As we've said before, if you've gone through the holidays without hearing "Sugar Rum Cherry"...

 ... you have not had a cool Christmas.

 

Sixties television was filled with heart-warming Christmas episodes often featuring orphans

The Untouchables got a lot of criticism during its original run for its depictions of violence. Can't imagine why.

[Taking it easy with lots of reposts this holiday season but we have big plans for the blog in 2025.]

Eight years ago at the blog -- Evangelicals have always been passionate about the war on Christmas. They just used to be on the other side.

[December 1, 2016]

Tom Hanks, creepy CGI Santa Clauses, and the theological canary in the coal mine

I've been making the point for a while now that the evangelical movement that I grew up with in the Bible Belt is radically different from the evangelical movement of today. I was aware that something was changing for a while, but the nature and the extent of the change crystallized for me when I read this 2004 article from Slate:

Next Stop, Bethlehem?
By David Sarno

The Polar Express is the tale of a boy's dreamlike train ride to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus. Like all stories worth knowing, it's rich enough in image and feeling to accommodate many interpretations. Chris Van Allsburg, the author of the book, calls his story a celebration of childhood wonder and imagination. William Broyles Jr., one of the screenwriters of this year's film version, calls it a kind of Odyssey in which a hero undertakes a mythic, perilous journey of self-discovery. And Paul Lauer, who is a key player in the film's marketing apparatus, sees The Polar Express as a parable for the importance of faith in Jesus Christ.

Lauer's firm, Motive Entertainment, is best known for coordinating the faith-based marketing of The Passion of the Christ. Motive helped spread early word of mouth about the filmby holding screenings for church groups and talking the movie up to religious leaders. When The Passion took in a stunning $370 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, Lauer and his cohorts got a lot of the credit. Earlier this year, Motive was hired by Warner Bros. to promote The Polar Express to Christians. But wait, is The Polar Express an evangelical film?

You'd certainly think so, considering the expansive campaign of preview screenings, radio promotion, DVDs, and online resources that Lauer unfurled in the Christian media this fall. This Polar Express downloads page includes endorsements from pastors and links to church and parenting resources hosted by the Christian media outlet HomeWord. There are suggestions for faith-building activities and a family Bible-study guide that notes, for example, the Boy's Christ-like struggle to get the Girl a train ticket. "The Boy risked it all to recover the ticket," the guide observes. "Jesus gave His all to save us from the penalty of our sins."

HomeWord Radio, which claims to reach more than a million Christian parents daily, broadcast three shows promoting the film. At one point, the show's host wondered excitedly if the movie "might turn out to be one of the more effective witnessing tools in modern times." Motive also produced a promotional package that was syndicated to over 100 radio stations in which Christian recording artists like Amy Grant, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Avalon talked about the movie as they exited preview screenings.

…

Some audience members—and a few Christian film critics—would argue that Santa Claus isn't necessarily a stand-in for Jesus Christ. Last month, Lauer told the Mobile Register that he sees The Polar Express as a parable, "not a movie about belief in God." But when Lauer speaks to a Christian audience, he tells a different story. Lauer told HomeWord Radio that when he asked Robert Zemeckis about all the biblical parallels he was seeing in the film, the director "winked and said, 'Nothing in a movie this big ends up in the script by accident.' " (Zemeckis was traveling and wasn't available for comment.)

This is a spectacular example of getting the pertinent details of the story right and yet completely missing the point. In another piece, the understatement of “Santa Claus isn't necessarily a stand-in for Jesus Christ” would be sharply comic but Sarno seems to be completely oblivious to the joke.

I know we overuse the clip of the minister gunning down Santa in the middle of a children's sermon, but it illustrates an important point.

 [Clip missing because Viacom feels that fair use laws don't apply to them.]

Over the past few years the evangelical movement has abandoned the majority of its most deeply held theological beliefs (think of how doctrinal differences with Catholics and, even more notably, Mormons have been put aside). It is not at all coincidental the beliefs that were abandoned were uniformly inconvenient from a political standpoint. The conservative movement has both weaponized and secularized the evangelical movement with remarkable success.

Traditionally, evangelicals were more concerned with the potential corruption of their own religion (frequently to the point of paranoia) than with what others were practicing. Christmas was a particularly hot-button issue. In the eyes of several good Southern Baptist ministers, the holiday had become unacceptably commercial, cultural rather than religious, and, in many ways, pagan. Most of the music, imagery, and traditions had nothing to do with the nativity, the "reason for the season." Often, this general hostility toward secular Christmas celebrations focused on Santa Claus.

Like many religious practices, the no-Santa rule could look a bit silly when viewed from the outside, but there's nothing unreasonable about adherents of a particular faith wanting to maintain what they see as the original meaning of a religious holiday. Growing up, I found these attitudes and the little lectures that often accompanied them painfully annoying, but, even though I disagreed, I could see where they were coming from from a theological standpoint.

Now evangelicalism is a religious movement stripped of its religious elements. There is no scriptural foundation for tax cuts for the rich, deregulating greenhouse gases, or Donald Trump, but those are the defining issue of the movement of today.

Of course, evangelicals are not monolithic. There are many within the movement, some in positions of authority, who object to these obvious deviations from their original core principles. There are indications that the resistance is gaining momentum, and it is entirely possible that in a few years we will have to rethink our assumptions about evangelical Christians and politics. For now, though, this is a cultural (social reactionary) and political (far right) movement, not a religious one, and trying to think of it in any terms that these is misguided.

Lord Peter Wimsey on the enshittification* of Tonka trucks -- a Toys for Tots follow-up

* Being a bit loose with the definition of the term.

[Updated with cooler and longer video clip including Tonka truck as spare tire.]

