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On the Amazon

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Steve Landsburg

on November 10, 2009

. 13 Comments

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:

Chilled the Fresh

Frozen Horse

Ass Meat Research Group

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Blind Justice

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Steve Landsburg

on November 9, 2009

in Economics, Ethics, Fairness and Policy

. 62 Comments

Partially blind gamer Alexander Stern wants Sony to make its games more accessible to him and others like him—and he’s gone to court to force the issue. This raises the question: Exactly what does Sony owe to Alexander Stern (and others like him)?

A similar issue comes up in Chapter 20 of The Big Questions, where Mary the landlord won’t rent to, say, Albanians. Ought we force her to?

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Another Great Week

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Steve Landsburg

on November 7, 2009

in Uncategorized

. 10 Comments

It’s been a great week on the blog with thoughtful and thought-provoking comments cropping up everywhere. Several threads have touched on the question phrased most succinctly by Al. V. on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Physics thread:

Are the laws of mathematics inherent in our universe, and therefore really a product of physics (and not the other way around), or are they supra-universal?

This question, of course, plays a starring role in The Big Questions , where I’ve explained why I believe that the supra-universality of mathematics (thanks for that word, Al!) gives the most coherent explanation of why anything exists at all.

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Jenkin Off

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Steve Landsburg

on November 6, 2009

. 21 Comments

It is well known (to the sort of people to whom such things are well known) that the Scottish engineer Fleeming Jenkin was the first to formalize a toy model of Darwin’s evolutionary theory—with results that were most unfavorable to Darwin: The model predicts that random improvements, even when they confer survival advantages, still tend to disappear over the course of a few generations. This was in 1867.

It seems to be far less well known that Jenkin’s model also predicts that all life on earth dies out after a few generations, which would seem to cast doubt on its assumptions. Jenkin was apparently unaware of this, and so, presumably, was Darwin, who gave considerable credence to the Jenkin model in the final edition of The Origin of Species. This was in 1872.

It seems to be even less well known that the inadequacy of Jenkin’s model was identified in a little-noticed letter to the editor of Nature by the mathematician Arthur Sladen Davis. In that letter, Davis corrected Jenkin’s error and supplied an alternative model that he believed was favorable to Darwin. This was in 1871, but apparently Darwin never heard about it.

And it seems to be known only to me (and now, to the readers of this blog!) that Davis’s model is also flawed, in the opposite direction from Jenkin’s, in that it predicts that any species population must grow without bound following the appearance of a beneficial mutation. And as a result of this, the Davis model undercuts Darwin more than it supports him.

I’ve adjusted Davis’s model much as Davis adjusted Jenkin’s, and gotten a result that could be considered favorable to Darwin. In fact, it’s more or less the result that Davis thought he’d gotten, but hadn’t.

Here comes the more technical part. If this is not your cup of tea, stop reading now. Do come back tomorrow though. I’m not always like this.

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Public Service Announcement

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Steve Landsburg

on November 5, 2009

. 1 Comment

The “Look Inside” text for The Big Questions should be up on Amazon’s website in a few days. Meanwhile, Snorri Godhi suggested in comments that I should post the index for your perusal. Good idea, Snorri. Just click on “Index” at the top of this page.

Some Big (and small) Questions

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Steve Landsburg

on November 5, 2009

. 14 Comments

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.
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The Times, They’ve Been a Changin’

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Steve Landsburg

on November 4, 2009

in Literature, Progress and Progress2

. 8 Comments

I have recently finished reading Hunters and Gatherers, a (quite good) novel written and set in 1991, which includes the following plot elements:

1) A door-to-door saleswoman pitches (hardcopy) encyclopedias to customers who eagerly seek easy access to vast quantities of information.

2) A man is eager to read an obscure novel he’s heard about, so he scours used book stores, hoping to find a copy. In the meantime, he’s not sure what the novel is about, and has no way to find out.

3) A comedian stores his collection of jokes on notecards, filling two rooms worth of file cabinets.

4) A collector of sound effects stores her collection on cassette tapes, and has no cost-effective way to create backups.

5) A man is unable to stay in close contact with his (adult) children, because long distance calling rates are prohibitively high.

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What Are You Surest Of?

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Steve Landsburg

on November 4, 2009

in Evolution, Math, Ontology and Physics

. 39 Comments

Among the things you’re sure of, which are you surest of? For Richard Dawkins, writing in the Wall Street Journal, it’s the theory of evolution:

We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that [evolution] is the process that has generated life on our own planet.

Now, I would be thunderstruck if the theory of evolution turned out to be fundamentally wrong, but not nearly so thunderstruck as if arithmetic turned out to be inconsistent. In fact, I can think of quite a few things I’m more sure about than evolution. For example:

1. The consistency of arithmetic. (This amounts to saying that a single arithmetic problem can’t have two different correct answers.)

2. The existence of conscious beings other than myself.

3. The fact that the North won the American Civil War. (That is, historians are not universally mistaken about this. I am not interested in quibbling about what constitutes a “win”; I mean to assert that the North won in the everyday sense of the word, as reported in all the history texts.)
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Today’s the Day

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Steve Landsburg

on November 3, 2009

. 10 Comments

I once owned a book where page 317, in its entirety, read as follows:

ERRATA

On page 317, change ERRATA to ERRATUM.

It’s a good thing I didn’t steal that joke. Because as it happens, The Big Questions contains an actual erratum. True, it’s only two missing letters. But of all the letters in the book, these are probably the two I’d least like to have seen go missing.

