Status-Q

I have very little interest in the Olympics – and strongly object to the hundreds of pounds of my taxes that will be wasted in 2012 – but I do get a regular report of recent events over the dinner table, and a thought occurred to me tonight….

I think there should be a unit of Olympic achievement for countries. We might call it the Apollo. Your Apollo score would be something like the number of medals won divided by the number of your athletes attending and by the population of your country and its GDP. You’d also want to subtract something for the proportion of your athletes who had tested positive on drugs tests in the past…

Rose says it’s more complicated than that, because so many athletes do not train in their own country; they get scholarships to US universities, so the GDP of their country is less relevant. And I think an athlete who gets medals in several different disciplines should score more than one who just gets the 100, 200 & 400m medals in the same thing.

So it’s far from trivial. The definition of the Apollo would need to be refined over time.

Still, it might make an interesting discussion in the pub. If you wanted a realistic measure of a country’s sporting achievement, how would you do it?

An exceedingly impressive video from Boston Dynamics. Well worth a look.

Dashed clever, these robotics chaps.

Many thanks to Jason Young for the link.

Dinner tonight at the splendidly-named Bar Q. It does Asian-style barbecue (and, by the way, comes highly recommended).

The friend who met us there was asking the waitress how business was going (since so many NY restaurants last only a few months). She said it was good, but the pattern of business changed in the summer because so many people go away for weekends, and she came up, completely seriously, with what I thought was a wonderfully New-York phrase. She said that

Wednesday/Thursday is the new Friday/Saturday

Well, after our flight from Detroit to New York was cancelled twice in a row and delayed for an uncertain period on our third attempt, we decided that 36 hours of delay was quite enough for a 2 hour flight and we should take our destiny into our own hands.

So we’re driving. This comes to you from a thoroughly uninspiring Best Western in Youngstown, Ohio, where we’ve broken our journey. Normally I quite enjoy long cross-country drives in the States, as long as I have plenty of time to stop and explore the back-roads. This time, however, we need to see Rose’s publishers before the flight home, so I think we’ll hit the highway again tomorrow for 7 hours or so on the cruise control…

Update: Well, we got to New York in the end, and, even including a reasonable night’s sleep and meals, we still managed to travel an average of 28 miles per hour for the last 24 hours!

I was out with my brother-in-law a couple of days ago, when his mobile phone beeped. He looked at it and handed it to me.

“It says I have a ‘text message’. What’s that? And how do I read it?”

I was reading a discussion about whether or not it was worth buying AppleCare – Apple’s extended warranty – on your new iPod/laptop/desktop. It reminded me of another discussion, several years ago, when a friend pointed out to me that all insurance policies of any sort will, statistically, lose you money. If they were worthwhile for the purchaser, they wouldn’t be worthwhile for the manufacturer/insurer, and they exist only because they make money. Money for other people. People who aren’t you.

Now, it’s not always easy to keep that fact in mind when you suddenly get a £700 bill for a new logic board on the laptop you bought 18 months ago. You forget that you saved £120 by not buying the extended warranty on the elderly fridge which is still working fine, and the TV, and more on the last laptop, and your last three mobiles… and so forth, all of which add up to much more than the immediate bill that looks so distressing.

So you should only buy insurance when the thing you’re guarding against is so expensive that you really couldn’t afford to be hit by it (which must also mean that it’s terribly unlikely, or you couldn’t afford the premium), when you’re legally obliged to, or when you have good reason to believe that it’s very much more likely to happen to you than to anybody else. For anything else, if you feel pangs of angst when the salesman starts putting pressure on you to buy his lucrative extended warranty, set up a special savings account and put the money there instead. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you’ll be better off in the end, my friend!

The US/Canada edition of Rose’s latest book officially hits the shelves next week. We’re heading over to Michigan for the launch, and stopping briefly in New York on the way back.

But apparently, people who ordered it on Amazon have started receiving their copies. So I thought I’d let my transatlantic readers know, just in case… there’s a link on Rose’s site if you get the urge… 🙂