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Wednesday, Feb 20, 2008 - 23:59 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Images Ready

In lieu of five thousand words, I offer the following five pictures (and a video as a bonus):



(Probably belongs to the previous post). Note the closeness of the espoused positions. This led me to recalled a pertinent quote from Alvin Toffler's Powershift, by Ronald Reagan's chief aide Lee Atwater:

"You will hear a lot in the coming months about the Reagan Revolution, the headlines will be full of the tremendous changes Reagan plans to introduce. Don't believe them. Reagan does want to make a lot of changes. But the reality is, he won't be able to. Jimmy Carter pushed the 'system' five degrees in one direction. If we here work very hard and are extremely lucky, Reagan may be able to push it five degrees in the opposite direction. That's what the Reagan Revolution is really about."

Obama, hear that?

The relative closeness of political positions can admit an economic explanation - imagine a straight waterfront or beach, with people evenly distributed along its length - if you were an ice cream vendor with a mobile cart, where would you place it to get the most sales? Yes, that's right, smack in the middle. Now enter another vendor - where would he place his cart to grab the maximum amount of sales? Right next to you, that's where, assuming that customers have a preference for the cart closest to them.

If the political spectrum can be roughly said to have a single axis, then the corollary of the ice cream example is obvious - parties will park themselves in a centrist position to get the votes. Even with two axes as shown above, the middle ground is still the most fertile, especially as the mass of opinions are going to be situated there rather than being equally sparse everywhere.

(Also probably belongs to the previous post). N.B. there were some who got the full marks in my case:



To those who think NUS is stuffy, I offer countervailing evidence in the form of this:



We got ten million bucks in "Ben" (that's our prof) money to "vote" for good project proposals in a Saturday pitching session, and while sadly the scheme couldn't be followed through due to time constraints, they still made good souvenirs of the event.

The initial plan was to give the money to each presenting group after they said their piece, but of course this was a bit problematic as the later presenters might indeed be the best, but all the cash might have been given out before then; The obvious solution would be to wait till everybody was done, but then some presentations may have been forgotten (then again, those probably wouldn't deserve the cash anyway). If we had only a single ten million dollar note, this could be considered as a form of the secretary problem (may have covered it on this blog already, but what the heck).

And on the subject of cash, the plastering of Google Adsense on this blog has finally paid out:





Thanks for the support, folks :) Please do continue clicking on them if they honestly interest you.

The hamster thanks you too, as you are indirectly funding his star-shaped treats:





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Next: Midterm Break Begins


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1 comment

c.wenhoo said...
how come bush won ah
he like hiding in a bush on the top right


February 21, 2008 - 09:56 SGT     

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