Quick thoughts about good faith

Yglesias cites Mark Kleiman saying:

Remember this the next time a conservative explains how we ought to voucherize public education. The minute that happens, the conservatives will come back and decide that we need to means-test the vouchers. That done, they’ll attack the remaining program as “welfare.”

This seems bang on, and is a good part of why I changed my mind about these things. Given a sufficient degree of good faith and such, it would make sense to argue that the government ought to means-test the safety net, and that people who've got the money to send their kids to school or themselves to the hospital ought to spend on such things. But of course any means-tested program is vulnerable to the welfare-for-people-not-like-us line of attacks unless it provides goodies for a sufficiently large number of people; conversely, any public program that provides goodies for enough people is politically invulnerable. Therefore the best model for sustainable safety-net programs is something like Medicare, which spends most of its money on people who pay (slightly) more in taxes than they get out of the program, but feel -- being irrational -- as if they're getting free stuff. [One could argue about the existence of economies of scale, as with e.g. the NYC subway, but this is beside my point.] Another promising line of attack is to make most people feel vulnerable and in need of a safety net -- this is Tony Judt's notion of a "social democracy of fear" -- but I'm not clear how much mileage an approach like this would have in countries like the US where the rate of downward mobility has not historically been very high.

Link roundup

1. The Short Career of Amy Bishop (LRB)
2. Inappropriate Witticisms (Scott Adams blog)
3. How to split up the US using facebook connectivity data (Pete Warden)
4. Binge drinking won't mess up your test scores (Awl)
5. Margaret Antwood (Book Bench)
6. A well-known case of forgery (LRB) [see also Judith Thurman in the NY'er on fake Roth]
7. Having daughters makes you a reactionary (Gelman)
8. Dead men flying (Awl)
9. Sex in space (NSS review)
10. Horse sense and heartache (NYRB, review of Lydia Davis's collected)
11. Williams kids are too dumb to form racial stereotypes (NatureNews)
12. Fake NY townhouse (Curbed NY)
13. Womb with a view (Metafilter)
14. Trustworthiness of beards (Flowing Data)
15. Europe as Marge Simpson (Strange Maps)
16. What do Norwegian dirtheads and Richard Perle have in common? (NY Press)
17. Swiss euthanasia outfit dumps ashes in lake (Awl)
18. Free land out west (Toothpaste for dinner)
19. Illusions of the year (Neural Correlate) [see also Electric Brae]
20. Three-toed sloth video (Andrew Sullivan)
21. The Froot Loops bubble (Yglesias)
22. Ambien walrus adventure (Toothpaste for dinner)
23. Liquids can form craters too (Phys. Rev. Focus)

"Laurel becomes a devastated brow"

Eleanor Ross Taylor, who I guess is pushing 90, recently won the Ruth Lilly poetry prize. The current issue of Poetry has a bunch of her stuff, some of which is enjoyable. For instance,

And the happiness of  the unconscious
is scurrying already
from the knife-edge of   light,
pain’s night-light,
waiting under the door across the hall.

Dread’s square hair stiffens,
her feet have corners,
trying to trick the stairs out of their creaking,
and the house out of  groaning before coffee,
before resurrection.

Death before resurrection is hard;
breakfast and the stars belong first;
plenty of  time to die all day
when everything does groan, and unhappiness
shakes itself out like a musty old mare
all over the house.
(from "Pain in the House")

I also enjoyed "The Young Writer's Reply," "Kitchen Fable," and "Against the Kitchen Wall."

Royal Obstetricians

From a new review article on the anomalous Hall effect:

The first discovery provided a simple elegant tool to measure carrier concentration in nonmagnetic conductors and played a midwife’s role in easing the birth of semiconductor physics and solid-state electronics in the late 1940s. For this role, the Hall effect was frequently called the queen of solid-state transport experiments.

The associative bridge here seems to have been that both midwives and queens are female. On the other hand there's something pleasantly grotesque about the logic here: you must be the queen, you're covered in someone else's bodily fluids.

"A Fabian non-socialist"

David Bromwich's anti-Obama rant in the LRB is very good. Some excerpts follow.

