certain, denialists. I hope it insults both sides equally. My BS degree is in earth science. I work for an oil company. I believe in the scientific method. I believe that government has a legitimate role to play in society. I am not a Neanderthal. I have biases. Some may think that because I work for an oil company, I desperately want to see the warmists fail. Look, I'm too close to retirement for anything that happens now to have an effect on my personal earnings or career, so I don't think that comes into play. And by the way, I live on this planet. If humans are doing something to damage the planet, I want it to stop. I want us to take action to fix and reverse the harm. I may be retiring within fifteen years, but I hope to live a lot longer than that, and I want my kids to inherit a good place. I have read a lot about the science, politics, and economics of the CO2/glob...

BMI is such a bad metric for measuring obesity. Better would be FMI which instead of the weight/ht^2 is weight*body fat%/ht^2 or BMI * body fat %. Or how about simply body fat percentage. It is a lot more relevant to the measure of obesity. There has been some recent press about how people with high BMIs might be healthy and people with low BMIs might be unhealthy. Well duh!!! The following article talks about people who are "skinny fat." Normal Weight Obesity: An Emerging Risk Factor For Heart And Metabolic Problems More than half of American adults considered to have normal body weight in America have high body fat percentages -- greater than 20 percent for men and 30 percent for women -- as well as heart and metabolic disturbances, new Mayo Clinic research shows. The finding conflicts with the widely held belief that maintaining a normal weight automatically guards against disorders such as high levels of circulating blood fats and a tendency to develop metabolic s...

Seth Roberts of Shangri-La diet fame interviewed Gary Taubes who wrote Good Calories, Bad Calories . Fascinating stuff. http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhm4f3rg_36gg4956dm&pli=1 GARY TAUBES Interviewed November 30, 2007 by Seth Roberts [part 1] INTERVIEWER I just spoke to someone who reduced the carbohydrate in his diet, for various reasons, including your book. He found that his performance on mental problems started improving again. It had stopped improving; it had been constant for a long time, and then he started getting better. So it may be that when you reduce the carbohydrate in your diet, your brain starts working better. TAUBES Well there is evidence that your brain works more efficiently on ketones, as does your heart. So if he reduced his carbohydrate consumption sufficiently, he probably increased the level of ketones in his blood. But I'm just speculating here. INTERVIEWER: The book seems to have had an unusual beginning. You’d been writing about salt, and ...