Pun Salad

I was sent to the blog post "Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World" by (of all places) one of Debby Witt's link-collection posts at the NR Corner blog. I went seeking amusement; I came away merely irritated.

I like to think I'm relatively good at math, although I started getting out of my depth in "Introductory Methods of Applied Mathematics" in my junior year. I think it was the instructor's unexpected usage of the greek lowercase-xi (ξ), a scribble which I—to this day—cannot write legibly. (I was fine with everything else: alphas, mus, thetas…) Note-taking was impaired, things went downhill from there. That one little squiggle was my own personal learning impediment.

Anyway: the article, written by one Ben Orlin, purports to criticize math-impaired folks at the newspapers. Also a pet peeve of mine! So I had high hopes.

Unfortunately, the article is pretty bad. Its goal is to improve headlines (all imaginary, I think), using mathematical insight. Some hit the target, too many don't.

Let's take an easy one first, which I will screenshot:

In an article that attempts to speak from the holy cathedral of "mathematical literacy", this is just embarrassing. Orlin apparently wants to make the point that government expenditures may sound big in absolute terms ($50 million is a lot), but can be made to sound small if you figure out their cut of the overall budget.

Or to put it in terms that matter a bit more: if you want to eliminate a $680 billion deficit (FY2013), you would have to find and zero out about 13,600 of those $50 million "controversial programs".

Trivial. But here's an exercise for the reader: $50 million is 0.0001% of what?

OK, I'll do it for you: 0.0001% equals 10^-6, aka one-millionth. So $50 million is 0.0001% of $50 x 10¹², or $50 trillion dollars. That's almost 20 times bigger than actual Federal government revenue ("only" $2.8 trillion in FY2013); it's about 3 times bigger than the entire current US GDP (about $15.7 trillion in CY2012). So my headline would be:

Mathematically More Accurate World: Controversial Program Would Cost 0.0018% of Taxpayer Money

While accurate, that maintains the tendentious subtext that Orlin apparently wants to slide in: people are silly to worry about wasteful government spending if it's a sufficiently small fraction of the budget. But it's not math making that judgment: it's Orlin.

Now (to be fair) sometimes he's completely right:

Good point: generally speaking, people misperceive risks, and a sensationalistic news media seldom helps. (See this story for some relative numbers on the danger from shark attack, vs. (say) wrestling with a recalcitrant vending machine. Note that the article is written by a sharkbite victim.)

But other times Orlin simply goes off the rails:

That's (again) not "mathematical literacy" speaking: it's Orlin. Apparently he likes minimum wage laws, and the only people who oppose them are "economists" with those new-fangled "models". It's easier to do that than, I suppose, than deal with an actual headline from an article by an actual economist.

Look, I'll make it easy. Here's one: "The Minimum Wage Is Cruelest to Those Who Can’t Find a Job". Key quote:

A “fair wage” is a “free wage”—that is, one that results from voluntary exchanges among workers and employers. Government should prevent fraud and violence and allow individuals to enter into mutually beneficial exchanges under a just rule of law that protects persons and property. The minimum wage violates freedom of contract and hence private property rights; it is neither moral nor effective. It is unfair to workers who can’t find a job, especially young workers in search of a better future.

Or, using Orlin's format and a reality-based headline:

Our World: President Obama Claims "No Solid Evidence" Increased Minimum Wage Costs Jobs
Economically Literate World: President Obama Wants To Make It Illegal To Hire Workers At A Wage He Dislikes, Can't Imagine Anything Bad Could Possibly Happen

Unlike Obama, I don't want to ignore the fact that there is a debate on the economic impact of minimum wage laws. See, for example, the WaPo fact checker Glenn Kessler, who (generously) awards the President merely two Pinocchios for his silly claim. (I'd especially recommend it to Orlin, who might learn that the debate doesn't just involve "models", but also a lot of empirical research.)

OK, just one more:

Not much pretense to "mathematical literacy" here at all. I will rewrite:

Our World: Politician Promises to Fund Math Education
Politically Literate World: Politician Pledges to Throw More Taxpayer Money At A Failing System Of Math Education With Zero Evidence That It Will Improve Anything, And No Accountability If It Doesn't

See? It's easy.

