"Grief is not an achievement"

Jon Venables, one of the two boys involved in the horrifying James Bulger murder, has been arrested again, on charges that the British govt. -- probably with reason -- won't divulge. Andrew O'Hagan has a very good piece on this in the LRB; I particularly liked his rant about how the victim's mother has become a media sensation:

The British papers were in their favourite mode, evident again this week: mixing vengeance with sentiment, while exuding prurience and humbug. Denise Fergus, the mother of James Bulger, is being paraded as the proper arbiter of justice: as if the mother of a murdered child should call the shots, should be the one to decide what ought to be done with the killers. She is not to be challenged: who in their right mind would seek to challenge a grieving parent?

Yet we need to challenge her, because that also means challenging the moral stupidity the media’s use of her represents, the urge towards counter-violence that always seems to make sense to the mind of the average working-class Briton. Of course she wants the boys behind bars for ever. She wants their rights taken away. Which of us, given the horror, would never be tempted down that road? No matter what the law says, a sense of entitlement nowadays devolves to the families of murder victims. The tabloids and not just the tabloids like it that way. Among the tabloids I include the Today programme.

This case has, from the beginning, involved the need to say that grief is not an achievement, doesn’t confer power, and Denise Fergus should have no say at all in the fate of the boys who killed her son. She speaks contemptuously of the justice system, feels she should be consulted on every aspect of the case, and the media egg her on because her words claim attention and sell papers. She, too, is one of the shades haunting the Strand Shopping Centre. We want to listen to her, but to act on what we hear would be criminal. She says she won’t rest until those boys are truly punished for what they did: she wants them incarcerated under their original names – a death sentence.[*] Meanwhile the justice secretary feels he must pay lip-service to her status in all of this.

That said, I suspect this would have been handled much worse in the American system, where some rising prosecutor would have mined substantial political capital out of the case.

Doctor 'Hue

It's to be regretted that Bill Donohue isn't as well-known as, e.g., Abe Foxman, because he's a lot funnier. Apparently his official role is to fight anti-Catholic tropes in the media but he moonlights as an all-purpose culture warrior. Below are some of the things he's said, they're really quite breathtaking. (I would be curious to know what a "normal" socially conservative Catholic like Ross Douthat thinks of this guy.)

On "The Passion of the Christ" [per Wikipedia]:

Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth. It's about the Messiah.

On sex:

Sexual libertines, from the Marquis de Sade to radical gay activists, have sought to pervert society by acting out on their own perversions. What motivates them most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity. They know, deep down, that what they are doing is wrong, and they shudder at the dreaded words, "Thou Shalt Not." But they continue with their death-style anyway.

Secular saboteurs have often seized the arts to make a statement. That's why the blasphemous often tracks the obscene: if the goal is to put an artistic dagger into the heart of culture, then it makes sense to use all the ammo available by attacking the sacred. And they are certainly masters of that art. From scatological artistic exhibitions to the latest obscene installation, the charlatans have succeeded in politicizing the arts and denigrating Christianity.

On pedophiles, Ratzinger, and the Catholic church:

when Ratzinger's subordinates recommended therapy for Hullermann, he approved it. That was the drill of the day: after being treated, the patient (I prefer the term offender) returns to work. It's still the drill of the day in many secular quarters today, particularly in the public schools. A more hard-line approach, obviously, makes more sense, but the therapeutic industry is very powerful.

(This is the conservative synthesis in full bloom -- the instinctive leap from purification to violence is very Jack-D-Ripperian. Pass me the grain alcohol and rainwater!)

PS has anyone seen the South Park episode that mentions Donohue?

UPDATE Gawker (via Awl) explains what Donohue meant when he said that the church had a "homosexuality problem, not a pedophilia problem":

See, if the kids were post-pubescent—12 or 13, according to Bill—then it's not pedophilia anymore, it is homosexuality. And that means it's not the fault of the church, it is the fault of Gays.

A slightly more "moderate"-sounding version of this argument emanates from Ross Douthat. I consider my initial question largely answered.

Influential books

Yglesias, Tyler Cowen, and Kieran Healy [and probably lots of other bloggers] have been posting lists of books they found particularly influential. I'm finding it harder than I expected to come up with a similar list; I feel like I've picked up most of my ideas about life, politics, etc. -- at least the valuable ones -- by trying to reconcile apparent contradictions; the contradictions are typically easy to state, but I don't find other people's resolutions of them terribly useful. Most books that have actually mattered to me have done so by raising rather than settling problems. This should explain why I have more fiction than nonfiction on the list:

1. The Prince, by Machiavelli: for exemplifying the strictly instrumental approach to politics, and reminding me that it's valuable because good policies are useless unless you have the power to enforce them.

2. Some Versions of Pastoral, by William Empson: for the notion that "life is essentially inadequate to the human spirit, yet a good life must avoid saying so" -- as Empson said elsewhere, that "life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis" -- which is at the heart of Empson's sense of the importance of literature. There's an internal paradox in this, I suppose, as Empson also declared elsewhere that "Critics, as barking dogs, are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up. I must, I confess, aspire to the second of these classes." The Pastoral book is the most important because it quite directly addresses the question of propaganda from a literary perspective, and once -- like me -- you've decided that there aren't objective moral truths, the study of propaganda becomes terribly important.

