Another post I won't have time to write

If you follow all the links in this post from the redoubtable James Kwak, you'll find a fascinating discussion on the speculator-driven bubble. I was going to comment on this at length but I don't have time so here's the thumbnail:

Kwak and Felix Salmon both have smart things to say on the subject while James Stewart continues to show his skill at saying what a large segment of his audience wants to hear.

n-gram ranking can be fleeting

One of these days I plan on doing something about how television, particularly in its early days, resurrected all sorts of fading stars and franchises. In the meantime, I decided to check out how the fame of some of these stars of franchises tracked according to Google's n-gram viewer.

Early television programmers were hungry enough to dig deep in the vaults, even to the silent era.





The difference between Keaton and Lloyd was particularly telling though I suspect that Keaton's films aging better was also a factor (Sherlock Jr. is the best comic film ever made. Anyone who cares to disagree can step outside). Keaton embraced the medium early.

From Wikipedia:

In 1950, Keaton had a successful television series, The Buster Keaton Show, which was broadcast live on a local Los Angeles station. An attempt to recreate the first series on film as Life with Buster Keaton (1951), which allowed the program to be broadcast nationwide, was less well received. He also appeared in the early television series Faye Emerson's Wonderful Town. A theatrical feature film, The Misadventures of Buster Keaton, was fashioned from the series. Keaton said he canceled the filmed series himself because he was unable to create enough fresh material to produce a new show each week. Keaton also appeared on Ed Wynn's variety show. At the age of 55, he successfully recreated one of the stunts of his youth, in which he propped one foot onto a table, then swung the second foot up next to it, and held the awkward position in midair for a moment before crashing to the stage floor. I've Got a Secret host Garry Moore recalled, "I asked (Keaton) how he did all those falls, and he said, 'I'll show you'. He opened his jacket and he was all bruised. So that's how he did it—it hurt—but you had to care enough not to care." In 1952 Keaton appeared with Charles Chaplin in Limelight (1952 film).

Unlike his contemporary Harold Lloyd, who kept his films from being televised, Keaton's periodic television appearances helped to revive interest in his silent films in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1954, Keaton played his first television dramatic role in "The Awakening", an episode of the syndicated anthology series Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Presents. About this time, he also appeared on NBC's The Martha Raye Show.

Here's an ad from the sixties when Keaton was pushing 70. Check out the reaction to the "moo."







Westerns, particularly juvenile Westerns were also a natural fit. The most notable early success was a popular but second tier character played by a very shrewd fellow named William Boyd.

Boyd resumed production [2] in 1946, on lower budgets, and continued through 1948, when "B" westerns were being phased out. Boyd thought Hopalong Cassidy might have a future in television, spent $350,000 to obtain the rights to his old films,[2] and approached the fledgling NBC network. The initial broadcasts were so successful that NBC could not wait for a television series to be produced and edited the feature films to broadcast length.[3] On June 24, 1949, Hopalong Cassidy became the first network Western television series.

The success of the television series made Boyd a star.[2] The Mutual Broadcasting System began broadcasting a radio version, with Andy Clyde (later George MacMichael on Walter Brennan's ABC sitcom The Real McCoys) as the sidekick, in January 1950; at the end of September, the show moved to CBS Radio, where it ran until 1952.[4]

The series and character were so popular that Hopalong Cassidy was featured on the cover of national magazines such as Look, Life, and Time.[2] Boyd earned millions as Hopalong ($800,000 in 1950 alone),[2] mostly from merchandise licensing and endorsement deals. In 1950, Hopalong Cassidy was featured on the first lunchbox to bear an image, causing sales for Aladdin Industries to jump from 50,000 to 600,000 in one year. In stores, more than 100 companies in 1950 manufactured $70 million of Hopalong Cassidy products,[2] including children's dinnerware, pillows, roller skates, soap, wristwatches, and jackknives.[5]