• It's that most wonderful time of year, by which I mean Dave Barry's Gift Guide for 2013 is available on the web.

  The holidays are a wonderful time of year, but too often, in all the excitement and craziness, we forget the real “reason for the season.” The holidays are not about parties, or decorations, or Frosty the Snowperson. Those things are fun, but they are not the true purpose of the holidays. The true purpose of the holidays is to purchase consumer electronics.

  So you should go check it out, knowing that any purchase you make is "backed by our Personal Gift Guide Guarantee, as follows: If you purchase one of these items and for any reason are not completely satisfied, you have our personal guarantee that there is nothing that we, personally, can do about it."

  Pictured at right—no, your right—is one of the items, available at Amazon: the Cat Lady Action Figure. What youngster wouldn't want one?

• As a longtime employee of the University Near Here, I sometimes run across articles that do a particularly good job of capturing some of that special atmosphere that is American Higher Education today. And so let me share with you: "How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang".

  Specifically, both operations have come to rely on a mass of poorly-paid, disrespected minions (low-level drug runners/adjunct faculty), doing the unpleasant scutwork that the elite members (drug lords/tenured faculty) would prefer to avoid. In both cases, the minions put up with their lousy positions in the hope they'll break into the upper echelons someday. And in both cases, the probability of that happening is low.

• Although I think Tom Zhang, currently a mere "lecturer" here in math, has a pretty good shot at tenure, if he wants it.

• Although I (and Professor Greg Mankiw) didn't think much of Pope Francis's recent apostolic exhortation, in the interest of equal time, you might want to check out James Pethokoukis's attempted defense at the NR site. And you might also check out this article by Kate O'Hare at Breitbart, which at least raises the possibility that we may have been misled by lefty translators of the document into English.

Mrs. Salad and I ventured out to an actual movie theater to catch this. The IMDB raters (as I type) have this plugged at number 223 on the Top 250 movies of all times. I liked it, but please: not that much. I find myself asking: what movie did it bump out of the list?

Set (duh) after the first movie, our heroine Katniss is trying to get back to some form of normal life in good old District 12. Her family's living quarters have been upgraded from "hovel" to "ramshackle house". But she's psychologically haunted by her Games experience. Worse, her heroics with partner Peta have turned her into a symbol of individual defiance against the state. That, of course, worries the Powers that Be, who turn to increasingly brutal means to stomp out any hint of rebellion.

Evil President Snow hatches a scheme to discredit Katniss and cement his rule. This involves putting Katniss and Peta back in the arena, fighting once more against hopeless odds.

One problem with the movie, if I may quibble: this all takes an incredibly long time to set up, and nothing all that interesting happens during that period.

Also, a matter I discussed with Mrs. Salad afterward: there's a Shocking Plot Twist at the end, and (without spoiling things too much) its revelation seemed to make the entire rest of the movie kind of a cheat.

Anyway, I followed it better than Larry King:

• Another data point exposing the hostility of the IRS to Constitutional freedoms: the recent proposed regulation of the political speech of 501(c)(4) groups. Bradley Smith has a good rundown at the NR website. Example:

  The proposed rule would not only limit speech, it would go backward to censor speech. The rule proposes to require groups, starting 60 days before the election, to scrub their websites of any material mentioning a candidate. Thus, an article written last month quoting Democratic members of Congress echoing the president’s assurances that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” would have to be taken down next Labor Day, just as the campaign was heating up.

  The point, Smith argues, is to force via regulation what "progressives" have failed to do via legislation: the disclosure of contributors to conservative/libertarian groups, so they can be boycotted and bullied into silence.

  Preferably, the IRS should be disbanded. If that can't happen immediately, the whole notion that certain groups are less deserving of First Amendment protections than others should be repealed, legislatively or judicially.

• Also coming in for some deserved criticism: the recent apostolic exhortation from Pope Francis, in which he asserted (among other things):

  … [S]ome people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.

