Max's Blog

In discussions with my friends about the rising cost of  medicare and medicaid the idea of just cutting military spending to pay for government programs frequently comes up. I always think this is a bad justification. Even if we could cut spending, that doesn't justify inefficiencies in spending that lead to higher costs, and there are less painful solutions out there (that might require more political capital, but that's what discussions are for). But lets grant that cutting military spending is something we want to do. How much is there really to cut? We constantly here from the DoD that they need more money, although that's what we hear from every government agency. I decided to actually look at some numbers. Turns out that military spending has proportionally become less and less of discretionary spending, even after Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" speech. Going from 73% of outlays in 1962 (the first year data is available, even before the Gulf ...

Shakespeare’s Genres      Any school child will be familiar with the classification of Shakespeare's plays into comedy, tragedy, and history. Yet these classifications, that are so old they appear in the first published collection of his work, are not as simple as they seem. Since the beginning of Shakespeare’s writing and especially towards the end of his career the lines between the genres blur. As a result, alternative classifications of Shakespeare’s canon have been proposed. Along with this blurring of lines between traditional sorting’s, new plays have been discovered. This has led to the question of what genres these new plays belong in. I decided to use PCA and HCA analysis to see if a quantitative method can provide clues as to what classifications are useful, and where new plays belong.                      Seven years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616 the First Fol...