I’ve watched the three first lectures, and here’s what I’ve learned so far:

Essentially, game theory is strategic thinking. It’s also applied math. Is is applied in the fields of business, politics, economics and engineering, to name a few. So far, the professor Benjamin Polak has been great at offering examples that are not only interesting, but engaging.

The professor kicked off the course with a game.

Without showing your neighbor what you are doing, write down on a form either the letter Alpha or the letter Beta. Think of this as a `grade bid’. We will randomly pair your form with one other form. Neither you nor your pair will ever know with whom you were paired. Here is how grades may be assigned for this course.

- If you put Alpha and your pair puts Beta, then you will get grade A, and your pair grade C.
- if both you and your pair put Alpha, then you both will get grade B-.
- if you put Beta and your pair puts Apha, then you will get grade C, and your pair grade A.
- if both you and your pair put Beta, then you will both get grade B+

We learned that Beta is weakly dominated by Alpha in this case.

(here is a link to the pdf of the first lesson)

Read on… »

I have decided to expand on my first post on being healthy. Truth be told, I have a hard time being polite about it now. I’ve seen a lot of disgusting things and I feel like ranting about it. I’m not trying to make everyone slim or skinny; I’m trying to tackle our obesity problem up front.

If you want natural selection to favour you and your ability to carry on your genes, it is in your interest to start living a healthy lifestyle.

Stay away from processed food.

That means ditch Pepperoni, Hot Pockets and Mr. Noodles. Sunny Delight is healthy you say? I think your body would prefer it if you simply drank tap water with 1/3 of the volume in granulated sugar. Would you drink that? Of course not. Stay away from fatty food or at least excessive amounts thereof. Burgers may satisfy your palette, but you will slowly retain gained weight, putting more strain on your joints. Your kidneys will be strained from sifting through all the salt you intake. I went out with friends for wings last night, and am now regretting it, as I still feel pretty sick.

Don’t even enter the aisle with chips and pop. It’s all crap. Unless, of course, you want to get diabetes, and chance passing it along to your own children.

It’s all in the whole Food, Kids

There are many ways to use fresh or frozen fruit and veggies, combined with spice and different ways to cook. Off the top of my head: Lentils with curry, red pepper, carrot, a bit of tabasco. Serve with a salad of romaine, spinach, mango with a squirt of lime. It’s really not that hard. Use avocado. Eat smaller portions. When you *sigh* when eating, stop eating; it’s your body’s way of telling you you’re getting full. It takes 20 minutes for you to “feel” the food you swallow, so try not to gorge.

Don’t always eat the same food. Your body needs variety. I’m not saying you need to eat organic, although avoiding pesticides may help in preventing cancer. Your call.

Take A Hike

When was the last time you went for a jog? Can you even jog? How many push-ups could you do at this instant? You do know that reducing the bodyweight on your joints requires you to burn more calories than you intake eh? So you need to do something that burns em. Walk the dog while you’re at it, they’ll love you for it. Building a bit of muscle mass is healthy, and prevents injury.

Take Responsibility

The animal in me doesn’t really care if others don’t take care of themselves, it just gives me better comparative chances at pretty much anything in life. The human in me, however, wishes people would take responsibility of their own health. It’s not a matter of obese people costing us more in tax revenue for health care, it’s a matter of our collective well-being and happiness.

Have you or has anyone you know made an insurance claim following an injury? My father was in a vehicle that was rear-ended by a van, suffered a severe back injury, and to be honest has actually ruined his own life psychologically and now physically (and it has affected the lives of others, which I’ll describe some day). It took him four years to settle with insurance, receiving only a fraction of what his plan was supposed to offer.

In the Unites States, health care is pretty much the same. If you don’t have insurance, you’re fucked if you contract a long-term illness. If you do have insurance, they’ll blame some fabricated “pre-existing condition” that usually does not apply, in order to make it so that the sick don’t get their coverage. In all honesty, even Canadian insurance companies are disgusting.

The worst part? That New Brunswick lost out on the chance to have a government-run insurance option in 2004.


Fear Mongering in America

Not to mention how scary it is for people to bring an AR-15 to an Obama town hall meeting:

I would dare think that if people would be generally more informed and cared a little more about how their country was run, life would be much better.

This is my first bold step: I will be stepping down from my current HVAC design job at the end of the week, and I will begin following some of the steps I think need to be successful at what I want to do. My first task; to virtually attend each of the 26 lectures of Introduction to Game Theory from Yale’s Open Courses.

I’ve read quite a bit about starting a business in the past three years, and I feel I know what I need to know. This couldn’t have happened sooner.

Here’s the first lecture:

This year, it will be mandatory that public schools include The Bible in their curriculum. This is absolute nonsense, why don’t we teach about the alternative view that the Earth is flat at the same time? It’s not as if you’ve traveled around the world yourself; how could you contradict me?

God, I love our socialized researchers and watchdogs. This is why we pay taxes!

• Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance, according to new research on rats and people. (New York Times)

• Canadian Privacy Commissioner: Facebook has until Monday to find a way to fix its ’serious privacy gaps.’ These include the retaining of personal information after an account has been deactivated, and the sending of personal information (other than contact info) to third parties. (www.canada.com)

• Gene therapy improves vision for the blind, by creating a new fovea, the part of the retina that is most densely populated with photoreceptors. (www.technologyreview.com)

• The temperature of the sun’s outer atmosphere soars to several million degrees Kelvin (K); which is much hotter than at the sun’s surface. Scientists have been baffled by this until now. (www.spacefellowship.com)

• Seth Godin has written another unreal post, this time about the future of education. (www.sethgodin.typepad.com)

In December I will finish university. Finally, I’ll get the piece of paper needed to get around in the job market. The pressure’s on—I will be making decisions within this time frame that will shape the rest of my life more than any other time. It almost feels like when I was graduating from high school; nervous, yet open to any possibility.

Thing is, I am convinced that my field of study is not the one in which I wish to pursue a career. I have far more interest in far more topics than engineering. I have learned more out of the classroom by reading, listening and discussing about everything from economics to biology to law. Man, I hate this feeling.

I know that I know nothing:

Now this is how to communicate science!

CreatureCast Episode 1 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.