Category Archives: Interesting

More Fun With Congressional Payrolls

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I’ve done a little more digging over at Legistorm and here are some fun numbers about the payrolls of North Carolina’s congressional delegation.  This time I’ve included the Senators, both of whom are Republican (Dole and Burr).  Please keep in mind that these numbers are extrapolated from the first quarter 06 numbers reported by House members, and 1/2 of the payroll reported by the Senators between 10/1/05-3/31/06.  That means they may not be exact to the dollar but they’re definitely close:

  • Total Payroll for Congressional Staffers in 06, not including the members’s salaries: $17,579,880
  • Cost per NC resident to cover Congressional staff salaries in 06 (not including the members’ salaries and based on US Census’s most recent Estimate of NC Population): $2.02
  • Total Number of staffers: 359 (306 full time)
  • Avg. pay per staffer: $48,969.03
  • Avg. pay per staffer in Senators’ offices: $80,135
  • Avg. pay per staffer in Rep.’s offices: $42,849
  • Highest payroll for a NC member of the House: $969,552 (McIntyre, D-7th)
  • Lowest payroll for a NC member of the House: $645,382 (McHenry, R-10th)
  • Average payroll for Republican House members: $802,231
  • Average payroll for Democratic House members: $906,577
  • Average payroll for Senators: $2,023,399
  • Average number of full time staffers for Senators: 42
  • Average number of full time staffers for Representatives: 17

If you want to be a well-paid Congressional staffer in NC you
definitely want to first try and get on a Senator’s staff (they pay
almost 90% better than House members do) but since there’s a limited
supply of those jobs you’re more likely to get a job on the House side.  I had my suspicions that the amount that members of the House were paying might have a correlation with how long they’d been in office, so I decided to rank them by seniority and then by their payroll.  Below is a list of Representatives in descending order (longest serving to shortest) and in parentheses is their rank in terms of payroll (1 is highest payroll and 13 is lowest).

  • Rep. Coble (2), R, 11th term 
  • Rep. Price (4), D, 9th term
  • Rep. Taylor (10), R, 8th term
  • Rep. Watt (5), D, 7th term
  • Rep. Myrick (3), R, 6th term
  • Rep. Jones (9), R, 6th term
  • Rep. McIntyre (1), D, 5th term
  • Rep. Etheridge (8), D, 5th term
  • Rep. Hayes (11), R, 4th term
  • Rep. Miller (7), D, 2nd term
  • Rep. Butterfield (6), D, 2nd term (served a partial term in 04)
  • Rep. Foxx (12), R, 1st term
  • Rep. McHenry (13), R, 1st term

My suspicion was borne out somewhat.   If you want to work for a Representative who pays well then you need to work for one who’s been in office for at least five terms and if you can’t hire on with one of them then get in on the ground floor with Rep. Butterfield;  he’s showing early signs of being a generous boss, at least financially.

Or just go after the Democrats, since with the exception of Rep.’s Myrick and Coble the Republicans appear to be pretty tight with the dollar.  Here’s the ranking by party, again 1 is the top paying office:

  1. Dem
  2. Rep
  3. Rep
  4. Dem
  5. Dem
  6. Dem
  7. Dem
  8. Dem
  9. Rep
  10. Rep
  11. Rep
  12. Rep
  13. Rep

Of course the real money play is to get a job with one of these folks, put in a few years and then go work for a lobbyist.  The trick, of course, is to make connections on the right side of the aisle (i.e. for the party that’s in the majority) so you may want to wait until after this November to apply.

In Defense of La Siesta

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Some of the smartest people I’ve known have been avid nappers.  For full balance and accuracy I should also tell you that some of the laziest people I’ve ever known are also avid nappers, but the difference is there is often no discernible time between sleeping and napping.  Anyway, it ends up that some brain studiers (neurobiologists) did a memory study on a bunch of folks and found that those who napped did 15% better than those who didn’t.