  As a result of such, he has been widely quoted by "progressives" that would otherwise not give two figs about the Pope's opinions on anything.

  My own reaction would be ill-tempered, profane, and likely to offend the majority-Catholic population of the Salad household. Instead, let me quote Havard Genius Econ Prof Greg Mankiw in near-entirety:

  First, throughout history, free-market capitalism has been a great driver of economic growth, and as my colleague Ben Friedman has written, economic growth has been a great driver of a more moral society.

  Second, "trickle-down" is not a theory but a pejorative used by those on the left to describe a viewpoint they oppose. It is equivalent to those on the right referring to the "soak-the-rich" theories of the left. It is sad to see the pope using a pejorative, rather than encouraging an open-minded discussion of opposing perspectives.

  Third, as far as I know, the pope did not address the tax-exempt status of the church. I would be eager to hear his views on that issue. Maybe he thinks the tax benefits the church receives do some good when they trickle down.

  I would dearly love to see a debate between the Pope and Prof Mankiw on whose views are better "confirmed by the facts". To be fair, "facts" have never been religion's strong suit; the Pope probably shouldn't have tried to pretend otherwise.

• Mr. Steyn's column is appropriately merciliess this week. To share one bit, our President is uttered the following in November 14 news conference:

  On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as -- the way it was supposed to. Has I been informed, I wouldn't be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I'm accused of a lot of things, but I don't think I'm stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn't going to work.

  Steyn responds:

  Ooooo-kay. So, if I follow correctly, the smartest president ever is not smart enough to ensure that his website works; he’s not smart enough to inquire of others as to whether his website works; he’s not smart enough to check that his website works before he goes out and tells people what a great website experience they’re in for. But he is smart enough to know that he’s not stupid enough to go around bragging about how well it works if he’d already been informed that it doesn’t work. So he’s smart enough to know that if he’d known what he didn’t know he’d know enough not to let it be known that he knew nothing. The country’s in the very best of hands.

• New Hampshire's other great essayist, P.J. O'Rourke, has a new book, The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn't My Fault) (And I'll Never Do It Again) and the WSJ has a bit of it outside its paywall as I type. As a baby-boomer myself—yes, I confess—I heartily concur:

  We are the generation that changed everything. Of all the eras and epochs of Americans, ours is the one that made the biggest impression—on ourselves. That's an important accomplishment, because we're the generation that created the self, made the firmament of the self, divided the light of the self from the darkness of the self, and said, "Let there be self." If you were born between 1946 and 1964, you may have noticed this yourself.

• A useful reminder from Patterico; file it under This is who they are; this is what they do.

  Cancer Patient Loses Coverage, Blames ObamaCare . . . Gets Audited

  Also being audited: the health insurance broker who managed to get the patient's coverage restored.

  The IRS would no doubt deny any cause-and-effect here. But they have an established lack of credibility on such matters.

• I find myself in total agreement with the blogger "Lexington Green" at America 3.0: the IRS can only be trusted to invade people's privacy and abuse their liberties:
  The IRS is structurally and inevitably a pathological organization that is destructive of our liberty. The people who work there, without regard to their personal morals, face pernicious incentives. That is one of the most poisonous things about bureaucracy. Ordinary, decent people end up participating in destructive policies and processes with no personal malice and even with little or no personal fault.

  The power the IRS possesses, like every power granted to government, will be abused. And the IRS possesses enormous power, and the temptation to abuse that power will prevail, inevitably and frequently and destructively.

  I have little patience with soi-disant "civil libertarians" who are outraged by NSA snooping disclosures but have never had anything to say about the other three-letter agency whose everyday workings are (as LG says) "an affront to the letter and spirit of the Fourth Amendment."

• Which reminds me. In case you're not a reader of Pun Salad's book items, more serious recent reads include America 3.0 by James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus (also the proprietors of the blog referenced in the item above); Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism by Richard Epstein; The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory by Jesse Walker; and (less political) The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel.

Happy Black Friday, everyone! Hope you stayed sane!

