Nerd Pride

Tyler Cowen reminds us of a Hanson point: politics is about status.

I was disappointed but not surprised by this passage by Gary Silverman:

What I like about Obamacare is that it shows some respect for “those people” – as Hudson called them in Giant – who are good enough to work the fields and mow the lawns, and build the roads and sew the clothes, and diaper the babies and wash the dishes, but somehow aren’t good enough to see a doctor from time to time to make sure there is nothing wrong inside.

That is in fact what most of politics is about, namely debates over which groups should enjoy higher social status and which groups should receive lower social status. Of course critics of Obamacare have their own versions of desired status reallocation, typically involving higher status for the economically productive.

...

The deeper point is that virtually all of us argue this way, albeit with more subtlety. A lot of the more innocuous-sounding arguments we use all the time come perilously close to committing the same fallacies as do these quite transparent and I would say quite obnoxious mistaken excerpts. One of the best paths for becoming a good reader of economics and politics blog posts (and other material) is to learn when you are encountering these kinds of arguments in disguised form.

I agree.

And so we come to Noah Smith's article wishing for higher nerd status, or at least an end to nerd-bashing.

Seriously, America. The nerd-bashing has gone too far. Sure, there is a grain of truth in all of the criticisms of the tech industry -- but only a grain. Yes, startups are riskier than many founders realize; but founders are people with good skills who will never go hungry. Yes, San Francisco rents are out of control, but this is more about development policy and NIMBYism than Google and Apple. Yes, inequality is increasing, but it’s increasing across all industries and classes, and bashing Silicon Valley isn't going to stop the march of automation. Yes, big American companies and corporate governance need to improve, but bashing “disruptive” startups isn't going to help the situation. Yes, some tech companies ignore the public interest when pushing for deregulation, but show me an industry that doesn’t do that. Yes, there are sociopaths and wackos among the ranks of tech entrepreneurs, but they’re certainly a tiny minority. (The only tech industry problem that really seems to live up to the hype is the sexism.)

...

We’re looking for rich, successful people to bash. And Silicon Valley happens to be where the rich, successful people are right now. So we’ve turned on the nerds.

... 

Still, I’m irked. I’m a child of the 1980s, when jocks ruled the high schools, and nerds were confined to the basement while the good ol’ boys slapped backs and made deals. When the bespectacled Bill Gates became the world’s richest person, something changed for the better, and I don’t want to go back to the old days. The tech backlash is just another situation where America needs to put aside its urge to turn inward and demonize some subset of the population. We should work to fix the problems associated with the industry, of course, but vitriol isn't the way to do it. The nerds are not the hosts of Mordor.

 Bryan Caplan arguably predicted much of this in his nerd/jock theory of history:

Notice: For financial success, the main measure where nerds now excel, governments make quite an effort to equalize differences. But on other margins of social success, where many nerds still struggle, laissez-faire prevails.

It's suspicious - and if you combine the Jock/Nerd Theory with some evolutionary psych, it makes sense. When the best hunter in the tribe gets rich, his neighbors will probably ask nicely for a share, if they dare to ask at all. But if the biggest nerd in the tribe gets rich, how long will it take before the jocks show up and warn him that "You'd better share and share alike"?

Punchline: Through the lens of the Jock/Nerd Theory of History, the welfare state doesn't look like a serious effort to "equalize outcomes." It looks more like a serious effort to block the "revenge of the nerds" - to keep them from using their financial success to unseat the jocks on every dimension of social status.

I'd love to see a version of Piketty that looks at inequality in dating success for those aged 16-25. Has that inequality gotten larger or smaller over time? Does anyone know? Does anyone other than the nerds care?

It wouldn't be hard to build a stylised case that social changes from the 1960s through to present that decoupled dating from marriage-search for the first decade of dating strongly benefited the jocks at the expense of the nerds. But we have no empirics on it. How would a Herfindahl dating concentration index change over time? Or a Gini coefficient?

Which inequalities matter is more interesting than what's going on on any particular margin of inequality.

Actions have consequences

Last year, I tweeted:

Kid school form, listed ethnicity as "geek", "Jedi". Wife didn't appreciate secretary's quizzical look. In future must hand those in myself.
— Eric Crampton (@EricCrampton) March 26, 2013

I'd filled in the form, Susan had handed it in.

