Earth Hour - Nonsense on Stilts

Can there be an event more thoroughly deserving of scorn and derision than Earth Hour? This is the time when sanctimonious hairshirt poseurs deign to turn off their lights for an hour, in order to do... well, I never quite figured out what. Protest consumerism, or show solidarity with the environment, or conspicuously show off their concern for Gaia, something. Whatever it's meant to be about, I'd basically just written it off as a stupid token gesture.

But Ross McKitrick isn't content to just roll his eyes and nod along with it. He presents a very deeply felt argument of why the idea is loathsome to him:

"The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity....

I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on."

Spot on. This is the most stirring defense of Julian Simon economics that I've read in recent times, but one that views human progress as something that needs defending, rather than something inevitable.

If the name Ross McKitrick sounds familiar, it's because he was one of the two authors (along with Steve McIntyre) who pointed out that the hockey stick graph was based on Michael Mann not knowing how to do principal components analysis. Michael Mann, you may recall, is the guy who was implicated in the Climate-gate controversy, for using his 'trick' to 'hide the decline' in temperatures, thereby adding bad faith to bad statistics.

Ross McKitrick, you are hereby inducted into the Shylock Holmes Order of Guys Who Kick Some Serious Ass.

(thanks to Coyote for the pointer)

I'm with Big Red

Jerome Cardinal recently sent me this great video currently doing the rounds of this kid getting bullied who snaps and bodyslams the hell out of the bully. Check out the full video at Popehat, it's well worth your watching.

The outrage brigade, of course, is scandalised that a child would ever resort to violence to solve their problems. As Patrick notes, they never seem to muster the same level of outrage at the initial bullying, which passes without comment. But once the faux shock of educational professionals and bullying experts is passed over, the overwhelming internet consensus opinion seems 'Good on Big Red! Way to teach that little shit a lesson.' I find myself in complete accordance with this.

The position of schools tends to be that it's never okay to fight back, and you should always just report it to the teachers. This is of course completely at odds with the criminal law in just about every jurisdiction on earth. When someone assaults you, you have the right to use reasonable force in self-defence. There's no 'schoolyard exception' to this in the law. Don't listen to what the principal says, kids - if someone attacks you with illegal force, you are completely within your rights to defend yourself with legal force. Centuries of common law tradition will have your back, even if the teacher doesn't.

As I noted in the comments at Popehat, the only thing that could have made that video more awesome would have been if, when Johnny McTurd was lying on the ground, Big Red started yelling at him “Do you see what happens? Do you see what happens, Larry?”.

I salute you, Big Red. You're probably embarrassed about the fact that you're on video all over the world. But doubt not this fact - lots and lots of people get bullied, and most of them wish they could do what you did. Read through the comments at the Popehat thread and see how many people have stories to report about how they were in situations just like yours, including lots of people who went on to do awesome things.

And this is the tip of the iceberg. For every one that has a story about successfully getting rid of bullies, I'm guessing there are at least 10 more who didn't ever have the courage to fight back, but always wished they had. They're not commenting in the internet threads because it's a painful memory that they don't like to bring up, but they're cheering you on all the same. In fact, those people are cheering you twice as hard.

You're an internet hero today. Wear it with pride, mate.

Quote of the Day

John Podhoretz on Obama's inaction on the crises in Libya, Japan and Bahrain:

"We’re going on four weeks now, or more, that Barack Obama has been reading My Pet Goat."

Ouch, that's got to leave a mark. Read the whole thing here.

(Via Ace of Spades, who takes second prize for Quote of the Day with the headline of his post: "Rebels In Libya Prepare For Slaughter; Look To US For One Thing That Can Save Them-- Another Empty Statement from Obama That Qadaffy Must Go" )

Stated vs. Revealed Preference in Abusive Relationships

It is always a good rule of thumb that when people say they want one thing and consistently do another, this should make you suspicious of whether they actually know what they want. Or in economists terms, when people's stated preferences and revealed preferences diverge, they are probably screwing something up. ("Screwing something up" is in fact a technical term :)  ).

Economists, for largely good reasons, tend to trust revealed preference. Talk is cheap, but when the chips are down, go with what people actually do. Usually this is a good way to bet - when a guy tells you he wants to see more opera but actually spends his weekends watching TV, it's a fair bet that he doesn't actually want to see opera, he just likes the idea of it.

But what about a woman who is in an abusive relationship who manages to leave and tells you she really wants to be done with the man, but then keeps going back again and again after he apologises?

In that case, it's not so simple. Right-minded people immediately jump to the conclusion that the woman actually wants to leave, and must somehow just be being prevented from this (such as by threats from the man).

The trouble with this view is that it has difficulty explaining why there is such cyclicality - women will leave, and then come back, many times over. It can't be that they never can find a way to leave. Even if you have all the sympathy in the world for such women, you're still left with a puzzle of trying to explain what the hell they're doing. In other words, something funny is going on.

One of my favourite papers in economics looks at this. They argue that women in abusive relationships have time-inconsistent preferences - in other words, they truly do want to leave when they leave, but they predictably change their mind and return to the guy. Hence their preferences are inconsistent over time.

They study a fascinating case that provides evidence for this - the case of 'no-drop' laws, whereby when a woman complains of domestic violence, prosecutors are obliged to proceed with the case even if the woman subsequently recants her testimony. This tends to happen a lot, which should also make you suspicious - if the guy is already in prison pending charges, what's the harm in going to trial?

When these laws were passed, they resulted in a drop in violence of men towards women - no surprises there. But here's where it gets interesting - the law also resulted in a drop of murders of men by abused women. The authors argue that people with time-inconsistent preferences need commitment mechanisms to stop them changing their mind. Murder is one such mechanism, albiet a very poor choice. These no-drop laws work because they substitute a much less costly commitment mechanism, helping women stop themselves from predictably going back to their man. They might be my favourite example ever of 'nudging' type laws, where you can stop people making bad mistakes by subtly crafted laws.

