Quotes of the Day

Everywhere around the world, the future is uncertain. But in India, even the past is uncertain.

This quote, from former RBI Governor Y.V. Reddy, has been used by multiple authors (Ajit Ranade, Vivek Kaul) in the context of the revised GDP growth data for 2004-11 using the new methodology. [I managed to track this one to the book, Who Moved My Interest Rate: Leading the Reserve Bank Through Five Turbulent Years by Reddy's successor, D. Subbarao.]

Another favorite, this one from Ronald Coase, has been used (also in the same context) in today's column by A.S. Panneerselvan, the Readers' Editor at The Hindu:

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess [to anything].

Finally, Ashok Desai has some seriously sarcastic things to say in his Economic Times column (which is also a great explainer for what has just happened). A couple of examples:

[The lower GDP growth rates for 2004-11 in the new methodology are] obviously because some new activities have grown very rapidly in recent years. Kumar gave a long list of the modifications. Some of them are so serious that even a PhD thesis might be insufficient to justify them.

... and

Maybe the government has created not only new GDP statistics, it has even invented anew economics, turning old economists into chaiwallas. Anything is possible in a country that manufactured airplanes three millennia ago.

QoTD

... [B]ad papers take a lot of time too, so let us just write a good one.

Attributed to the Princeton economist Dilip José Abreu by his junior colleague Markus Brunnermeier, as reported in Rohit Lamba's essay on Prof. Abreu and his key contributions.

The full paragraph presents the context in which these words were uttered:

In the late 1990s, as Abreu started to develop an interest in financial markets, a young Markus Brunnermeier, now a leading financial economist, joined Princeton. The duo teamed up to write a paper that explained why financial bubbles sustain. Investors are uncertain of when others will start trading against the bubble, making it worthwhile to continue riding it until its painful burst. For example, in the prelude to the 2008 financial crisis, banks kept issuing subprime mortgage backed securities, even as it was becoming clear that the mountain of debt was going to collapse. The then chief executive officer of Citigroup, Chuck Prince, uttered the now iconic words, “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” Bubbles emerge and persist in many such situations, breaking the hypothesis that prices internalize all possible information. It was as if Prince had received the Abreu-Brunnermeier memo, but a tad late. Brunnermeier is effusive in his respect for Abreu: “He has been a mentor… He sets very high standards for himself. As we worked through many models of bubbles and I grew anxious as an assistant professor, he joked that bad papers take a lot of time too, so let us just write a good one.” And boy they did.

QoTD

I am not a fan [of flag burning]. I agree that the American flag should not be disrespected. It's a sacred symbol that should be honored, whether it be on paper plates, or napkins, or banana hammocks.
-- Stephen Colbert [The Late Show (30 November 2016); the clip is also embedded below -- the relevant part starts at the 7th minute.]

Quotes

If you are going to use mice in your research, there are all these federal requirements that have to be complied with. [...] And yet, when it comes to your teaching assistant, [there is] no such requirement that you treat them in a humane way. [...] If someone has engaged in sexual harassment, or if someone has discriminated, or if someone is a sexual predator, they should not have access to federal dollars.
-- Congresswoman Jackie Speier.

That quote is from this CNN story on sexual harassment in science that uses Geoffrey Marcy's case in UC-Berkeley as an example. Here's another quote:

... Institutions are incentivised to protect their faculty.
-- Jessica Kirkpatrick, Astrophysicist.

QoTD

The three purposes of the University?--To provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.
-- Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley (1952-57)

Source: Wikipedia, Quote Investigator.

Narendra Modi: "Vote for the Louts"

Freudian slip, or misspeak? In either case, this fabulous fail of a tweet is way too funny:

Urged people to start voting early, vote for the Louts & give BJP a chance to serve them once again.

Quote of the Day

Ballmer’s reign has done more to defang Microsoft than the Justice Department could ever have hoped to do.
-- Nicholas Thompson in the New Yorker: Why Steve Ballmer Failed.

Note the key word: "defang."

Theory and Experiment

Experimentalist commands, "Emma, please insert NMR data here!"

Theorist begs, "Do you have any data that will fit my theory?"

And Yogi Berra says, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."

Quote of the Day: Trying to have a life

... I don’t leave comments on other blogs, I don’t have another Twitter account, Facebook account, Google Plus account, or any of that. Hey, I am trying to have a life.
-- Paul Krugman on his blog.

Quote of the Day

If you want to go to a university where the government decides what kind of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply to a school in North Korea.
-- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg [Source]

For background on the Brooklyn College event that moved him to issue such a strong statement supporting academic freedom, see the posts at Crooked Timber: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

From the Annals of Longest Gramatically Correct Sentence

... that made a spectacularly wrong assessment.

"I believe he has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous. If he can't learn simple Biological facts, he would have no chance of doing the work of a Specialist, and it would be sheer waste of time both on his part, and of those who have to teach him."

From the 1949 school report card of Sir John Gurdon, 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, when he was 15.

Here is an image of part of that report card.

Read more from this Telegraph article.

Quote of the Day

Even jerks have the right to free speech, but they are still jerks.
-- Salman Rushdie in an interview with Jon Stewart [Video embedded below]. The New Yorker has excerpted Rushdie's latest book Joseph Anton about his life after The Fatwā.

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Quote of the Day

Blogging is not writing. It's just graffiti with punctuation.
-- Dr. Ian Sussman, a character in Contagion (2011). [video]

Quote of the Day

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-- H.L. Mencken [in A Little Book in C major (1916)]

[Source: WikiQuote.]

Quotes

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides."
--John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

From Brad DeLong's post:

* * *

Here's a juicy put-down, found in Paul Krugman's post:

"He’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like."
--Ezra Klein (about someone called Dick Armey)

Quote of the Day

It is 1986. You know in your mind you will be here for two years. You will get your degree and go back. You think you will work as a journalist. Maybe even teach. No, you will work as a journalist. Teaching is for people who keep themselves safe from the world. Why return to India if you aren’t going to go out every day to learn about the lives around you? [My emphasis]

That's from Amitava Kumar's essay -- The point of no return -- in which "an Indian-born, US-based author constantly battles that inevitable guilt question: Does he really belong here?"

Krugman Quip

The latest -- from his blog post, VSP Economics -- is about a recent WaPo editorial:

... the WaPo editorial tries to have it both ways. Monetary and fiscal stimulus “kept unemployment from rising out of control” — but somehow doing any more of the same would be disastrous. I guess we’re supposed to believe that there’s some kind of nonlinearity that makes exactly the amount of stimulus we’ve already done a positive, but any slight further stimulus very negative. It would be interesting to think of what kind of model could generate that result.

But I’m joking, of course. There is no model, just the unwisdom of the in-crowd. [My emphasis.]

QOTD

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-- George Bernard Shaw

I found the quote at Science is Beauty, a curator of awesome stuff on science from all over the web.

For a quick taste of what this blog offers, check out this dance of a milk drop on coffee.

QoTD: Otto Neurath on How Knowledge Works

We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismount it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components.
-- Otto Neurath (Wikipedia has a slightly longer version)

Found that quote in this article that starts off with an implausible story about the Titanic, and keeps you hooked all the way to the end.

I also found this Joseph Conrad quote that appeals to the materials engineer in me:

But all this has its moral. ... Yes, material may fail, and men, too, may fail sometimes; but more often men, when they are given the chance, will prove themselves truer than steel, that wonderful thin steel from-which the sides and the bulkheads of our modern sea-leviathans are made.
-- Joseph Conrad, Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic (1912).

Quote of the day

Why do we need to pay scientists when we make the best shoes in the world?
-- Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy [source].