Fortunately, I discovered this erratum within minutes of receiving my first hardcover books a couple of weeks ago, and the Free Press division of Simon and Schuster sprang into action. Everyone, from the publisher to the editorial assistants to the warehouse managers, understood immediately that we needed to fix this. Better yet, they kept me involved and informed throughout the process, which contrasts dramatically with experiences I’ve had with other publishers.

final Doubly fortunately, I happened to pour out my woes to the brilliant psychometrician Ellen Julian, who suggested that we make up cards much like the one illustrated here and somehow get them into the tens of thousands of books that were scheduled to leave the warehouse the following Monday morning. (This was a Thursday.) The Free Press made it happen in a day, and all would have been well had I not awakened on Saturday to the sickening realization that the cards contained the wrong URL. Now it was the weekend and too late to have new cards made in-house.
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Hot Air

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Steve Landsburg

on November 2, 2009

in Books, Economics, Paul Krugman and Policy

. 8 Comments

Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner, the SuperFreakonomics guys (formerly the Freakonomics guys) have raised a lot of temperatures with their chapter on global warming. The backlash began with Paul Krugman, who in turn was neatly skewered by several authors, but most effectively by the journalist Ari Armstrong.

The critics have raised two objections that come perilously close to contradicting each other: First, Levitt and Dubner are accused of minimizing the problem. Second, they are accused of overeagerness to solve the problem, as opposed to, say, demonizing the responsible parties. Of these, only the first deserves to be taken seriously.

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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Physics

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Steve Landsburg

on November 2, 2009

in Math and Physics

. 5 Comments

In The Big Questions (pages 18-19) I talk (channeling the physicist Eugene Wigner) about the apparently unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in revealing truths about the physical world. In Wigner’s words, “It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here.”

But the physicist Peter Landsberg (no relation!) observes that sometimes the miracle runs in the opposite direction, and offers a curious use of physical reasoning to reveal a purely mathematical truth!

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Pausing for breath

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Steve Landsburg

on October 31, 2009

. 3 Comments

Wow. The response to this blog—in comments, in email, and in mentions around the web—has been huge and overwhelmingly positive. I am particularly struck by the many thoughtful (and thought-provoking) comments from attentive readers. We’re only two days into this and I’ve learned a lot already. Thank you.

I’m taking the weekend off, but I’ll be back on Monday to amuse, enlighten, provoke and continue to learn. In the meantime, for your amusement, I present this letter to the editor from the estimable organizer of Freedomfest, correcting a possible Freudian slip at the New York Times:

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The $10,000 suit

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Steve Landsburg

on October 30, 2009

in Economics and Oddities

. 28 Comments

suit

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.
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Principia Mathematica: The Comic Book

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Steve Landsburg

on October 30, 2009

in Books, Heroes and Philosophy

. 5 Comments

Logicomix is—I am not making this up—a graphic novel (that is, what we used to call a comic book) about Bertrand Russell and the writing of Principia Mathematica. Implausibly enough, it succeeds, making rather gripping drama out of the twentieth century crisis in the foundations of mathematics. The technical issues are portrayed clearly and accurately (a novice reader could learn a lot from this book) but never coldly; this is above all a saga about human obsession. I even like the device where the authors themselves appear as characters, trying to figure out how best to present this stuff. It works.

But there’s one part I find almost impossible to believe is accurate; maybe a reader can set me straight. The novel begins in 1939 and proceeds by flashback. In 1939 we see Russell, a lifelong pacifist confronted by the Nazi horror, being shaken to the core by the realization that his beloved Logic does not contain the answers to all of life’s problems. Can there be even a shred of truth to this? Surely the man who devoted his youth and over 300 printed pages to proving that 1+1=2 must always have been well aware that formal logic has its limitations as a practical guide to life.
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There He Goes Again

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Steve Landsburg

on October 29, 2009

in Evolution, Ontology and Religion

. 55 Comments

I said this in The Big Questions and I’ll say it again: Richard Dawkins is an international treasure and one of my personal heroes, but he’s got this God thing all wrong. Here’s some of his latest, from the Wall Street Journal:

Where does [Darwinian evolution] leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must be at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

But Darwinian evolution can’t replace God, because Darwinian evolution (at best) explains life, and explaining life was never the hard part. The Big Question is not: Why is there life? The Big Question is: Why is there anything? Explaining life does not count as explaining the Universe.
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Thoughts on Health Care Reform

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Steve Landsburg

on October 29, 2009

in Economics and Policy

. 40 Comments

The American health care system desperately needs reform. But there are certain inescapable truths that would-be reformers would do well to heed; otherwise they risk making things worse for everyone, and particularly for the poor. Here are a few of those truths.

1. Insurance is not part of the solution; it’s part of the problem. Many people—and especially poor people— get too little health care in this country. That’s largely because many other people—and especially rich people—are overinsured. People with insurance demand more health care, which drives up prices. More insurance coverage will make this problem worse, not better.
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Up and Running

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Steve Landsburg

on October 15, 2009

. 4 Comments

The Big Questions should be in the stores shortly. I expect and hope that my readers will have a lot to say about it. I welcome your thoughts, comments and complaints at this email address: questions at landsburg dot com.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from my readers and I expect I’m about to learn a lot more. I’ll use this blog to share some of what I learn—along with anything else that strikes my fancy.

If you choose to comment, your first post will be held for moderation. Once that first post is approved, your future posts will be approved automatically. I’ll delete or edit comments only when they’re clearly quite unserious or abusive. I’m looking forward to this dialogue.

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