The reason this is such a fantastic paper is that it gets towards the heart of understanding why people end up in these crappy situations. The feminists of the world would tell you that the women are 100% victims, and that if they're returning to the men, it must be because of threats - we just need to be harsher on the men. In fact, believing this misplaced sympathy would cause you to completely miss the bigger picture of how these relationships persist, and what you can actually do to help end them.

Sympathy is not a substitute for analysis. And you can depend on it that when stated preference and revealed preference diverge, it's a situation worth your studying.

A Public Service Announcement

From The Department of Needlessly Inflammatory Yet Statistically Likely Observations:

Are you a member of a fraternity? Were you once part of a fraternity? You may be suffering from a disease that doctors describe as "being a giant piece of shit".

More details here.

Sociologists are at a loss to explain why this happened at the SUNY University at Albany (ranked #143 in US News and World Report National Universities Rankings) rather than say, Yale (ranked #3 in US News and World Report National Universities Rankings).

Labour economists created controversy amongst SWPL consensus opinion by suggesting that 'being a bunch of imbeciles at a third-rate college' may be a factor.

Happy Half-Tau Day!

Sure, to the layman it's "Pi Day".

But to the sophisticate, it's Half Tau Day.



The full Tau Day Manifesto makes an incredibly compelling argument that it would be far more useful to have tau = 2 * pi as the circle constant (instead of pi).

Consider me sold!

Jersey Shore, summarised

I've only watched about 3 minutes of the show (after seeing the Southpark episode about it), but this review is so full of win I don't know where to start.

The Extreme Path-Dependence of History

The Steyn article below hints at something that is enormously under-appreciated, which is the fact that major political and historical events are incredibly difficult to predict. I don't think that the CIA is especially stupid due to its inability to forecast major political events like 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall etc. I remember hearing that the great Gary Becker toured around Eastern Europe in 1989  a few months before the wall fell, and he didn't see anything that hinted at instability.

This exercise is of course enormously clouded by hindsight bias - after the fact, everyone's sure that they knew that Mubarak was unstable, that there weren't going to be any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that real estate was overvalued in 2006, and that structural factors meant everybody knew that World War 1 was inevitable. Which is why there's such great value in exercises like Niall Ferguson's paper that looks at the reaction of bond prices to the outbreak of World War 1 - what do you know, they went crazy. It turns out that investors in government bonds, who aren't exactly incurious about political risk, were truly surprised by World War 1. When you go back to what people were saying and doing at the time, it turns out that there were far fewer expert predictors at the time than "expert predictors" years later

It goes without saying that if you go back 6 months, nobody was predicting the collapse of governments in Tunisia and Egypt, nor massive unrest in Bahrain and Libya. Certainly not the CIA. But then again, neither were the people currently laughing at the CIA for its ineptness. Short answer, nobody was.

This is where the concept of path-dependence comes in. As wikipedia describes it, it states that "predictable amplifications of small differences are a disproportionate cause of later circumstances."

This is in contrast to the classic debate in history about structure vs. agency. 'Structure' roughly says that broad social trends and circumstances determine the path of history, and that individual actions make little overall difference. 'Agency' says that individuals have free choice, and that these decisions end up affecting history (such as through the impact of 'big men' political leaders whose decisions determine outcomes).

The way I interpret path-dependence is somewhere in between - essentially that the vast majority of individual decisions don't actually matter, but when they do they can matter in extremely amplified and unpredictable ways. Which is why forecasting history is so difficult.

Tunisia is a perfect example of this. Let's read the Wikipedia description:

The demonstrations were precipitated by high unemployment, food inflation, corruption, a lack of freedom of speech and other political freedom and poor living conditions. ... The protests were sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December and led to the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali 28 days later....

Or as the Malaysia Star puts it:

"Fruit seller ignites a revolution"

Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest of official corruption and harassment of his fruit-selling business. Now, doubtless millions of Tunisians had been pissed off at official misbehaviour before, and taken angry actions in response. But this particular one struck a nerve, and the riots it set off brought down the government. Seeing the example of Tunisia, Egyptians protested in response, and so too did the Libyans.

No doubt, the protests wouldn't have happened without the volatile social conditions described in the Wikipedia article (which is why there are few spontaneous revolutions in rich, peaceful first world countries).

But ask yourself this: what would the world look like today if Mohamed Bouazizi hadn't set himself on fire?

There's a strong argument to be made that the middle east political situation would be considerably different.

And that's why I don't blame the C.I.A. for not forecasting these events. If history is path-dependent, then individual actions can sometimes matter, but usually in incredibly chaotic and unpredictable ways.

Word has gotten out!

It's good to know readers of this blog in Amherst, Virginia have taken my 24 carat gold advice to heart.

Steyn on the CIA

Mark Steyn seems to be back to regular writing, much to the benefit of all of us. Here's his latest:

"In the new budget, there's a request from the CIA for an emergency appropriation of $513.7 million. Great! A mere half-billion. That's enough for 10,000 cowboy poetry festivals. So what's it for? Toppling Kim Jong-Il? Taking out the Iranian nuclear program?

Er, no. It's an emergency payment to stop the CIA pension fund from going bankrupt next year with unfunded liabilities of $6.4 billion. The CIA failed to foresee the collapse of the Iron Curtain until it happened. It failed to spot that Pakistan was going nuclear until it happened. But, when the world's most bounteously endowed intelligence agency fails to spot that its own pension fund is going bankrupt until it happens, I wouldn't bet the future on anyone in the United States government having much of a clue about what is or isn't "in China's interest.""

Read the whole thing. Comedy gold!

