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Coming Attractions: Wagner Ate My Blog Post

by meep

5 June 2015, 06:37

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Before I get to the story, thanks to my referrers this past week:

And to all my retweeters — unfortunately, I’m still figuring out a way to get a convenient list twitter-related stuff. I’ll figure it out eventually. Maybe. After I do some graphs.

ORGANIZATION

Just for convenience, here are the posts on the five Illinois state pension plans, separate and in aggregate: (not in chronological order)

By no means are those all my Illinois blog posts.

I just picked those as the highest-level explanations, and are a bit more timeless than the news-commenting items that go by.

WE’VE GOT GRAPHS!

So the blog post that was eaten by Wagner last night contained these exhibits:

(oooo blobs)

(remember the kids game SPOT THE DIFFERENCE?)

My twitter header photo is also related. (depending on the device, you may not see it… it’s the graph at the top, not the picture of my face.)

That the blog post got eaten gives me a little more breathing space. I’ve emailed the people who created that first block of graphs to see if I can reproduce their results. I’m sure they ran the statistics code properly. It’s that there were some interesting correlations I saw in the data, and I want to graph those.

As opposed to the blobs you see above.

Also, I want to geek out about the issue with correlation coefficients, and that will take a little time as well.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

Obviously, the graphs above will be coming back, whether or not I can get the underlying data. It’s inspired me to do some digging in the Public Plans Database. I’ve been using a lot of their graphs directly, but there is so much more info in the database than they show you in the standard graphs.

I’m going to reproduce some graphs (like my twitter header) to see if I can get to this whole discount rate issue.

Among other things.

Other things I’m working on:

Statement to the Actuarial Standards Board for a public hearing on Actuarial Standards for Public Pensions being held in Washington, DC on July 9. I’m going to be there. Mark Glennon of Wirepoints has posted his own statement, and you should read it. It has a bunch of the ideas I’m working on for mine.
Pension numbers for: Ohio, Kentucky, Chicago, New York. I’ll leave New Jersey to John Bury for now. Chicago will likely come first, for obvious reasons.
My tumblr, Croton Falls Heights I let it die for a while, and want to bring it back.
Some articles on Churchill and Ben Franklin for external publication. Here’s my blog post on Orson Welles and Winston Churchill. Here’s my Amazon review of Ben Franklin’s Autobiography.

And much, much more

GETTING BACK AT WAGNER WITH VERDI

The story with Wagner is that one of the Met Opera’s productions of Wagner just came on my Met Opera on Demand account. I’m not into Wagner, but I have a lot of Wagnerite friends, and der Meistersinger is supposed to be a comedy, so what the hell. I mean, Wagner was an asshole (that’s an understatement), but lots of assholes made great music I enjoy.

So I had the opera playing in my browser while I was working on the blog post last night.

And the computer froze up about a half hour into the opera.

So:

1. I am not going back to Wagner for a while
2. I will remember to keep my posts in draft mode and back them up
3. I will get back at Wagner with this Verdi aria

Verdi is the anti-Wagner (though yes, they had some commonalities)

The grand work of each at the end of their lives?

Wagner: building a monument to himself with other people’s money

Verdi: building a rest home for poor musicians with his own money

Yeah.

Let’s put in some more Verdi:

Va, Vecchio John!

STUMP » Articles » Coming Attractions: Wagner Ate My Blog Post » 5 June 2015, 06:37

Coming Attractions: Wagner Ate My Blog Post