As mentioned before, I always celebrate Christmas with a Toys-for-Tots haul, looking for nice toys that will stand up to lots of hard play. Metal Tonka trucks were an excellent option and I usually cleared out the store's stock. 

The trucks were originally marketed as being nearly indestructible.

This year through, as I was loading my purchases into my car, I noticed that the trucks (which had been rebranded "Steel Classics") were now almost entirely made of plastic other than the bed.

I also noticed this claim on the box: MADE WITH METAL

This called to mind a passage from Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise.

“Hum!” said Parker. “Pretty extensive injuries for a fall of that kind.”

“So I thought, before I saw the staircase. To proceed. On the day after this occurrence, the sister of deceased sends to Mr. Pym a fragment of a half-finished letter which she has found on her brother's desk. It warns him that there is something of a fishy nature going on in the office. The letter is dated about ten days previous to the death, and appears to have been laid aside as though the writer wanted to think over the wording a bit more carefully. Very good. Now, Mr. Pym is a man of rigid morality—except, of course, as regards his profession, whose essence is to tell plausible lies for money—”

“How about truth in advertising?”

“Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising,” announced Lord Peter sententiously, “is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow. Which incidentally brings me to the delicate and important distinction between the words 'with' and 'from.' Suppose you are advertising lemonade, or, not to be invidious, we will say perry. If you say 'Our perry is made from fresh-plucked pears only,' then it's got to be made from pears only, or the statement is actionable; if you just say it is made 'from pears,' without the 'only,' the betting is that it is probably made chiefly of pears; but if you say, 'made with pears,' you generally mean that you use a peck of pears to a ton of turnips, and the law cannot touch you—such are the niceties of our English tongue.”

“Make a note, Mary, next time you go shopping, and buy nothing that is not 'from, only.' Proceed, Peter—and let us have a little less of your English tongue.”

Twelve years ago -- serious news outlets were still taking seriously a plan to colonize Mars with a reality show...

And as far as I can tell, none have apologized since then.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Mars One -- libertarian ideology, ddulite fantasies and the decline in journalistic standards

There is a lot to complain about in the coverage of science and technology and, God knows, I do my share of bitching about the way the NYT et al. report on topics like driverless cars. Just to be clear, though, my complaints are generally meant to be focused on specific problems that tech journalists tend to overlook, usually involving issues like implementation, compatibility, scalability and infrastructure. For example, Google's autonomous car is a tremendous piece of engineering, but it currently requires road-data that cannot be gathered cheaply on a large scale. Google appears to have gotten stuck on this and a handful of other problems that effectively keep the technology from being commercially viable.

Most tech stories play out like that. They start with interesting, even promising ideas from smart, serious people, then the journalists covering them either choose to ignore or don't understand the subtleties and caveats. The researchers aren't always completely innocent here -- there's often a temptation to feed the hype -- but in their primary role they are doing respectable work.

Not all of these stories are cases of good research badly reported. Sometimes the rot goes all of the way down with lazy writers uncritically reporting bad technology and questionable science. Elmo Keep is neither lazy nor credulous. Writing for Medium, she has produced a devastating take-down of one of the most notable of these bullshit stories:

I will have to tell him that from everything I can find, Mars One doesn’t appear to be in any way qualified to carry off the biggest, most complex, most audacious, and most dangerous exploration mission in all of human history. That they don’t have the money to do it. That 200,000 people didn’t actually apply. That, with all the good faith one can muster, I wouldn’t classify it exactly as a scam—but that it seems to be, at best, an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media, in money, to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life’s work.

I started to excerpt a few paragraphs of Keep's article but you really need to read the whole thing to grasp just how unlikely it is for this enterprise to go beyond the asking for money stage. Every single aspect collapses under scrutiny, from the unrealistic funding model to the wildly optimistic cost estimates to the nonexistent specs and contracts to the unresolved technical issues.

There is no excuse for a respectable news organization to treat this as a serious and yet we still get articles like this from Vibeke Venema and the BBC:

Could you leave everyone you love for the chance to settle on Mars? Sonia Van Meter describes herself as an "aspiring Martian" - she hopes to be one of the first humans on the planet in 10 years' time. But it would mean never seeing her husband again.

"I don't think you can apply for something like this and not be the tiniest bit insane," says Sonia Van Meter. "But this is the next great adventure, and I'm going to do absolutely anything I can to be a part of this."

The 35-year-old political consultant from Austin, Texas, is one of 705 people in the running to form a 20- to 40-strong human colony on Mars - a group whittled down from 200,000 who sent applications to Dutch not-for-profit organisation Mars One last year.

"I thought: 'Shoot, this sounds like fun!'" she says. "I didn't think there was the slightest chance that I would be selected, I just wanted to be a part of it."

For her husband Jason Stanford, her application - and the fact that she now appears to have a 35-to-one chance of leaving forever - evoked mixed emotions.

"Like any good red-blooded American male, at first I thought this was all about me. I thought: you're leaving me," he says.

Over time he changed his mind. "The more she talked about it, the more I realised she was doing this for the right reasons - she was doing this to show humanity what we can all do if we work together," he says.

There is one quick cover-your-ass 'if' buried deep in the piece ("The mission, if it goes ahead, will be dangerous, some say suicidal."), but even in that single brief sentence, the possibility of it not happening is just an aside. There is no real effort to put this in a realistic context. Instead, we're given figures like that 35-to-one chance; it's almost certainly false but it makes for a good story.

The press likes to maintain the convenient fiction that it is "open to all voices." This is an obviously absurd proposition – – even though the Internet has greatly expanded what news organizations like the BBC can offer, they can still only cover a tiny fraction of the information and opinions out there – – but it serves the purpose of absolving journalists and, more to the point, editors and publishers from taking responsibility for what they present to the public.

