As “Atrios points out”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_07_15_archive.html#162127958575664769 the Pope is indeed a Primate as well as a primate. This reminds me of watching RTE news years ago reporting on the death of “Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiach”:http://www.answers.com/topic/tom-s-cardinal-fiaich, Primate of Ireland. The newscaster asked some talking head whether he preferred to remember the Cardinal as a man or a primate. I know which PZ Myers would pick.
“John Tierney”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/17tier.html?8dpc=&_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all today writes about Richard Gott’s Copernican principle. He has a little more on “his blog”:http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/how-nigh-is-the-end-predictions-for-geysers-marriages-poker-streaks-and-the-human-race/#more-103, along with some useful discussion from “Bradley Monton”:http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/fac/monton.html. The principle in question says that you should treat the time of your observation of some event as being a random point in its duration. Slightly more formally, quoting Gott via “a paper”:http://spot.colorado.edu/~monton/BradleyMonton/Articles_files/future%20duration%20pq%20final.pdf Monton wrote with Brian Kierland,
bq. Assuming that whatever we are measuring can be observed only in the interval between times tbegin and tend, if there is nothing special about tnow, we expect tnow to be located randomly in this interval.
As Monton and Kierland note, we can use this to argue that the probability that
bq. tfuture is between _a_ and _b_ times tpast
is 1/ ( _a_ + 1) – 1 / ( _b_ + 1), where tpast is the past duration of the event in question, and tfuture is its future duration. Most discussion of this has focussed on the case where _a_ = _b_ = 39. But I think the more interesting, or at least easy to interpret, case is where _a_ = 0 and _b_ = 1. In this case we get the result that the probability of the entity in question lasting longer into the future than its current life-span is 1/2.
As a rule I tend to be very hostile to these attempts to get precise probabilities from very little data. I have a short argument against Gott’s Copernican formula below. (Against the general version, not for any particular values of _a_ and _b_.) But first I want to try a little mockery. I’d like to know anyone who would like to take any of the following bets.
Jerome Weeks offers another tale from the crypt:
A 17th century English lit doctoral candidate has completed her dissertation on Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist. Early on in her studies (yes, the gender makes this seem sexist, but I’m just reporting the anecdote as I heard it) she moved away from the university because of something — oh, let’s say she had to live with her parents. So she completed her work by mail. This was not that uncommon 25 years ago, and probably even less so today with the internet.
At any rate, it’s the day of her defense, she returns to the department and faces a jury of professors — who quickly realize that in all this time, no one has explained that Pepys’ name is pronounced “Peeps.” But the professors are embarrassed as well, to have one of their Ph.D. candidates get this far and never to have spoken to one of them directly. So our plucky candidate has the unnerving experience of hearing her mentors nervously coo at her for several hours.
Everytime she says “Peppis,” one of them would softly go … “Peeps.”
Maybe it actually happened. Maybe it’s academic folklore. But Jerome says he had one confirmation of the premise: He told the story to an English professor who admitted he hadn’t realized how the name was pronounced either.
Hewitt defends Vitter against charges of hypocrisy: [click to continue…]
Someone I believe to be Megan McArdle weighs in at the Economist blog on the laughable graphic run by the WSJ the other day. Brad DeLong is not impressed, nor is Mark Thoma (in part because comments are misattributed to him in the post), and nor am I. She singles me out for membership in “a special category of wrong,” I think mostly because my Ph.D is in sociology and not economics.
The Invasion
By now you’ve probably all seen this ridiculous graphic from todays’ WSJ, which purports to show that the Laffer curve is somehow related to the data points on the figure. “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/07/most-dishonest-.html, “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_07/011682.php, “Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/worst_editorial_ever.php, “Mark Thoma”:http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/07/yet-again-tax-c.html and “Max Sawicky”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/003184.html have all rightly had a good old laugh at it, because it’s spectacularly dishonest and stupid. I just want to make a point about so-called outlying cases, like Norway.
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While messing around on Cosma Shalizi’s “website”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/ (surely the _Wunderkammer_ of the blogosphere) I came across this “piece”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/bulletin/logic-of-diversity.html on Scott Page’s ideas about diversity, which sums them up rather better and more crisply than I did in my own “review”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/06/27/review-scott-e-page-the-difference/ of Page’s new book from a few weeks back.
Via Unfogged, “a key piece of empirical evidence”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19740787/ in the gun control debate. Faced with an intruder attempting to rob them at gunpoint, the homeowners responded successfully with wine and cheese. Merely brandishing the Camembert and bottle of Chateau Malescot St-Exupéry was not sufficient, though: they were discharged, but without injury to either party, or indeed the party itself.