3. Collected Essays by George Orwell: especially the ones about Lear and Gandhi, which raise an important issue:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

This is a dangerous idea to take seriously -- it seems clear that there are at least some ways in which human beings leave room for unambiguous improvement -- but it identifies something that I've always considered a bit whiffy about the saints.

4-5. The Dyer's Hand and Collected Poems by W.H. Auden: for a more-or-less worked out attempt, though ultimately a flawed one, to create a sensible contemporary ethics. Auden's essay on "making, knowing, and judging" is a classic; so are a lot of the famous -- and facially silly -- distinctions between Europe and America in "The American Scene," which periodically give way to passages like this:

As the issue between virtue first and liberty first becomes clear, so does the realization that the cost to any society that accepts the latter is extremely high, and to some may seem prohibitive. ... But if the principle is accepted, it means accepting this: it means accepting a State that, in comparison to its Roman rival, is dangerously weak (though realizing that, since people will never cease trying to interfere with the liberties of others in pursuing their own, the State can never wither away. Tyranny today, anarchy tomorrow is a Neo-Roman daydream); it means accepting a “Society,” in the collective inclusive sense, that is as neutral to values (liberty is not a value but the ground of value) as the “nature” of physics; it means accepting an educational system in which, in spite of the fact that authority is essential to the growth of the individual who is lost without it, the responsibility for recognizing authority is laid on the pupil; it means accepting the impossibility of any “official” or “public” art; and, for the individual, it means accepting the lot of the Wandering Jew, i.e. the loneliness and anxiety of having to choose himself, his faith, his vocation, his tastes.

And of course "In Praise of Limestone"

6. The Penguin Book of Everyday Verse, ed. David Wright: for a good introduction to the folk poetry of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early 19th cent., which leaves one at least somewhat conscious of the limits of "progress" and of the extent to which human life is a zero-sum game that cannot be raised very far above the level of farce, regardless of how much technological progress one makes.

7. In search of lost time by Marcel Proust: for its brave attempt to argue that life is worth living because the pleasant recollections that pile up over time are enough to justify the drab interstices between them. (This offers an indirect resolution to the "lifespan dilemma" -- if your average utility per moment is proportional to how long you've lived before that moment, then average and total utility are the same thing and a long life is worthwhile on either count. I'm not, btw, convinced that this is the case, but Proust's way of reconstructing a life from its sensations makes it seem at least possible.)

8. Ulysses by James Joyce: for refuting the solipsists by example. You can stub your toe on Bloom.

9. The Canterbury Tales: for offering a reasonably complete portrait of what might be considered a harmonious "beehive" society; for making it seem a beautiful whole despite the lack of adequate plumbing; and for, in a somewhat limited sense, his defense of human existence as at least pleasantly vigorous if not dignified.

10. A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver, etc., by Jonathan Swift: for offering, through his unremitting and entertaining misanthropy, a credible case for the prosecution (contra Chaucer, that is).

Twitter roundup

Just to rescue some tweets from their probably deserved oblivion:

I can't deferret, I'll defer it.
I can't defer it, I'll deferret.
I wonder if "racist" is such a slur b'se it sounds like "rapist." (This would also account for "papist.")
I feel like "pulchriturd" has a nice ring (or squish) to it. If only it meant something.
Re Pynchon -- I draw the line at Mason & Dixon.
My g-nome ate your genome.
Shakespeare was disbard for life.
Why is the wan king wanking?
RT @hellobigfoot By look of pee stain forming on front of shorts, is fair for me to assume you familiar with my body of work
"I'm having a terrible time in here," said Anne frankly.
I'm just a harem-scarem lad with ten petrified young wives.
Roman Polanski is your new tricycle.
Picture yourself with a stoat on your liver.
There are distinctions a mustelid must elide.
"There is, it turns out, an improbably long catalog of things that you can outlive." http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23430
Adam and Eve were ribbed for your pleasure.
Livestock and two smoking barrels #farmerfilms

(Poor judgment, if evident, is partly due to sleep deprivation.)

Nero-Keynesianism

An odd parallel from the Wikipedia article:

The economic policy of Nero is a point of debate among scholars. According to ancient historians, Nero's construction projects were overly extravagant and the large number of expenditures under Nero left Italy "thoroughly exhausted by contributions of money" with "the provinces ruined."^[77][78] Modern historians, though, note that the period was riddled with deflation and that it is likely that Nero's spending came in the form of public works projects and charity intended to ease economic troubles.^[79]

Tacitus and Suetonius, I guess, were proto-Tea Partiers.

A supinely indolent post

Gibbon on the Germans:

Money, in a word, is the most universal incitement, iron the most powerful instrument, of human industry; and it is very difficult to conceive by what means a people, neither actuated by the one nor seconded by the other, could emerge from the grossest barbarism.

If we contemplate a savage nation in any part of the globe, a supine indolence and carelessness of futurity will be found to constitute their general character.

To solicit by labour what might be ravished by arms was esteemed unworthy of the German spirit.

On the purpose of war:

Such, indeed, is the policy of civil war; severely to remember injuries, and to forget the most important services. Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.