• The great national treasure that is Kevin D. Williamson discusses the relationship between President Obama's megalomania and Pope Francis’s recent anti-free market apostolic exhortation. The common thread is selfishness: both the Pope and the Prez claim to be agin' it, but (a) Obama's entire career has been the selfish pursuit of political power, and (b) the Pope (and not just the Pope) has a huge blind spot to this form of selfishness.

  KDW is set off by a recent Barackrobatic oration where he bemoaned "our politics" which he claimed "all too often encourages people to think selfishly or short-term."

  What could it possibly mean to be lectured on selfishness by a man whose entire career has been dedicated to no cause other than the cause of himself? “Selfishness” has been conflated with materialism and greed, but the literal meaning of the word is excessive devotion to one’s self and one’s interests. To be unselfish is to be ready to give up that which one holds most dear; for some men, that is money, but what is money to a president of the United States, who knows that in retirement he can support himself in ducal style with one day’s work a month at Bill Clinton rates, in princely style with two days’ work, and in imperial style with three? Money is an abstraction to a retired president. But the thing that he really cares about — power — Barack Obama guards in a fashion more miserly than that of any mythical dragon watching his horde. That the president is so haughty about the prospect of negotiating with his rivals in the House and the Senate comes as no surprise to his advisers, whose opinions he holds in equal contempt: “I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters, I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. . . . I’m a better political director than my political director.” And he has some thoughts about generosity of spirit he would like to share.

  He touches on a theme that can't be touched enough. Read the whole thing! Especially if you're the Pope!

• The Presidential address mentioned in the item above is described here, and it's… well, darned odd. The venue for this lecture about "selfishness" was Magic Johnson's mansion in Beverly Hills. If that's not cognitively dissonant enough:

  “We know what works, and what’s stopping us is a failure of our politics and a lack of ambition and we shy away from what might be hard," he said.

  Given the disastrous bungling of Obamacare, how out of touch does the President have to be to still claim he knows "what works"?

• Very cool news in the WSJ today: Amazon is producing a pilot for a possible TV series, Bosch, based on Michael Connelly's driven LAPD detective Harry Bosch. I'm a big fan of the Bosch books, and I hope it works out as well as Justified.

  The (paywalled) article has details on how painful it is for an author to deal with Hollywood bigwigs. Not a problem I'm likely to have, but still. It would be neat if Amazon could provide an alternative path to bring more literary characters to the screen.

  Connelly had previously been quoted as saying a good actor to play Bosch would have been Billy Burke. Agreed! But he's busy doing his own series, Revolution. The role is instead being played by Titus Welliver. Who? Well, I remember him best as the "Man in Black" on Lost. And, yeah, I think he could be pretty good as Bosch too.

This was one of Mrs. Salad's choices. Netflix predicted I wouldn't like it much. You can see the mediocre score from the IMDB raters. It was barely released in theaters back in 2011, and finally came out on DVD this summer. None of this screams "must-see".

But still: produced, written, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. How bad could it be?

Well, let's put it this way: Mr. Coppola knows infinitely more about making movies than I. So he probably did pretty much what he wanted here. Give him that. Okay, what I'm seeing is incoherent and uninteresting, but almost certainly that's what he was going for.

Val Kilmer—boy did he get fat, or what?—plays writer "Hall Baltimore", on a book tour to a dinky town named Swan Valley. There's no actual bookstore, he's informed: just a hardware store that sells some books. He's accosted by the local sheriff, played by Bruce Dern in full-weirdo mode: there's been a local murder with hints of vampirism, wouldn't that make a great book for us to collaborate on, huh?

Baltimore is intrigued enough to stick around, but he's bedeviled by (a) wacky dreams in which Edgar Allen Poe and a creepy girl named "V" appear, uttering loopy dialogue; (b) Skype calls from his shrewish wife (played, amusingly enough, by Val Kilmer's ex-wife Joanne Whalley); (c) guilt-ridden memories of his dear, decased daughter; (d) his publisher, who demands more of the same schlock.

