Spoiler warning: the following contains spoilers for Game of Thrones Season 7 (2017) 

In episode 4 of season 7, “The Spoils of War” we learn that the Lannister army successfully moved gold from Highgarden to the capital, and Cersei can now pay back the Kingdom’s debt to the Iron Bank.

The bankers have a problem though. Now what? Cersei has their gold in King’s Landing. To return it to the bank’s vaults it’d have to get all the way to Braavos:

The Iron Bank could ship the gold over but piracy is alive and thriving, and rumors of gold shipments would spread far.

Euron Greyjoy’s fleet has proved adept at dominating the seas and could perhaps be hired by the Iron Bank for cover. But even the strongest Ironborn ships will sink to dragon fire, and sea routes out of King’s Landing pass dangerously close to Dragonstone, where Danerys and her dragons will be looking for chances to burn down the Greyjoy fleet. Using it could make the gold more vulnerable rather than less.

Euron’s fleet isn’t the only one around. Mercenary ships could be found but they would expect a large commission and there’s always the risk that they’ll loot the gold themselves.

The Iron Bank could get clever and avoid transporting it altogether. Gold is fungible and a brick of it in the capital is the same as a brick in Braavos. The bank could ask residents of Braavos to deposit their gold in the Iron Bank’s vault and then promise them an equivalent amount plus a premium of 1-2% when they show up in King’s Landing. The bank wouldn’t be too happy about paying premiums, but 2% probably compares favorably to the cost of hiring a navy and risking the whole lot being sunk.

But this assumes there are masses of (rich) people migrating from Braavos to Westeros. In reality, the flow of people is probably in the other direction. Between an oncoming zombie army and continued endemic political instability, Braavos probably looks like the more attractive destination.

The Bank has a final option. Instead of transporting gold to sit in a vault they could put their money to work and lend it out again. Since the gold is in King’s Landing they can’t hope to fund any of Cersei’s enemies without raising the Queen’s suspicions. And so in the episode it makes sense that banker Tycho Nestoris is eager to take the bank’s gold and lend it back to Cersei at (one assumes) an attractive interest rate.

Microsoft released a tool that estimates age based on a photo.

The job of being President is stressful as the Huffington Post noted in this article. We decided to build on this work, and to use Microsoft’s tool, to quantify just how stressful it is, by looking at how much holding the Presidency has aged a person. Our dataset went back to the time of LBJ.

Presidents seem to age at twice the rate of a normal person. For every year that a President spends in office, on average, they age two years.

Not all Presidents age at the same rate. Gerald Ford aged an incredible 13 years, for each of the two years that he was in office.

Meanwhile Reagan actually managed to turn back time and looked younger by the end of his Presidency. This may explain his popularity with old, white, male voters.

We not only looked at photographs, but also put Presidential portraits through the tool. On average, the artists creating Presidential portraits made their subjects appear two years younger than the age they were at their inauguration.

Unsurprisingly, Nixon was the most audacious of the group. As is befitting the only President to have resigned in history – over a question of integrity at that – Nixon’s Presidential portrait made him look 19 years younger than his age at inauguration.

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According  to a 1767-1770 study referenced in this essay, the average wage for an English farm worker was approximately 12 pence per day (plus a small beer allowance), which at 12 pence per shilling and 21 shillings per guinea, translates to approximately 17.38 guineas per year. Read the rest of this entry →

Sachin Tendulkar, among the greatest cricketers the world has ever seen, has decided to retire from one-day-international cricket. Here are three graphs that show why he was by far the greatest batsman in the format:

Nobody comes even close to Tendulkar’s 49 centuries in ODI cricket. The 19 centuries that separate Tendulkar and second placed Ponting are more centuries than legends such as JH Kallis, AC Gilchrist, and ME Waugh have scored in their entire careers.

And lest one think that this is because Tendulkar has played more matches than any other player, here are the same batsman sorted by the average number of innings it took them to score a century:

Tendulkar scored one about every nine matches. There’s just no comparison.

Ultimately though, cricket is about runs:

Tendulkar has scored 34% more runs than the person who’s scored the second greatest amount of runs in ODI cricket. He has scored 13.5% of all one day runs that have been scored by India in ODIs since his debut, and, in fact, Tendulkar is responsible for scoring 1.6% of all ODI runs that have been scored by all players since he made his debut.

Tendulkar’s numbers show that in ODI cricket, not only was he the greatest, he was in a league of his own. There existed no other player of his caliber.

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We suspect that this graph will simply confirm what we have all long suspected. An action movie starts off with things going well for the protagonists, then getting worse, then finally turning around at the end. The graph below shows a minute-by-minute account of if things are going well for the factions, or badly.

As we say; no surprises, but our suspicions are confirmed.

For those who have yet to watch Serenity, the tale is of the crew of a cargo ship (the good guys) on the wrong side of a heartless system-wide regime intent on destroying them. Featuring space pirate-cannibals called reavers.

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