On Obama's relationship with the rich and famous:

He was new to the national elite and enjoyed his membership palpably. This came out in debates and town meetings where he often mentioned that the profits from his books had lodged him in the highest tax bracket. It would emerge later in his comment on Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan: ‘I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.’ One can’t imagine Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy saying such a thing, or wanting to say it. They had known ‘those guys’ all their lives and felt no tingle of reflected glory. Obama has not yet recognised that his conspicuous relish of his place among the elite does him two kinds of harm: it spurs resentment in people lower down the ladder; and it diminishes his stature among the grandees by showing that he needs them.

On his humorlessness:

A spontaneous ability to laugh at oneself, or to make a witty remark that doesn’t wound, is always appreciated in a politician, but it has not been given to Obama. His self-depreciation is stiff and rehearsed, and his cutting comments always sting. His equability in interviews has partly concealed this defect from an admiring press; the radio shock-jocks make more of it, and dwell on his superior airs. When Obama feels edgy or tired, his manner turns condescending and priggish. It is at just such moments that he seems most heartily one of the elite. His saying to Hillary Clinton in an early debate when she called Obama likeable, ‘You’re likeable enough, Hillary,’ was an early example of the propensity. He did it again in the healthcare summit when John McCain was making heavy weather of the campaign promises Obama hadn’t kept, and Obama, where no response was necessary, chose to say: ‘Let me just make this point, John, because we’re not campaigning any more: the election’s over.’ Before the putdown, McCain had looked small and confused – there was dead air all around him – but Obama by his response awarded him the pathos of a beaten man. An oddly unpleasant schoolmasterish moment.

On his national security policy:

the delay in the closing of Guantánamo might be supposed an effect of sheer miscalculation, except that it so plainly falls in with the Obama style. Obama is unique among politicians in running out the clock when there are many minutes left on it and he is not ahead. He did that on Guantánamo. He did it with Israel-Palestine when he required a settlement freeze and then assumed, if he waited long enough, Netanyahu would grow amenable. He did it and still is doing it with Iran...

And again:

He is, by nature, a man of tendencies rather than commitments.He would like things to improve for everyone, even for the rich, but especially for the poor because they need it. Yet he shuns the language of economic equality. He is a Fabian non-socialist. Libertarians are right to see him as an outsize admirer of legitimate authority who relies on state power far too much and too implicitly.

Why coffee stains are ring-shaped

There's a group of clever people at the James Franck Institute (UChicago) who study some of the overlooked and bizarre regularities of everyday life -- e.g. Tom Witten, Sid Nagel, Heinrich Jaeger, and Wendy Zhang. Their work has always struck me as very beautiful and "classical" in its spirit: it is the sort of thing the founders of the Royal Society, or for that matter Euler or the Bernoullis, might have studied and would have appreciated. They work on things like the flow of sand out of thin nozzles, the fact that liquids do not splash on top of Mt Everest, and the extent to which a droplet of water that pinches off a nozzle remembers the shape of the nozzle.

An esp. nice result that I heard about at a talk yesterday was Witten's group's theory of why coffee-stains have the sharp-edged, ring-like shapes they do. [The relevant references are Nature 389, 827 (1997) and Phys. Rev. E 62, 756 (2000).] The answer goes something like this: the edge of the coffee-bearing water droplet snags on surface roughnesses and gets pinned. (On sufficiently smooth surfaces, e.g. Teflon, coffee stains are not ring-shaped but uniform.) As water evaporates the bubble has to shrink; the water evaporates at roughly the same rate everywhere so ceteris paribus the bubble would want to shrink everywhere, but it can't because that would decrease its diameter and require the edge to move, and the edge can't move because it's pinned. The only way to keep the edge where it is while all of the surface evaporates at the same rate is for fluid to flow from the center of the droplet to the edge, to replenish the water lost from the edge. So over time most of the water in the bubble evaporates from the edge, and most of the solute gets deposited at the edge, so the stain is ringlike.

Under certain conditions, the edge is "almost" pinned but periodically unsnags ("depins"), moves some distance, and then snags again; this leads to terrace-like stain patterns.

Physics and Incompleteness

Responding to new-age spewage the other day -- at greater length than was probably warranted -- I asserted in passing that Godel's (first) incompleteness theorem probably didn't apply to "theories of everything" in physics because such theories need not include Peano arithmetic, which is one of the hypotheses in Godel's proof. I'm going to think aloud about this; comments would be appreciated.