Fast forward a year. Yesterday we had a parent-teacher interview. Ira's teacher asked us to check over his form to make sure his details were correct. One of them wasn't. And so I tweeted this this morning.

I was confused why the school had our son listed as "Greek". Then I remembered that I wrote "geek" on the ethnicity line at enrollment.
— Eric Crampton (@EricCrampton) April 9, 2014

I'd forgotten that we'd listed him as geek. I agree with Liberty Scott here:

@EricCrampton Nothing wrong with that, ethnicity is meant to be "what you identify as", it's almost entirely a psychological state
— Libertyscott UK (@LibertyscottUK) April 9, 2014

But SystemD helps me see the violence inherent in the system.

@EricCrampton Sounds like the education system is trying to repress your child's unique ethic identity .. clearly a case of racism
— SystemD (@gavinbnz) April 9, 2014

Expecting Better

My review of Emily Oster's excellent Expecting Better appeared in this weekend's Christchurch Press; it's copied below. I've added in a few relevant links.

I had a lot of questions for our midwife when we expected our first a few years ago. Questions like, "Which shared-care obstetrician has the best delivery outcomes adjusting for the risk of the patient base?" My wife later warned me that our excellent midwife seemed to think me some kind of pod-person for asking questions about the evidentiary base around the standard pregnancy recommendations. Had we then had a copy of Professor Emily Oster's new book, "Expecting Better", I wouldn't have needed to torture her. I should send her a copy now. And if you're expecting, or thinking about getting pregnant, you should pick up a copy too.

Emily Oster is a University of Chicago economist. When she and her husband, economist Jessie Shapiro, decided to start a family, she started into the data. The pregnancy books and doctors provide a lot of recommendations. Some of these benefit the foetus at next to no cost to the mother. Others provide only a small benefit to the foetus while imposing some cost on the mothers. And, sadly, some impose reasonable cost on the mother while doing nothing to help.

Oster provides us the story of her pregnancy, in an accessible and conversational style, while walking us through the research she conducted along the way. While trying to conceive, she worked out the conception probabilities at each date of the cycle. She also found that while obesity makes it harder to conceive, merely being overweight isn't much different from being normal weight. When the pregnancy test came back positive, she wanted to know, and quickly, whether she could stick with her standard caffeine addiction. She charted the probability of miscarriage at every week of pregnancy. All the “no, you can't eat that” rules? She shows us which of them make sense. Later in the book, she walks through the difficult cost-benefit analysis around amniocentesis - the exact same calculation we ran ourselves.

So what's an economist doing writing a book on pregnancy? Economists are good at framing tradeoffs between risks and benefits to help others decide what's right for them. Further, economists' statistical toolkits are built for solving the kinds of statistical inference problems that plague the population health literature. If a study finds mothers who drink more coffee during pregnancy have worse outcomes, is it because of the coffee, or is it because more nauseous women both have better outcomes and find coffee unappealing? Economists' training helps us sort out which studies have done a reasonable job and which ones really haven't. Oster concludes that a couple cups of coffee a day are just fine.

If costs to the mother never mattered, and if statistical inference were easy, then life would be simpler. But in most cases, we need to weigh how much real risk is imposed by, say, smoking a cigarette during pregnancy, and then decide whether the benefit to the mother could outweigh the cost to the foetus. Smoking during pregnancy is very risky and even light smoking is associated with worse outcomes, so the calculus for most mothers on that one should be easy. But what about drinking? Oster's review of the literature here coincided perfectly with what I found when I looked at the same studies: light drinking during pregnancy, on the order of a small glass of wine every other night or so, does absolutely no harm to the foetus. Heavy drinking is very very bad indeed. But the bulk of the well-designed studies show no risk, and in some cases some benefits, from light drinking. If a small glass of wine with dinner helps you relax and you've been abstaining because you're scared that one glass will do harm, you're making pregnancy less pleasant than it could be and achieving little for it.

Oster concluded, as I did, that most recommendations in this area seem motivated by the fear of encouraging binge and heavy drinkers to continue such very harmful practices during pregnancy. But is it really ethical to lie to pregnant women because we're scared they can't handle the truth?

