LOST is back tonight! And what better way to prepare than an interactive timeline from the excellent NYT graphics team? A good infographic should communicate otherwise-complex ideas in a simple and intuitive manner… oh, never mind, LOST is back and that’s really what matters. Check out the timeline here!

• It’s American as sweet potatoes (but not sweet potato pie)
• The 100 users of Twitter
• Untangling charts
• Is TV getting LOST?

Every single street in Boston is one-way, the wrong way. At least, that’s what I’ve believed since I lived there – no matter where you want to go, the roads that appear to form the most direct route will inevitably carry traffic only in the opposite direction. And somehow that remains true when you try to drive back!

Until today, this was just a thought I kept to myself, except to commiserate with other Boston drivers. But now, Andy Woodruff at Cartogrammar (last seen on TGR mapping the colors of Harvard Square) has exposed this bizarre phenomenon to the world. Andy has mapped out a selection of Boston routes which look short and simple as the crow flies but end up being circuitous nightmares thanks to the city’s bizarre traffic patterns.

I immediately recognized the first (above) as the loop of Cambridge Common in Harvard Square – anyone familiar with the rest?

(Via Cartogrammar)

• Colors of Harvard Square
• Critiquing the Crimson
• The Yom Kippur effect
• Can I get salmon with that?

The WSJ has crunched the numbers and concluded that:

In nearly 200 years of recorded stock-market history, no calendar decade has seen such a dismal performance as the 2000s.

Investors would have been better off investing in pretty much anything else, from bonds to gold or even just stuffing money under a mattress. Since the end of 1999, stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange have lost an average of 0.5% a year thanks to the twin bear markets this decade.

I think the authors should have stopped right there, scratched their heads and wondered how the words “twin bear markets” and a tiny loss of just 0.5% a year could appear in the same  sentence. But they did not, they plowed on with such statements as, “From 2000 through November 2009, investors would have been far better off owning bonds.”

The answer, of course, was a bubble-fueled bull market of low volatility and cheap credit coupled with a decade of unprecedented volatility in general. If we assume for a moment that instead of being a horde of mindless idiots, investors are shrewd market timers, they could have returned 100% just by buying the S&P 500 basket from 2003 to 2007. They would have had not one but two (“twin”) opportunities to reap the same profit shorting the market in 2001 and 2008.

This is why the exercise of boiling arbitrary time periods down to a first order statistic – the average return – is such a meaningless exercise if performed without context. It fails to capture the full texture of the decade – the ups, the downs, the in-betweens. The richness and texture of the last 10 years are to some extent by the S&P’s chart. It’s not useful, instructive, or even a proper comparison to compress the decade. Show me an investor who purchased the index at the start of the decade and hasn’t traded since, and I’ll show you someone who actually might find long term bonds a more suitable alternative.

The second order measure is the real story of the decade: in 2008, the VIX hit 80!! And as late as January 2007, it was under 10!

But enough with the decade retrospectives, with the sensationalist headlines comparing this decade’s average return to that of the 1930′s (here’s a hint: Black Friday was in 1929). You want a story? Focus on the twin bear markets – look at how amazing it was that you could have two in such a short span and still only lose 0.5% a year on average!

But the next time I find someone who only invests on January 1 of years ending in zeros, I’ll be sure to pass this along.

• The end of the world, relatively speaking
• Things you should know before you invest
• Finding the bottom
• From the “future knowledge” file

Aaron Swartz makes some good points about Google, but I just can’t keep reading once he invokes a tactic I can’t stand (and which sadly seems to be gaining currency):

If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results?

Via Daring Fireball

• Don’t Bing me
• Tuesday trends like an Apple a day
• Bing me!
• The Datarati

I saw this ad for the new Cadillac lineup, in particular the CTS coupe, on Sunday night and was left with the feeling that I had seen something almost-but-not-quite-like it before. The sand, the straight-line speed, the radio-quality voices, the ambient nothingness… and finally, I remembered.

Here’s the Cadillac ad:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s the classic BMW spot that preceded it by 8 years:

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Top Gear season 13 is coming!!
• “Why do we live together?”
• You can keep the note
• Ferrari 458 in motion (x2)

Jalopnik’s QOTD: What’s the worst state to drive across?

• Pun watch: Chrysler edition
• Places I’ve been: the Big Well (and meteorite!)
• The M is dead, long live the M
• Ohio: bellwether or fairweather?

Posted as a public service following this announcement (click to zoom):

via Daily Fill.

• The world as seen from Tiananmen Square
• Breaking down labor mobility
• Hedging their bets?
• What [not] to read

The NYTimes Magazine has an article about cooking or, more accurately, how that act has is vanishing from American homes. It addresses the causes of that transformation, from pragmatic time constraints and demographic shifts to the technological (this excerpt stuck strongly in my mind):

“Here’s an analogy,” Balzer said. “A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.”

Leave it to TGR to find the futurist quote in a largely nostalgic essay.

