Quotulatiousness

September 5, 2011

Vikings sign players to practice squad

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:10

The team roster has solidified a bit from the initial release yesterday, as they claimed linebacker Xavier Adibi off the waiver wire from Houston, and cut tight end Allen Reisner to make a roster spot for him.

Position Starter(s) Backups Practice Squad Injured Reserve
QB (3) McNabb Ponder, Webb    
WR (5) Berrian, Harvin, Jenkins Camarillo, Aromashodu Arceneaux, S. Burton  
RB (3) Peterson Gerhart, Booker King  
FB (0)     Asiata, D’Imperio  
TE (3) Shiancoe, Rudolph Kleinsasser, Reisner1 Reisner  
OL (10) Loadholt (RT), Hutchinson (LG), Sullivan (C), Herrera (RG), C. Johnson (LT) Cooper, Love, Fusco, Brown, Olsen DeGeare Kooistra
DL (9/10) Robison (LE), Williams (UT)2, Ayodele (NT), J. Allen (RE) Griffen, Ballard, Awasom, Guion, Reed, Evans McKinley  
LB (6) Greenway (S), E.J. Henderson (M), E. Henderson (W) Onatolu, Dean, Adibi    
CB (6) Winfield, Griffin C. Cook, Sherels, A. Allen, B. Burton    
S (5) Abdullah, Sanford T. Johnson, Frampton, Raymond   Brinkley
K (1) Longwell      
P (1) Kluwe      
LS (1) Loeffler      
KR Harvin* Booker*    
PR Sherels* Camarillo*    

Players who have been waived are marked like this, and newly signed players are marked like this.

Notes:

1. Allen Reisner was cut to make room for signing linebacker Xavier Adibi. The team hoped to sign him to the practice squad if he cleared waivers on Monday night.

2. Kevin Williams has been suspended for the first two games of the season, and fined another two game cheques. He won’t count against the roster limit until the third game.

Update, 6 September: The team announced that Christian Ponder will be the backup quarterback (Joe Webb will run the scout team), Jamarca Sanford will be the starting safety over Tyrell Johnson, and Allen Reisner cleared waivers and has been signed to the practice squad.

“Listening to some foodie types, you would think that anything that has been remotely industrially processed was as deadly as nerve poison.”

Filed under: Food, Health, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:48

Rob Lyons calls out hypocritical attitudes toward processed food:

Listening to some foodie types, you would think that anything that has been remotely industrially processed was as deadly as nerve poison. Yet even food snobs eat plenty of processed food. It’s just the right kind of processed food.

A great illustration of the fact that there is nothing wrong, per se, with processed food is a little bit of self-experimentation by Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University. Last year for 10 weeks, Haub ate a Twinkie bar every three hours instead of a meal, adding variety to his diet with Doritos, Oreos and sugary cereals. He kept up some semblance of good nutrition by taking multivitamins and throwing in a few vegetables, too.

But most importantly, Haub stuck to eating no more than 1,800 calories per day — well below the 2,500 calories per day usually suggested for men. The result was that Haub lost 27 pounds. This ‘convenience store diet’ may not have been ideal, but in many respects his health appeared to be better. His cholesterol test results suggested he was in better condition than before, despite this diet of ‘junk’.

How the wreck of a ship-of-the-line led to the Mary Rose

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

The bottom of the Solent must be carpeted with shipwrecks:

According to naval historian Dr John Bevan, the largely forgotten flagship, which sank in the Solent at Spithead in August 1782, helped divers to locate the wreckage of the Mary Rose in the 1830s — a full 150 years before the stricken vessel was raised from the seabed.

More than 900 people died when the Royal George sank, including 300 women and 60 children who were visiting the ship which was due to head for Gibraltar with HMS Victory.

It was the biggest loss of life in British waters.

The 100-gun battleship had been heeled on to its side for repairs to be carried out on its sea cock — a valve on the hull — when it began to take in water though its open gun ports. It capsized and sank.

“For weeks after the tragedy, bodies washed ashore at Southsea, Gosport and Ryde and were buried in mass graves along the seafront,” said Royal Marines Museum historian Stuart Haven.

The Royal George remained in shallow water just beyond the entrance to Portsmouth harbour for many years, “her masts standing above the water a macabre reminder of the tragedy,” Mr Haven said.

Some 50 years later the pioneering divers Charles and John Deane tried to recover the battleship, which had become a hazard to other vessels.

Between 1834-36 the brothers undertook a series of dives.

False ideas about investment risk

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Dan Ariely points out that most people have no idea at all about some of the key questions on investment risks:

To this point, we’ve run a number of experiments. In one study, we asked people the same question that financial advisors ask: How much of your final salary will you need in retirement? The common answer was 75 percent. But when we asked how they came up with this figure, the most common refrain turned out to be that that’s what they thought they should answer. And when we probed further and asked where they got this advice, we found that most people heard this from the financial industry. Sort of like two months salary for an engagement ring and one-third of your income for housing, 75 percent was the rule of thumb that they had heard from financial advisors. You see the circularity and the inanity: Financial advisors are asking a question that their customers rely on them for the answer. So what’s the point of the question?!

In our study, we then took a different approach and instead asked people: How do you want to live in retirement? Where do you want to live? What activities you want to engage in? And similar questions geared to assess the quality of life that people expected in retirement. We then took these answers and itemized them, pricing out their retirement based on the things that people said they’d want to do and have in their retirement. Using these calculations, we found that these people (who told us that they will need 75% of their salary) would actually need 135 percent of their final income to live in the way that they want to in retirement. If you think about it, this should not be very surprising: If you add 8 hours (or more) of free time to someone’s day, they will probably not want to spend this extra time by going for long walks on the beach and watching TV — instead they may want to engage in activities that cost money.

You can see why I’m confused about the one-percent-of-assets-under-management business model: Why pay someone to create a portfolio that’s 60 percent too low in its estimation?

And 60% is if you get the risk calculation right. But it turns out the second question is equally problematic. To show this, we also asked people to tell us how much risk they were willing to take with their money, on a ten-point scale. For some people we gave a scale that ranges from 100% in cash on the low end of the risk scale and 85% in stocks and 15% in bonds on the high end of the risk scale. For other people we gave a scale that ranges from 100% in bonds on the low end of the risk scale and buying only derivatives on the high end of the risk scale. And what did we find? People basically looked at the scale and said to themselves “I am a slightly above the mean risk-taker, so let me mark the scale at 6 or 7.” Or they said to themselves “I am a slightly below the mean risk-taker, so let me mark the scale at 4 or 5.” In essence, people have no idea what their risk attitude is, and if they are given different types of scales they end up reporting their risk attitude to be very different.

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