Similarly, and at least in North America and the UK, there's no good reason to avoid sushi during pregnancy as the dangerous forms of salmonella there are very rare. Were we ever to contemplate a third child, I'd be investigating whether those strains are at all common around New Zealand. On the other side, gardening is riskier than I had expected because of toxiplasmosis gondi.

I worry that the standard full set of dos and don'ts make pregnancy sufficiently costly and nerve-wracking that some families are smaller than they otherwise would be. A lot of current recommendations seem to be public rituals designed to allow the mother to display how much she cares about the infant, and for others to display similar amounts of care for the infant by tut-tutting the mother-to-be. This does harm. We make pregnancy a worse experience, and too-often needlessly so, for the mothers who care and worry most about following all the rules. I worry further that by promoting rules that most people know make little sense, we encourage some mothers to discount even the rules that make a lot of sense. Oster provides a sound assessment of the actual risks to help families make their own decisions about the path through pregnancy that is right for them.

Related posts:

• Naming names
• Transfusions and operating room ethics
• Otago bioethics: Downs edition

TANSTAAFR

Ladies and gentlemen, the Owlbear song.

Geek cred to the first commenter explaining my cryptic title and the problem in Marcotte's song to which it alludes.

Marcotte's D&D works are up on Spotify (and here and here). Listen to them during your next campaign.

HT: my search on Spotify for the word "Owlbear". This is the only song that came up. If you need to ask why I'd have searched Spotify for Owlbears, you've not been reading me long enough.

Middle Earth trade politics

I think that Jason Sorens has the stylized facts wrong here:

Seen on an International Political Economy quiz:
The world of Middle-Earth has become largely peaceful, and international trade is growing. The Shire, Gondor, and Mordor are three countries in Middle-Earth. The Shire is abundant in land and scarce in labor and capital; Gondor is abundant in labor and capital and scarce in land; Mordor is abundant in labor and scarce in land and capital. Some of the products these countries trade include Longbottom leaf (produced intensively with land), mithril chain-mail armor (produced intensively with labor and capital), and raw iron ore (produced intensively with labor).

In the period leading up to the events described in the Lord of the Rings, Mordor was clearly capital-intensive. Gondor eschewed physical capital, favouring magic and tradition over technology and research.

Subsequent to the war of Gondorean aggression against the peaceful Orocuens of Mordor, egged on by the Wizards' Council who sought to prevent the coming Industrial Revolution in Mordor which would have forever reduced the relative power of magic, the Elves implemented policies in Mordor that Pol Pot would have supported: destroying any remnant technology and exterminating those with an education, while the Ithilians and Gondoreans tried to salvage some of the technology for their own use. So, post-war, Gondor was relatively abundant in capital (stolen from Mordor). And maybe Mordor was relatively abundant in labour, but only by virtue of its land having previously been turned to salt-pan pre-war by a failed irrigation scheme and its capital having been destroyed more thoroughly than its labour.

Worse, you can't make Mithril chain mail unless you get the Balrog out of Moria. Other sources say that Moria-induced lack of raw material was just a cover for the technology's having been lost - magic is in long term decline.

If you're insufficiently familiar with the true history of Middle Earth and the war of Gondorean aggression, read The Last Ringbearer (pdf), which anticipated a lot of the arguments made by David Brin back in 2002: LOTR was history as written by the victors who demonized their enemies as having been less than human. I wonder whether Brin had read the (1999) Russian version of The Last Ringbearer.

@ModeledBehavior asked if he should read Lord of the Rings. Of course he should. So that he can read The Last Ringbearer.

Geek Dad recommendations

I know I'm doing something right. The three year old last night, for the third night in a row, asked to play Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the bath. We have three plastic boats: one for the Mariner, one for Death and Life In Death, and one for the Pilot; we also have two rubber ducks: one is the Mariner, the other is the albatross. I tell the story, getting him to fill in gaps; he makes the actors play their parts on the water. He especially likes the Mariner shooting the albatross and things sinking like lead into the sea. The initial storm is also fun. I'm going to have to get some other bath toys for the slimy things that lived in the shallows where the Mariner was becalmed [a three year old saying "becalmed" is also awesome].