Girl Talk - The Big Beat of Mashup DJs

I spent yesterday downloading the rest of the Girl Talk albums. (Incidentally, the illegal art store may be the single worst designed commercial website I've come across - it took some serious dedication to find where the hell the list of Girl Talk albums was)

It cemented something I've thought for a while - Girl Talk is like the Big Beat of Mashup DJs.

Big Beat is a style of techno made famous by groups like The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy. One of the ways in which it differed from earlier genres is that it featured way more samples - different drum beats, lots of random vocal and clicking samples that add a lot to the richness of the sound. You don't necessarily appreciate each one, but you notice the overall effect.

Back to mashup DJs - the typical mashup (some great examples here at the Bootie Blog) mixes two or maybe three songs. They tend to have naming conventions that reflect this. e.g.

DJ Lobsterdust – Knock Out Eileen (LL Cool J vs. Dexy's Midnight Runners)

Most of the effort and talent is finding songs that share a similar lyrical idea:

e.g. 'Paper Rump' by DJ Tripp, which mashes up Wrexx-n-effect 's "All I wanna do is stick my zoom zoom zoom in your boom boom' sample with MIA's 'All I wanna do is [bang] [bang] [bang] [bang] and [click] and [ching] and take your money' sample.

and/or musical styles that work well together, despite you not realising it:

e.g. 'House of Klezmer' by Faroff, which mashes up House of Pain's 'Jump Around' with this crazy pipe music I'd never heard of, but is awesome.

Girl Talk is very different. Every one of his songs uses tons of different samples. Because there's so many damn samples, he has to abandon the standard mashup naming conventions, and go with song titles that often reflect a single sample (e.g. 'Oh No', 'Let It Out' etc.)

Some people put together great graphical representations to show just how many samples Girl Talk uses:

-Here for the youtube version

-Here for the graphic summary

To see what I mean, click here and watch the clip for the first song, 'Oh No'. Count the number of songs that either appear for 10 seconds or less, or feature only a drum beat:

Used for drum beats only

'2-pac featuring KC and Jo-Jo - How do you want it'

'NWA - Express Yourself'

'Eminem featuring Dr Dre and 50 Cent - Crack a Bottle'

'J-Kwon - Tipsy '09'

'Slick Rich and Doug E. Fresh - La Di Da Di'

'Jay-Z and Alicia Keys - Empire State of Mind'

Used for less than 10 seconds

'Jay-Z - 99 problems'

'Jay-Z featuring MIA and Kanye West and Lil Wayne - Swagga Like Us'

'Trina featuring Killer Mike - Look Back at Me'

Bear in mind, these are the extra samples - they aren't even the main ones you hear! Most people probably wouldn't even be aware that any of these were actually in the song. But having that many extra drum beats and small shout-out samples gives a much more 'produced' sound that I think has been part of the huge success of All Day.

This must take an incredible amount of work. Hell, it took 5 minutes for me to listen to the song (and watch the video) and just write them all down! This guy thought of them all, and figured out how they'd add to the song.

Girl Talk, you are a cool dude.

The Lies we tell ourselves

An old story, but a revealing one.

Pamela Anderson, former 'Baywatch' star, made one of the original sex tapes. This was when she was married to Tommy Lee, the drummer for the band Motley Crue. The tape was apparently stolen from their home. Bear in mind this was back in 1997, when the internet was much less developed and it was harder for these things to go viral. A second tape that she'd made with Bret Michaels of the band 'Poison' also surfaced in 1998.

She and Lee got divorced. Since that time, she got engaged to Kid Rick, and then broke up with him, before finally marrying him in July 2006. The marriage only lasted a few months, with them filing for divorce in November 2006. It was announced that Anderson had miscarried a few weeks earlier. The fact that the marriage was premised on a pregnancy and terminated on the conclusion of such is entirely plausible, and sufficient to explain all the actions involved. Additionally, one does not need to reach for conspiracy theories to describe the marital breakdown of a woman who married her first husband after knowing him for 96 hours. All this is given. But it's not what I want to talk about.

What is far more interesting is the rumor that the divorce was triggered at least in part by the movie 'Borat'. In the film, Pamela Anderson is the love interest of Borat, and the movie features a couple of non-explicit clips from Anderson's sex tape with Tommy Lee. But Anderson is playing herself, with the plot being that she gets kidnapped by Borat by being put in his 'marriage sack'. In other words, she comes across as pretty normal. The sex tape scene is mainly a joke to show that Anderson is not the virgin that Borat thinks she is. The joke, in other words, is about Borat, and Pamela Anderson is just being Pamela Anderson.

So goes the story, there was a private showing of the movie at the Anderson/Rock home held by Universal chief Ron Meyer. Kid Rock (Robert Ritchie) apparently was furious after the screening:

"Bob started screaming at Pam, saying she had humiliated herself and telling her, 'You're nothing but a whore! You're a slut! How could you do that movie?' — in front of everyone. It was very embarrassing," the source said.

Now, it bears repeating that this movie actually made Pamela Anderson appear in a better light than her actual actions in real life did. In the movie, she didn't appear naked (which she's done dozens of times, in Playboy and elsewhere). She didn't sleep with anyone. She didn't even pretend to sleep with anyone. She wasn't even shown as being a slut.

And bear in mind, all of Pamela Anderson's horrible relationship choices were known to Kid Rock long before they got married. She's made sex tapes with two separate men, both of which are readily available on the internet. Her naked body can be seen just by googling her name.  If you're marrying this woman, let's just say, "caveat emptor".

No, what the movie actually did was publicly draw attention to and make light of the fact that she had been boned by her ex-husband. It is incredibly difficult for any man to maintain an even temperament watch himself being cuckolded on camera by another man. Even if it was in the past. Even if it was before she knew him. It is virtually impossible for a man to maintain an even temperament while jokes are publicly made for the whole world to see about his wife's past escapades.

