Posts by richard
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INHO, Making Money is worth the price of admission for the water-powered model of the economy alone -- which is actually (I assume) inspired by a real gizmo, incidentally (one of the few examples of which is in NZ).
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I loved Unseen Academicals - he was fully on form, and given his illness I had picked it up with a certain amount of trepidation.
[Pratchett visited New Zealand in the early is the early-mid 90s (maybe 94??) -- and I realized afterwards that I had sat next to his table at a small Chinese restaurant in Christchurch, near the University. I was having dinner with a friend who had come back from California for a visit and she had been good enough to bring me a very high tech 14.4k Teleport Gold Modem, then unobtainable for pretty much any money in New Zealand - the thing was under my chair, in its box with the words "Teleport Gold" written on the side of it. About midway through the meal a bearded British gentleman at a nearby table politely caught my attention and said he was enormously curious to know what was in the box. It was only afterwards I realized who he was.]
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The epilogue of the recent repatriation of Te Umuroa’s remains to Whanganui is very moving.
And, sadly, riddled with plagiarism.
Which is kind of rich in a novel about dispossession.
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Rabbit, however, does have a hole, in which Pooh gets stuck having eaten too much in the way of elevensies. Christopher Robin reads a Sustaining Book to the North end of Pooh, while Rabbit hangs his washing on the South end, and after a week Pooh is thin enough to be pulled free.
And I am quite sure that A A Milne didn't mean it to be read in any double-entendre kind of a way...
This always bothered me -- if a bear eats, a bear presumably excretes. Now, the bear proverbially does his business in the woods, but in this case his south end is stuck in rabbit's living quarters, and we have to wait long enough for him to metabolize the food he so unwisely consumed while waiting for his friend...
A bear whose name - well never mind. Not A Pretty Thought.
(Am pretty sure this in the Poohperplex.)
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Joe Wylie has already discovered it and posted comments. I also noted that the Moomins have never travelled widely, except for the Japanese, who focus on the 'cute' factor.
I think I have only really encountered Moomin in Japan, and not in literary form.... I used to eat curry a couple of times a week at a curry house called "Moomin" in Takadanobaba in Tokyo, across from where I worked. It had six stools at a counter, and you queued for an empty spot.
Unusually for Japan, you ordered the curry on an open-ended scale of potency (an Italian guy who also worked there once got to "12" and was sick for a couple of days), and when I told the proprietor I was leaving he gave me a huge bottle of sake that caused me all sorts of excess baggage problems at Narita the following day....
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After thinking and discussing with my statistically adept partner: 0.36 is the probability of there being a gay player on the team if they are selected at random form the general population. And no matter what you might think of Graham Henry I'm fairly sure he doesn't do that.
This is not strictly true. All it assumes that being gay is uncorrelated with ability or enthusiasm for playing first class rugby.
That is, Henry presumably selects them very carefully (most likely based on their propensity for choking in World Cup matches), but I am assuming that this selection process is entirely uncorrelated with their sexual orientation. (Replace "being gay" with "has a birthday in January" and a similar argument would hold).
If you want to argue that it IS correlated, then you also have to provide some justification for that, and the sign of the correlation could go in either direction -- it is certainly plausible that closeted gay men would find playing rugby to be excellent camouflage, precisely because its culture is not known for its inclusiveness toward homosexuality.
(That correlation may be a function of time, too, given changing attitudes towards homosexuality in New Zealand over the last 30 years).
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Dude, where were you when I was asking for stats help on Twitter (I did pure maths, no stats)
Somewhere other than twitter it would seem.
Doesn't your equation assume that they are selected from a general population and not from a particular group of rugby players?
Sure. But we have no obvious way of knowing whether or not gay men are more or less likely to play rugby than straight ones. (Indeed, if you were anxious to "prove" your masculinity, an interest in rugby may be just the thing for closeted gay men)
Same goes for the 15 All Blacks in history.
Also, 64% is still a good bet against.But in five years time there will be a new squad. So sooner or later you will lose that bet. But given the somewhat larger population of first class players in New Zealand (~10 teams, ~25 players per team??) these numbers suggest that a couple of them are likely gay.
Personally I think 1.5% is too high, based on survey bias. But we'll stick with it.
I should've also pointed out that this is for players who identify as gay.Not sure what you mean by this. Survey bias could push the reported fraction of gay men down down. too. And the issue here is not the number of gay-and-out players (which are easy to count) but the number of gay-and-closested players who, by definition, are pretty hard to count.
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Booya
A guy who calls his blog "field theory" is basically saying "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough" to anyone with a penchant for applying mathematics to the real world.
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Actually, there is this too. Not a new idea.
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I am not sure I understand this argument. If we buy your statistics that roughly 1.5 % of men are gay, and that "gayness" and success at rugby are uncorrelated (in either direction) then at any given time there is a 36% chance that a 30 man All Black squad contains a gay player*
Put another way, given that there have been something like a 1000 All Blacks over the years, that makes for about 15 gay All Blacks (and a somewhat larger number who have had sex with other men, but are straight. Yes sir, very straight indeed, thanks for asking).
As you observe, top class rugby is perhaps not the most accepting environment for a young gay man, so it is likely that any rugby playing homosexuals would be closeted.
But 15 is not an insignificant number, and it is predicated on your assumption that the "actual" proportion of homosexual men in the population is at the 1% level -- change that to 2.5%, and the odds of having a gay man in the squad today are a little better than even.
(Or put a third way, given a dozen or so serious rugby nations, chances are three or four of their national squads have a gay player amongst them -- or that there are several gay men currently playing first class rugby in New Zealand.)
* To work this out properly you can't simply multiply 0.015 by 30, but should multiply the probability that any given player is straight 30 times, or
p(no gay players) = .985^30
p(at least one gay player) =1-p(no gay players) ~ 0.36