When something appears in a major news outlet, particularly when it is presented noncritically, that outlet is implicitly endorsing the story; it is, in effect, saying that this story is something important enough to spend time learning about. I have seen numerous stories on this proposed Mars One mission but Keep's article is the first of those to make any real effort to address the sheer silliness of the proposal.

And you thought the space hotel was embarrassing*

From CNN:

Now an Austrian company wants to extend this opportunity for deep-dive delights to the world of superyachts, by building customized private submersibles that can descend 250 meters (820 feet) beneath the ocean surface and remain submerged for up to four weeks.

Migaloo has revealed its ambitious plans for what it claims will be the “world’s one and only private submersible superyacht,” offering “a not-yet-existing alternative to large privately owned surface vessels.”

This submarine, named M5, would measure 165.8 meters in length and 23 meters across at its widest point, with a range of around 15,000 kilometers and a speed of up to 20 knots when surfaced (or 12 knots when underwater). However, says Migaloo, “The wished dimensions of the submarine-yacht hybrid, the exterior styling and the interior design are up to the owners’ preferences.”

So, like any billionaires’ superyacht worth its salt, the default design includes a helipad, a swimming pool and spa, a gym, art gallery cinema, party area with DJ booth, along with plenty of spaces to lounge or dine. Optional extras include a hot air balloon and underwater shark-feeding station.

 It's also a practical place to keep your valuables in case of pirates, solar flares, pole shifts.

Also suitable for Ice Station Zebra cosplay.

CNN had lots of competition on this story.

It took me at most ten minutes on LinkedIn to establish that this company claiming it could design and build the civilian equivalent of an Ohio class submarine was a transparent fraud. This company doesn't have the resources to design a functioning toy sub for your bathtub.

Amber DaSilva of Jalopnik had the same thought, pointing out that CEO Christian Gumpold was the only listed employee. DaSilva also went the extra mile and dug up more than anyone needed to know about the company.

Migaloo’s website dates back to 2013, according to WHOIS records, but the oldest version archived is from 2015. Back then, the company was offering “submersible superyachts” in cooperation with a company called Starkad Technologies OÜ, which provided “technical development.” Starkad does show up in Estonian business records, but the company’s 2023 annual report shows just one employee — and an annual operating budget of just under $2,700. The company’s official contact email is a Hotmail account. 

...

Rather than creating actual submarines for the world’s richest few, Migaloo appears to create pictures of submarines for magazines read by those richest few (and, of course, NFTs.) It’s unclear what the company would even do if a Bezos or a Musk called them up with $2 billion in hand — it’s unlikely a single person in Estonia could actually assemble anything the company proffers.

 The standard comeback is what's the harm? Some guy creates some silly images borrowed from a post-war issue of Galaxy magazine and we all have fun pretending. The trouble is our weakness for hoary sci-fi fantasies, our willingness to accept laughable pitches for obvious snake oil has created large fortunes for con artists, diverted resources from promising tech and real solutions, and distorted our sense of the future.

And the CGI really isn't that good.

*OK, maybe this is more embarrassing.

Either a 2% or a 75% chance of rain

Part of my daily routine is to check the weather in my neighborhood and various nearby destinations (between its size and, more to the point, topography, LA has an extraordinary range of conditions. It's the only place I've ever lived in where people call each other up and ask other residents of the same city how's the weather where you are?).

Last Saturday, I checked Google and saw the forecast for a week from that day was a 75% chance of rain. That would have been very good news – – it's been dry in Southern California this winter – – perhaps too good to be true. I checked a couple of competing sites and saw no indications of rain in the next seven days anywhere in the vicinity. A couple of hours later I checked back in and Google was now in line with all the other forecasts with 5% or less predicted. 

As of Thursday, Google is down to 0% for Saturday while the Weather Channel has 18%.

 

We've talked a lot about what it means for a continuously updated prediction such as election outcomes, navigation app travel time estimates, and weather forecasts to be accurate. It's a complicated question without an objectively true answer. There are many valid metrics, none of which gives us the definitive answer

Obviously, accuracy is the main objective, but there are other indicators of model quality we can and should keep an eye on. Barring big new data (a major shift in the polls, a recently reported accident on your route), we don't expect to see huge swings between updates, and if there are a number of competing models largely running off the same data, we expect a certain amount of consistency. If we have a prediction that is inaccurate, displays sudden swings, and makes forecasts wildly divergent from its competitors, that raises some questions.

Another indication that the original Drake Equation was worthless

One of the oft-noted problems with the Drake Equation was the many ways it assumed that alien worlds would look, not just like Earth, but mid-twentieth century earth including our proclivity for constantly pumping out radio signals...

[Unrelated note, why isn't Missi Pyle a star?]

and would continue to look that way between 1000 and 100,000,000 years.

It appears that Earth at least will fall a little short of that range. 

“The search for extraterrestrial intelligence [Seti] is changing,” he said. “We have relied in the past almost exclusively on radio telescopes to detect broadcasts from alien civilisations just as our radio and TV transmissions could reveal our presence to them. However, to date, we have heard absolutely nothing.”

Nor should we be surprised, [Oxford University astrophysicist Prof Chris] Lintott argues. “Humanity has already passed its peak radio wave output because we are increasingly using narrow beam communications and fibre-optic cables, rather than beaming out TV and radio signals into the general environment.”

Humanity could become radio-quiet in about 50 years as a result – and that will probably be true for civilisations on other worlds, he added. “They will have gone radio silent after a while, like us. So Seti radio telescopes will need to be augmented with other ways of seeking aliens. We are going to have to be more creative about what we’re searching for in the data and find unusual things that reveal they are the handiwork of aliens.”

 Nor is Lintott the first to make this observation. 

