Electoral College Optimization

The US Constitution establishes an indirect system to elect the president and vice president. People elect a college (a group) of electors that then elects the president. This used to be a non-issue and non-event for ages up until in November of 2000 the election was so close in Florida that it required waiting for a few weeks and a Supreme Court decision to decide the winner. Another eventful election happened in 2016 (sans the Supreme Court intervention).

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I am on Fiverr.com…

…And sometimes I wonder why.

Anywho. I mostly do Excel gigs on Fiverr. Ah, by the way, Fiverr.com is a website and marketplace where freelancers showcase the “gigs” they are prepared to work on. There is some literature about Fiverr on Amazon. You can check what I offer on the top menu on this blog under “Services”, the submenu links to some of the gigs (and clicking “Services” links to my profile on Fiverr).

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The Millionaire next door (book review)

I finally finished reading “The Millionaire Next Door” by Thomas Stanley and William Danko. Early this summer at a garage sale in my neighborhood I got a copy  of the first original edition from 1996:

And I say “finally finished” because it was hard to go through it, I was a bit disappointed but I still got a few good things out of it (details towards the end). Continue reading “The Millionaire next door (book review)”

A neural network approach to college football rankings

The usual image of an artificial neural network:

What follows is a paper that I wrote in the Spring of 2001 for an “Introduction to Neural Networks” class that I took as part of my Master’s degree. It is mostly a review of someone else’s paper on the subject, except that I wrote the network in Excel and ran it on that year’s football season games. Fun, fun. Continue reading “A neural network approach to college football rankings”

Your money or your life (book review)

Just finished reading “Your Money or Your Life” (1992), by Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin:

I first heard of the book last year from the Mr. Money Mustache site and then from many other sources in the financial independence movement. It turns out 2017 is the 25th! anniversary of the book and the authors had been organizing seminaries and workshops for years before the book, so this “thing” has been going on for a long time.

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