So there’s this man-eating creature named Jozin who lives in a bog, and is vulnerable only to crop-dusting powder. The mayor promises his daughter in marriage to whoever can defeat the creature. A stranger comes to town, borrows a crop-duster, captures Jozin, and wins the daughter. The end.
This, I think, is as good an example as any of why a gripping story requires more than just a good beginning and a happy ending. But sometimes, a hefty dose of looniness can fully compensate for the complete absence of dramatic tension. Et voila:
Here is a link to my piece in today’s issue of Time.com; and here’s the executive summary:
Deep inside a West Texas mountain, engineers are building a clock designed to click for 10,000 years. Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos has sunk $43 million into this project and that’s just a start. What’s the purpose? “To foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years”, say the organizers.
Now thinking and responsibility are two different things, but it’s hard to see how this project is likely to encourage either. Re thinking: The question of what we owe to future generations is subtle and difficult and requires close attention to difficult arguments; it’s hard to see how a ticking clock will do to foster that kind of effort. And as for responsiblity — if responsibility means making a better life for our distant descendants, then Bezos’s $43 million would almost surely be better spent on lobbying for lower capital taxes. Whether the goal is thinking or responsibility, a giant clock seems like a giant waste of time.
If you study economics, or statistics, or chemistry, or mathematical biology, or thermodynamics, you’re sure to encounter the notion of a Markov chain — a random process whose future depends probabilistically on the present, but not on the past. If you travel through New York City, randomly turning left or right at each corner, then you’re following a Markov process, because the probability that you’ll end up at Carnegie Hall depends on where you are now, not on how you got there.
But even if you work with Markov processes every day, you’re probably unaware of their origins in a dispute about free will, Christianity, and the Law of Large Numbers.
The AFL-CIO is calling for passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act to close the wage gap between men and women, a problem they say is increasingly urgent, with the above graph as Exhibit A. Get a load of that plummetting dotted gray line!
Now have a look at the right hand axis, which the perpetrators have conveniently drawn upside down for no apparent reason other than the obvious dishonest one.
One year ago today, somewhere in the Phillipines, a reporter checked his web logs and wondered where all the new readers were coming from. Today we celebrate the first anniversary of one of the most unfortunately worded headlines in the history of journalism.
If you’re planning to lie about your weight on an online dating site, you’d be well advised to shade downward if you’re a woman and (more surprisingly) upward if you’re a man.
That’s one apparent lesson of the data in this recently published paper by three careful researchers. If I’m reading their tables correctly, they say roughly this:
Taking as given your reported age, height, race, weight, income, attractiveness, education, marital status and so forth, there is some class of users who have about a 50/50 chance of contacting you. Now if you are a 5’4″ woman and you subtract 11 pounds from your reported weight (lowering your body mass index, or BMI, by about 1), then you’ll hear not from 50% of that class but from almost 60%. On the other hand, if you are a 5’10″ man and you *add* 7 pounds to your weight (adding about 1 to your BMI), you’ll hear from about 53%.
Moreover, these effects fall off very slowly, so that even very thin women gain from underreporting their weights, and even very heavy men gain from overreporting. The effects also fall off very slowly with BMI differences, so that even quite heavy men prefer thinner women, and even quite thin women prefer heavier men.
In the course of planning a rather significant event for the coming weekend, I was forced, for the first time in my life, to confront the following conundrum:
Which is sunnier — “partly sunny” or “partly cloudy”?
My faith in the power of pure reason was severely shaken when I realized I could construct equally plausible arguments in either direction. So, with reluctance, I abandoned theory and turned to evidence, in the form of the logos employed by two of the more popular weather forecasting sites:
Weather Underground takes an unambiguous stand: partly cloudy is definitely sunnier than partly sunny. Accuweather is a little, umm, hazier on the issue; apparently at Accuweather, partly cloudy means something like “somewhat wispier clouds, covering more of the central portion of the sun but a bit less of the edges, than partly sunny”. Overall, though, it appears that at Accuweather, partly sunny is sunnier than partly cloudy.