There was a new demand for Hopalong Cassidy features in movie theaters, and Boyd licensed reissue distributor Film Classics to make new film prints and advertising accessories. Another 1950 enterprise saw the home-movie company Castle Films manufacturing condensed versions of the Paramount films for 16 mm and 8 mm film projectors; they were sold through 1966. Also, in January 1950 Dan Spiegel began to draw a syndicated comic strip with scripts by Royal King Cole; the strip lasted until 1955.[6][7]

Boyd began work on a separate series of half-hour westerns made for television; Edgar Buchanan was his new sidekick, Red Connors (a character from the original stories and a few of the early films). The theme music for the television show was written by Nacio Herb Brown (music) and L. Wolfe Gilbert (lyrics). The show ranked number 7 in the 1949 Nielsen ratings, number 9 in the 1950-1951 season and number 28 in 1951-1952.[8] The success of the show and tie-ins inspired juvenile television westerns such as The Range Rider, Tales of the Texas Rangers, Annie Oakley, The Gene Autry Show, and The Roy Rogers Show.

Universal monster movies also had obvious appeal to young boomers. It's not a coincidence that Hammer got into the business of horror in the late fifties.






But the Universal stars were still the icons.




[The jump in werewolf citings in the 1860s appears to trace back to this guy.]



Phantom was about as obscure as you could get in 1952. I cut off the graph at 1985 for obvious reasons.

The best parts always end up on the cutting room floor

Bull almost showed up in an aerospace post I wrote recently. I can't remember what I had planned for Vidocq. Both are too interesting not to at least mention.

Gerald Vincent Bull (March 9, 1928 – March 22, 1990) was a Canadian engineer who developed long-range artillery. He moved from project to project in his quest to economically launch a satellite using a huge artillery piece, to which end he designed the Project Babylon "supergun" for the Iraqi government. Bull was assassinated outside his apartment in Brussels, Belgium in March 1990.

Eugène François Vidocq (French pronunciation: ​[øʒɛn fʁɑ̃swa viˈdɔk]; July 24, 1775 – May 11, 1857) was a French criminal and criminalist whose life story inspired several writers, including Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac. The former criminal became the founder and first director of the crime-detection Sûreté Nationale as well as the head of the first known private detective agency, Vidocq is considered to be the father of modern criminology[1][2] and of the French police department.[3] He is also regarded as the first private detective.

"The van-leader of civilization"

Mark Twain probably never said "Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over." But he did have some sharp observations on the former in what may be my favorite of his books.

How solemn and beautiful is the thought that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary -- but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey -- I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail -- and behold! civilization is established forever in the land. But whiskey, you see, was the van-leader in this beneficent work. It always is. It was like a foreigner -- and excusable in a foreigner -- to be ignorant of this great truth, and wander off into astronomy to borrow a symbol. But if he had been conversant with the facts, he would have said: Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way.

- Life on the Mississippi

Now back to the fighting part (thank God, we've got a grown-up in charge again).

Self-inflicted Gish Gallops

I came across this concept recently and it got me to thinking about an ongoing conversation I've been having for years now wwith my co-blogger, Joseph.

Gish Gallop

The Gish Gallop is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of small arguments that their opponent cannot possibly answer or address each one in real time. More often than not, these myriad arguments are full of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments — the only condition is that there be many of them, not that they be particularly compelling on their own. They may be escape hatches or "gotcha" arguments that are specifically designed to be brief, but take a long time to unravel. Thus, galloping is frequently used in timed debates (especially by creationists) to overwhelm one's opponent.

Examples are commonly found in "list" articles that may claim to show "100 reasons for" something, or "50 reasons against" something. At this sort of level, with dozens upon dozens of minor arguments, each individual point on the list may only be a single sentence or two, and many may be a repeat or vague re-wording of a previous one. This is the intention: although it is trivial amount of effort on the part of the galloper to make a point, particularly if they just need to re-iterate an existing one a different way, a refutation may take much longer and someone addressing will be unable to refute all points in a similarly short order. If even one argument in a Gish Gallop is left standing at the end, or addressed insufficiently, the galloper will attempt to claim victory.