After the bath, he requested Rhinegold for his bedtime story. We got through the first two acts.

How can you too achieve such magnificent results? Your two big recommendations for the day.

First: StoryNory. Before the earthquakes, our commute was 25-33 minutes from house to the University's daycare. Ira demanded I tell him stories on the commute, so I had varying length versions of Rhinegold, Walkure, Star Wars, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and a few others at the ready. If traffic was light, I skipped detail; if heavy, I provided more explanation. Kinda like lecturing; storytelling and lecturing are strong complements.

After the February earthquake, we had three big problems. First, the commute lengthened to 35-70 minutes [now down to 22-50 minutes]. Second, because I had no office, Susan was usually dropping the kids off before heading to her office while I tried to work from home. Third, because the roads have been unpredictable, diverting attention to story-telling became more hazardous. So I searched around for audiobooks for kids. From StoryNory I downloaded a ton of Greek myths; Knights of the Round Table; Brothers Grimm; Hans Christian Anderson; 1001 Arabian Nights; Kipling's Just-So Stories; Poems (including Mariner); and other good stuff. Once he's well enough versed in the Norse, Arabic, Greek and Eastern myths, we'll download some of the Christian ones.

Second: Graphic novels. Ira's particularly liked the first two operas in the Ring Cycle, The Odyssey, and The Hobbit. We've picked up a few others, but nothing that's held his interest like those ones; the Ring Cycle is his favourite. It's win-win with these at bedtime: the kid gets a story with which he can follow along in pictures; you get to read something worth reading.

I really really don't get folks who choose instead to play Wiggles CDs in the car. There's a basic set of myths that are necessary for cultural literacy. They show up as metaphor all the time. Why not spend the commute making sure the kid really knows those basic prerequisites rather than making yourself angry by listening to the Wiggles?

The NY Times has been featuring economic lessons in children's literature. A few I've liked:

• Tales of the Arabian Nights. Lots of great material in there, even if you have to editorialize every now and then.
• The Lorax. It's all kinds of fun working through the ways in which The Lorax was a complete idiot. Had the Lorax just reminded the Once-ler that failure to replant meant that the factories would fall silent, appealing to the Once-ler's self interest instead of his altruism, he'd have had a shot. And lots of great stuff on the importance of property rights. All of that requires a lot of editorial intervention though; I wouldn't touch it without the editorializing. 
• Little Red Hen (obviously)
• Make up your own! Ira regularly gives me the parameters of the story that he wants, then I work it through with him. One fun one from almost a year ago now: Ira wanted a story of IraMan (a regularly occurring superhero) with his rake and his shovel and his motorbike fighting a bad guy. As he was watching old Spiderman cartoons on YouTube, I gave him LeafMan - a villain like SandMan, but composed of leaves. Ira was perturbed when City Council refused to grant him resource consent to burn leaf litter, and so LeafMan just kept coming back to do evil.

Previously: Lessons from Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland...

Baby got Stat

I love that the same day I put up a post giving the .dta and .do file for a very simple little regression, this bit of awesomeness shows up from @heidactyl via @stata .

Living in the Undying Lands

Peter Thiel's investing heavily in New Zealand. I appreciate his naming conventions:

Thiel has set up a local venture firm called Valar Ventures. Valar Ventures LP was registered in New Zealand in July 2009, more than a year before Thiel's first known New Zealand investment, and is managed by Valar Capital Management LLC, based in San Francisco, according to official records.

Does that make San Francisco Mithlond and Thiel Círdan?

The end of nerd culture?

The internet kills nerd culture says Patton Oswalt at Wired.

The problem started, says Oswalt, when Watchmen popularised the idea of geek culture.

Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python riff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at Bennigan’s. Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun. The Lord of the Rings used to be ours and only ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books. Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the One Ring would be sold as bling.

The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet. Everyone considers themselves otaku about something—whether it’s the mythology of Lost or the minor intrigues of Top Chef. American Idol inspires—if not in depth, at least in length and passion—the same number of conversations as does The Wire. There are no more hidden thought-palaces—they’re easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages with thousands of fans. And I’m not going to bore you with the step-by-step specifics of how it happened. In the timeline of the upheaval, part of the graph should be interrupted by the words the Internet. And now here we are.