As far as I can tell, the screening did two things, both of which made the marriage terminal.

The first was that it forced Kid Rock to publicly witness an acknowledgement that his wife had been boned by another man in the past, and that this was on film. You don't need a PhD in psychology to hypothesise that Kid Rock probably spent a good deal of his time avoiding thinking about this question. You don't have to be a marriage counselor to imagine that this issue may have been a source of friction beneath the surface of their marriage (or indeed above the surface). Having this comforting amnesia ripped off in a public setting was likely a major source of discomfort.

But that alone I don't think would have done it. Kid Rock must have been fairly tough-skinned at dealing with these kind of jokes.  He had to be. How can you marry a woman who was famous for appearing on TV in a tight bathing suit, then appearing in Playboy, then appearing in multiple sex tapes, without acknowledging her past actions?

But there was something else this time.

This time, Pamela Anderson herself was in on the joke. She was happy to be part of a movie that made joking references to his cuckolding. The jokes were mild, no doubt. But not to him. In the eyes of Kid Rock, she had joined the chorus of laughter at him about the fact that he married a woman famous for being boned by someone else.

And that was what he couldn't abide.

But you can't admit that. You can't say 'How could you publicly acknowledge your past marital relations and be a part of a comedy scene vaguely about that?'. You can't say 'How can you force me to publicly endure recognition of the existence of your sex tape by watching small, inexplicit segments of it'. Because both of those are ridiculous-sounding complaints, even though they're the actual problem. So what accusation does he reach for? In his desperation to hurt her in return, what does he say? Let's rewind:

"Bob started screaming at Pam, saying she had humiliated herself and telling her, 'You're nothing but a whore! You're a slut! How could you do that movie?' — in front of everyone. It was very embarrassing," the source said.

Let's examine the three complaints in reverse order.

3. "You're a slut"

Yes. But that's old news. Why did you marry her then?

2.  "You're nothing but a whore"

Yes. But that's old news. Why did you marry her then?

1. She had humiliated herself

Wrong. She humiliated you.

Or more specifically, Tommy Lee humiliated you. She just reminded you publicly of the fact, and was in on the joke.

And that has to end in divorce.

Hell hath no fury like a person exposed to truths they've known but tried to ignore.

Miscellaneous Joy

-Steve Sailer #1, demonstrating wonderful note-perfect satire.

-Steve Sailer #2, with the quote of the day:

"The public doesn't want new ideas, they just want to be told that their old ideas are new ideas that have been discovered by brain scans."

-Accounting for computer scientists (that is, how to teach the academic discipline of accounting to those with a background in computer science, not how to account for the number of computer scientists the country has)

-Dalrymple on Libya. Self-recommending.

-The War Nerd on assassinations. Grim pictures, black comedy, incisive analysis.

Sting - Unoriginal Talentless Lyrics Thief (a.ka. Questions Google doesn't know the answer to)

Let's face it, there aren't many of these questions. But this is one.

Sting has a hit song, 'Englishman in New York'.

Wikipedia notes that the song was apparently written about Quentin Crisp. The song itself is okay, but it's the lyrics that are interesting. You can find a copy of them here.

So what's the problem?

The problem is that I'm quite certain that most of the lines (and in fact all the interesting lines) are taken from a poem of the same name, "An Englishman in New York". It's not credited anywhere, and I can't find it anywhere online. I can't even find any acknowledgement that it exists online. I don't remember who wrote it.

I remember seeing a poster of the original poem in the library in high school and thinking it was great. The poster was on a black background, and had a big green apple with a bite out of it behind the text, and a white silhouette of a man. I found the Sting song afterwards, recognised it as a blatant rip-off, and went searching for the original poem.

Except that now I can't find it. Most of the lyrics overlap, so the phrases tend to have a lot in common. The only phrase I know that's not directly in the song is

"If manners maketh man then I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien, an Englishman in New York".

Sting broke this up into two parts, thereby ruining the flow of the line. The best bit, and he couldn't get it right.

Seach ' "Englishman in New York" poem ' and you get the Sting stuff.

Search ' "Englishman in New York" poem -Sting ' and you get a bunch of stuff about Quentin Crisp instead. 

Search ' "Englishman in New York" poem -Sting -Crisp' and you get random peoples thoughts on stuff (lots of posts from people who like the idea of themselves being an Englishman in New York) with much higher pageranks than this poem, which apparently doesn't exist.

Search the precise phrase ' "If manners maketh man then I'm an alien" ' and you get nothing.

Search '"englishman in new york" sting lyrics rip-off stolen poem ' and you get stuff about lines he's ripped from William Blake, but nothing on this one.

So how do you know I'm not crazy, or making this up? How do you know the poster I remember wasn't just a transcription of the song?

I can offer only two bits of evidence. One, the aforementioned phrase that's not actually in the song, and I'm certain I didn't imagine - I would be very unusual to just put together two random lines in the song in my memory, given they're not even near each other in the song (and make much more sense together than apart).

Secondly, Sting himself offers a very sly allusion. The line in his song is:

"If manners maketh man as someone said"

He's acknowledging that at least part of this song isn't his own. Which isn't surprising. Do you think the guy who penned such inspiring lyrics as 'Every step you take, I'll be watching you'. 'Oh can't you see, you belong to me, how my poor heart aches, with every breath you take'? Puke. He wouldn't even know what a legal alien is if he hadn't ripped off the lyrics from someone else. He has to admit that 'maketh' isn't his own, because NOBODY would believe he came up with that.

Yes "someone said" it, you asshole! Someone you stole the lyrics from and who's now getting no credit!! Someone who doesn't exist even on the internet! How low do you have to get to not exist on the internet? I'm nobody, and I've got my own blog that's read by at least my Dad! This guy wrote an ass-kicking poem that got turned into a famous song, and he's a non-person, while that no-talent loser claims credit as a poetic genius.