The term was coined by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, named after creationist Duane Gish. Creationists are fond of it; see "101 evidences for a young age of the Earth and the universe" for example, which is perhaps the most stunning case. Sam Harris describes the technique as "starting 10 fires in 10 minutes."

I tend toward exhaustive arguments, taking an opposing position and attacking every flaw I can find. Joseph has frequently pointed out the practical flaw in that approach: even if every point is winnable, by opening up so many fronts, your opponent can pick points that distract from the main argument. Worse yet, your opponent can just keep moving from point to point, making it next to impossible to construct a coherent argument. The result is a rhetorical draw.

I'm trying to be more disciplined about my arguments, but blogging has a way of encouraging bad habits.

California Drought -- Bad Grandfather

"Whiskey's for drinking. Water's for fightin' over."
            Someone who probably wasn't Mark Twain

I remember my surprise the first time I saw rice growing in the Central Valley. It didn't seem like a very profitable crop to grow in the desert. It wasn't until later that I learned about certain externalities that came into play.

SAN FRANCISCO -- California's drought-ravaged reservoirs are running so low that state water deliveries to metropolitan areas have all but stopped, and cutbacks are forcing growers to fallow fields. But 19th century laws allow almost 4,000 companies, farms and others to use an unmonitored amount of water for free -- and, in some cases, sell what they don't need.

With grandfathered legal rights, this group, dominated by big corporations and agricultural concerns, reports using trillions of gallons of water each year, according to a review by The Associated Press. Together, they have more than half of all claims on waterways in California.

However, the state doesn't know if any are overdrawing or wasting water. The AP found the state's system is based on self-reported, incomplete records riddled with errors and years out of date.

"We really don't know how much water they've actually diverted," said Bob Rinker, a manager in the State Water Resources Control Board's water rights division.

With a burgeoning population and projections of heightened climate-related impacts on snowpack and other water supplies, the antiquated system blunts California's ability to move water where it's most needed.

When gold miners flocked to the West in the 1800s, the state drafted laws that rewarded those who first staked claims on the region's abundant rivers and streams. Today, California still relies on that honor system.

The system's inequities are particularly evident in the arid Central Valley.

Near Yuba City, second-generation rice farmer Al Montna has been forced to idle 1,800 acres because of scarce water. About 35 miles north, however, fourth-generation Butte County rice farmer Josh Sheppard had more than enough water, thanks to superior rights to Feather River water dating to the late 1800s.

"No one thinks of it when there's ample water and plenty to go around, but in these times of tightness it is a very contentious resource that gets fought over," Sheppard said, standing next to his flooded fields.

I hope to get back to this soon. In the meantime, here's some data from the AP and a related article from the Washington Post.

Educational media of yore

From Wikipedia:

The filmstrip was a common form of still image instructional multimedia, once commonly used by educators in primary and secondary schools (K-12), overtaken at the end of the eighties by newer and increasingly lower-cost full-motion videocassettes and later on by DVDs. From the 1940s to 1980s, filmstrips provided an easy and inexpensive alternative to 16mm projector educational films, requiring very little storage space and being very quick to rewind for the next use. Filmstrips were large and durable, and rarely needed splicing. They are still used in some areas.

A filmstrip is a spooled roll of 35 mm positive film with approximately thirty to fifty images arranged in sequential order. Like 16 mm film, a filmstrip was inserted vertically down in front of the projector aperture, rather than horizontally as in a slide projector. Therefore, the frame size is smaller than normal 35 mm film. Two image frames of a filmstrip take up the same amount of space as a single 35mm frame, including its guard band, so that a 25 exposure 35mm film can contain fifty filmstrip images. Early celluloid filmstrips had a habit of melting or combusting from the intense and sustained heat of the projection lamp.[citation needed] These were called pictural filmstrips, the first filmstrips that were produced in a complete set[clarification needed].

