Thursday: Isn't this an obvious thing?

Why don't the rich consider themselves rich.  That link has a whole bunch of bullshit associated with it.  Now, look at this link, which has a simple income percentile graph based on census data.

There's a curve there, and I'm going to be lazy and assume this curve has the form of a logistic function:

p = 10**(1 / (1 + exp(- 3.5 * (log10(x) - 4.2)))) - 1) / 9

See, I didn't just make that all up.

It's not perfect, but it's close enough for the next step.  Assume people hang out with people who are roughly randomly sampled around their own wealth percentile.  Basically, everyone hangs out with people that are "in the same income group" in some fashion.  However big you assume that box is, your income relative to that of the wealthiest person you know is basically the inverse derivative of this curve:

I switched to log10(income) because that simplifies the math.

See?  If you make $1e5 a year, you probably know someone who makes 10**(0.75) = 5.62x more than you.  You make a million?  Oh, I'm sorry, someone you know makes a hundred million, you poor asshole.  

Yes, my initial assumption that people hangout in percentile cohorts is poorly supported.  However, this is probably easiest to support, especially in the highest ranges (5.5 and higher), as we're starting to talk about high paid doctors/lawyers/CEOs.

Also, there's a feature where poor people realize that they're poorer than everyone else they know.  Unfortunately for them, this isn't really incorrect.  They really are really poor.

• Today's links are dominated by the Powerpuff girls.
• "some dumb fatty."
• Here's Bubbles in a bunny suit.  It's from this episode.
• Now, scroll down in that transcript to where it says "Hello Kitty", and follow along with this gif.
• Fat dragon.
• Bunny.

Wednesday: Better than garbage with one algorithm

It's clearly not perfect, but my implementation of the first pass (and obviously simplest) algorithm tells me that the value that should be ranked first comes up with a rank of second.  I didn't do a full study of the errors, but a few spot checks indicate that I'm not completely crazy.  Good to know.

I decided today to convert some of my leftover tikka masala into pizza form, using a pita and some fontina cheese.  This was a good idea, and I believed in myself, and so made it a personal pizza.  I'm also glad I got the $6 pitas and not the $3 pitas.  These had a nice flavor, and weren't bland styrofoam like a lot of the other ones I've had in the past.

• I saw this article earlier today, and a quick read through brought up the following points:
• K-modes is basically just K-means, which is kind of the brain-dead-iest way of saying "put things into groups, automatically."  Nice shout out for algorithms, but it's not really a breakthrough.
• The clustering should really be a product of the webpage.  They have this damn data, why aren't they doing this analysis?  Similarly, ranking questions by applicability should be the default.
• "so he wrote a new program to visit the pages of his top-rated matches, cycling by age" This is where things go off the rails from "should have been already implemented" to "kind of creepy."  This is kind of similar to ringing a bunch of doorbells, and then seeing who answers the door.
• "It was first date number 88." Ok, so, great that the method told him how to get sufficient attention for a first day, but this still kind of boils down to Monte Carlo sampling.  That's marginally better than 1%.  If algorithmic improvements really only boost the effectiveness to 1%, that's a really shitty system.
• Next up: the new Powerpuff Girls special.
• I didn't like the new art.  I especially felt that the first five-ten minutes were over-exposed, washing out a lot of the color and detail.  It did improve towards the end of the episode.
• The writing was good.  This wasn't "last season of Dexter's lab", where everything is different because the new team doesn't understand the characters.  It looks like part of the reason is that the director also wrote some of the old episodes.
• It's good to see Ringo still getting work.
• Wonder Woman.
• Finn and Jake in the best Jake transformation scene ever.
• Grover.