Regarding the first point, in a 2006 Sky & Telescope article, Seth Shostak wrote, "Moreover, radio leakage from a planet is only likely to get weaker as a civilization advances and its communications technology gets better. Earth itself is increasingly switching from broadcasts to leakage-free cables and fiber optics, and from primitive but obvious carrier-wave broadcasts to subtler, hard-to-recognize spread-spectrum transmissions."

 

"The city would naturally form a line as it tried to get away from itself."

YouTube is an SEO snake pit, a place where Gresham's Law of content prevails with an abundance of intelligent, informative, and entertaining work buried by a limitless supply of derivative and often largely plagiarized rip-offs alternating with AI-generated crap. The algorithm is great at recommending videos I'm tempted to click on; it's terrible at recommending something I actually want to watch. To add insult to injury, a bad click is usually followed by more recommendations for the same channel.

This makes me reluctant to try a new YouTuber without checking them out on Google or seeing if they were followed by the right people on Twitter.  People like this.

 So when I recommend Patrick Boyle, you know I've checked him out first.

Boyle is a Visiting Professor of Finance at King’s Business School, London. He is also a wickedly funny deadpan commentator on hype, fraud, and general stupidity in finance, business and public policy.

The title of the post comes from Boyle's take-down of MBS's personal Xanadu (which we've also been commenting on for a while)

Neom - The Line - The Rise and Fall of Saudi Arabia's Linear City.

The video that first caught my attention was the following piece on Silicon Valley innovations, which included this addition to my tech bro messianic delusions file.

And this gem.

Our annual Toys-for-Tots post

 

A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a bad year). It's the season to pick up a few toys, drop them by the fire station and make some people feel good about themselves during what can be one of the toughest times of the year.

If you're new to the Toys-for-Tots concept, here are the rules I normally use when shopping:

The gifts should be nice enough to sit alone under a tree. The child who gets nothing else should still feel that he or she had a special Christmas. A large stuffed animal, a big metal truck, a large can of Legos with enough pieces to keep up with an active imagination. You can get any of these for around twenty or thirty bucks at Wal-Mart or Costco;*

Shop smart. The better the deals the more toys can go in your cart;

No batteries. (I'm a strong believer in kid power);**

Speaking of kid power, it's impossible to be sedentary while playing with a basketball;

No toys that need lots of accessories;

For games, you're generally better off going with a classic;

No movie or TV show tie-ins. (This one's kind of a personal quirk and I will make some exceptions like Sesame Street);

Look for something durable. These will have to last;

For smaller children, you really can't beat Fisher Price and PlaySkool. Both companies have mastered the art of coming up with cleverly designed toys that children love and that will stand up to generations of energetic and creative play.

*I previously used Target here, but their selection has been dropping over the past few years and it's gotten more difficult to find toys that meet my criteria.

** I'd like to soften this position just bit. It's okay for a toy to use batteries, just not to need them. Fisher Price and PlaySkool have both gotten into the habit of adding lights and sounds to classic toys, but when the batteries die, the toys live on, still powered by the energy of children at play.

Double-talk from the other side

Years ago we did a few posts on double-talk, the type of comic improvisation where a performer mimics the sound of a foreign language with gibberish syllables. Sometimes we talked about the practice itself. In others, we used it as a metaphor. Double-talk has fallen out of fashion for the very good reason that, when done badly it usually degenerates into racist caricature and it is almost always done badly. The best known exception was Sid Caesar, whose mimicry was reasonably nuanced and generally respectful, and who gets a bit of a pass for being widely considered a comic genius.

Of course, the term "foreign language" is relative. English is a foreign language to most of the world. This raises the question what would it sound like if someone from, say, Italy were to do American double-talk? The answer in at least one case is that it will sound unnervingly American.

For those who don't know, this song is called "Prisencolinensinainciusol" by Italian singer Adriano Celentano. The lyrics are complete gibberish made to sound American.

— All About Steve (@AllAboutSteveW) October 4, 2024

Here's an audio only version.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Double Talk

Believe it or not, I am going to connect this to one of our threads.

From the Wikipedia page on Sid Caesar

Max and Ida Caesar ran a restaurant, a 24-hour luncheonette. By waiting on tables, their son learned to mimic the patois, rhythm and accents of the diverse clientele, a technique he termed double-talk, which he used throughout his career. He first tried double-talk with a group of Italians, his head barely reaching above the table. They enjoyed it so much that they sent him over to a group of Poles to repeat his native-sounding patter in Polish, and so on with Russians, Hungarians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Lithuanians, and Bulgarians.
...
Of his double-talk routines, Carl Reiner said, "His ability to doubletalk every language known to man was impeccable," and during one performance Caesar imitated four different languages but with almost no real words. Despite his apparent fluency in many languages, Caesar could actually speak only English and Yiddish. In 2008, Caesar told a USA Today reporter, "Every language has its own music ... If you listen to a language for 15 minutes, you know the rhythm and song." Having developed this mimicry skill, he could create entire monologues using gibberish in numerous languages, as he did in a skit in which he played a German general.

Five years ago at the blog we were talking about an aborted twenty year old project that keeps getting more relevant

Didn't do a great job with this the first time. The patches are in brackets.

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Agent-based simulations and horse-race journalism

(This was never my area of expertise, and what little I once knew I've mostly forgotten. Since lots of our regular readers are experts on this sort of things, I welcome criticism but I hope you'll be gentle.)

I tried a little project of my own back in the early 2000s. One of these days, I'd like to revisit the topic here and talk about what I had in mind and how quixotic the whole thing was, but for now there's one aspect of it that has become particularly relevant so here's a very quick overview so I can get to the main point.

Imagine you have an agent-based simulation with a fixed number of iterations and a fixed number of runs. You randomly place the agents on a landscape with multiple dimensions and multiple optima and have them each perform gradient searches.  Now we add one wrinkle. Each agent is aware of the position of at least one other agent and will move toward either the highest point in its search radius unless another searcher it is in communication with has a higher position in which case it heads toward that one.