Let me remind you briefly of how Godel's proof works. You start with an axiomatic system (i.e., a list of allowed characters -- a language -- and a list of axioms in that language) that includes all the usual operations involving natural numbers. Because of the unique prime factorization property, you can assign each string in the language a unique number (called its Godel number) as follows: first assign each allowed character a number, then encode the string as 2^(number of first character) x 3^(number of second character) x 5^(...). E.g. if the language were English, you could encode the string "babe" as 2^2 x 3^1 x 5^2 x 7^5 = some large number. You could recover the word from the number by counting the 2's in its (unique) prime factorization to get your first character, then counting the 3's for your second character, and so on. Now you can start making self-referential statements within your language, you can say something like "the string with Godel number N has certain properties," which would mean "the string 'blah' has certain properties." You could drop "the string" as that's implied by the quotes.

It turns out that one of these sentences is essentially Quine's version of the liar's paradox:

“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation” yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

(The stuff in quotes is to be encoded as a Godel number, so formally the statement would look like "The Godel number G has certain properties, and is thus possible to construct in the language of Peano arithmetic.)

Now the point is that none of this would have worked without the uniqueness of prime factorization. And it's hard to see why a physical theory of everything -- if it were axiomatizable -- would have prime factorization in it. Consider the following simple theory of everything, which is of course incorrect but is probably structurally similar to what the real one would look like -- it has a finite list of things, 1 through N, each with a charge and a mass; the forces acting on each of them in any given configuration follow from Maxwell's equations, and how they react to the force is determined by Newton's laws of motion. (Throw in gravitation as well, it doesn't matter.) The point is that you now have all the prerequisites for an axiomatic system in which one can ask all sorts of questions about what the velocities, positions, position-velocity correlations, etc. of the particles are at any time, i.e., this is Laplace's universe. The key point is that the minimal set of mathematical rules you need to make sense of this theory are rules about arithmetical operations on the real numbers. Although the reals include the naturals, they are infinitely simpler because everything divides everything else. Natural numbers do not enter the language of the theory at all -- yes, you need natural numbers to list the particles while constructing the language of the theory, but that's in the meta-language. Ergo no prime factorization, ergo no self-referential statements, ergo no incompleteness theorem. While we do not know quite what the theory of everything would be it seems almost certain to be structurally rather like the one I just described. (You might say, well, isn't quantum mechanics "grainy" and doesn't it therefore have something to do with the integers; the graininess doesn't enter into the fundamental equations, but even if this were the case, you only add and never multiply quanta so you wouldn't need all of Peano arithmetic so you wouldn't have an incompleteness theorem.)

I think this is all true so far as it goes but there's a potential loophole in the argument, which is that one might want to ask questions about the world that are not phraseable in the language of the theory. For example one might want to ask questions about thermodynamics, involving macroscopic quantities like pressure and temperature in my toy axiomatic system. I could, in principle, define pressure in terms of a sum over all the velocities of the particles near the walls divided by the number of particles (or something like that), but really what I want to talk about when I'm talking about pressure is a property that becomes well-defined only for systems, and I can't even construct my toy theory of everything for an infinite system. Therefore, what I'm really doing when I construct thermodynamics is setting up an entirely new axiomatic system by a process of taking limits over larger and larger versions of the original theory of everything.

Basically what this says is that a theory of everything in the ordinarily understood sense is not a theory in which a lot of the questions that physicists in practice work on would be well-defined. Could these "effective" theories, or the union of them, be strong enough to include PA? Maybe. In particular, a lot of natural-number arithmetic comes in from the topological properties of wavefunctions, the spaces they live in, etc. I'm still doubtful that you'd ever have to multiply natural numbers, but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Dept. of complicated rhyme schemes

Brad Leithauser (I think) says this poem has the most intricate rhyme scheme of any really successful poem. BTW flush/flash is what's called pararhyme and was an invention of Wilfred Owen's. It's neither dulce nor decorum but it's kind of a nice effect. Interestingly most of the formal inventions in 20th century English poetry have been by relatively minor writers -- Owen, Marianne Moore, Kay Ryan, R.S. Thomas, Louis MacNeice, H.D. etc. -- and someone like Auden was much more of an adopter than an inventor.

from Five Songs
W.H. Auden

That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning's leveled gun.