On Constantine and the early church:

An absolute monarch, who is rich without patrimony, may be charitable without merit; and Constantine too easily believed that he should purchase the favour of Heaven if he maintained the idle at the expense of the industrious, and distributed among the saints the wealth of the republic.

Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty, was successfully practised.

"At least it's an ethos"

This remark of Ian Buruma's strikes me as extremely stupid:

Hitler’s Third Reich produced no great films. Leni Riefenstahl was a brilliant innovator and superb editor, with an extraordinary gift for visual effects, but I would hesitate to call Triumph of the Will, or even Olympia great films, unless greatness can be confined to technical prowess. Nazi Germany did not have the equivalent of an Eisenstein or Pudovkin, who still managed to create masterpieces out of political propaganda. Perhaps this reflects a difference between National Socialism and Communism, even though Stalin was no less murderous than Hitler. Great work can still emerge from the utopian ideal of the workers’ paradise. It is harder to imagine artistic excellence arising from violent racism.

Never mind that Stalin was in power twice as long as Hitler; that Communism survived a lot longer than Stalin; or that if you pick a different genre -- literature, say -- you immediately run into Celine, Hamsun, Yeats, Eliade and the rest of that lot, maybe not all Nazis, but certainly (1) brownshirts and racists fascinated with violence and (2) by and large, very great writers. (See e.g. this recent NYRB piece on Celine.) The assertion is prima facie so absurd it scarcely merits refutation. Violence and racism are, frankly, individually aesthetically appealing. There are tons of established literary tropes that a Fascist would feel at home with. There's all that stuff about blood and primal screams and ancestral soil and whatnot -- all that D.H. Lawrence crap -- which is racist or at least deeply anti-racial-mixing. (cf. Riefenstahl's later work on the Nubile Nubians) Then there's all that stuff about weeding out the degenerates -- the Taxi Driver tendency. As for hero-worship tied to expansionist nationalism, well, that was not without its appeal even to non-fascists like Virgil. And don't get me started on literature and violence...

I suppose one could argue that Celine et al. were simply "technically proficient" but that'd just be admitting that the original claim was designed to be true by construction. Incidentally I'm not trying to defend Nazi ideology as intellectually respectable; it's just that it gets the history all wrong to say that it wasn't plausible.

"If all else fails, write in German"

Via Dan Crow, J.S. Milne has advice for authors of math papers (at least, those who want to seem profound). Some of these tips for obfuscating are quite fresh and potentially useful:

• Use c, a, b respectively to denote elements of sets A, B, C
  
• If, in a moment of weakness, you do refer to a paper or book for a result, never say where in the paper or book the result can be found. In addition to making it difficult for the reader to find the result, this makes it almost impossible for anyone to prove that the result isn't actually there.
  
• Begin and end sentences with symbols wherever possible. Since periods are almost invisible (and may be mistaken for a mathematical symbol), most readers won't even notice that you've started a new sentence. Also, where possible, attach superscripts signaling footnotes to mathematical symbols rather than words.

I must mention, in connection with this, a pet peeve and an annoying habit I used to have. The peeve: people quite often use the two kinds of lowercase phi to mean different things; this makes things extremely hard to follow as my brain processes both characters as "lowercase phi." It also makes it difficult to talk through certain arguments because there aren't conventional words for the two kinds of phi. (The latter point also applies to the two kinds of epsilon but these are less problematic because they have fixed, different connotations -- one of them's an infinitesimal, the other is a dielectric constant.)

The annoying habit: I used to write A = B = C when what I meant was B = A = C. These statements are both true in the same contexts (they have the same "reference") but mean different things; the former says A is B [for some reason] and B is C [for some other reason] so A is C; an = sign implies an argument. Rob Benedetto wasn't very forgiving of this habit. What's always struck me as odd, however, is that I'd naturally put the chains of equalities in the wrong order. It seems like one should naturally get the sequence right in the course of making the argument, unless one actively tries to screw it up.

Surname frequencies revisited

(This is a follow-up to the previous post.)

It looks like the log-log plots did a fairly shitty job of getting the power right: the correct dependence is much more like a square-root (0.5) than 3/5 -- at least that's what toying around with the powers suggests. Apparently this is a fairly standard issue with power laws; it's hard to spot because the graphs are only somewhat sensitive to the power you use. (The systematic discrepancy presumably happens because the intercept -- the extrapolated popularity of the 0th most popular name -- is nonzero.) With the new dependencies, the correct number for the US is something like 880 rather than 600; this is probably closer but I don't know if it's an underestimate or an overestimate. (Obviously extrapolations from the range (1,100) to 800-1000 are very sensitive; it's a long way off.)

Anyway, these are the graphs. First, the US, where P(N) ~ N^0.47:



Precisely the same exponent seems to work best for Japan:



For France and Australia, the exponent changes somewhat: France is dramatically higher at 0.68:


Australia seems happiest at 0.57:



The higher power might be an artifact of there being fewer data points; if you squint at the US or Japan graphs, the initial part curves upward slightly which would suggest a slightly higher power, perhaps more like 0.6. Regardless, the overall behavior is evidently power-law. This does not appear to be the case for Hungary regardless of how you massage the data; it crosses over from a rather large power to a much smaller power around N = 10. (Prev. post's comment thread suggests that something similar might be true for Korea.)