Eerily reminiscent of critiques of the globalisation of culture: wasn't it cool when you had to go to Korea to get decent Korean food? Now you can get it anywhere, and that makes your special trip to Korea a little less special. And so you're a little less special for having gone there.

Oswalt worries that "everything that ever was, available forever" will produce sated consumers rather than inspired producers. I'd bet against it.

Towards synthehol?

Slashdot points to a Korean study showing that oxygenated alcoholic beverages (tiny oxygen bubbles dissolved in the drink) show quicker sobering up and reduced hangovers. They used Soju as the base drink for experimentation.

Maybe this is the first step towards synthahol, the intoxicating drink on Star Trek that people can sober up from instantly.

Let's hope not. Synthehol epitomized the decline in the Federation from TOS to TNG. Zephram Cochrane loved Scotch and refused to fly without it [Sue very early ruled out Zephram as a boy's name, thereby precluding Ira from becoming the inventor of the Warp Drive]. Scotty properly refused the synthetic abomination; Picard and Riker, emissaries of the Nannyfied federation, preferred it. Modern Drunkard nicely surveyed things a couple of years ago.

Soju may well be the first step towards synthehol. At a restaurant in Seoul a couple of years back, we asked the waiter for a bottle of what everybody else was drinking...a green bottle of Soju. We asked him afterwards from what it was distilled - rice, wheat, corn? He came back shortly with a Korean-English dictionary, pointing to the word "chemistry".

Gollum in the DSM

NCBI ROFL usefully points to psychiatric discussion of Gollum's potential mental disorders. While the original article seems to present a solid diagnosis (schizoid personality disorder), at least to a non-psychiatrist, the range of potential disorders listed by discussants in the comments section suggests more art than science. Potential disorders there suggested include:

• Heavy metal poison from eating raw fish for decades in a cave in a goblin mine
• Vitamin B12 and iron deficiency from an all-fish diet
• Exclusion of said deficiencies because Gollum augmented his diet with occasional goblin; exclusion of said deficiencies because of lack of associated peripheral neuropathy
• Heavy metal / mercury / radiation poisoning from the One Ring
• Exclusion of heavy metal poisoning because of maintained high mobility and strength
• Addiction (to the Ring)
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (ring related), comorbid with antisocial personality disorder
• Traditional Chinese Medicine diagnosis of Kidney Yin deficiency and liver-yang excess
• It's just symptoms of extreme old age
• Symbiotic parasite infection from the Ring
• Borderline personality disorder
• Chronic bacterial/fungal infection
• Psychopathy (murdered Deagol on sight of the Ring)

Obviously, accurate DSM assignation is difficult when simply presented with a list of fictional symptoms, but it does make me wonder about the arbitrariness of such assignations in real world cases.

Gollum himself weighs in in the comments:

Nasty psychiatrissstss! Hates them, my precious! They locks uss up in padded cell! They makes uss look at inkblotsss! Tricksy, sly inkblotsss! Nasty Elvish pills burnsss our throat!
...
Yesss We Hatesss themsss Evil oness yess my preciousss we hatess themsss

But They Helpsss us!

No they hurtsss usss, hurtsss usss sore!

Vitas

We're not hiring this year, but if we were, and if I were on the committee, and if I saw a vita that were the Econ equivalent of the one below, I would move heaven and earth to get the applicant an interview at the AEAs.I'd put high odds that one or two folks round the traps would see this kind of vita as being a reason to rule a candidate out. It would be highly interesting if some job market candidate next year were to do a randomized trial on whether this kind of vita or the generic sort landed more AEA interviews. Highly interesting 'cause the costs don't fall on me and I'd want to know the results. If there weren't so many veto players in hiring processes, the strategy would induce a nice separating equilibrium.

As a side note, I can imagine how I'd come up with scores on strength, dex, con, intelligence: get measures of strength, dexterity, stamina and IQ, get some population averages, then map them to the 3d6 distribution. I have no clue how wisdom could be measured in the real world; charisma would similarly be tough.