[Let's explain this in a bit more detail. Say we have fifty agents, one hundred iterations, and two maxima (A with height 10 and B with height 5) and that agent 1 shares with agent 2, agent 2 shares with agents 1 and 3, and so forth. At the beginning of each iteration, each agent looks around a radius of one unit then shares the results with whatever other agents it is in communication with. Agents move toward the highest point they are aware of. If 1 found h=0.4, 2 found h=0.2 and 3 found h=0.3, 1 would move in the direction of the sharpest gradient, 2 would move in the direction of the the highest point 1 found and 3 would move in the direction of its sharpest gradient.

[After one hundred iterations, some agents will be at A, some will be at B and some will be in transit. At the end of one hundred iterations, we measure the height of each agent's endpoint and take the average. -- MP]

What happens to average height when we add lines of communication to the matrix? At one extreme where each searcher is only in contact with one other, you are much more likely to have one of them find the global optimum but most will be left behind. [If we greatly increase the number of iterations, all of the agents will hit the global optimum almost all the time -- MP] At the other extreme, if everyone is in contact with everyone, there is a far greater chance of converging on a substandard local optimum [In other words, given enough iterations, minimal communication consistently beats maximal. -- MP]. Every time I ran a set of simulations, I got the same [lopsided] U-shaped curve with the best results coming from a high but not too high level of communication.

It is always dangerous to extend these abstract ideas derived from artificial scenarios to the real world, but there are some fairly obvious conclusions we can draw. What if we think of the primary process in similar terms? Each voter is doing an optimization search, bringing in information on their own and trying to determine the best choice, but at the same time, they are also weighing the opinions of others performing the same search.

Given this framework, what is the optimal level of communication between voters via the polls? At what point does the frequency of polling reach a level where it makes it more likely for voters to converge on a sub-optimal choice? I'm pretty sure we've passed it.

 

What did John von Neumann mean by the "singularity"? -- a lemma post

Sometimes, when I try to take on a really big topic here at the blog, smaller related topics start popping up. These tend to be right on the line between relevance and distraction. I like to give these side topics their own little lemma posts. Case in point, I'm working my way through David Donoho's latest and, though this is a minor point, invoking von Neumann is problematic in a way that points out deeper issues with the paper. So here's a little bit of background on one of the foundational myths of the singularity.

 

 From Donoho's paper:

[Ray] Kurzweil quotes one of the 20th century’s most prominent mathematicians, John von Neumann:

The history of technology ... gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race, beyond which, human affairs, as we know them, cannot continue. (Ulam, 1958, page 5)

Von Neumann introduces the idea that a singularity is coming. But when?

At the risk of being overly precise, Kurzweil wasn't actually quoting von Neumann; he was quoting Stanisław Ulam describing a conversation with Von Neumann. That's a fine distinction but not a trivial one.

Since this quote features so prominently in these discussions, let's look at the whole passage: 

Quite aware that the criteria of value in mathematical work are, to some extent, purely aesthetic, he once expressed an apprehension that the values put on abstract scientific achievement in our present civilization might diminish: "The interests of humanity may change, the present curiosities in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind in the future." One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

 All we get from this is that von Neumann once had a discussion with Ulam and possibly some of their peers about the accelerating pace of science and technology and the inevitable breaking point it seemed headed toward. Given the caliber of the intellects involved, we can safely assume it was a profound and insightful conversation. The degree to which it was original, on the other hand, we will never know. It is worth noting that scientifically literate, forward thinking people started talking about that topic a lot starting in the late 19th century and many, probably most, reached that same conclusion.

More important to our conversation, we don't know what technologies and fields of science struck them as the most imminent threats, but here we can make an educated guess. We know a great deal about these two men and we know a great deal about the period when this conversation very probably took place.

Here's more from Ulam's memoir of his friend : [emphasis added.]

I would say that his main interest after science was in the study of history. His knowledge of ancient history was unbelievably detailed. He remembered, for instance, all the anecdotical material in Gibbon's Decline and Fall and liked to engage after dinner in historical discussions. On a trip south, to a meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Duke University, passing near the battlefields of the Civil War he amazed us by his familiarity with the minutest features of the battles. This encyclopedic knowledge molded his views on the course of future events by inducing a sort of analytic continuation. I can testify that in his forecasts of political events leading to the Second World War and of military events during the war, most of his guesses were amazingly correct. After the end of the Second World War, however, his apprehensions of an almost immediate subsequent calamity, which he considered as extremely likely, proved fortunately wrong. There was perhaps an inclination to take a too exclusively rational point of view about the cases of historical events. This tendency was possibly due to an over-formalized game theory approach.

Here's another relevant detail from Ulam.

In October, 1954, he was named by presidential appointment as a member of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. He left Princeton on a leave of absence and discontinued all commitments with the exception of the chairmanship of the ICBM Committee. Admiral Strauss, chairman of the Commission and a friend of Johnny's for many years, suggested this nomination as soon as a vacancy occurred.

Of course, Ulam also gave a great deal of thought to nuclear weapons.

While these two were unusually aware of the possibility of nuclear war, the threat loomed over everyone and everything. Drills and shelters were part of the culture. When it wasn't implicitly stated in international news, it was always part of the subtext. It is almost impossible to overstate how big a role displayed in the popular imagination throughout the Cold War era, and arguably especially during the 1950s and early 60s. It even generated, not just science fiction genres, but subgenres as well.

The once-popular Phaëton hypothesis, which states that the asteroid belt consists of the remnants of the former fifth planet that existed in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter before somehow being destroyed, has been a recurring theme with various explanations for the planet's destruction proposed. This hypothetical former planet is in science fiction often called "Bodia" in reference to Johann Elert Bode, for whom the since-discredited Titius–Bode law that predicts the planet's existence is named. 

