Prediction du jour: The economy will suddenly be acknowledged by the administration to be tanked, flushed, hosed. Not because of policy, but because of the immense damage of Hurricane Katrina. Poor insurers. Poor oil industry. Poor disaster victims.
They are the administration’s excuse.
Just watch.
Tornados striking Finnish golf tournaments.
Here’s a question for the diligent meteorological aficionado out there: What is the distribution of surface wind speeds on the Earth at any given moment? How much does the maximum surface wind speed vary over time, when you bother to check all surface points worldwide?
We’re often told how many earthquakes there are in a day; how many gales? How many hurricane-force winds? How many tornados? How many lightning strikes per minute, worldwide?
We are so damned illiterate. By which I mean you, and me, and most everybody else in this wonderful modern era we call… well, “nowadays”.
Just transcribed a review of an influential anti-smoking tract, which was soundly dissed in an esoteric and exceptionally obscure libertarian Unitarian freethinker ‘zine edited by Sam Morse’s brother. Telegraph guy. You know.
While it is clear from the tone that the reviewer does not approve of Trask’s disapproval… well, I confess I can’t follow it all rightly.
See, like I could Google Ixion-and-his-sexy-cloud [do you need to?]. I can find out a bit — a merest jot, a weeny tittle — about the general overarching history of anti-smoking crusades in America. But you know… that whole differential calculus on a pony business.
We are so damned illiterate, it’s embarrassing.
Comments from the collective knowledge of the Smart Mob would be welcome, here or over at Odd Ends.
This week was spent on a “small” home improvement project, out of town. Not much time taken to write, which in a sense is good, and in a sense ill.
<tangent>
I have the feeling that many of the younger academics who seem to make up my readers are perennial renters; I see a lot of novice homeowner stuff cropping up in my recent bloggish reading, which discusses the complexities of even minor household tasks like lawn mowing, purchasing furniture, &c.
On the assumption that some of these folks will eventually become homeowners and need to learn which one is the hole in the ground, I’d like to pass along one bit of advice, hard-earned bit, of the sort that I have repeatedly ignored to my inevitable regret and real, physical pain:
Do not imagine that bathrooms, because they are small, are in any sense easier to work on. This covers all aspects of work: painting, simple wall repair, flooring, electrical work, window treatments. Bathrooms, even though they get steady wear and tear and go out of date quickly, are not the place to begin. The wallpaper is inevitably hard to remove, unexpected time-eating horrors lurk (especially in corners; Lovecraft was talking about bathrooms) for those who remove tile, the painting is more than half cutting-in, every piece of flooring will be fiddly and oddly-shaped and cut on three sides and cannot be so fashioned as to avoid all the obstructions (no matter how much trigonometry and template-making you bring to bear), and the wiring of a 20-pound wall fixture (which takes two people and a ladder and involves little teeny easily-dropped bits) is more or less a nightmare.
This, our sixth renovated/redecorated bathroom, went more smoothly than most. That’s about when you get used to them — around the fifth or sixth. Take my advice: stick to big, long-walled bedrooms and living rooms till you get the hang of things a bit. You are deceived if you think a larger wall will take longer to address than a short one. In home improvement, always remember that area is your companion and helper; perimeter your insidious and quirky enemy….
</tangent>
So it was with great pleasure that I found two big boxes had arrived while we were gone, and were sitting on the floor of the foyer when we got home from our family renovation excursion. I tore into them.
These boxes contained some of the prettiest books I’ve ever had the pleasure to acquire: The first six volumes of Belgravia magazine, two full volumes of the Knickerbocker Monthly Magazine, and a couple of other miscellaneous periodical volumes (The Radical, and The Pictorial Family Magazine). Unlike a lot of the VOBs we’ve bought through the years, these are pristine, in fine half-morocco bindings, and look as if they’d be at home on a shelf behind a learned scholar or in a fire-lit drawing room. Absolutely stunning.
And thinking about my intense pleasure at these physical and cultural artifacts, and the pleasure, not of owning them (I am no miser), but of having them around — of being graced with their presence — you know what I realized I sound like? A garden club person.
Librarians are to horticulturists, as we are to garden club officers. Many people who “like” books are content with visiting vast archives and libraries maintained by long-respected institutions: Kew and the British Library; the Library of Congress and Butchart Gardens. Some folks are happy to hit the Recent Releases at the library and the plants at Home Depot, some folks are happy with Book of the Month Club and Burpee; others hunt and preserve heirloom varieties and antiquarian objects.
Is this just an aspect of any sufficiently advanced case of aficionadoism? Dunno. Rockhounding? Local history?
A sudden spate of outright plagiarism from blogs by the “more mainstream” or “bigger” media seems to be popping up in many disparate locations. Perhaps we’re entering a new phase of the transition, in which the old media believe quoting without attribution is somehow analogous to linking?
I doubt it. I expect the authors and editors who copied are just lazy and rude.
Oh, and an amusing splogger writes:
You can stop your plagiarism search now! We have amalgamated all the really great plagiarism definition related information and articles we could find and posted them here.
[link not provided....]
I want a Machine, into which I can put a book. I would not open the book, just set it on a little pillow, and perhaps press a green glowing button, or use a little joystick to send it into a big metal tube or something. The lights in the room would be low, and indirect; the Machine I Want would be in the middle of a large white expanse of floor. We would be sitting at a console, at a distance, not looking at the Machine I Want, but rather hunched over the Results Screen.