I don't buy the guy' scores if he's using a standard early edition set of D&D rules. 3d6 gives an average of 10.5 and sd is 3. So he's claiming to be >4sd above average - IQ 162.5 - in a part of the distribution you can't get by standard rolls. Of course, I'd expect any PhD-bearing candidate in Econ to score at least a 19 INT; I'd also expect to see some GRE scores to back that up. My GRE scores gave me a D&D INT score that rounds to 21, if 1998 GREs are still a reliable predictor. The rest of my scores would be much much worse.

Could be fun over Christmas...the D&D Vita. Publications and such as Inventory...

Dunedin for the jocks, Chicago for the nerds

Drinkwater points to an excellent Slate column on the battles over Chicago's Olympic bid reflecting the jock/nerd divide.

The bid's most visible opponents have spent years howling that the Olympics will breed graft and political corruption and bleed an already cash-strapped city dry. Chicago 2016's supporters, by contrast, have argued that the Olympics will improve the city's standing, create jobs, and boost local morale. The debate here wasn't best understood as an honest disagreement over what's best for Chicago. Rather, the rhetoric was indicative of a more fundamental clash: the eternal battle of jocks vs. nerds.

For two years, wonks like Ben Joravsky of the Chicago Reader and Tom Tresser of No Games Chicago have denounced Chicago's Olympics gambit as poorly conceived and wasteful. These stalwarts of the city's nerd opposition have couched their arguments in numbers, rules, and historical precedent, hoping to persuade the Games' supporters through tireless skepticism.

...

Though the Chicago 2016 committee has produced a detailed plan for the IOC that lays out the logistics of paying for and hosting the Games, its message to Chicagoans has emphasized emotion. A recent Huffington Post article by bid chairman Ryan has no numbers. Rather than explain the committee's financial plan, Ryan simply calls it "strong" and cautions readers from throwing in with the naysayers who are too afraid of the scale of the Olympics to take them on. Translation: "Shut up, nerds. The Games are going to be awesome!"

The hard-to-refute fuzziness of concepts like "the world stage" and a city's "global profile" resonate with large segments of the public. They also drive nerds into a rage by giving them no data to refute. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the two sides are talking past each other, appealing to their constituencies by speaking different languages.

We see this same jocks-vs.-nerds conflict play out every time a pro sports team threatens to skip town unless the taxpayers cough up money for a new stadium. The opposition to these arena grabs typically consists of good-government types who argue that the alleged economic impact of the new building is greatly inflated—and wouldn't that money be better spent on education? The jocks play to municipal pride and the desire for the beloved local team to stay in town. And usually, though not always, the stadium gets built.

I was never more proud of Winnipeg than when we let the Jets go rather than give in to NHL extortion. But the jocks won in Dunedin and got City Council to front up for a new stadium for the rugby world cup. They won so handily that the nerds had to pay court costs, which is kinda like finishing off the wedgie with a swirly.

I'm a fan of Caplan's Jock/Nerd theory of history and of progressive taxation.... In the long run, the nerds will win though.

Afternoon roundup

• Luke Malpass at CIS argues that the government should realize its losses and sell off KiwiRail: privatisation and immediate culling of unprofitable lines makes more sense than continued stagnation. He's right.


• Grocery line optimisation algorithms. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only person in the world trying to run these models in his head while standing in line. Long story short: ballpark 50 seconds per person ahead of you with fewer than 3 items and add in an additional 3 seconds per item beyond that. Of course, adjust for the usual confounds like chatty or trainee clerks or elderly folks in the queue. In NZ, add in 10 second fixed cost per person in line with alcohol so the clerk can get a manager's check on age. HT: Marginal Revolution

Wolfram Alpha passes my test

Wolfram Alpha, what is the meaning of life?



Update: Wolfram Alpha, what is the velocity of an unladen swallow?



Update 2: it gets even better. Click on velocity of a European swallow, above, and you get the actual speed. More easter eggs below:

How many roads must a man walk down?
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?
Why did the chicken cross the road?

Please add any other found easter eggs in the comments!

Update3: Josh Gans seems to be tweeting Alpha eggs! He found this one.

Update4: Technewsreport finds a few more.