You may have got away with this fraud so far Sting, but the internet never forgets.

I've never bothered editing Wikipedia yet, but if I find out what the original poem is, I'm going to make an account to call you a thief and a fraud.

Before and After

Apropos nothing, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.

Hugh Laurie holds a special place in my esteem as the 'best non-American impersonator of an American accent', in his performance on the show 'House'. While it's not too hard to do a fake accent that can fool foreigners, it is incredibly difficult to to do an accent that can convince native speakers. He manages it so well that it surprises people to find out that he's actually British. He's also a member of the order of 'actors that are demonstrably great in both comedy and drama', another slim category.

I wonder what a photo of me in 20 years will look like.

A passage so good I'm typing it out in full

"The citizens of modern complex societies usually do not realize that we are an anomaly of history. Throughout the several million years that recognizable humans are known to have lived, the common political unit was the small, autonomous community, acting independently, and largely self-sufficient. Robert Carneiro has estimated that 99.8 percent of human history has been dominated by these autonomous local communities (1978:219). It has only been within the last 6000 years that something unusual has emerged: the hierarchical, organized, interdependent states that are the major reference for our contemporary political experience. Complex societies, once established, tend to expand and dominate, so that today they control most of the earth's lands and people, and are perpetually vexed by those still beyond their reach. A dilemma arises from this: we today are familiar mainly with political forms that are an oddity of history, we think of these as normal, and we view as alien the majority of the human experience. It is little surprise that collapse is viewed so fearfully."

From Joseph Tainter's fascinating book "The Collapse of Complex Societies", which I'm halfway through. Thoroughly recommended.

The Elderly are Invisible

I was sitting in a park near my apartment this morning, drinking my coffee and watching the world go by. While sitting on my bench, an old man (who must have been at least 80 or so) with one of those wheeling walkers shuffled by. He said hello to me (and another person he passed), walked a few paces past me, and started leaning against the back of the bench next to mine. He did a few leg stretch things, then meandered over towards some nearby stairs and slowly walked down a few of them  (one at a time) and back up again, holding both rails the whole time. I confess to wondering if he'd made it down and up okay, but he seemed reasonably sure-footed, if very slow.

I remember Papa Holmes once making the point to me that once you reach middle-age, you become invisible. People's eyes are drawn towards young, vibrant beautiful people (of whatever sex). When you start getting past the point that you are attractive, people stop noticing you. It's almost as if you don't exist - when they walk past you, you are just another obstacle in their automatic collision detection software, the same as a tree or a lamppost. If you asked 20 people that just passed you, nobody would be able to remember that you were there.

There is an old people's home near my apartment, and while most of them do not venture out very far, it seems almost certain that I've passed some of them before while walking. I can't remember it happening though. Without the contemplation encouraged by having nothing to do on a park bench on a Sunday morning, I almost certainly wouldn't have noticed this man either.

As Al Pacino's character put it in the movie 'Any Given Sunday', "when you get old, things get taken from you.". I think he's right, but I would modify it slightly. Things are lost, but not taken. The difference is one of agency, but it is an important one.

I found myself reflecting on how much the elderly have lost that you and I take for granted in our youth. I bound up and down stairs without thinking about it. I swim in the ocean. I drive my car. I fly for 18 hours to a foreign country. I dress myself, bathe myself, and go to the toilet without noticing that I don't need anyone to help me. I reflect on my health only on the odd occasion when I get a cold. I eat whatever food I wish. I pass a pretty girl in the street, and she smiles at me. I have friends I can call and go out to a bar, cinema, cafe, or restaurant.

You may depend on it, dear reader, that there will come a time when you can no longer do all these things.

Indeed, there may come a time when you can do none of these things.

As I got up to leave, the old man was resting on the seat part of his walker. As I walked off, I stopped to talk to the man. I smiled and lamely tried to make conversation by saying that he had a better seat than I did. He smiled back and said 'Good', in a tone that implied that he hadn't heard the statement properly and assumed I was asking how he was. I walked off, regretting my awkwardness at not stopping and talking more. I wondered how many others were sitting in the retirement home nearby, without anyone who visits.

The elderly are indeed invisible. Old age is dukkha, as the great recluse said.

The Disney Hipster Meme

I seem to be getting slack on keeping up with the latest memes the the cool kids are using.

But I did like these two:





As the man said - comedy gold!

(via Ace of Spades )

Phrases that crack me up

"Bachelorette Party".

The phrase 'bachelorette' is, as far as I can tell, the penis envy of the linguistic world. Bachelor parties reflect a truth that feminists find uncomfortable, namely that an unmarried man is just as likely viewed as a someone with options rather than someone that's been passed over by the dating market. That's why bachelor parties exist - men are spontaneously mourning the loss of a certain freedom of action.

Moreover, the world was not lacking in a term to describe unmarried women. The term is 'spinster', and unlike 'bachelorette', it doesn't come up as a spelling error when I type it in blogger.

So why don't we have 'spinster parties'? Simple. The connotations of the phrase 'spinster' reflect another truth that feminists find uncomfortable, namely that unmarried women past a certain age are generally not viewed as having lots of options, but as people that have been passed over. Don't shoot the messenger, but that's just how it is.

Bachelor parties are usually quixotic, last-hurrah type affairs, where the groom-to-be is sadly bidding farewell to certain things he enjoyed, while his bachelor friends revel in the fact that they still get to do them. "Bachelorette" parties (or 'spinster parties', as I like to call them), on the other hand, have the opposite dynamic - the bride is triumphal, having finally gotten him to 'put a ring on it', while the other spinsters are trying to be happy for the bride's success. Whether this latter part always happens or not I do not know (having never been), but I would be surprised if there weren't a reasonable number of attendees who were merely putting on a brave face.