Typically, a filmstrip's running time was between ten and twenty minutes. Depending on how they were narrated or produced, filmstrips (which often came with an instructor's guide) were flexible enough to be used in both self-paced learning formats or a full classroom. In addition to a standard classroom wall or screen projector, personal film display units were available with a screen size of approximately eight inches diagonal for up-close viewing by one or two people.

The instructor would turn on a filmstrip projector that would show the first frame (image) of the filmstrip. The instructor then turned on a 33 RPM record or cassette tape containing the audio material for the filmstrip which included narration. At the appropriate point, a tone would sound, signaling the instructor to turn a knob, advancing to the next frame. Later, technical improvements allowed the projector to advance the film automatically.

There is something overwhelmingly quaint about these old filmstrips and learning machines and scratched 16mm movies. It is easy to get distracted by the antiquated analog quality, to focus too much on the technology and not enough on the underlying pedagogy. This, of course, begs the question: why should we care? Other than misplaced nostalgia, what is the value in studying this outmoded educational media?

The answer is that we are currently investing a lot of money and even more hope into the idea that technology can fix many if not most of the pressing problems in our educational system. Add to that, the fact that we have been at this now for over a century. These previous technologies were launched with similar rhetoric and expectations and most if not all either severely underperformed or failed outright. The case for learning exactly what went wrong seems fairly obvious.







Harold Dexter Hoopes illustrates Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns.

“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally” -- more for the to-blog pile

I really need to do something with this Justin Fox piece:

Are Money Managers Lemmings?

That Keynes quote alone is worth a mega-thread.

FMRI

The sad part is I'm pretty sure someone would publish it and I'm sure a number of news outlets would pick it up.

Is the attitude toward Israel another left/right axis shift?

I've been thinking for a long time about the different components of the liberal conservative spectrum and the ways they move and interact (this comes up a lot when you dig into the education reform debate). One point of particular interest is the catastrophic shift, cases where the "liberal" and "conservative" positions on an issue suddenly switch places. We've already discussed pacifism. Now this post by Corey Robin (followed by some excellent comments) has me wondering if attitudes about Israel have undergone a comparable shift.

The piece also made me think, though, about the initial reaction to Israel’s decision to try Adolf Eichmann.

The response to that decision, as historians like Peter Novick and Deborah Lipstadt have shown, was rife with anti-Semitism. The Wall Street Journal warned darkly of “an atmosphere of Old Testament retribution.” A Unitarian minister, according to Novick, claimed “he could see little ethical difference between ‘the Jew-pursuing Nazi and the Nazi-pursuing Jew.’” Those unitarian universalists.

The worst offender, though, was National Review. Combining all the elements of anticommunism, Christian homiletics, and ancient Jew-hatred, William F. Buckley’s magazine castigated the Israelis—really, the Jews, those Shylocks of vengeance and memory—for their inability to let bygones be bygones.

I assume support for Israel is now stronger on the right than on the left. Is that true?

Little Technophile on the Prarie

Brad DeLong has an interesting post (from, believe it or not, Laura Ingalls Wilder) that fits in with one of my favorite ongoing threads, the unprecedented transformation of every aspect of life (at least in places like America) that occurred late in the Nineteenth and early in the Twentieth Centuries.

One of my big complaints about tech journalism is the lack of historical context. Reporters see technology changing the world around them and, through a combination of historical illiteracy and self-absorption, they assume this makes them special.

There's no question that technology has had a big impact on our lives over the the past dozen or so years, but in most ways, 2003 doesn't seem that different. For Wilder in 1911, 1899 was, in almost every respect, another world.

Self driving cars

This is Joseph.