Expectant. Excited. Maybe, I dunno, just a touch concerned.
When the Green Button had been pressed or the Small Joystick wobbled appropriately, rays would come from the heart of the Machine I Want, which would pierce the volume — without harming it. Sensors would be watching, gathering terabytes of data. A high-resolution three-dimensional scan (at least 6003 voxels per cubic inch) would be created by the Machine I Want’s onboard controllers. Oh, regarding the rays: if you prefer, magnets might be involved. That would be good, because there would also be large sweating tanks of liquified gas in the room. This is a mere detail; I would be happy to wait in the next room, gazing expectantly down at the console, while your choice of powerful energies were brought to bear.
Go ahead. Try a few.
Now, before the expectant readers were shown much on the Results Screen, the resulting internal representation of the high-resolution 3-D scan of the book would first be sent to a moderately powerful computer in the Machine I Want. Or next to it. There, the pages of the text would be discerned, the characters and illustrations saved, and OCR†ed.
In the end, a valuable antique book would not have been busted open like road kill on a hot summer day, just so every page can be apposed to the over-small platen of a flatbed scanner. Brittle or uncut pages would not be damaged. Bindings would remain intact. That would be nicer than what we have now — which I admit is far nicer than what we had before that…. No, what we have now is an amazing and excellent piece of hardware, and I expect we will use it happily until I wear it to a little scanny nub.
But see, it’s not the Machine I Want.
So, anyway… I’m waiting.
Anybody?
People are dumb. They make mistakes, they mislead themselves, they are merely boundedly rational in a complex world, they think fuzzily, they rely on heuristics that generalize poorly, and they are prone to over-reliance on superstition and maladaptive instincts and pat hackneyed answers. If you want to know something, don’t walk up to an arbitrary person and ask them to figure it out for you.
In reading and complaining about Kevin Chang’s articles on Intelligent Design in the New York Times, it strikes me that what people misunderstand the most about science is this: We as scientists expect people to be wrong, including ourselves. The scientific process is not about finding the truth, but rather noticing and recovering from the stupid mistakes we make, faster and better than anybody else can.
The infrastructure of science, what makes it science, is no more philosophically complicated than that: it’s the transparency, the public statements of hypotheses and results, the checking each other, the arguments, the peer review. It’s not falsifiability and what’s a “theory” or a “fact”, it’s not positive and negative heuristics and research programmes, it’s not atheism and materialist bias in interpreting reality, it’s not logical consequences and induction and deduction or even abduction. Science is all about listening to other people when they tell you you’re full of shit. It’s about saying everything in a framework designed so that other people can check it. And it’s about responding gracefully when they do, inevitably, tell you your shit-levels are a bit high, sorry, revise and resubmit, thank you very much.
That’s the crucial point where ID falls on its face. It surely doesn’t manage to be judged by the same criteria as scientific research on evolution, or its believers would have vast bibliographies of reasonable papers in peer-reviewed journals. Which they do not.
So when you get right down to it, ID’s attempts to evade the scientific community’s steady and consistent stream of invective, calling them vacuous and wrong, is just another way of letting people stay stupid longer.
Note to Self: Invent New Publishing Model:
Remarkably, some of the editors liked the book — “A monument to scholarship,” “A tour de force,” “An incredible achievement.” But no deal: there is just no way, they said, to make any money on such a book. Not even the institutional purchasers — libraries that are basically forced to buy obscure books — could make my proposition profitable.
The printed monograph is dying.
(Via Ed Vielmetti’s Vacuum Blog.)
And the New York Times, of all places. PZ Myers simplifies it greatly:
Please, New York Times, we don’t need yoqr help if all you can do is shuffle credulous journalists with no understanding of the issues through the story. If you aren’t going to put someone on the case who understands biology (like Carl Zimmer, for instance), don’t bother. All you’re accomplishing is to give frauds and charlatans and bible-bleating pseudoscientists respect they do not deserve.
If only we could not bother with them. Alas, their credibility has ghostly inertia: most of the readers seeing the articles will never hear from the people criticizing them for being written by fools.
It’s that time of year. Signs are popping up along the sides of the road, here in the midwest. Corn mazes are now as much an aspect of our shared experience as religious-themed haunted houses, or arbitrary fruit-themed festivals aimed at getting people to please ferchrissake just look away from the Wal*mart for one goddamned minute and come downtown will you please!? If you’ve not been in a good, modern, GPS-inscribed corn maze, you should. Good exercise, and surprisingly difficult and amusing.
Just check the weather first.
The better calculators among you may want to consider using the phrase “boundedly rational” when speaking to people who you might otherwise be tempted to call “stupid”.
For best effect in a given social situation, you should determine the relative strengths of each of the two approaches by (1) creating functions describing the social costs, emotional benefits, and energy outlay of using each term, (2) projecting these functions out to an infinite time horizon, and (3) integrating beneath the curves. You may want to discount each term’s utility on the basis of the relative computational effort expended. The number and reaction of people you have not yet met should be modeled by a simple mixing model based on the people you already know — but then that should be obvious.
The term with the highest net utility is the winner, of course!
For additional justified tact, pairwise analyses of multiple alternatives such as “moron” or “pedant” may be examined, but it is unclear whether the sequential expenditure of computational effort on multiple pairwise comparisons calls for a discount schedule or may simply be ignored for particularly quick-witted speakers.
[And, no, I'm not allowed to say what I'm making fun of. It wouldn't be tactful.]
Pontification without all the gritty gravitas
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