And that's where "bachelorette parties" come in. It's not only a linguistic sleight-of-hand, but a serious attempt to ape the demeanour of the bachelor party - friends celebrating their freedom to drink and flirt and sleep with random guys, a precious freedom that the bride is about to lose. Nobody is fooled by this charade of course. And in the scheme of life, the bride is least fooled of all. She's got the man she wanted.

Fact is, no guests want to turn up to a 'spinster party' - who wants to be reminded that they're on the path to living alone, while their friends experience relationship success? Bachelorette parties are an attempt to paper over the truth of the dating market. And while I can support that, the phrase is so comically ridiculous I can't help but laugh. It's a dark kind of comedy though, with the tragedy side barely concealed.


Bachelor Party

Guests --><--Host

"Bachelorette" Party

Host --><--Guests

"Black People = Slaves"

An excellent and very even-handed discussion by Orin Hargraves of the censorship of the word 'nigger' in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. 

The bit I find so funny about this is that for some reason, it's always the books that are the most sympathetic to the plight of minorities and the underprivileged that attract this kind of censorship. Write 'Heart of Darkness' and scores of post-colonial pinheads line up to call you a racist for describing the hair of Africans as 'woolly' and not giving them enough dialogue. But nobody bothers to censor Mein Kampf, for instance - what would be the point? If however you tell a story that is an immensely powerful critique of the institutions and attitudes towards slavery, people can't wait to bring out the big red pen. There's little sense that these kind of actions make it less likely that people will actually read the book (and thereby receive its anti-slavery message), but when was that important compared with posturing and feeling self-righteous?

Orin also quotes this hilarious justification by the censor-in-chief:

In this edition I have translated each usage of the n-word to read "slave" instead, since the term "slave" is closest in meaning and implication. Although the text loses some of the caustic sting that the n-word carries, that price seems small compared to the revolting effect that the more offensive word has on contemporary readers.

I thought the best response to this was from D.L Hughley:

"They took 'nigger' out of Mark Twain and replaced it with slave. ... that's not an upgrade. ... I'd rather be a nigger than a slave. If you call me 'nigger' I can go home; if you call me 'slave' I've got to go with you."

Just so. Slavery is deeply, enduringly offensive at the core of its very idea. 'Nigger' is just a word. Moreover, in this case it's a word being employed by Twain in the assault on the far more serious evil.

On the other hand, I'm deeply excited by the prospect of the Alan Gribben revised version of many other popular works of contemporary scholarship. Take, for instance, "Shoot 'Em Up" by Nas, as interpreted by Alan Gribben:

"One 44, Two 45s
Three loaded clips
Four free slaves roll
One free slave drives"

Or the Alan Gribben version of Chris Rock's comedy sketch 'Black People vs. Niggers'

"There's some shit going on with black people right now
It's like a civil war going on with black people
There's two sides, there's black people and there's slaves
and slaves have got to go."

Some people may describe Alan Gribben as a humourless, pompous, preening buffoon. I would not be inclined to disagree with those people.

Everything that's wrong with Australia's industrial policy in one video

Article headline: "Prime Minister Julia Gillard has launched the new Holden Cruze".

Honestly, what the hell is the Australian Prime Minister doing being the spokesman for a private company launching a new product? The only reason they're doing this is because the government decided long ago that it was crucially important that Australia produced cars. Because, you know... no wait, I have absolutely no idea why. Consequently, the government (sadly of both parties) continue with ridiculous car tariffs which make the competition artificially expensive, and now have reached the new low of being the public face of these pieces of junk.
Doesn't she have anything better to do with her time?

As it turns out, no. No she doesn't.

Scrap that! Let the car launches and ribbon cuttings and meetings with seniors proceed apace! It is by far the least value destroying policy that the Gillard Brown government is likely to undertake. 

The best name for an alcohol brand

I submit the following:

'Barty'.
'Zarty'
'Zub'
'Trub'.

What am I getting at?

Musicians are lazy. They don't tend to come up with many original rhyming words. And there's certain themes that they want to sing about a lot, namely being out at nightclubs and parties.

Currently, the Bacardi Rum company has a monopoly on being the only alcohol company whose name rhymes with the word 'party'. As a result, they get millions of dollars of free advertising from lazy musicians who write down something about a party, can't figure out what comes next, and think of Bacardi. For example, here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or... well, you get the idea.

There's no good reason for this. For example, 50 Cent's "In Da Club':

Go, go, go shawty
It's your birthday
We gon' party like it's yo birthday
We gon' sip Bacardi like it's your birthday

There's plenty of other good substitute lines you could put in there:

We gon' party like it's yo birthday

Some guy was farty, ruining your birthday
Lots of castrati here for your birthday
Magna Carti gives rights on your birthday

Okay, so maybe we're seeing why most of the other words that rhyme with 'party' don't work (the second best is 'hardy', which sounds kind of weak and awkward).

Bottom line? It makes total sense for some other alcohol company to start competing on the 'alcohols rhyming with party' line.

50 cent also illustrates why 'Trub' and 'Zub' might be good names - there aren't many alcohols that rhyme with 'club'. Look at the lame extent he's forced to go to in the song:

You can find me in the club, bottle full of bub

'Bub'? Really? That's lame as hell. It's bad enough that it's short for bubbly, which is a chick name for a chick drink, or something that happens at classy celebrations. You really think 50 cent would be drinking champagne if the conventions of song-writing didn't apply? I think not.

But he would gladly be drinking Shylock Holmes excellent new mix drink 'Zub'.

When someone makes millions of dollars this way, I will of course file suit.

Black History Month

In the US, today marks the end of Black History Month, also known as 'February'.

