In 8 knockout games, three times a team scored first and lost (England, Switzerland, Ireland).

Cheers.

In a recent speech by cryogenically-frozen-fart come to life Donald Trump following the largest mass shooting in American history at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando he said: “I refuse to allow America to become a place where gay people, Christian people, and Jewish people, are the targets of persecution and intimidation by Radical Islamic preachers of hate and violence.”

No one in America should be the targets of persecution and intimidation by any group of people including, as Trump notes, gays, Christians, and Jews.  However, Donald Trump, an ambitious corn dog that escaped from the concession stand at a rural Alabama fairground, stole an unattended wig, hopped a freight train to Atlantic City and never looked back, seems to have no problem doing the persecution and intimidation when it comes to Mexicans and Muslims.  I’m sure that pointing out the massive, gaping hypocrisy of this particular Trump statement could not possibly convince this man who I’m sure has never once considered even the possibility that anything he has ever said has been factually incorrect, inconsistent, or hypocritical.  I want to live in a country where ALL Americans are free from being targeted from persecution and intimidation, not just groups that are politically convenient to protect.

This got me thinking about how much misguided persecution Muslims face in America, and I went looking for statistics on hate crimes in the U.S.  The data that I found comes from the FBI and is from 2014.  Below is a graphic that I made where the width of each box is the number of hate crime incidents and the height is the number of victims for a particular group.

By far the largest number of hate crimes fall into the category of being motivated by race.  There were 2,568 out of 5,462 total single-bias incidents and included 3,227 victims.    The largest share of these were crimes committed against blacks (1,621) followed by whites (593), Asian (140), and Native American (130).  Crimes based on religious bias and sexual orientation bias both had nearly the same number of incidents in 2014 at 1,017 and 1,014, respectively.  The largest share of hate crimes based on religion were against Jewish people (609) and Muslims (154).  This surprised me a little bit as my guess was that there would be more hate crimes in the U.S. against Muslims than any other religion as illogical reactions to events such as 9/11 and other terrorist acts perpetrated by jihadi extremists.  In terms of hate crimes committed with a bias toward sexual orientation almost 60% (599 out of 1,017) are committed against gay males.

Well, I think I’ve depressed you enough for now.

Cheers.

After their first 30 games, the Chicago Cubs were 24-6 with a winning percentage 0f 0.800.  How have they fared since?  Well, the Cubs are now through 51 games and are at 36-15 with a winning percentage of 0.706.  They’ve cooled off a bit since their blazing start (which isn’t surprising), but they still hold a 7.5 game lead in their division and are the only team in baseball with a winning percentage over 0.700.

After 30 games, I predicted that would win 103.41 games with a 95% prediction interval of (84.58, 122.24) and a 50% prediction interval of (96.93, 109.89).  After 51 games, my updated prediction is that they will win 102.90 games with a 95% prediction interval of (87.23, 118.58) and a 50% prediction interval of (97.51, 108.29).

Below you can see a plot of where the Cubs stand in relation to some of the all time winningest regular season teams.  Even with their “cooling off” the 2016 Cubs are still, at this point, ahead of the 1906 Cubs who went 116-36-3.

Cheers.

In this clip with Gwen Ifill, Obama claimed that the federal government has fewer employees now than under Reagan.  That seems hard to believe given the narrative that Reagan was all about small government and Obama is all about big government and ruining the economy (Thanks Obama).  Turns out it’s actually true though.  You can get the raw data here and see for yourself.

In terms of total number of employees, this topped out in 1968 at 6.639 million largely due to the increase in the size of the military during the Vietnam War.  If we only consider from 1977 on (Carter through Obama), the largest number of employees in the federal government was 5.301 million in 1987.  The next 3 years in the Carter to Obama window with the most federal employees were 1989, 1988, and 1985.

If we want to ignore the size of the military and look only at the size of the executive branch, the five years with the largest federal government employment since 1962 are 1990, 1989, 1988, 1991, and 1969.

If we look at the size of the legislative and judicial branch, which makes up a very small percentage of the total number of employees, these numbers were highest in 2009, 2002, 1993, and 1992 all with about 66,000 employees.

Cheers.

Over at Gawker, they are running a series on Adjunct professor’s, whom they refer to as “academia’s hidden underclass”.  I figured I would comment because I have a blog and you can’t stop me.

1.  Let’s stop talking about the academic job market as if it’s one homogenous entity.  Applying for academic jobs with a philosophy Ph.D. is no where near the same thing as applying for an academic job with a Ph.D. in a STEM field.  And even within the STEM fields that are HUGE differences between fields.  There isn’t one academic job market, there are many vastly different academic job markets and some of them are very strong markets and others are basically lottery systems where you just have to get lucky.
2. If you are working as an adjunct professor and that’s your only job, you’re doing it wrong.  Universities never intended for adjunct professors to make a living solely based on teaching as an adjunct.  It’s not a full time job, and it shouldn’t be treated as such.  The idea of an adjunct professor, in my mind, is someone that works a full time job, usually in an industry that is related to the subject they will be teaching, and they teach one class a semester, maybe two.  Maybe.  When I was in grad school we had an adjunct professor who worked for a major pharmaceutical company who taught clinical trials.  I can assure you he wasn’t struggling to make ends meet.
3. Do universities rely to heavily on adjunct lecturers.  Absolutely.  But why shouldn’t they?  What incentive does a university have to NOT use this model?  Students don’t seem to be demanding that universities use less adjuncts.  (And if they did demand that, tuition would probably go up.)  And it seems like there is someone always willing to be an adjunct.  It would be nice to think that universities would stop relying so heavily on adjuncts because it’s the “right thing to do”, but that ignores the financial realities of running a university.
4. We need to get rid of the idea that if you get a Ph.D. and don’t end up in a tenure track position that you are a failure.  I think that’s why a bunch of people end up as adjuncts.  They think they adjunct for a little bit and hopefully get a tenure track position later.  But for a lot of people it’s just not going to happen either because the job market just isn’t there or they simply aren’t good enough.  When I got my job in 2014, it was my only job offer.  If I didn’t get this job I was all ready to apply for jobs in industry rather than take some temporary lecturer position.   And that wouldn’t have made me a failure.  It would have been fine.
5. I don’t feel bad for you at all if you went and spent 10 years getting a Ph.D. in medieval studies and now you are an adjunct professor making $5000/year.  I just don’t feel bad for you.  And no one else should feel bad for you either.  If you aren’t making enough money, then maybe it’s time to go in a different direction.
6. Doing a Ph.D. is not a good financial investment.  Even if you get a STEM degree, often times the bump you get from the Ph.D. isn’t enough to justify the 4-10 years in school making almost no money and possibly even going into more debt.  If you are not in a STEM field, it can be a financial disaster.  The ONLY reason to do a Ph.D. is if you really love researching a particular topic.

Cheers.

So since January of this year I’ve been taking improv classes at Second City Training Center and last Thursday (May 12) I participated in my first “show”.  It’s called Jam Sandwich, which consists of faculty and students doing improvised scenes based on several monologues.  During the show I was wearing my FitBit and here is what my hear rate looked like during Jam Sandwich.

I think that huge spike around 10:40 is me after I went out for my first scene.  It looks like my hear rate returned to pretty much normal as the show went on, but I was pretty nervous at the beginning.  I think it’s also really interesting that my heart rate spiked again at the end of the show.  That’s not something I expected.

Cheers.

Cheers.