A gaming and Shakespeare blog (no joke, it really exists) had a nice argument for why driver-less cars are unlikely to greatly reduce the number of cars needed.

Well worth a quick read.

An April Fool's Day Repost

From July 7, 2014

Over at the New Republic, Julia Ioffe has a fascinating piece on the Russian media's treatment of the downing of MH17:

Did you know Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was full of corpses when it took off from Amsterdam? Did you know that, for some darkly inexplicable reason, on July 17, MH17 moved off the standard flight path that it had taken every time before, and moved north, toward rebel-held areas outside Donetsk? Or that the dispatchers summoned the plane lower just before the crash? Or that the plane had been recently reinsured? Or that the Ukrainian army has air defense systems in the area? Or that it was the result of the Ukrainian military mistaking MH17 for Putin’s presidential plane, which looks strangely similar?

Did you know that the crash of MH17 was all part of an American conspiracy to provoke a big war with Russia?

Well, it’s all true—at least if you live in Russia, because this is the Malaysia Airlines crash story that you’d be seeing.

As the crisis surrounding the plane crash deepens and as calls for Vladimir Putin to act grow louder, it’s worth noting that they’re not really getting through to Putin’s subjects. The picture of the catastrophe that the Russian people are seeing on their television screens is very different from that on screens in much of the rest of the world, and the discrepancy does not bode well for a sane resolution to this stand-off. 

This reminded me of a conspiracy theory I've considered blogging on partly because it uses such bad statistics to make much of its case, but mainly because it is so incredibly weird. Forget von Däniken and Velikovsky; this is the hard stuff. From Wikipedia:

The New Chronology also contains a reconstruction, an alternative chronology, radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all ancient history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages. According to the revised chronology, the written history of humankind goes only as far back as AD 800, there is almost no information about events between AD 800–1000, and most known historical events took place in AD 1000–1500.

The main mover for this is Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko and he has put in an incredible amount of effort making sure everything fits his theory, including some things that are difficult to ignore:

The Great Pyramids naturally fit in the epoch of the monumental constructions, which blossomed in the XIV-XVI cc. all over the Empire. They are: 1) The Great Wall of China, 2) the magnificent cathedrals of Western Europe, 3) the indomitable Kremlins and fortifications in Russia-Horde, 4) the massive Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, aka (according to our reconstruction) – The Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem = Czar-Grad, 5) the Great Sphinx, [actually "a very familiar Christian Cherubim." Who knew? -- MP] 6) the Great Pyramids and temples of Egypt 7) the great pyramids and temples of Central America, in particular Mexico, 8) gigantic constructions of Baalbeck (Lebanon).

That part about the Russia-Horde is important. (All remaining quotes from Wikipedia):

Central to Fomenko's New Chronology is his claim of the existence of a vast Slav-Turk empire, which he called the "Russian Horde", that played the dominant role in Eurasian history before the 17th century. The various peoples identified in ancient and medieval history, from the Scythians, Huns, Goths and Bulgars, through the Polyane, Duleby, Drevliane, Pechenegs, to in more recent times, the Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Belarussians, are nothing but elements of the single Russian Horde. For the New Chronologists, peoples such as the Ukrainians, Belarussians, Mongols, and others who assert their national independence from Russia, are suffering from a historical delusion. 

That might explain this:

Despite criticism, Fomenko has published and sold over one million copies of his books in his native Russia. Many Internet forums have appeared which aim to supplement his work with additional amateur research. His critics have suggested that Fomenko's version of history appealed to the Russian reading public by keeping alive an imperial consciousness to replace their disillusionment with the failures of Communism and post-Communist corporate oligarchies.

I don't know enough about Russia to even start speculating about the larger question of conspiracy theories in today's Russia. That's a question for people who know what they're talking about. I will, however, note that, if nothing else, Fomenko's New Chronology shows why chess masters might not make such formidable Bond villains in real life.