Perhaps because I'm a foreigner (and hence have little personally invested in issues of race guilt in this country), this always struck me as a completely absurd tradition.

Just stop and think for a minute. It's not Black History Day (which would make total sense) or Black History Week (which seems a little excessive, but I could understand).

No, a full month of every year needs to be devoted to Black History. It's Just That Important.

According to the powers that be, I ought to spend roughly one day in 12 over the course of my entire life contemplating the role of black people in history. By contrast, I would be blown away if more than 50% of the adult population call their parents one day in 12.

On the other hand, one advantage of the current system is that it's so overblown that it seems to mostly turn into a joke anyway.

For instance, I noticed an ad on the way to work advertising the lap band which said 'Celebrate Black History Month' and then some tenuous connection I can't even remember, then 'Get a Lap Band'. This is exactly in line with the lap band people's estimate of the overall demographic they're targeting at - in other words, people too dim to realise that the lap band has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH BLACK HISTORY.

Another bizarre aspect is if you type in Black History Month into google images. A weird number of the hits show pictures of Nike Sneakers:



Below are the proportion of images on each page showing sneakers:

Page 1: 2/40
Page 2: 6/40
Page 3: 10/40 (!?!)
Page 4: 18/40  (?!?!?!?!?)

By contrast, here are the proportion of images featuring Louis Armstrong:
Page 1: 0/40
Page 2: 1/40
Page 3: 0/40
Page 4: 0/40

Apparently Nike Sneakers formed a very integral part of Black History. Who knew?

Meddling government policy has unintended consequences, news at 11!

Oh, the tasty Schadenfreude.

San Francisco provides a subsidy for  low-flow toilets.

San Francisco gets huge stench from low flow toilets clogging up drains.

San Francisco buys huge amounts of bleach to try to combat the stench.

In terms of scoring that policy, it saves 20 million gallons of water, but uses but uses 8.5 million pounds of bleach, which will go into drains or the drinking water supply. I don't know about you, but I'd score that as an environmental loss, or at best breaking even.

Meanwhile, the cost of the bleach is $14 million, they spent $100 million upgrading the sewer system to deal with the problem, as well as the cost of the subsidy itself, whatever that is.

Shylock says, it's a bargain!

Another money quote from the article:

A Don't Bleach Our Bay alert has just gone out from eco-blogger Adam Lowry who argues the city would be much better off using a disinfectant like hydrogen peroxide - or better yet, a solution that would naturally break down the bacteria.

A natural solution! Brilliant! We'll break the poo down with magic pixie dust. I'm sure Adam Lowry is hard at work right now, toiling in a biology lab to generate this new solution.

What's that you say? He's just lazily demanding that someone else do it, on the premise that because he wants it to happen, it's got to be feasible?

Personally I like the idea of San Francisco living in the stench of it's own filth. It seems like a fitting monument to the governance of the place.

The worst metaphor in the history of song-writing

From the otherwise enjoyable Van Halen's song "Why can't this be love":

"Only time can tell if we'll stand the test of time."

Awful, awful stuff. Honestly, how can you write that and not cringe? How can you sing it year after year and not be embarrassed that you didn't spend an extra 5 minutes and come up with something less laughable?

Still, they made a lot of money off that song. I'm sure there's a lesson in that, and while I'm not sure exactly what it is, I'm sure it's depressing.

Apple : nanny-Jobs-knows-best computing

Apple has decided that attachments I download on my phone should be inaccessible to me. If I'm not connected to the Internet, I can't access them.

Thankfully, I have an app, Stanza, that saves the PDFs so you can view them later offline. You know, like when you want to view a flight reservation while on the plane.

So I had some stuff I wanted to read on a plane, but had forgotten to download to my computer. No worries, I'll just load it on my iphone, copy it to Stanza, plug in my phone to my computer and copy it across, right?

Wrong. It's somewhere on the phone, but you can't access it. Not through their own applications, not through allowing other apps to save files.

They're so obsessed with making the outside interface pretty that they won't let you do anything under the hood, even if it's just a workaround for their lack of functionality. And this isn't an accident - they fought in court tooth and nail to prevent you jailbreaking their phones too. You may have bought it, but that doesn't mean you should be able to use it as you please, according to Apple.

So instead of doing productive work at the airport, I instead fill up the Internet with pointless complaints about their company. Touché, Apple. Touché.

Posting Political Stuff on Facebook

Perhaps I'm the only one who thinks this, but I always find it incredibly boorish when people post political status updates on Facebook. They always have a smug condescension about them, as the person (giddy with the mind projection fallacy), assumes that every one of their acquaintances can't wait to hear their latest thoughts on Palin, Obama and everything else that we're already frustratingly overexposed too. They're rarely saying anything actually original or insightful either, just boilerplate and talking points repeated as if they're hilarious bon mots.

The thing I wonder is whether the people stop and consider what fraction of the audience agrees with them (it's always lower than you think) and whether those who disagree are likely to appreciate the verbal intrusion (they're not). Facebook isn't twitter, where people are explicitly signing up to read your nonsense. People may friend you for many reasons, not all of which involve wanting to read your every thought. It's like if you happened to run into an acquaintance from work that you hadn't seen in a while. Would you launch into a tirade about abortion or gay marriage? Of course you wouldn't. And yet give people a keyboard, and they suddenly feel that no thought is too contentious to not be imposed on everyone you've ever met. This is a thoroughly bipartisan feeling of mine - I may agree with some of the conservative sentiments, but I feel just as put off by their airing in this forum, knowing that plenty of other people won't like them.

That's why I prefer the blog. If you want to read my political writings, you have to seek them out. I'm not press-ganging my friends against their will into being an audience for my screeds. The scheme is an opt-in one, not an opt-out one, and the audience thus selected for people who, by revealed preference, are happy to read my rantings, however inane and reactionary.