It will not come as a shock to my friends and family, many of whose names I can never remember, that I never nap.

This is Your Egg. This is Your Egg Being Launched by an Induction Coil Rocket Launcher

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How do people who are really smart (i.e. geeks) with some time on their hands entertain themselves?  Why, they build a do-it-yourself electro-magnet rocket launcher using something called induction coils.  If you care you can read about it here, but take my word for it that they get a lot of bang out of this gizmo.  Don’t believe me? Watch the Youtube video below of them launching an egg.  Keep watching until the end to see how the inside of the egg ends up:

This is Your Brain. This is Your Brain on…

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So Bill Gates sets up a huge non-profit foundation with his wife that is funding some amazing projects around the world.  What has his old partner, Paul Allen done?  Well let’s see. 

Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science
in Seattle are today celebrating the completion of a new digital atlas
of the mouse brain. The achievement will likely lead to a greater
understanding of how the human brain works…

Mice brains and human brains have significant differences, but are
similar enough that a complete "atlas" of the mouse brain is seen by
many scientists to be as important a milestone as the Human Genome
Project, which mapped the DNA sequence.

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft 30 years ago with Bill
Gates and is one of the world’s richest men, donated $100 million to
create a searchable 3-D digital map called the Allen Brain Atlas. The map is the inaugural project of the Allen Institute for Brain Science…


Allen’s funding helped to assemble a dream team of scientists, who
methodically scanned ultra-thin slices of mouse brain with the aid of
robot helpers. Those scans help to identify how individual genes are
"turned on" in different areas of the brain…

Link to related text and images at Wired News.

You know I’m starting to feel a little better about all the cha-ching I’ve spent on Office and Windows over the entire span of my adult life.  Here’s a sample pic from the atlas:

Mousebrain

Poker Econ or Econ Poker?

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So I’m mowing my lawn on Saturday and is it’s wont to do my brain started wandering off without me.  During its journey it stumbled across an idea that I’m thinking of actually trying to implement.  Here it is in bullet point via the stream-of-conciousness path that my brain took:

  • I wonder why I love playing poker in person, but not online.
  • I miss playing poker.
  • I should put together a poker game.
  • Didn’t those Freakonomics guys say they were going to study the behavior of poker players and weren’t they looking for people who would keep track of how their hands were played? (Yep, it’s called Pokernomics).
  • I wonder if people with different economic outlooks play poker differently?
  • I wonder if liberals play differently from conservatives?
  • I wonder if you could have a poker tournament with special rules that would somehow replicate economic or political situations?
  • I don’t know crap about economic or political theory…maybe I could recruit someone to help me create rules and then see if peoples’ behavior changed.  I think we’d have to run two games: one a control with normal rules and then a second with the changed rules and then track how people play in each. 
  • Is this even feasible?  I mean if someone is a horrible poker player it doesn’t really matter what they’re economic theory is does it?
  • Yep, I need to recruit someone to help me with this.
  • If we can make it work this would be a great fundraiser.  We could donate at least some of the pot to charity, although this might be an economic exercise in and of itself.  People will play awful loose if their stake is a sunk cost.  Maybe we’ll have to come up with another incentive for winning.
  • Wow, the lawn’s done.

After mowing I researched this a little bit and I found a guy who posited the idea of using poker as an analogy in teaching law/economic theory.  I also found a site that has rules for something called Solidarity Poker; in my brief review it looks like it might be an interesting experiment for the liberal (i.e. communist) side of the spectrum, but I’ll have to review further.  I’m thinking this could be a fun thing to do, but I really need to get some help on this.  Maybe Boyd?  Suggestions are welcome.

And if we can’t make it work then screw it, I’ll just put together a good old fashioned game of 7-stud or hold ’em. 

Don’t Fear the Smart Big Man, Embrace Him

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My favorite people are large, strong men who also happen to be intelligent.  I thought of this when I ran across this Freakonomics post about a 6’8", 350 pound professional football player who majored in economics at Cal and who reads educational material in his free time.  That’s my kind of dude.

