Happy Birthday Whitey Ford

This... This is a black day for baseball.

Flatten a square matrix in Mathcad

Mathcad is awful,

If you like me are being forced to use Mathcad after several blissful years of Mathematica then you get very sad very fast.

Here is a function to flatten a square array of square arrays in Mathcad (click to pop)

It could be extended to non-square arrays by adding a few more arguments. The advantage over the stuff on this page (current top google hit : http://communities.ptc.com/thread/38326 ) is no if-else statements and it works on matrices, not just vectors. Note the ORIGIN is set to 0

More importantly the whole mess can be avoided with creative use of the augment and stack function for array building

A .mov that works in Mac Powerpoint 2011 via quicktime export.

Hey have you ever made a quicktime movie in final cut pro only to not have it work in powerpoint?

I made a movie (.mov) using final cut on a university computer and though it would play locally on my laptop in Quicktime it would not work in powerpoint. I do not have final cut or quicktime pro on my laptop.

I tired using VLC to convert it to an avi, but it would drop frames including the last one.

To do a quick conversion to get it to work open the .mov in quicktime and select File -> Export...

On the Formats Menu select anything, like 720p for instance, and export the movie.

Try it in powerpoint!

Some search terms to help land you here:

Quicktime
Mac Office 2011
Powerpoint
Convert .mov for powerpoint
Export quicktime movie
Final Cut
won't work in powerpoint

12 Million Jobs, Meh

Governor Mitt Romney promises to create 12 million jobs in the 4 years he would be in office, that works out to 12,000,000 / 4 / 12 = 250,000 per month. That sounds like a lot. In general it is, from 1950 to 2007 the average number of jobs created per month was 136,000. (http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet). And compared to recent history it looks like a lot.

But is it a lot ? The average of the positive values in the data from 1950 to 2007 is 212,000. Not that much different than his promise. In fact the Romney has an almost guaranteed shot at accomplishing that goal. If we stay on the course President Obama has gotten us on we'll do just as well. Take a look at the trend started by Obama and the promised growth via Romney.

In fact Obama's trend line, that is the slope of the net jobs curve has been curtailed by the Republicans in congress since his mid-terms. Since then there has been no stimulative spending and growth crushing partisan politics such as the debt ceiling fight. If we had maintained the policies of the first two years we'd be alot closer to that goal. Take a look at this floating average of the derivative of the Jobs Created per month. That is to say d^2 Jobs / d Month^2.

During the first half its pretty good, the stimulus does way better than the Bush Tax Cuts. Even with the winding down of the stimulus the positive derivatives are of a larger magnitude than anything in the Bush years. If anything we need more stimulus, interest rates are low borrow now, repair bridges, jobs nows cheaper transportation tomorrow!

Ive been quiet, too quiet. Here:

oh jeez its been a while

Hello, I saw a post today on Daily Kos and was like wheres the Graph? So then I clicked through to the original Ezra Klein article at the Washington Post to no avail. So with no further research or commentary on veracity here is a graph of the numbers quoted in the Daily Kos blurb.

Anyway I have been super busy with real work but anytime something from the news needs a graphing I'll be back.

Growth Rates

Tim Pawlenty took a drubbing today for saying that his super plan will generate 5% growth for a decade. One article on the subject is here at TPM. Currently the growth rate is 1.8% according to the article. Growth rates are tied to the exponential function. As much as this guys pleads with his students and now millions of viewers on Youtube the exponential function is little understood.

In this case we are going to look at continous GDP growth at a rate of 5% and 1.8% for 10 Years. The function for continous growth like compounding interest is pert or



What does that actually look like. Using the google history of US GDP I made this chart.




Five percent doesn't look that crazy based on the previous years, but a lot of people think its impossible to do that for a decade straight. In fact its never been done before.


Just to illustrate how crazy big 5% growth is lets investigate the history of the growth rate and expand his promise out a few years. The fed has GDP measured here data from the fed available here. By calculating the change in growth each quarter, taking the mean and standard deviation of the result we can get sense of typical growth rates. The resulting distribution shows how rare 5% growth is.



To compare typical growth to 5% growth lets expand our charts to 20 and 50 years. The distribution function was used to create a random growth rate for each year past 2011. At twenty years twice as long as Pawlenty is promising we get this.



Redoing it for 50 years, You can see how incredible that kind of growth would be.



So take growth predictions with a grain of salt and remember the exponential function when a politician, broker or god forbid an engineer promises you a growth rate.