When Incentives and Noble Aims Collide

Further on Libya, Businessweek reports that Switzerland has decided to freeze the assets of Gaddafi and his cronies for 3 years:

Switzerland froze the assets of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and his entourage for three years to avoid the possible “misappropriation” of the funds.

The freeze takes effect immediately, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The move comes less than two weeks after the government froze funds and assets in Switzerland belonging to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his circle.

“The Cabinet sharply condemns the use of force by Libyan rulers against the population,” the ministry said in an e- mailed statement from Bern today. “In view of the developments, the Cabinet decided to block any possible assets of Muammar Qaddafi and his circle in Switzerland with immediate effect.”

So what's the problem? Who wants to let this thug loot the treasury on his way out?

Well, me for one. Not because I don't think he's a monster that deserves far worse than he's going to get.

But think about it from the perspective of Gaddafi for second. Already people view you as a crazy loon, and you've vowed publicly to not leave until you're carried out in a box. (or more likely, hanged from meathooks on top of a petrol station)

But secretly, you're wondering if the gig is already up.You're losing control of cities left, right and centre. You've got two choices. One, grab what you can and fly to Venezuela, like was already rumoured. Or two, get whoever will still obey you in the airforce and army to start bombing, gassing, and killing as many people as you can in what will either be a defiant last stand or your one chance at regaining power.

So the first question is, which of these two outcomes would the west prefer to happen?

And the second question is, how do you think Gaddafi's decision will be affected if he knows that he can't take any money with him, and will be completely penniless in exile, as opposed to comfortably rich.?

It is more important to get rid of this monster than to keep him poor.

In the words of Sun Tzu:

Soldiers when in desperate straits lose the sense of fear. If there is no place of refuge, they will stand firm. If they are in hostile country, they will show a stubborn front. If there is no help for it, they will fight hard.

When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.

Great Website Titles

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, two esteemed MIT economists, have a new website examining their work on poverty. The website is called 'Poor Economics':

http://pooreconomics.com/

I think this is a wonderful title. Many people would say that MIT has been doing poor economics for quite some time now.

Oh, burn!!!

Actually, that's not true, but I couldn't resist the gag.

Why most bands suck by the time you've heard of them

Let me a describe a situation that long characterised my music listening, and see if it applies to you.

The bands I like always had one great album that was inevitably in the past. Occasionally you'd get to see them live and they'd play their old stuff, but they seemed a bit tired and past it - you never got to hear their good stuff while it was actually current.

I think I figured out a rough model of why this should be the case.

Suppose that each band has a underlying quality distribution - each time they write an album, it's an independent draw from their base quality distribution. Sometimes it's a good one (i.e. The Joshua Tree), sometimes it's a bad one (i.e. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb). The distributions will vary across bands in both mean and variance.Some bands have a high mean (e.g. Radiohead), some have a low mean (e.g. Nickelback). Some have a high variance (e.g. Bob Dylan), some have a low variance (Red Hot Chilli Peppers)

Friends don't let friends listen to Nickelback

Now, suppose further that there's a fixed quality threshold required in order to achieve popular success. You've got to have at least one good album to become popular. Additionally, suppose that news about bands only diffuses slowly - not everyone finds out about a band at the same time.

So how will this play out? Well, let's take the set of all bands who cross the quality threshold for the first time. Some of them will be truly talented and have a high distribution mean. Being above the quality cutoff signals a long line of good future albums (e.g. Death Cab For Cutie).

A lot of the time, however, being above the quality cutoff signals the band just got lucky with that particular album. After that, you get reversion to the mean. Think Jason Mraz or Ryan Adams. They have a couple of awesome songs ('I'm yours' and 'Desire' respectively), and whole albums full of complete crap.

This sketch of a model generates a couple of predictions:

-The average band will have their best album as their first major commercial success. After that they'll never have another good album

-The bands that have their best album as one of their later albums (Death Cab for Cutie with 'Plans', The New Pornographers with 'Challengers') will be more likely to to release subsequent good albums. These are the high mean bands, not the bands that were lucky.

-Related to the above, if a band releases a second album that's better than their first breakout album, it's a very strong signal of band quality.

-The chances that you get to hear their good stuff depends on how connected you are. If you hear about new bands quickly, you'll get to see them at their prime. If you're late in the loop, you'll always find out about them too late.

The optimal strategy in this setup is to go to see bands as soon as you can after they become popular - that's the high point, and they'll rarely get any better.

Which is a sad conclusion, but certainly sounds like the world we live in, doesn't it? Dire Straits was probably the best band in the 1980s (bar maybe U2), and yet Mark Knopfler has never lived up to the early promise since.

Headline of the Day

From Zero Hedge:

Has The Chairman Stopped Ordering Ink? Hewlett Packard Plummets After Hours On Major Downward Guidance Revision

Comedy gold!

The New Democratic Strategy

Every time a Republican state legislature threatens to pass legislation stripping public sector unions of their right to negotiate, they flee the state, thereby depriving the Republicans of quorum.

First in Wisconsin, now in Indiana.

It looks like they're taking a page out of the play book of Monty Python's Sir Robin:

"Brave Sir Robin ran away.
Bravely ran away away.
When danger reared its ugly head
He bravely turned his tail and fled
As brave Sir Robin turned about,
And gallantly he chickened out,
Bravely taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin!"

Frankly, only good things can come from this strategy. It makes them look like cowards, and likely galvanises public opinion against the unions.

But even if this doesn't happen and the legislation doesn't pass, every day that a legislature is deadlocked is one less day that value-destroying legislation can be passed. If I were the voters of Wisconsin, I'd call off the search for them and instead offer to put them up indefinitely in a swanky hotel in Illinois - it's got to be cheaper than the alternative.