Here’s the deal: through ninth grade I was always the smallest kid in my class and I wasn’t endowed with natural strength although I did have a little speed.  In ninth grade I had the distinction of being the punching bag or locker-stuffing victim of several convicts-to-be, but I learned how to run well and I often found I could out-think my tormentors, usually by pointing behind them and saying "Holy shit that girl’s boobs are showing" and when they turned to look I’d take the precious seconds it bought me and run like hell. Sometimes my trickery didn’t work and that’s where the smart big man came into play.

You see I made friends with this one freshman football player who was actually studious.  The problem for him was math; he was doing okay but he really wanted to ace the class and we’d often work together during breaks to get him up to speed.  Well, one day he saw me getting chased around the track in gym class (I’m not kidding) and proceeded to whip up on the kid doing the chasing.  Word got around and my torture decreased significantly, but unfortunately not completely.  Still I forever after had a soft spot for studious big men.

I finally hit my growth spurt in tenth grade and after that I only got into a couple of scrapes and those were always fair fights.  I also found that most of my friends who were big suffered a kind of prejudice where everyone assumed they were dense.  Of course they weren’t and it was always fun watching them prove people wrong.

Can you think of a better person to have in your corner than a smart big man.  Put another way, would you want that person in the other corner?

A Book for My Mom and Other Smart People

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My mom has always liked doing crossword puzzles, acrostics and other mind games as a form of entertainment.  Now she does them because she thinks she’s getting old and everything she’s read tells her that constantly challenging her brain will help stave off dementia or just plain memory loss.  So she’s gone from a casual procrastinator to a motivated procrastinator (I’m still in the casual category).

That’s why I think a perfect gift for mom this x-mas will be a book called Mind Performance Hacks from O’Reilly publishing.  David Pescovitz at Boing Boing described the book this way:

The book is like a user’s guide to your brain complete with new
"software subroutines" that you can run to optimize various mental
processes like memory, creativity, emotional response, learning, and
logical analysis.

You can read seven sample hacks here, including:

World’s Greatest News Spoof or Creepiest News of the Day

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According to this story in the BBC there’s a small town in Cambodia with people who have been infected by a new parasite carried by mosquitos native to the area.  The mortality rate for those infected so far has been 100%, but the strange part of the story is that the parasite restarts the victims’ hearts and other organs for a couple of hours and the victims proceed to walk around in a zombie-like state and behave violently before the effect wears off.

According to the story the Cambodian government is studying the parasite, an action which US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has objected to and claimed that the Cambodians hold a great potential biological weapon.  You think?  (I’m wondering if the same parasite is indigenous to DC…might explain a lot of the goings-on at the White House).

This has all the earmarks of a spoof, but if it’s true I can honestly say that it’s one of the creepiest stories I’ve seen.  Ugh.

Debunking Internal Myths and Others’ Perceptions of Me

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Every once in a while I think to myself, "You know you can be pretty smart" and then something or some one comes along to knock me down a peg or twelve.  More often than every once in a while my family and friends think to themselves, "Jon/Husband/Dad/Son sure is a blogging dork.  Look what he's reading/doing/watching."  Well I offer the following as evidence that I'm not that smart and not nearly as dorky as some:
Cardmachine
"Menger’s Sponge – named for its inventor Karl Menger and sometimes
wrongly called Sierpinski’s Sponge – was the first three dimensional
fractal that mathematicians became aware of. In 1995 Dr Jeannine
Mosely, a software engineer, set out to build a level 3 Menger Sponge
from business cards. After 9 years of effort, involving hundreds of
folders all over America, the Business Card Menger Sponge was
completed. The resulting object is comprised of 66,048 cards folded
into 8000 interlinked sub-cubes, with the entire surface paneled to
reveal the Level 2 and Level 3 fractal iterations."

I rest my case.