I realize we're entering dead horse territory here -- UPDATED

... and, as promised in the last post, we are approaching the end of this thread, but I recently came across this article from 2013 and since I haven't said much about those 200,000 applicants...

Private Mars Colony Project Undaunted by Application ShortfallRob Coppinger, SPACE.com Contributor   |   August 28, 2013 07:00am ET

Mars One opened its application process for potential colonists on April 22 of this year and set a deadline of  Aug. 31. Applicants have to pay a fee, which ranges from $5 to $75 depending on which country they live in. The fee for United States citizens is $38.

On April 10, Lansdorp told SPACE.com that Mars One expected to get 1 million applications. By mid-April, the foundation had 45,000 people registered for its mailing list and had received 10,000 emails from individuals. By early May, two weeks after applications opened, Mars One was claiming 78,000 applicants.

At the time, Lansdorp said in a statement: "These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants," lowering the applications bar he had set a few weeks earlier.

By Aug. 22, Mars One had received about 165,000 applications, meaning the foundation could have a total of around 200,000 in hand by the Aug. 31 deadline. Lansdorp told SPACE.com on Aug. 23 that potential applicants should not be concerned about any perceived lack of qualifications: "We have the feeling that people feel that, 'If I’m not a pilot or I don’t have astronaut training already, how can I ever be qualified to go to Mars?' And actually, the opposite is true."

The average application fee is about $25, Lansdorp said, so 200,000 submissions would bring in about $5 million. That would leave Mars One $20 million short of what it would have gotten from 1 million applications (and $7.5 million shy of the $12.5 million that 500,000 applications would have brought in).

However, Lansdorp also told SPACE.com last week that the 165,000 included those that had not paid. He declined to say how much revenue applications had generated.

Now cut to 2014 courtesy of Elmo Keep.

Then there’s the company’s claim that 200,000 people applied for a one-way ticket. This incredible piece of information issued by Mars One’s press office was picked up with credulous haste by news outlets around the world. Even religious leaders made their opinions known, with the UAE-based General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment strictly forbidding Muslims from applying, as to leave the sanctity of Earth was an affront to Allah.

But Norbert Kraft, the chief medical officer, has told The Guardian he was sorting through 80,000 applicants, not 200,000. NBC News tallied the number of video applicants on the Mars One website and came to 2,782, each of whom paid an application fee of between $5 and $75. I ask Lansdorp if in the course of fact-checking this story he will allow me to see the list to verify the number. I ask where the 200,000 people registered their interest and if it was ever made public. His answer was…complicated.

“I don’t know if that was ever made public, but they have registered on our website for applying for our program,” he says. “Then there was a number of steps where people had the opportunity to drop out as that was exactly the point. The application process was kind of a self-selection that avoided us having to review all of them. The first step was paying the application fee. A number of people already dropped out there. Then there was a video that you had to make and questions that you had to answer. And that’s also where a lot of people dropped out, that they’re not lying in their motivation.”

I ask again if sharing the list would be possible to verify the figure.

“Of course we cannot share the details of the applicants with you because that’s confidential, private information that we cannot share.”

I offer that the names can be redacted in maintaining the privacy of the applicants before viewing the list.

“Ah, no. I’m not interested in sharing that information with you.”

He emails later, with an invitation to come at my own expense to Mars One’s office in the Netherlands and see the list in person, though cameras will not be allowed. “I will need to read your article before publication and reserve the right to deny you access to the list if I don’t like what you wrote.”

I tell him that of course that won’t be possible.

P.S. And the revision continues. Emphasis added.

From a Pakistani news site:

When Mars One, Dutch non-profit foundation, launched a program to establish permanent human settlement on the red planet, they never thought that they would be swamped with a flood of applications. Shockingly, 202,586 people signed up for this crazy, one-way trip to Mars, of which 100 made it to Mars One’s highly coveted shortlist.

I don't have time to blog about this

Techno Fantasies

or this:

Evolutionary Psychology Is Neither