I must say that a power of 1/2 -- which is relatively ubiquitous in these sorts of phenomena -- is probably easier to explain, and certainly less interesting, than the esoteric 3/5, which mostly shows up in 3D self-avoiding random walk and critical exponents.

Surname frequencies

Last year a Chinese friend of mine asked me if I knew what the smallest N was such that the first N surnames would cover half the population of, e.g., the US or the UK. I estimated 100 or so and forgot all about it until -- looking up the physicist Kobayashi on Wikipedia and following a few links -- I discovered Wikipedia's useful list of common family names. This had enough information, at least for the US, to prove that my estimate of 100 was pretty far off, but didn't directly answer the original question, so I decided to extrapolate using some rather primitive data analysis in Excel. I discovered, a little to my surprise, that surname distributions follow a surprisingly regular power law: the form is approximately

Cumulative percentage of population by Nth surname ~ N^(3/5)

for a fairly wide range of large countries. (3/5 is only true for the US and England; otherwise it sort of varies between 3/5 and 2/3: the US is at .588, England at 0.606, Germany at 0.61, Australia at 0.63, Russia at 0.637, and Japan at 0.65.) In all cases the power-law dependence is quite good. (I really ought to put up the graphs but I'm too lazy to.) For smaller countries the picture is somewhat mixed, the exponent tends to be somewhat higher on average (Scots at 0.76, N. Irish at 0.88) but in some cases -- Hungary and Sweden -- the dependence clearly isn't power-law.

Poking around in the literature I found nothing much except this old paper that describes finding something similar but doesn't have a theory (JSTOR required):

The Distribution of Surname Frequencies
Wendy Fox and Gabriel Lasker
International Statistical Review 51, 81-87 (1983)

I imagine this is one of those Zipf's law effects but I'm unclear about what kinds of processes would give rise to a Zipf's law in this context. It's esp. interesting to me that Japan fits so well in this series given cultural differences etc. Would also like to know if the exponent is really size-dependent.

Oh and to answer the original question I estimate that it'd take about 650 names to cover 50% of the US, and about 400 for the UK. I think these are underestimates.

UPDATE the graphs are up here.

Edwidge DantiCat

While I remember:

The Way of the Word

I. It turns out that "interesting" was quite recently a euphemism for pregnant; see these OED examples:

1930 GALSWORTHY On Forsyte 'Change 171 Winifred, beginning to be ‘interesting’, owing to the approach of a little Dartie, kept her eyes somewhat watchfully on ‘Monty’. 1970 K. GILES Death in Church ii. 49 Her little maid got into An Interesting Condition and the young fellow was willing to solemnise it.

II. Here's a famous passage from Congreve's play The Way of the World (1700) about interest and pregnancy. The situation should be fairly self-explanatory: Mirabell and Mrs Fainall were [and are probably still] lovers, and he married her off to a friend of his to shield her potentially "interesting condition." (Fainall was induced to marry her for her money.)

MRS. FAINALL
While I only hated my husband, I could bear to see him; but since I have despised him, he's too offensive.

MIRABELL
Oh, you should hate with prudence.

MRS. FAINALL
Yes, for I have loved with indiscretion.

MIRABELL
You should have just so much disgust for your husband as may be sufficient to make you relish your lover.

MRS. FAINALL
You have been the cause that I have loved without bounds, and would you set limits to that aversion of which you have been the occasion? Why did you make me marry this man?

MIRABELL
Why do we daily commit disagreeable and dangerous actions? To save that idol, reputation. If the familiarities of our loves had produced that consequence of which you were apprehensive, where could you have fixed a father's name with credit but on a husband? I knew Fainall to be a man lavish of his morals, an interested and professing friend, a false and a designing lover, yet one whose wit and outward fair behaviour have gained a reputation with the town, enough to make that woman stand excused who has suffered herself to be won by his addresses. A better man ought not to have been sacrificed to the occasion; a worse had not answered to the purpose. When you are weary of him you know your remedy.

III. The converse, of course, is true to a degree -- conception, abortion, pregnant, embryonic, fertile, and miscarriage are all potentially applicable to thoughts and actions. This paradigm does, however, lead to odd results if you substitute synonyms: e.g. a knocked-up pause, an absolutely third-trimester notion, a phrase gastrulating with meaning, a fetal vagueness, an amniotic fluidity.

"IM SO DARK JUST LIKE THIS SITE"

This is amusing and topical (h/t Jeremy):

Vowel Shift Trivia

Was re-reading that old Geoff Nunberg parody of Pope ("who would not weep if E.B. White were he"); happened upon an interesting discussion of English phonetic history in the comments. Someone quoted Dr. Johnson:

"Sir," said he, "what entitles Sheridan [this is Thomas, father of Richard Brinsley S. the playwright; he had undertaken to write a pronunciation dictionary] to fix the pronunciation of English? He has, in the first place, the disadvantage of being an Irishman; and if he says he will fix it after the example of the best company, why, they differ among themselves. I remember an instance: when I published the Plan for my Dictionary, Lord Chesterfield told me that the word great should be pronounced so as to rhyme to state; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to seat, and that none but an Irishman would pronounce it grait. Now here were two men of the highest rank, the one the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely."