Over at Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson blogs about a science fiction novel that posits a world where people routinely sell shares in their future income. (I have not read the novel, which is called The Unincorporated Man.) Robin laments that while many reviewers have taken it for granted that we wouldn’t want to allow such contracts, none seem to have seriously engaged the idea.
I’m not sure if this counts as serious engagement, but I am reminded of the apparently little-known fact that the singer/actor/TV phenomenon Dean Martin did exactly this. In fact, he overdid exactly this. By the time he was 27 years old, Martin had sold 10% of himself to MCA Records, 20% to his manager DIck Richards, 35% to his other manager Lou Perry, and 25% to the mobster Frank Costello. That left him with 5% of himself—”$50 for every grand he made” in the words of writer Nick Tosches. A year later, he hired yet another manager and sold him another 10%. Having now sold 105% of himself, it became imprudent to earn money. Therefore, in need of something to live on, Martin sold yet another 10% of himself to nighclub owner Angel Lopez.
The clip is from the Subliminal Learn Gaelic Irish/Scottish CD available from Brainwave Mind Voyages. According to their website, listening to this CD while you sleep will train you not just to speak Gaelic but to read it as well. (If the clip above didn’t work for you, please try it again while sleeping.) If you really want to go high-tech, they also offer an ultrasonic track that teaches you Gaelic in complete silence.
In case Gaelic is not your thing, the same company offers subliminal CDs that will teach you to dance, trade stocks, or stop pulling your eyelashes. Or on the racier side, there are CDs for subliminal breast enhancement, “natural male enhancement”, and combating both impotence and the gag reflex.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to have developed a technology that will teach you to keep squirrels in your pocket while you sleep. For the time being, only the traditional methods are available. But who knows what the future might bring?
The secret of invisibility and the secret of keeping a squirrel in your pocket—all for one low price of $24.95. Now there’s something you’d never see under socialism.
An unexpectedly full weekend leaves me caught short without a full fledged blog post for today. I’ll make up for it tomorrow. In the meantime, here are two tidbits to hold you over:
A useful recipe for salted water. Do not fail to read the reviews.
A puzzle I got from the mathematician Alexander Merkurjev. If I recall right, he told me that it had appeared on a college entrance exam in the old Soviet Union:
A regular 400-gon is tiled by parallelograms. Prove that at least 100 of those parallelograms must be rectangles.
(A regular 400-gon is a 400-sided figure with all sides equal and all angles equal. The parallelograms can all be of different sizes and shapes—or not. “Tiled” means that the interior of the 400-gon is entirely covered, with no overlaps.)
I once told the late Nobel prize winner George Stigler that I was teaching a course on the relationship between economics and the other social sciences. “Ah”, he nodded. “That would be haughty superciliousness, I suppose”.
I was reminded of this when a comment on a recent blogpost asked for my further thoughts on the economics of superstition. This, after all, might be one area where economics lags behind its sister sciences. And this in turn reminded me of a true social science classic—anthropologist Michael Pacanowsky’s investigation into the origins of the folk belief that the utterance “Please pass the salt” is causally linked to the passage of salt from one end of a table to another.
While everyone else blogs the State of the Union, I prefer to bring you something a little more uplifting—like a watermelon car. I want one.
I first discovered this at ReflectionOf.Me, which houses a really quite extraordinary collection of beautiful oddities. You might want to mosey around there and take your mind off politics for a while. You’ll feel better.
Let me tell you about my collection of really bad animal question-and-answer books.
This is a genre that thrived back before the Internet (mostly between 1930 and 1960) when connoisseurs of weirdness and misinformation had only bound books to turn to. Its heroes include Osmond P. Breland (author of the classics “Animal Facts and Fallacies”, “Animal Friends and Foes”, and “Animal Life and Lore”) and Alan Devoe (who gave us “Speaking of Animals” and “This Fascinating Animal World”).
Here’s a six-question quiz I compiled from these books.
Can a toad live for years sealed up in solid rock?
Can a dog procreate with a skunk?
Do snakes swallow their young to protect them from danger?