...

Following the invention of the atomic bomb in 1945, stories of this planetary destruction became increasingly common, encouraged by the advent of a plausible-seeming means of disintegration.^[15] Robert A. Heinlein's 1948 novel Space Cadet thus states that the fifth planet was destroyed as a result of nuclear war, and in Ray Bradbury's 1948 short story "Asleep in Armageddon" (a.k.a. "Perchance to Dream"), the ghosts of the former warring factions infect the mind of an astronaut stranded on an asteroid.^[3][5][16] Several works of the 1950s reused the idea to warn of the dangers of nuclear weapons, including Lord Dunsany's 1954 Joseph Jorkens short story "The Gods of Clay" and James Blish's 1957 novel The Frozen Year (a.k.a. Fallen Star). 

We don't have to fill in that much of the picture to conclude that John von Neumann was greatly concerned imminent threat of nuclear Armageddon, and that when he discussed the idea of technology outpacing our ability as humans to cope with it, he was probably focused on the immediate existential threats of the Cold War: nuclear weapons and possibly biological and chemical weapons as well, things which he believed had a very good chance of devastating the world within a matter of years and possibly months.

The connection between these ideas and the singularity of Kurzweil or Donoho is weak at best and mainly serves to borrow a little reflected credibility from von Neumann. That's not to say he wouldn't have agreed with some or all of these ideas; is just that, as far as we know, the "singularity" in that conversation had nothing to do with what we're talking about here.

Having a Galactic Christmas

To the delight of art directors everywhere, Galaxy, arguably the best science fiction magazine of the postwar era, is in the public domain (sort of) and is available on the Internet archive. The copyright situation is a bit complicated because most of the stories are very much not in the public domain, but the commissioned parts including the columns, reviews, and best of all, art are.

From Wikipedia:

Notable artists who contributed regularly to Galaxy included Ed Emshwiller, who won several Hugo Awards for his work, Hugo nominee Wallace Wood, and Jack Gaughan, who won three Hugos in the late 1960s, partly for his work in Galaxy. Gaughan was commissioned by Pohl to provide the cover and interior art for Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters in 1962; the resulting illustrations made Gaughan immediately famous in the science fiction field.

Wally Wood was one of a number of EC artists who showed up in the pages of the magazine including the unexpected but unmistakable Don Martin.

Throughout the 50s, December issues of the magazine featured Emshwiller's four-armed but otherwise reassuringly familiar Santa Claus on the cover. I thought this would be a good way to kick off the month.

Happy holidays.

Trump did better with women against Harris than he did against Biden -- you'd think that would be the lede

I've seen remarkably little coverage of this. [From the AP. Emphasis added.]

Men were more likely than women to support President-elect Trump, the survey showed. That gap in voting preferences has largely remained the same, even as vote choice among men and women has moved modestly.

Harris had the advantage among women, winning 53% to Trump’s 46%, but that margin was somewhat narrower than President Joe Biden’s in 2020, according to the survey. In 2020, VoteCast showed Biden won 55% of women, while 43% went for Trump.

It's very possible I missed something. I haven't been following the postmortem discussion that closely, but I did multiple Google and NYT news searches and none of what I've found have focused on this one big and completely unexpected result. Many of the articles didn't even mention it.

The dominant narrative going into the election was that we would see the gender gap growing on both sides, men increasingly trending toward Trump, women increasingly trending toward Harris. I don't recall anyone predicting that in a time of Dobbs with a woman at the top of the ticket, we would see women moving toward the Republicans.

Assuming we can trust these numbers, this would seem to be one of the biggest stories of the election, in terms of magnitude, impact, and questions raised. The kind of thing that demands new hypotheses and deep dives into the data. 

It also raises questions about pre-election polling, I don't recall any large segment of the population where women were moving significantly toward Trump. How did the polls do with slightly over half the population? Could Harris underperforming Biden be explained by who turned out? How did women's votes break in 2016 compared to 2008 and 2020?

Before Obama, I remember lots of Democrats asking if the country was ready for a black president. I don't recall nearly so many before Hillary asking if the country was ready for a woman president. Is it possible we were getting things backwards? This is not to say that a woman can't be elected president -- the closeness of the popular vote in 2016 and 2024 show that Clinton and Harris were competitive -- nor should we exaggerate the effect this had on the outcome. It's true that if Democrats had improved on their performance with women rather than lost ground, they might have flipped the popular vote, but lots of factors such as the shortness of the campaign, widespread misconceptions about economy, a slow and timid justice system, and godawful press coverage all arguably played a bigger role. 

It is also important to remember that just as it is a bad idea to assume that conventional political logic applies to Trump, it can be just as much of a mistake to assume the lessons of Trump can be generalized.

That said, this is a big story that raises significant questions and it's joined the long list of important stories that the establishment press has shown a bizarre lack of interest in covering.

For the math nerds in the audience (or, in our case, the audience)

The following is a standard collection of word problems but they havea most distinguished pedigree.

Any guesses? (Answer below the break)

A mule and an ass were carrying burdens amounting to some hundred weight. The ass complained of his, and said to the mule: “I need only one hundred weight of your load, to make mine twice as heavy as yours.” The mule answered: “Yes, but if you gave me a hundred weight of yours, I should be loaded three times as much as you would be.”
How many hundred weight did each carry ?

A father who has three sons leaves them 1600 crowns. The will precises, that the eldest shall have 200 crowns more than the second, and the second shall have 100 crowns more than the youngest. Required the share of each.

A father leaves four sons, who share his property in the following manner:
The first takes the half of the fortune, minus 3000 livres.
The second takes the third, minus 1000 livres.
The third takes exactly the fourth of the property.
The fourth takes 600 livres and the fifth part of the property.
What was the whole fortune, and how much did each son receive?