Incidentally this is related to the fact that the predecessors of words ending -ee- and -ea- in Modern English were pronounced differently -- resp. as "closed" and "open" forms of "ay" -- but spelled alike in Middle English; it was during the transitional period, when -ee- was pronounced in the modern way but -ea- was pronounced to rhyme with -ay- (e.g. where you, great Anna, whom three realms obey / do sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea), that English spelling was settled; if the commenter is right the distinction was codified in spelling (by Johnson and others) just as it was becoming obsolete.

And here's Nunberg on a similar issue, which I think comes off as endearingly unprissy of the Augustans though of course it's nothing of the sort:

Or to take an example I'm more familiar with, consider the 18th c. blurring of the nuclei of words like line and loin, which turns up several times in the Essay of Criticism:

In Praise so just, let ev'ry Voice be join'd,
And fill the Gen'ral Chorus of Mankind!

And praise the Easie Vigor of a Line,
Where Denham's Strength, and Waller's Sweetness join.

Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join;
To err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.

One notable point here is that this confusion was phonetically conditioned, limited to vowels before /n/, /l/ and some other sonorants, particularly when preceded by /p/ and /b/ (as in point and boil). Nobody rhymed toy and sigh as far as I know. So the rhymes here turned on a perception of phonetic closeness or identity, not simply a rhyming convention. A second is that the confusion left several doublets in its wake (rile and roil, for example) as well as some dialect variation: Dickens had his lower-class characters saying spile for spoil and jint for joint. A third is that the confusion was noted, and sometimes criticized as "abusive," by contemporary writers.

You can't facebook the truth!

This NYRB piece about Facebook seems shoddily researched (either that or my memory's failing). For instance:

1. It claims the original "relationship status" answers were: Single; In a Relationship; Engaged; Married; "It's Complicated"; "In an Open Relationship." I feel like "it's complicated" was a later addition, dating from 2004 or 2005.
2. It claims that the site removed "Random Play" and "Whatever I Can Get" from the options of what members were "Looking For"—to be replaced by "Networking." Last I checked, "random play" was definitely still an option.
3. It doesn't even mention my favorite erstwhile Facebook feature, the "social net" thing that allowed you to see which of your friends knew each other. I remember the feature was always plagued by various technical problems but it was actually a fun thing to mess with.
   

And there are some assertions that seem implausible. For instance: It even became something of a norm to greet a friend in the dining hall by declaring, for example, "I see you added Trotsky to your list of favorite authors—but dropped Marx!" This seems very far off; as the author remarks elsewhere, the site was generally understood to be a lark, and I certainly never overheard people talking about their profile updates at Valentine.

That said, this description of the decline and fall -- the growing tiresomeness -- of Facebook is exactly right:

... what might be called Facebook's "suburban period," which began in September 2006 and continues, in many ways, into the present. We can pinpoint the start date so precisely because at the same time that Zuckerberg opened Facebook to anyone who wanted to join, he launched a function that has since come to dominate the site: the "News Feed."

The News Feed, as the name suggests, resembled a personalized wire service. "Imagine a device that monitors the social marketplace the way a blinking Bloomberg terminal tracks incremental changes in the bond market," The New York Times described the new feature at its debut. But I would propose an alternate metaphor: the suburban backyard fence. Facebook, when restricted to colleges, had relied on the typically intense social lives of students in the dorm room and at the dining hall. It was possible to obsessively check the pages of a few good friends or a cute girl in your class, but you could easily ignore everyone else.

The News Feed, by contrast, made everyone and everything an object of gossip by automatically sending the minutest changes to a wide circle of "friends." Along with the pleasure of learning that a crush had added Godard to her list of favorite filmmakers, you had to endure image after image of the drunken escapades of people you hadn't seen in years. New features were supposed to screen out some "friends," but these settings barely worked.

Yes. This was a huge nuisance if you were already on Facebook and had the new features foisted on you. The problem was that under the old rules there was no reason not to be friends with everybody -- that way if they joined a different network you would still be able to Facebook-stalk them -- but suddenly your newsfeed was cluttered with, not the drunken escapades, but the vapid and inconsequential chatter of people you had no interest in.

In fact, there has always been a selection effect by which precisely the people you don't want to hear about are the kind that update their profile or join a group every three minutes. This effect extends, I think, to the Wall (the single most pointless and obnoxious thing about Facebook): I can't remember the last time someone actually posted something on my wall that I wanted to read; it's always random clowns I haven't seen in years saying something placeholderish and misspelled.

All the same, I can see that if I joined Facebook a long time after I actually did, I would perhaps like it better. Facebook does a lot of useful things: one could use the status updates as tweets, write facebook notes instead of blog posts, and use the privacy settings to get something almost like planworld. OTOH I don't really see myself defriending half my acquaintance; I might not want to know much about their lives, but I would like to know where they live, in case I'm ever in (say) Portland -- incidentally I'll be there in March for the APS meeting -- and have an afternoon to kill. Besides, the blog, twitter, Google reader, and planworld are entirely adequate as far as they go.

So thaoghaire!

Quoghoth Flann O'Brien (NB "strobh" is "strove" and "Dun Laoghaire" is "Dunleary" and everything else is determined by the rhyghymes):

Said a Sassenach back in Dun Laoghaire
"I pay homage to nationalist thaoghaire,
But wherever I drobh
I found signposts that strobh
To make touring in Ireland so draoghaire."

