Archive for September, 2007
Not Normal
September 27th, 2007One of the “inspirational people” I list in my sidebar is Nassim Taleb. He’s a trader by profession, but refuses to be pigeon-holed as such, calling himself both a philosopher and a “skeptical empiricist”. Here is the obligatory Malcolm Gladwell profile on him (Malcolm Gladwell is another “inspirational person” of mine, of course.) Besides all that, Taleb writes about and teaches statistics, which is where this blog comes in.
Taleb outlines his heretical (and extreme) viewpoints on the subject in two books of his, “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan”. I’ve read both books and greatly …
A Post With Personality
September 20th, 2007I’ve been interested in personality tests ever since the third grade, when I took a test to see if I was left-or right-brained. (The test said I was left-brained. Shocker, I know.) The problem is, most of the tests seemed like pseudoscience gobbledygook to me back then, so for years I never paid them any mind.
Then one day, a couple years back, my friend Bob sent me a link to one of those free MBTI personality tests. I remembered taking one once upon a time, and it seemed intriguing, so I gave it another shot …
Working Toward Your Goal
September 13th, 2007Sometimes I wonder if the job I have is the right one. (My original major in college was “undecided”.) Of course, a normal response to this question would be to go to your school’s resource center or some such thing, but I’m pretty sure I’m not a normal person, because I turned instead to the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) and the Career Guide to Industries (CGI), both of which are put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Let’s just say that neither are exactly bathroom readers. The OOH even specifically says not to read it cover to cover …
A Twins’ Tale
September 6th, 2007As regular readers of my blog already know, I’m an identical twin. It’s a source of constant curiosity to others, probably because there aren’t that many of us - The best estimate I found seems to put identical twins at about .4 percent of the population, or around 1 in every 250 births. Fraternal twins, by contrast, are much more common, at around 2.7 percent of births (around 1 in 37 births). So that means that there are almost 7 times more fraternal twins than identical twins out there. No doubt this is mostly due to fertility drugs …