A father leaves at his death several children, who share his property in the following manner:
The first receives a hundred crowns and the tenth part of what remains.
The second receives two hundred crowns and the tenth part of what remains.
The third takes three hundred crowns and the tenth part of what remains.
The fourth takes four hundred crowns and the tenth part of what remains, and so on.
Now it is found at the end that the property has been divided among all the children. Required, how much it was, how many children. there were, and how much each received.

Three persons play together; in the first game, the first loses to each of the other two as much money as each of them has. In the next, the second person loses to each of the other two as much money as they have already. Lastly, in the third game, the first and second person gain each from the third as much money as they had before. They then. leave oil and find that they have all an equal sum, namely, 24 louis each. Required, with how much money each sat down to play.

 

"As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]

 

 


If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. [The original link has gone dead, but I was able to find the relevant clip.]

As for my favorite line, it comes from the Buffy episode "Pangs" and it requires a bit of a set up (which is a pain because it makes it next to impossible to work into a conversation).

Buffy's luckless friend Xander had accidentally violated a native American grave yard and, in addition to freeing a vengeful spirit, was been cursed with all of the diseases Europeans brought to the Americas.

Spike: I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.
Willow: Uh, the preferred term is...
Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.
Buffy: Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of - Not that I don't like Spaniards.
Spike: Listen to you. How you gonna fight anyone with that attitude?
Willow: We don't wanna fight anyone.
Buffy: I just wanna have Thanksgiving.
Spike: Heh heh. Yeah... Good luck.
Willow: Well, if we could talk to him...
Spike: You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick.
Xander: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but, some of that made sense.

"The trouble with revolutions is that they get in the hands of the wrong people."

Phillip Marlowe's exchange with a private police officer guarding a gated community in 1942's The High Window raises some interesting questions. 

Marlowe is always guarded in conversation and prone to sarcasm, so it's not a good idea to read too much into the "tovarich," Chandler himself was a critic of both capitalism and communism, something that certainly comes through here. The status quo is unfair and corrupt; the alternative is probably just as bad. It's a nihilistic message, but what do you expect from a hard boiled detective?

Or it could have been a comment on this:

Hammett devoted much of his life to left-wing activism. He was a strong antifascist throughout the 1930s, and in 1937 joined the Communist Party. On May 1, 1935, Hammett joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Lillian Hellman, Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Frank Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I. F. Stone, Myra Page, Millen Brand, Clifford Odets, and Arthur Miller. (Members were largely either Communist Party members or fellow travelers.) He suspended his anti-fascist activities when, as a member (and in 1941 president) of the League of American Writers, he served on its Keep America Out of War Committee in January 1940 during the period of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

I would have expected it to be higher.

 It probably would have been OK to round this one off at 2%.

Dana Fradon, originally published 1/31/1977

 

 

Google and the Case of the Missing Search Term

Picking up the ball from Andrew Gelman's recent post on the declining quality of Google searches (which itself built on this one from Cory Doctorow), I've started to see an especially weird result when I do Google searches.

I'll see a result for an article that looks like it might be what I'm looking for. It comes from a reputable publication and there's no little message telling me that it does not include one of my search terms.

[Okay, quick digression. Why does Google not only include results that leave out search terms, but includes them on the first page? As far as I can recall, every single time I am asked do I want result with the terms I typed in, I always say yes. What kind of stupid question is that?]

I get the article, I read through it, and it has no mention whatsoever of one or more of my search terms. Control F shows nothing even related to what I'm looking for. Is the term there but hidden? There once but gone now (such as in a deleted comment)? Only there in Google's imagination?

Most of Doctorow's examples of enshittification* can be traced back greed and bad actors, but this seems to be something else, perhaps just a sign of general decay. That's not particularly reassuring given how much we rely on Google.

* If you're new to the topic, here's an excellent interview with Doctorow on the subject.

"You're right. We need to strengthen the dose... One part in ten million." -- Mitchell and Webb on Health Care

That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E


That Mitchell and Webb Look: Lifestyle Nutritionists

Nine years ago at the blog -- reposting this partially because RadioLab hasn't gotten any better but mainly because I really like the title.

Thursday, October 8, 2015

"So long and thanks for all the fish"

I've fallen into this trap before.

I'm driving down the road channel surfing the radio and I come across a snippet of something that sounds interesting on one of the NPR stations. I stop and listen long enough to start to get into the topic before I realize that this is RadioLab.

Now I am faced with a difficult choice:

I can change the station despite having become curious about what's going to happen;

Or I can continue to listen until the inevitable annoyance and disappointment kicks in.

I have been in this situation often enough to know that these are the only two possibilities. No matter how promising the opening or how intriguing the subject, I will regret it if I listen to the whole thing.

RadioLab beautifully illustrates the somewhat counterintuitive principle that if you're going to imitate someone, you are often better off imitating the mediocre than the great. The show is clearly trying to be the next This American Life. All of the cute touches and distinctive mannerisms are aped, but without any sense of taste, proportion, style, or restraint. The result is an overproduced, painfully self-satisfied show narrated by two grown men who can't get enough of each other.

All of this might be forgiven if the people behind the show were anywhere near as smart as the TAL crew and had something of interest to say.

One of the reasons that This American Life works is because what might otherwise tip over into excessive production on another show is supported by a foundation of extraordinarily solid journalism. No one is better at bringing clarity and insight to a big story like patent abuse or the financial meltdown of 2008. The chatty tone, the sound montage and all of the other potential distractions only serve to enhance the story because the reporting is so good.

RadioLab specializes in even bigger topics like the nature of language. Unfortunately, this added ambition only highlights the producers' limitations. Instead of clarity we get oversimplification; instead of insight we get lots of TED talk style geewhiz pseudo-profundities.