But morning let us pass,
And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grown credulous of peace,

As mile by mile is seen
No trespasser's reproach,
And love's best glasses reach
No fields but are his own.

Pundits on kids

E.D. Hearse takes on the most widely read morons in America:

She also challenges the claim by economists, and taken up by influential writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Kristof, that if only students were exposed to excellent teachers for three to five years in a row, the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students would be overcome. It is true that some math teachers have been able to make up as much as 33 percent of the lag for some students in a single year—whence the economists’ extrapolation to the three-to-five-year figure.

Not, of course, that one can assume either Gladwell or Kristof knows what an extrapolation is. I generally recommend the article -- a review of Diane Ravitch's [a.k.a. Dan Ravage] new book on how school choice has failed -- as it is sporadically sensible and has a lot of interesting factoids. E.g. here's Richard Hofstadter on child nature (on which see also Grobstein):

To believe that Dewey’s synthesis was successful required a certain credulity about the pre-established harmony between child nature and democratic culture which not everyone could share. It seemed…that one would have to give up either the emphasis on child nature or the emphasis on educating for democracy.

I would however part ways with both Hearse and Ravage when they rhapsodize about the "neighborhood school" as a pillar of the community. (I also find Hearse's whining about international league tables a little tiresome. Bloody awful, isn't it, that other countries educate their kids?) Most of the real problems with the school system have to do with schools for the poor; these tend to be in areas where there isn't a meaningful sense of community -- whose residents are in any case largely transient -- and the approach of the successful, no-excuses sort of inner-city schools has been to give kids an alternative social anchor from their "communities." Beyond that I don't think K-12 education can be sensibly addressed in isolation from the Big Sort -- it's a good thing to get middle-class kids into the public school system as their parents function as watchdogs, but it's not sufficient because it doesn't deal with the districts where most parents are too illiterate and/or busy to find out what their kids are learning at school.

Another bit of information that I think is crucial to this entire picture is this study (I'm quoting from an email I wrote a while ago):

[...] there's Richard Elmore's paper on high-performing schools. What Elmore found was that high-performing inner-city schools were different from both suburban schools and crap inner-city schools, which were rather like each other. In suburban schools, the instructors assumed (correctly) that parents would play the primary role in the education of students, and were hands-off; in crap inner-city schools, the instructors (incorrectly) made the same assumption, and let the kids smoke crack in class; in good inner-city schools, instructors realized that they had to make up for the lack of useful parenting, and put a huge amount of work into making sure the students were kept engaged.

Geezers in Freezers

A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park, Miami, Florida

Donald Justice

Risen from rented rooms, old ghosts
Come back to haunt our parks by day,
They crept up Fifth Street through the crowd,
Unseeing and almost unseen,
Halting before the shops for breath,
Still proud, pretending to admire
The fat hens dressed and hung for flies
There, or perhaps the lone, dead fern
Dressing the window of a small
Hotel. Winter had blown them south--
How many? Twelve in Lummus Park
I counted, shivering where they stood,
A little thicket of thin trees,
And more on benches, turning with
The sun, wan heliotropes, all day.

O you who wear against the breast
The torturous flannel undervest
Winter and summer, yet are cold,
Poor cracked thermometers stuck now
At zero everlastingly,
Old men, bent like your walking sticks
As with the pressure of some hand,
Surely they must have thought you strong
To lean on you so hard, so long!

Birthers and calories

There's this well-known paper by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler that shows -- I haven't really read it in detail but the analysis is simple and seems pretty airtight, and it is widely cited -- that political misinformation is very hard to correct; in particular, people tend to "double down," and lend more credence, to myths that line up with their political beliefs after they are debunked. (Empirical evidence for Credo quia absurdum est.) This is, of course, a broader phenomenon than just politics; it appears to have been behind some of the hysterical reaction last year (was it last year?) when someone suggested that mammograms were unnecessary for certain age groups. Via Nyhan's blog, here's an article describing how evidence-based medicine is ineffectual when it comes to getting people to give up their false beliefs re medication. (The article also has some pretty interesting stuff about breast cancer.)