Link roundup

Back in 08 I used to blog links I thought were cool. Then I started using Google Reader; sharing was less work than blogging but the catch is that everyone is a compulsive oversharer (I'd put myself somewhere between Emily Gould and Grobstein) so shared items tend to be more ephemeral than I'd like. I think I'm going to periodically blog a link roundup. Here's the first. (The others will, I imagine, be a lot shorter.)

[H/t as appropriate to Grobstein, Alan, and Liz Chiang.]

1. Rivers used to run straight before plants came along (SciAm)
2. What people thought about Reagan in 1982 (Bernstein)
3. Hexagonal London (Strangemaps)
4. They voted for healthcare before they voted against it (Yglesias)
5. Robert Solow on the financial crisis (TNR)
6. pourquoi michael jackson est blanc (Andrew Gelman)
7. "Orthogonal, ooh" (Volokh)
8. The Crisis of Juvenile Prison Rape (NYRB)
9. Auden martini (PoetryFoundation)
10. "The internet is badgering everybody" (Brendan Nyhan)
11. Quotes with and without quotes (Language Log)
12. The Samuel Beckett bridge (Crooked Timber)
13. "Eating an orange / while making love / makes for bizarre enj- / oyment thereof." (Tom Lehrer via Language Log)
14. Toy drives checking immigration status of children (Yglesias)
15. Can you guess what these maps show? (Flowing Data)
16. Power laws in chess (Physics)
17. Syllepsis gone wild (Language Log)
18. Frozen Horse, Embuggerance, etc. (Language Log)
19. 32 meters of Mao (Neatorama)
20. NYC population by borough (Yglesias)
21. X and Y: the one-track mind of Ivy Compton-Burnett (Light reading)
22. "America's secular saboteurs" (WaPo, On Faith [for the record this link is just amusingly abhorrent])
23. Who benefits from equality? (David Runciman, LRB)
24. Kay Ryan: The paw of a cat (New Yorker)
25. The Powers of Dr Johnson (Andrew O'Hagan, NYRB)
26. Why strip malls don't have empty storefronts (Yglesias)
27. The metamorphosis of Charlie Brown (Book Bench)
28. Kay Ryan: Fool's Errands (New Yorker)
29. 20 insults from P.G. Wodehouse (Cosmic Variance)
30. Sophomore optics fail (Cosmic Variance)
31. Geoff Nunberg channels Alexander Pope to mock Strunk (Language Log)
32. Evolution and the Second Law (Cosmic Variance)
    

"Everything reminds Judis of the white working class"

John Judis of the New Republic is a hack. Perhaps as a consequence, he is a respected and influential pundit; there's something about specious, easily refutable narratives that appeals to the collective unconscious of the pundit class. Judis's general shtick is to interpret all of national politics in terms of the "white working class," and his general approach is to vulgarize the sociology (making working-class whites out to be more racist and homogeneous than they are) and misrepresent the data. Jay Cost dismantled his "realignment" theory in 2007. I tried to test his theory about racism and the 2008 election here; it doesn't seem that he looked very hard at the data.

You might think it's a step forward for him to actually plot a graph, as he does in this (drearily typical) new piece:



(If the axes are illegible, the red graph is Obama's disapproval rating and the blue graph is the unemployment rate over time.) The analysis, however, is beneath rebuttal:

What I found in Obama’s case is that at the beginning of last fall, when Washington began debating his health care plan in earnest, his level of disapproval began to exceed the rise in the unemployment rate. [Having "established" this Judis goes on to blather about white working class anger re the Cadillac tax.]

Incidentally I suspect that he's using made-up data for unemployment Nov-Jan. Surely the unemployment rate hasn't stayed exactly the same to two significant figures.

Repeating recent history

I can't find the link but the sharpest point I've heard about MA and healthcare reform is that if the House Democrats give up, they will nevertheless be attacked in November as having been "for it before they were against it." Of course, it is unlikely to be the determining factor in the midterms -- if the economy is doing moderately well, the Democrats will avoid getting clubbed, etc. -- but it seems clear that (1) the Dems cannot salvage political capital regardless of what they do so they might as well pass the damn bill, (2) if Obama really takes the bill back to the Senate and spends another year on healthcare reform, he will look increasingly out-of-touch. Very few people care about healthcare reform; the best thing to do is to ram the Senate bill as-is through the House, and if that can't be done then to give up and pick other fights. (And please NOT cap-and-trade.)

Chewing (out) the fat

I've been making bits of this argument for years and maybe I should put it together. Here goes:

1. It is rational to trade off longevity for other kinds of benefits. Actually, it is not only rational, but commonly done. As Gary Becker says, most deaths are suicides: if one's overriding objective in life were to live as long as possible, one would live quite differently from the way people actually do.

2. Different people will presumably want to make their longevity-happiness tradeoff in different ways; there are no objectively right or wrong ways to do this; in the absence of externalities and other compelling reasons, the state should let them make such tradeoffs for themselves.