Which brings me to today's show ("today" being a relative term but anyway...).


When I tuned in, a researcher was discussing her work with dolphins in the sixties. I stuck with it through the discussion of giving the animals LSD, but then they got to the weird part...

When I turned the radio back on, the story featured a different researcher had moved to the present day. The methodology was more conventional but the annoyance factor was just as high.

Putting aside an enthusiasm level that would have been slightly excessive had the reporter been the first astronaut to land on Mars, the approach to the underlying scientific questions was awful.Even Malcolm Gladwell would've thrown up.

The big payoff also contained the most unintentionally telling part of the program, but first a little bit of background: according to the program (and I have no reason to doubt this), each individual dolphin has a distinct signature whistle. The reporter (who was also the producer of the segment) and the hosts consistently discussed this in anthropomorphic terms as the dolphins' names.

As an experiment, the researchers had come up with something like a voice recognition system for dolphins that categorized certain sounds as "words" and would also "speak" certain new words that represent, among other things, individual divers.

The big climactic moment came when one of the divers "spoke" her name, at which point one of the dolphins turned and "spoke" his signature whistle. This is where we hit the unintentionally revealing part. One of the hosts asked if this represents a major linguistic breakthrough, at which point the reporter suddenly switches to conscientious mode and tells us how rigorous the researcher is. We are told this would have to happen 35 times before... Then we literally get the sound cue from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a discussion of all of the deep philosophical conversations we might have with dolphins in the future.


This is what thirty plus years of TED Talks leads to, an entire generation of journalists and writers who think this is what science is about: take some isolated study or statistic, ignore the context and previous body of research, and instead start drawing sweeping inferences and telling elaborate narratives.

Preferably with lots of cute banter.

Last things first – – a few thoughts on the Mars conversation and on 21st century futurism in general.

There's a certain kind of "planning" that people indulge in when talking about things they know they will never do. It can be traveling to an exotic location, changing careers to a glamorous profession, or even leaving one's spouse for an attractive coworker. We've all seen people make these "plans." Chances are pretty good that we've made them ourselves at one time or another.

You don't have to delve deep into the psychology to see the appeal. It gives daydreaming the illusion of seriousness and productivity while making the daydreams themselves feel more real. Of course I'll have a house in Tuscany someday; I've already picked out the drapes.

Watching individuals do this can be sad (of Mice and Men comes to mind), but it's mostly harmless. When societies engage in this, the stakes are much higher. Though I have no objective metric to point to, it certainly feels like there has been an uptick. God knows we're not hurting for examples, with every serious news organization from the New York Times on down is pumping out bullshit analyses of how we need to prepare for the world of tomorrow.

There is almost invariably a powerful air of self-satisfaction around these articles, a sense of palpable pride in their scientific literacy and willingness to face the future. This would be bad enough if they actually had these qualities, but more often than not, the level of scientific and engineering ignorance is embarrassing and the "future" being faced consist entirely of some half century old science-fiction tropes.

Sometimes the technology is simply not viable (as with the Hyperloop), a fact that is often briefly acknowledged then completely ignored for the remainder of these pieces. Other times, the potential is real but is so far off in the future as to hardly be worth discussing (3-D printing of living organisms, AI middle managers). Then there are those cases as with the Atlantic monthly piece on policing Mars, that are simply based on a vacuum.

Productive planning always starts with knowledge and reasonable assumptions. We can't even begin to have a real discussion of issues like crime and law enforcement on Mars until we have some idea of what the economy, population density, and sponsoring institutions will look like, not to mention questions like terraforming. Are we talking about government bases, corporate outposts, billionaire vanity projects? Will the economy be based on mining, tourism, scientific research? Will there be a large, permanent population, a handful of engineers and programmers rotating in and out to keep the machines running, or perhaps no humans at all, just teams of autonomous and semiautonomous robots doing the work for us.

It's usually not difficult to tell the difference between real planning -- doing the hard work necessary to move forward with the project-- and "planning," dressing up fantasies and daydreams with serious looking details. What we've seen increasingly with discussions of Mars (perhaps hitting a plateau with the infamous Mars one scam) is a preponderance of the latter. What would the former look like?

The first priority would be to learn more. While our knowledge of the planet has exploded in recent years, it still fall short of what we need to mount a serious effort to do something with the red planet. If we're talking about permit human settlements, where should we put them? Given the radiation levels, habitats will probably need to be underground. What engineering problems should we expect with this kind of extraterrestrial excavation and tunneling? If we are interested in mining, where are the major mineral deposits of interest? How easy are they to get to?

We could keep adding to this list for a long time, but as varied as the questions are, the initial steps needed to answer them are relatively few and straightforward. We need to learn more remotely by putting survey satellites around the planet and launching a new generation of surface probes. (While we're at it, we should probably be doing something analogous with the asteroid belt as well.) We need to focus on developing relevant technologies like robotics and AI.

I will admit an ulterior motive here. The things that we should be doing if we are serious about human settlement of Mars are the same things we should be doing anyway. The data we gather looking for landing spots and mineral deposits on Mars will more than justify the effort in terms of scientific knowledge. The advances we make developing the machines to work the planet's minds and building structures will have enormous and immediate impact on life here.

A tale of two cities (no, really, the same story covers both of them)

  

[Blogger is having one of its weird days, so the formatting on this post will be a bit... quirky.]

Adam Something (a highly recommended skeptical YouTuber) recounted how, after doing a video on the Saudi Xanadu, Neom (which we discussed here), one of the paid consultants reached out to him and shared anonymously a first hand view of how these monstrosities get approved. It's better in the context of the Telosa video, but I captured the key quotes.

City building has become the fashionable hobby for the super-rich these days so there's a lot of competition, but even in its scaled back form, Neom remains that mad kings will aspire to for years to come.