This also applies to stuff like listing the calorie content of stuff on menus. Although salad dressing is unhealthy, it's hard to debunk the myth that salads are healthy no matter what. (If you don't like this example -- I don't know how true it is; frankly, food is not something I've ever been that interested in -- there must be other cases of deeply held misperceptions.) In general, this research on myth-busting suggests why (as e.g. Yglesias says here in passing) calorie labeling has been ineffectual so far, and will continue to be ineffectual, at getting people to form accurate beliefs about what's healthy. Of course, it might still be good for other things, like reminding people of how unhealthy the stuff they already consider unhealthy is.

snarXiv

In its own words:

The snarXiv is a ran­dom high-energy the­ory paper gen­er­a­tor incor­po­rat­ing all the lat­est trends, entropic rea­son­ing, and excit­ing mod­uli spaces. The arXiv is sim­i­lar, but occa­sion­ally less ran­dom.

The abstracts are utterly compelling. I have absolutely seen crazier-sounding stuff than this on the arxiv:

The SUSY CP Problem

Authors: D. Nelson, R. E. Fermi

Comments: 7 pages, minor corrections

Subjects: High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)

Some work has been done in recent papers on models of bubbles. We take a holomorphic approach to a primordial resolution of the fine-tuning problem, and find that observables follow from adjoint Matrix Models surrounded by a stack of (p,q) 7- branes wrapped on an Euclidean symmetric space. We conjecture that a surface defect is present as realized in the MSSM. When constructing a solution to the U(1) problem, we discover that, in the Clebsch-Gordon decomposition case, a (p,q) 7- brane reduction of superconformal TQFTs is gauge mediated.

T.S. Eliot, without the text

Eliot's book of essays on Elizabethan drama is available online; I strongly recommend it, as much for the quotations as anything else. (The pdf renders best, I think; just right for an iPad.) I'd read most of the essays in this book a long time ago -- 2004 or 2005, I think; I remember being impelled to spend a summer reading Webster and the lesser Elizabethans, who by and large did not live up to Eliot's hype -- and had forgotten a lot of the good stuff in here. A few quotations that jumped out:

Now comes my lover tripping like a roe,
And brings my longings tangled in her hair.
(Peele)

I pass'd, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that grim ferryman which poets write of,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.
The first that there did greet my stranger soul,
Was my great father-in-law, renowned Warwick;
Who cried aloud, "What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?"
(Shakespeare)

Go hurtless souls, whom mischief hath oppressed
Even in first porch of life but lately had,
And fathers fury -- go, unhappy kind,
O little children, by the way full sad
Of journey knowen.
Go see the angry kings.
(Jasper Heywood, translating Seneca re the dead children of Hercules -- I found the Latin helped me parse the English here:

ite ad Stygios, umbrae, portus
ite, innocues, quas in primo
limine vitae scelus oppressit
patriusque furor;
ite, iratos visite reges.)

If thou wilt stay,
Leap in mine arms; mine arms are open wide;
If not, turn from me, and I'll turn from thee;
For though thou hast the heart to say farewell,
I have not power to stay thee.
(Marlowe)

The rawish dank of clumsy winter ramps
The fluent summer's vein; and drizzling sleet
Chilleth the wan bleak cheek of the numb'd earth,
While snarling gusts nibble the juiceless leaves
From the nak'd shuddering branch
(Marston)

Mineralnye Vody

Earlier today, some airport-related link reminded me of this marvelous old Economist piece about Russian airports (gated version; Dec 19 2006). My favorite part:

Mineralnye Vody: To reach this airport, in the north Caucasus, passengers pass through a series of military roadblocks, where documents and the boots of cars are checked by slouching policemen, looking for weapons or terrorists. But a sensible terrorist would leave his weapons at home and buy new ones at the airport, where a wide selection of enormous knives and ornamental Caucasian swords is on sale. There are also embossed Caucasian drinking horns, and a large number of Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra.

Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. In Soviet times, before the region that the airport serves was desolated by separatist insurgencies, blood feuds and government brutality, the nearby mineral spas were popular holiday resorts. The building is incongruously large for a part of Russia that today, for all its macho hospitality and merriment, feels more African than European in its violence, poverty and corruption. It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of the Soviet Union.

The article is also memorable for coining the phrase "incremental babushka."

And now for sth completely different... The Telegraph has a pic of a lemur playing with an Easter egg.

"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: