Steven Engelhardt

Using Hugin (based on a recommendation from Keith) and some pictures I took last summer, I have created a few stitched panoramic pictures from last year’s Wisconsin vacation:

Now that I have completed my degree in Computational Finance from DePaul University, I have far more time for leisurely activities such as reading books. Here’s what I’ve been reading recently:

	How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff and Irving Geis.
	When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein.
	The Underpants by Steve Martin.
	The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing (Revised Edition) by Benjamin Graham.

Well, the original source of the error was somebody the WSJ quoted, but they took it the next step without correction:

Until recently, for instance, the Lincoln Navigator offered 128 options on its console alone.

“You know what 128-factorial is—it’s a lot of combinations,” Mr. Mulally joked at a conference recently, mocking the number of designs theoretically resulting from mixing-and-matching the options. (Answer: 3.85620482 x 10 to the 215th power.)

Spector, Mike. “Ford Eyes More Cuts as Recovery Advances; Earnings Improve”. The Wall Street Journal 23 April 2008: A1, A14.

128-factorial is the correct number of combinations of options only if the order in which you pick the options is important. It almost certainly is not. Instead, assuming each option is independent and can be either on or off, the correct number of combinations is 2^128—3.4 x 10^38. Mr. Mulally was off by a factor of 177.

Guess who People magazine voted the Sexiest Man Alive in 1992?

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While reading the Wall Street Journal this morning, I thought I caught them in a (relatively rare) factual error:

[Barack Obama's] subsequent [2004 U.S. Senate] victory was helped along by newspaper disclosures of embarrassing material from the divorce papers of a Democratic opponent.

Kaufman, Jonathan. “For Obama, Chicago Days Honed Tactics“. The Wall Street Journal 21 April 2008: A1.

I thought this passage referred to Jack Ryan, the at-the-time inevitable Republican nominee. Ryan’s candidacy was destroyed as his divorce papers revealed that his ex-wife alleged he forced her to go to sex clubs. However, the article later indicated that this passage referred to Blair Hull, a Democratic primary candidate whose divorce papers revealed he allegedly beat his ex-wife.

The Wall Street Journal did not escape completely unscathed, however, as I spotted this passage from the same article:

[In 2005, Obama] and his wife bought a mansion in Hyde Park for $1.65 million, $300,000 below the asking price.

Kaufman, Jonathan. “For Obama, Chicago Days Honed Tactics“. The Wall Street Journal 21 April 2008: A11.

Obama’s house is in Kenwood, not Hyde Park.

I see both Rudy and Theo Huxtable have appeared in pro-Obama videos. One important question remains: Who are Sondra, Denise, and Vanessa endorsing?

The folks behind chicagocrime.org are at it again — this time with a broader focused site called EveryBlock.

Here’s Chicago’s EveryBlock page, here’s where I work (the Loop).

Raymond Chen wrote an article today about how he couches his writing to preempt “nitpicking”. This hit close to home.

In my first drafts, I frequently add phrases such as “I think …” and adverbs such as “often”; the title of this blog post is an allusion to such behavior. These changes add precision but cause dramatic harm to readability and authority. I now make conscious effort to minimize these types of phrases.

It’s too bad Raymond feels the need to shift the balance the other way.

Bravo, sirs, bravo.

After a long resistance, I have finally caved and decided to use flickr to store my online photos. Here is my flickr account.