If you’re my age, you’ll surely remember the great Pet Rock craze of the 1970′s. (If you’re not my age, maybe you’ve heard about it from your grandparents.) In any event, here’s proof—if it were still needed—that the world just keeps on getting better: While the old Pet Rock just sat there not doing anything, today you can get a pet rock with a USB connection! Here’s the product description:
Simply plug the USB cable into a free port and let the fun begin. The USB Pet Rock will instantly begin to work its magic. People will stop by and ask you what your USB Pet Rock does. Each time, you can make up a new story; for no matter what you say, it will be greater than the truth – because these USB Pet Rocks don’t do a dang thing. Except make you smile. And confuse your friends and coworkers, which will make you smile even more. So, get your USB Pet Rock today, and help make us rich tomorrow.
Now there’s something that could never have been produced under socialism!
(A grateful hat tip to my friend Johanna.)
In other news, the year is winding down, and everyone else is doing end-of-year retrospectives, so I shall do the same. Check this space tomorrow for a review of the Top Ten posts of 2009 here on The Big Questions blog. And Happy New Year.
Some gift ideas for the more unusual people on your Christmas list:
First, with a hat tip to my sister, three from Amazon.com.
For your ex’s divorce lawyer: A laptop desk to attach to your steering wheel! Proceed as follows (you’ll thank me, really): First cursor over the customer images on the left side of the page. Then read the customer reviews.
For the political activist on your list: Uranium ore!. Again, read the customer reviews. Again, you’ll thank me.
For your oddball cousin: Wolf urine!. Not a common taste, but for those who indulge, there simply is no substitute. And of course: Read the reviews.
And speaking of Amazon customer reviews, I was more than pleased to stumble on this quote in a review of The Big Questions:
Also, if you are a parent and are blessed with a math/science inclined child, please, please, please buy them a copy!
It’s not too late!
Finally, as a Christmas gift to my readers—or at least to that vocal subset of my readers who have been clamoring for answers to the honors questions I posted a couple of weeks ago: Your wish is my command.
Courtesy of our frequent commenter Cos, I bring you a map of Silver Springs Shores, Florida, the place you most don’t want to be when you’re looking for an address. Go ahead. Click on the map to bring up the full sized version. Start reading the street names. I promise you, the longer you look the more hilarious it gets.
John Gottti Junior, fresh from his fourth mistrial on racketeering and murder conspiracy charges, reports a miracle: Over the past few days, two songs that remind him of his father (the late and legendary mobster John Gotti Senior) have come up on the radio at exactly 10:27 PM—and 10/27 is his father’s birthday.
From the New York Times:
Did the son feel that the father was was watching over him?
Suppose you’d written a book. And suppose, for some odd reason, that your middle name happened to be “And”. Suppose, for example, that mother had named you “Cary And Grant”.
Then the software at Amazon.com, not unreasonably, would assume that you were two people, and would list the book’s authors as (1) Cary and (2) Grant.
Now suppose, even more oddly, that your name contained a comma. Not the word “comma”, but the actual punctuation mark. Suppose, for example, that your mother had named you “Cary, Grant”. Then Amazon’s software, again not unreasonably, would assume that your name was being presented in the format “Last, First” and would reverse the order, listing the author as Grant Cary.
Now take this one step further and suppose your name contained both the word “And” and a comma. Perhaps more than once. Suppose, for example, that your name happened to be The Fresh, Chilled and Frozen Horse and Ass Meat Research Group. Then, in accordance with its not unreasonable rules, Amazon’s software would conclude that there are three separate authors, namely:
A while back, the BBC sent me a questionnaire that I had some fun with, and I was disappointed when they published only excerpts. But now that I have a blog, I get to post anything I want in its entirety! So here’s the whole thing. Do use the comments to suggest better answers. Continue reading ‘Some Big (and small) Questions’
Here’s a lovely suit of clothes that can be had for, oh, about $10,000. It’s the result of a project conceived by Drexel University instructor Kelly Cobb to make a man’s suit entirely from materials produced within 100 miles of her home. According to an article by Paul Adams in Wired magazine, the suit was produced by a team of 20 artisans, requiring a total of 500 man-hours.
Let’s see, that’s 500 hours of skilled or semi-skilled labor by artisans whose time is probably worth something on the order of $20 an hour. For about $10,000 I can have one made for you. Continue reading ‘The $10,000 suit’
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