3. In a society with universal healthcare (e.g., Britain) it is sometimes claimed that fat people are a burden on the healthcare system. This isn't actually true. Fat people cost more per year of life, but less overall. (e.g. This study shows that the lifetime medical expenses of the obese/smokers are less than those of "fit" people.) Remember, the life expectancy even for obese people is somewhat higher than the retirement age. Therefore, healthy people generally spend their additional years of life as parasites rather than as generators of wealth. [In a society like the US the situation is unjust to the fat. Obese people, smokers, and others who are less likely to live past 65 are subsidizing the medical expenses of those who live past 65. There seems to be no compelling economic reason to provide this kind of incentive for living past 65.]

4. Life expectancy is not a sound measure of welfare any more than GDP per head. As Krugman argues here, the French put up with earning less because they get to take longer vacations. Similarly, obese alcoholics might be fine with heart attacks because they get to drink bacon martinis while they are alive. These are both, in principle, rational tradeoffs, though in both cases you can imagine conditions (acquiring expensive new obligations, being on your deathbed) where people regret their rationally made choices.

5. Exceptions should, I suppose, be made for the case of serious physical addiction, in which the addict seriously wants to change his lifestyle but can't. For long-time smokers I imagine this is a substantial fraction of the relevant demographic, but for drinkers, stoners, compulsive eaters, and non-exercisers it's a relatively small segment. e.g. there's a large grey area between drinking enough to increase your chances of liver cancer and drinking enough to be unable to go without booze; this is presumably where most regular drinkers fall.

6. Unlike smoking or public drunkenness, obesity does not obviously hurt other people. (Except on airplanes. I don't really have a problem with charging people extra if they don't fit in their seats.)

7. Arguably being obese increases your chances of being unemployed and therefore on public assistance. (And maybe it increases your chances of being poor and hence a beneficiary of progressive tax credits and/or welfare policies.) I'm pretty sure, however, that the causation goes the other way, and that whatever residual effect there might be is largely explained by anti-fat discrimination. If one could establish that being fat or a smoker made you sufficiently unproductive per hour that you were on the whole a ward of the state in times of full employment I would probably change my mind on this entire issue.

---

So to sum up etc. (1) I don't see that society has a compelling reason to want people to make the health/pleasure tradeoff in a way that's maximally skewed toward health. (2) One could argue that by feeding kids healthy food when they're young you avoid the tradeoff altogether because they learn to enjoy the mashed yeast. I am deeply skeptical of this: in general, food can be arbitrarily healthy and arbitrarily good for you only to the extent that the ingredients are arbitrarily upscale. This is unworkable for a large number of people. (The usual ways of dealing with lousy ingredients, e.g. spicing the hell out of everything a la Indian food, come with health costs.)

I should note that the basic reason I care about this issue is that I think Megan McArdle's right that there's something very Victorian and moralistic about the (blue-state) public's attitude to fat. I find this sort of hardworking/lazy dichotomy extremely irritating esp. since the "upright" classes tend to be smug, rich, and liberal.

Are badgers "demure"?

John Clare thinks so. This poem describes the rather horrific old sport of badger-baiting. (It's not clear whether "badgering" refers to what people do to badgers or what badgers do to other animals.)

The Badger
John Clare

When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by.
He comes and hears - they let the strongest loose.
The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose.
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry,
And the old hare half wounded buzzes by.
They get a forkéd stick to bear him down
And clap the dogs and take him to the town,
And bait him all the day with many dogs,
And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.
He runs along and bites at all he meets:
They shout and hollo down the noisy streets.

He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very door.
The frequent stone is hurled where'er they go;
When badgers fight, then everyone's a foe.
The dogs are clapped and urged to join the fray;
The badger turns and drives them all away.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.
The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray,
Lies down and licks his feet and turns away.
The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold
The badger grins and never leaves his hold.
He drives the crowd and follows at their heels
And bites them through - the drunkard swears and reels.

The frighted women take the boys away,
The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray.
He tries to reach the woods, an awkward race,
But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase.
He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles, groans and dies.

The biosphere on a rotisserie

Michael Hoffman's review of Frederick Seidel quotes this poem, which makes me want to read Seidel:

from Evening Man
Frederick Seidel

To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.
Outside the windows is New York.
I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland
Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.
And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some
I still remember when I lift my knife and fork.
The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned
Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.
The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound
That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.
The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.
They’re watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.
The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.
The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that’s missing.

Counting Badgers

There was a Language Log post the other day about how some phrases seemed to return more Google hits when you searched for them with quotes than when you searched without quotes; this clearly oughtn't to happen because every phrase which contains "badger hair" contains the words "badger" and "hair." I would suppose Google is finding all the results but just not doing a very good job of estimating how many there are.

I tried the following variant on this: I googled strings of the form "badger badger ... badger" (i.e. arbitrarily long sequences of the word "badger" -- and I had quotes around the string to get rid of e.g. the Wikipedia page for badgers, which has a lot of nonsequential instances of "badger") and wanted to see if the hit count was monotonic with the length of the string -- which, again, it ought to be as any string of the form "badger badger badger" contains a string of the form "badger badger." I was amused to find out that this is not in fact the case. Something weird happens with the seventh "badger," the hit count goes up from about 10000 to about 85000 and I have no real sense of why.

(For instance I also tried this with the string "seal seal seal... seal," which was well-behaved.)

