Is there a dog?: Ramblings

Actuaries

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 10:18:38 GMT

I couldn't resist this, as most people I tell what I'm doing want to know what an actuary actually does...so here's a definition, and a few pointers...

An actuary is a person, who passes as an expert on the basis of a prolific ability to produce an infinite variety of incomprehensive figures calculated with micrometric precision from the vaguest of assumptions based on debatable evidence from inconclusive data derived by persons of questionable reliability for the sole purpose of confusing an already hopelessly befuddled group of persons who never read the statistics anyway!

In response to "How much is two plus two?", a marketing VP will say "22"; an accountant will say "4.00"; a mathematician will say "I can demonstrate it equals 4 with the following proof ... "; an actuary will ask "What do you want it to equal?"

Question: How many actuaries does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: a) How many did it take last year? b) How many do you want it to take? c) None, after credibility weighting, we have indications that the bulb is still lit. d) None, the insurance department is not allowing any modifications to the bulb at this time. e) Have any of our competitors changed bulbs yet? f) None, they prefer to leave us in the dark. g) Five: one to screw it in, and four more to estimate the length of its life before being screwed in. h) The same number that it took last year, adjusted for trending. i) Two- The Senior Actuary presents the proposal to Managment and the Junior actuary does the work. j) One- But he/she has to do battle first with Sales and Marketing over the issue. k) One- But first, it takes ten years to pass the exams.

List of actuarial pick-up lines:
7. Of course I won't tell anyone. I'm like the exponential distribution, I have the memoryless property.
6. Is that an official SOA calculator in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? Please note that only an official calculator, bearing the seal of the Society of Actuaries, will be accepted as an answer.
5. So, what exam are you sitting for? Hey, what a coincidence, I'm on that exam committee. I've seen the questions they're gonna ask this time. You should see them, it's gonna be a real killer ...
4. My love for you is endless, like a perpetuity.
3. Since the first time I saw you, my interest in you has compounded continuously.
2. I love the way your hairline emulates the p.d.f. of the Gamma distribution.
1. If you put 5 red, 4 yellow, and 3 green balls in an urn, what's the probability of you coming home with me tonight?

And, my personal favourite:

What does an actuary's wife do when she has insomnia? She rolls over and says, "Tell me again, darling. Just what is it you do for a living?"

-Source: ACTUARIAL JOKES

In case you missed it...

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 08:33:17 GMT

The feed on the right from Barking Dog is my new incarnation, mostly (well, actually, completely so far) updated from Ubuntu.

The main difference between the two from a content perspective would be that here I tend to stick to rants and ramblings and questions of belief and other blather about life in general, whereas there I intend to contain it more neatly to the more technical side of my interests. That's the idea, anyway - it may be that I will end up moving to one or the other, but not for a while yet....

Conspiracies can be fun...

Wed, 17 May 2006 21:06:33 GMT

Just finished reading the Da Vinci Code. I must confess that I was initially not going to, but I was just the tiniest bit intrigued by the idea of a conspiracy, and I always find theories involving secret societies and masonic rituals lots of fun. In case you didn’t know, there is a great deal of quasi-religious (usually Christian fundamentalist) claptrap out there claiming that the entire world is being run by one of a number of different secret societies, including groups variously named as the Freemasons, the Knights Templar and the Illuminati. These groups, one of whose members is always the president of the United States (he/she gets initiated directly after being sworn in – now that’s something you don’t see on Commander in Chief, or maybe you do, I wouldn’t know really), are in control of something known as the New World Order (not like the band formerly known as Joy Division, more like the Ministry song) which has been subtly converting everybody in the world to devil worship or homosexuality or some such perverse practice for the last two thousand years. They also variously practice astrology, witchcraft, tarot, pagan sex rites and other bacchanalian activities, depending on who’s doing the claiming. I know, I know – sounds like fun, right? ;)

The Da Vinci Code is just the latest of a number of books which touch on the topic of conspiracies like this – a couple of others include Philip K. Dick’s Valis (or was it The Divine Transmigration of Timothy Archer? I forget now, maybe both) and the sublime Umberto Eco novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. Now I happen to be quite the sceptic when it comes to ideas like this – my own thoughts on Gnostic spirituality being founded on my own Catholic upbringing. I was poorly educated in the Catholic tradition, with very little in the way of sex rites or anything like that. Perhaps if I had indeed been educated by the Jesuits (who any good conspiracy buff will tell you are all in on this too) I would right now be sitting in a freemason hall, getting my tarot done, drinking a psychedelic aphrodisiac, waiting for my turn in the sex rite. Ah well, what are you gonna do?

So anyway, there was a point to this ramble. Although the vast majority of the ideas in the Da Vinci Code are a bunch of rubbish (IMHO only, of course), there is one that stands out as having a grain of truth. Because among the claims the book makes, one is that the Church (Catholic of course) has from very early times, right back in the fourth century at the Council of Nicaea, suppressed the notion of the sacred feminine in religion. The idea of woman as a sacred vessel, a being capable of the ultimate miracle, the creation of life, is ruthlessly and even savagely oppressed and driven out of doctrine, thought and practice. The only woman that the writers of the gospels appeared to think any good of was the mother of Jesus, and in order for her to be any good at all, they had to strip her of any appearance of sexuality and make her a virgin. And of course the act of sex itself had to be demonized. Instead of a sacred and beautiful communication between two people, it became a bothersome duty of married people to perform behind closed doors, lights off and as little noise as possible, just long enough for impregnation to occur. Heaven forbid you should actually enjoy it.

[It goes far beyond this too – the suppression extended to any other religion at all, as these posed a direct threat to the Catholic domination of the world. When you think about it, it was sort of like a religious version of the business model for Microsoft – if there was a competitor in operation, start doing the same thing with better marketing and distribution and tell everybody those other guys won’t get you into heaven. ]

Anyway, I was just thinking about this because my wife is currently undergoing this very miracle – we are very soon to become parents to a second child, and it is a beautiful thing. Perhaps this is the limit of my own spiritual experience: this is the one thing that I acknowledge is a miracle.

Atheism and how it's related to smoking

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 08:58:16 GMT

Quote: from Way of the Mind

'...faith and religion, in me, only “survived” because I had a defense mechanism - I refused to think about it, like I thought about anything in the “real world”.'

Not going to post much about this, just ran into it while looking around some. Smoking? well, speaking as a smoker who recently quit, I feel much the same way about the brainwashing that we have to go through in order to continue to smoke as I do about the brainwashing required to ensure that we don't apply reason or intellect to our beliefs.