A friend has asked about a story that may be the academic equivalent of an urban legend. I had never heard it. I asked some journalists who cover higher education, and they also say it does not ring a bell. But the thing sounds just plausible enough that it might really have happened. So at my friend’s request, here is a call for leads in case there is anything to it.
I will avoid naming the university in question, leave gender uspecified, and say only that the events in question are supposed to have happened within the past decade. Here is the the gist of it:
A doctoral candidate has finished a dissertation based on the archives of a village in Italy. It has been accepted, the defense has gone well, and all that remains is a little paperwork. A member of the committee (or possibly just someone who knows about the dissertation topic) happens to be on vacation in Italy and decides to visit the village. It’s not clear why — curiosity, time to kill, maybe to explore the archive? In any case, it turns out there is no village.
So there you have it. Does anyone know of a real case like this?
A few years ago, I read around in the literature on “contemporary legend” (the term now preferred by people who study them, rather than “urban legend”). Usually they amount to cautionary tales of some sort, in which some norm or rule is violated and punished. The tale of the faked archive seems to qualify, though I suppose it’s possible that it might be based on something that actually happened.
(crossposted to Cliopatria)
Under intense pressure from the rightwing commentariat (several members of which have been appointed to its board by the Howard government) the Australian Broadcasting Corporation presented a shortened version of Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle last night. Our local climate science delusionists looked forward to this event with keen anticipation, but they were in for a nasty shock.
The cover story of the Washington City Paper this week is about Late Night Shots, “a very exclusive, invite-only social-networking Web site” enabling rich young white people from good prep schools to get drunk and have casual sex with others of the kind in the Washington, DC area who share their right-wing politics and their sense of entitlement (if that isn’t, in this case, verging on the redundant).
LNS claims to have something like 14,000 members. Many are, the article says, Episcopalian or Presbyterian. The whole things sounds like something produced by splicing together the work of John Updike and Bret Easton Ellis with a business plan cooked by a savvy venture capitalist.
Features in the City Paper are often dubiously reported and normally at least twice as long as the content merits, though this one seems competently edited. It might be worth a look for those of you concerned with networks, online and off — just as an example of something off the MySpace/Facebook binary, so to speak.
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David Denby didn’t like “Sicko” very much. In the New Yorker, he writes:
“Hauling off seriously ill people to a military base where they won’t receive treatment is a dumb prank.”
Okay – I’m not the biggest Michael Moore fan in the world, and I can see how this might rub some people the wrong way.
“Why not tell us what really happened on the trip – for instance, what part Cuban officials played in receiving the American patients?”
Actually, that might not be a bad idea.
“Moore winds up treating the audience the same way that, he says, powerful people treat the weak in America – as dopes easily satisfied with fairy tales and bland reassurances.”
Seems harsh – this is clearly supposed to be a piece of entertaining propaganda – but, again, I can see the point.
“A shift to the left, or, at least, to the center, has overtaken Michael Moore, yielding an irony more striking than any he turns up: the changes in political consciousness that Moore himself has helped produce have rendered his latest film almost superfluous.”
Er, how’s that again? In polls, a majority are in favor of universal health care, so there’s no need to build grass-roots pressure anymore? Same for getting out of Iraq, I suppose.
Sara Taylor is confused about the nature of legal-rational authority. Via “Matt.”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/my_oath_like_your_oath_is_to_u.php
My undergraduates get introduced to this issue via the question, “Why can I require that you write a term paper but not require that you wash my car?” It’s not hard. The problem, as Chick Perrow remarks somewhere, is that even in well-run bureaucracies there’s always a tendency for the person or people at the top to act as though they own — and sometimes really believe they own — the whole organization, even though this shouldn’t happen.
I am reduced to nicking stuff from “Harry Hutton”:http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/2007/07/in-this-clip-michael-moore-is-yelling.html . Oh well. But I couldn’t resist the two quotes from Mark Steyn that he links to. The evils caused by socialized medicine have “limits”:http://www.nysun.com/article/58028 :
bq. Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can’t wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No.
That’s a relief. But we shouldn’t get “complacent”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2Q0OTg2NGUyOGJlNjMwYmZhNWU4ZmFlY2UxNmY5YzI :
bq. … the unloveliness of any British city after six in the evening – the dolly birds staggering around paralytic, the pools of “pavement pizza”, the baying yobboes gagging for a shag and hurling bollards through the bus shelters to impress the crumpet – is a natural consequence of what happens when the state relieves the citizen of primal responsibilities.