Dept of Voluminous Drivelers

(Wildly overpraised) poet and translator Richard Howard, blurbing the Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright version of Proust:

Twice amended to bring it to documentary decorum and the kind of textual completion Proust himself could never achieve, the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of the Search, buffed, rebuffed, lightened, tightened, and in the abstergent sense, brightened, constitutes a monument which is also a medium—the medium by which to gain access to the book, the books, even the apocrypha of modern scripture. A triumph of tone, of a single (and singular) vision, this ultimate revision of the primary version affords the surest sled over the ice fields as well as the most sinuous surfboard over the breakers of Proustian prose, an invaluable and inescapable text.”

"The Voluminous, Prosaic, and Drivelling Monk"

The fifteenth century was a low-water mark for English poetry, inter alia because of the accidentally pernicious influence of Chaucer. So in Chaucer's day words like make, lerne, etc. had the final e pronounced (as in modern German). So for instance a typical Chaucerian line like

Han felt that Love dorste yow disple[a]se

is actually an 11-syllable line in good iambic pentameter. However, even by the time of Chaucer's death the final e was falling out of use, and by the early 15th-cent it was gone altogether. Unfortunately, 15th-cent poets took it as axiomatic that (1) what Chaucer wrote was metrical, and (2) Chaucer pronounced words they way they themselves did. This led to an essentially complete cluelessness about meter and rhythm that affected all their work, which was, as it happens, not free of other faults. Eventually, English verse became metrical again in the 16th century, because people stopped imitating Chaucer and found other models in (e.g.) Italian where all you had to do was count syllables; the process of writing ten-syllable lines leads one fairly directly to iambic pentameter if one has a decent ear. Of course it took about 200 years longer to realize that Chaucer was metrical too if you pronounced the final e, but that his successors were not.

All of this is by way of introducing George Saintsbury's wonderful evisceration of John Lydgate, the most famous -- at his time -- of Chaucer's disciples, which I've excerpted below.

---

It is thus reasonable to fix his career as lasting from c. 1370 to c. 1450.
If this be so, his life was not short: and it is quite certain that such exercises of his art as we possess are very long.

Of Chaucerian vigour, Chaucerian pathos, Chaucerian vividness of description, Lydgate had no trace or tincture.

To these defects he added two faults[...]: The one is prosodic incompetence; the other is longwinded prolixity. [...] It is enough to say that, even in rime royal, his lines wander from seven to fourteen syllables, without the possibility of allowing monosyllabic or trisyllabic feet in any fashion that shall restore the rhythm; and that his couplets, as in The Story of Thebes itself, seem often to be unaware whether they are themselves octosyllabic or decasyllabic—four-footed or five-footed. [...]

The Temple of Glass, partly in heroics, partly in rime royal, is one of the heaviest of fifteenth century allegorical love-poems, in which two lovers complain to Venus and, having been answered by her, are finally united. It is extremely prosaic; but, by sheer editing, has been brought into a condition of at least more systematic prosody than most of Lydgate’s works. The Assembly of Gods is a still heavier allegory of vices and virtues presented under the names of divinities, major and minor, of the ancient pantheon, but brought round to an orthodox Christian conclusion. The piece is in rime royal of the loosest construction, so much so that its editor proposes a merely rhythmical scansion.[...]

Lydgate has not lacked defenders, who would be formidable if their locus standi were more certain. The fifteenth century adored him because he combined all its own worst faults, and the sixteenth seems to have accepted him because it had no apparatus for criticism. When, after a long eclipse, he was in two senses taken up by Gray, that poet seems chiefly to have known The Falls of Princes, in which, perhaps by dint of long practice, Lydgate’s metrical shortcomings are less noticeable than in some other places, and where the dignity and gravity of Boccaccio’s Latin has, to some extent, invigorated his style. Warton is curiously guarded in his opinions; and a favourable judgment of Coleridge may, possibly, be regarded as very insufficiently based. The apologies of editors (especially those who are content with systematised metre, however inharmonious) do not go very far. On the whole, though Ritson’s condemnation may have been expressed with characteristic extravagance and discourtesy towards the “voluminous, prosaic and drivelling monk,” nobody can dispute the voluminousness in the worst sense, and it is notable that even Lydgate’s defenders, in proportion as they know more of him, are apt to “confess and avoid” the “prosaic” and to slip occasionally into admissions rather near the “drivelline.” It is to be feared that some such result is inevitable. A little Lydgate, especially if the little be judiciously chosen, or happily allotted by chance, is a tolerable thing: though even this can hardly be very delectable to any well qualified judge of poetry. But, the longer and wider that acquaintance with him is extended, the more certain is dislike to make its appearance. The prosodic incompetence cannot be entirely due to copyists and printers; the enormous verbosity, the ignorance how to tell a story, the want of freshness, vigour, life, cannot be due to them at all. But what is most fatal of all is the flatness of diction noticed above—the dull, hackneyed, slovenly phraseology, only thrown up by his occasional aureate pedantry—which makes the common commoner and the uncommon uninteresting. Lydgate himself, or some imitator of him, has been credited with the phrase “gold dewdrops of speech” about Chaucer. He would hardly have thought of anything so good; but the phrase at least suggests an appropriate variant, “leaden splashes,” for his own.