Much of the article is dedicated to America’s fascination with televised cooking, beginning with Julia Childs half a century ago (indeed, the timing of the article is suspiciously fortuitous for Nora Ephron’s new movie). As a recent initiate into that sphere, I appreciated the analysis all the more.

Is cooking doomed to fall by the wayside, a casualty of the march of progress? I hope not; there is such reward in a good homecooked meal – even (especially?) when someone else prepares it.

• Dude, that’s a toad
• “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”
• Things you should know before you invest
• And on the 73rd day I will rest

This article on the newly-announced Ferrari 458 is so incredibly bad – in content and in tone – that I am forced to conclude that Ferrari paid the author for the publicity. Moreover, what’s it doing on a technology site? The complete sum of knowledge regarding this vehicle is four photographs and a vague press release; it won’t be fully revealed until the Frankfurt Motor Show in September – and the article doesn’t mention any of that anyway.

Witness:

People who actually own a Ferrari are, to a man, the kind of self-obsessed weasels you’d cross the road to avoid. And they’d be walking because the Ferrari will be under a dust sheet, broken or being serviced.

And if that didn’t scare you off:

A Ferrari may be an aspirational vehicle, but then so are BMWs, Mercedes and Jaguars costing a fraction of the price and offering practical, reliable, motoring enjoyment. These cars are bought by people who know about driving rather than simply having more money than sense.

Ah, the old “Why buy a steak at Luger’s when you could get one at Friday’s?” argument. And here I thought the whole idea behind choice in consumption was to accomodate differing preferences. I really don’t want to enter this flame war, so just one more quick thought: is the author absolutely out of his mind?

And yes, I will spare you a soliloquy on the automotive wonder that is shared by all – and exclusive to none - of these manufacturers.

• Sponsored by Michael Dell
• “I” before “E” except after “Treasur”
• QOTD: slow and steady edition
• A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street

Love this brief observation from Andrew Gelman:

Original title of article: “Estimating turnout, vote intention, and issue attitudes in subsets of the population”

New title: “Who votes? How did they vote? And what were they thinking?”

• Math is hard!
• Super Tuesday
• Illustrating the importance of data visualization
• Mississippi number crunching

Who knew the little guy was so prolific? A very funny read in today’s NYT:

As we head into the second hundred days of my administration, I feel more pride and pleasure than ever at the prospect of serving the American people and finding ways to make this nation, and this planet, a better place for our children and our children’s children. I am speaking metaphorically here, of course, as I am neutered.

• The First Nerd
• Thoughts on Obama’s first primetime press conference
• Worst Weekend: Roundup
• Keep those soles down!

Nemo and I have been engaged in a very enjoyable debate about zero sum games, and with all this talk of transactions I’m reminded of the following Chelm story (for those unfamiliar, this staple of Yiddish storytelling is a fictional town entirely populated by fools):

Two men are transporting a horse cart of apple cider back to Chelm on a hot August day. One of them is very thirsty and says he wants a drink. The other driver says there are no unpaid drinks allowed. The first man has a single kopek and offers it in payment; it is accepted and the first man drinks. Ten minutes later, the second driver gets thirsty and hands the same kopek to the first man in full payment for the drink he now serves himself. Shortly thereafter, the first driver returns the kopek in exchange for another drink…

The drivers finally arrive in Chelm and find the barrel dry. Thinking over how much cider they sold, the first driver excitedly reaches into his purse to count the profits. After a second, he looks up at the second driver and exclaims, “We’ve been robbed!”

• I’ll have a carbonated beverage, please
• He clearly didn’t give it 110%
• The end of the world, relatively speaking
• Don’t touch that Sortino ratio

Best plot summary ever:

Elsewhere, the giant shark leaps thousands of feet from the ocean and attacks a commercial airplane, forcing it to crash into the water.

The movie’s trailer is here.

• Top Gear season 13 is coming!!
• Hamsters… in 3D
• Coming this November
• Tuesday trends are black and white

Add it to the list of things you didn’t even realize you were missing – here’s a stunning infographic about butter:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(via information aesthetics)

• The Mountain Cleaners
• Dreams of Kurzweil
• If you’re watching this, it’s not the future yet
• DVNO: Four Capital Letters

I really love xkcd. There’s something encouraging about a webcomic focused on math and computer science that is nonetheless so funny and accessible that tens of millions of people read it every month.  And every now and then it errs strongly on the obscure side, as exemplified by this recent comic that sent me off researching Paul Erdos in order to get the joke.

I learned that Paul Erdos was an extremely eccentric Hungarian mathematician who holds the distinction of authoring more papers than anyone else. And apparantly I’m not the only one, as “Paul Erdos” was Google’s #1 hot trend last Thursday, when comic was published.

Incidentally, the punch line is here. Caution – this is nerd humor in rare form. Well, this and yesterday’s post, which I’m off to watch again.

• The First Nerd
• How did I miss this?
• R style guide
• No cash for clunkers