It's a big mess, but there are some funny bits. Bruce Dern is always good when he's weird. And Val Kilmer does some impressions: Marlon Brando and James Mason. Yay, he can still be funny, but it made me wish we'd rented Top Secret or Real Genius instead.

I avoid learning too much about movies before I see them, but now I learn that Father Guido Sarducci himself, Don Novello, was in this. I totally missed that. But I'm not watching it again to catch his performance.

Another (number 11) in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. And, although I've liked all the ones I've read, this one struck me as clearly above average.

A brief opening chapter describes the bad guys disposing of a troublemaker by helicoptering him—still alive—out to the Mojave and dropping him from 3,000 feet. Ouch! Those bastards...

Days later, Reacher is nonplussed by the anonymous deposit of $1030 into his bank account. He recognizes this as a code sent by an ex-Army colleague, Frances Neagley, asking him to get in touch and provide assistance. (MPs use 10-30 as a "Request assistance" code, but I see a few that might have been more appropriate.)

It turns out that, like Neagley, the victim, Calvin Franz, used to be part of Reacher's investigative unit. It hardly needs be said that Reacher and Neagley take Franz's death personally, and begin to make plans to find the perpetrators and extract extralegal vengeance.

Neagley and Reacher attempt to reach out to the remaining members of the team. But they are unresponsive. Could they also be the victims of foul play? And who is in the cars following them around?

Eventually it all gets sorted out, but, in these books, the journey is the reward. Albeit a journey filled with violence, betrayal, gunplay, etc. Reacher is a stellar investigator, and it's a joy to watch him peel away the layers of the onion to reveal the nefarious plot that the evildoers are attempting to bring to fruition.

I got this book, by James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus, on Interlibrary Loan from Boston College, due to many, many plugs from the Blogfather. And he's right, it's quite good.

Their thesis: America's best days could be ahead of us, if we (a) embrace the best bits of our Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage and (b) jettison the increasingly creaky and unsustainable misfeatures of overly-centralized government and other sclerotic institutions.

The authors jam a lot of history into a small number of pages to make their argument. And I'm going to simplify even further. "America 1.0" was the original US operating system, with a small Federal government, westward expansion, rural life, and a strong farm economy. "America 2.0" was the transition, starting around the Civil War, into a more centralized, bureaucratic, collectivist, paternalistic government, urbanization, industrialization, etc.

Our transition to America 3.0 [the authors claim] is in progress, and will undo many of the 2.0 features: decentralization, a return to individualism and voluntarism, strengthening of state and local government at the expense of the Federal.

This won't be without pain: most notably, what the authors term the "Big Haircut"—essentially bankruptcy proceedings—as Federal expenditures are brought into line with revenue, bondholders and pensioners get less than their "entitlements", and many of the functions run from D.C. are spun off to the states, localities, and individuals. The megacorporation would also become a (more) endangered species, as technology and innovation would give the advantage to more nimble and flexible entrepreneurs.

The central government still runs foreign policy and national defense, but with a more realistic goal: "maintaining the freedom of the global commons of air, sea and space." (The authors have little patience with nation-building adventures like Iraq and Afghanistan.)

The book seems a little repetitive in places, and can occasionally get bogged down in less-than-fascinating detail. (Defense procurement reform. Yes, I'm for it, can we move on?) But overall very worth reading.

I don't know if they're right, however. I hope they are. It sounds plausible. But as Neils Bohr said: predictions are difficult, especially about the future.

At my age, one of the more reliable indicators of movie quality is: did I fall asleep while watching it? If I did, it's a hint that it didn't hold my interest. This is a subjective measure, but I've never pretended to do anything else here.

Friends, I fell totally asleep about two minutes into my first attempt at watching Pacific Rim. I woke up for a bit around the 17 minute mark, then off to dreamland once more. Mrs. Salad woke me and suggested we give up for the evening.

The second attempt went better, but I think I missed around 15 minutes or so in the middle.

And I really wanted to like it too. It's got one of my favorite actors, Idris Elba. And he acts the heck out of his role, but that doesn't disguise the fact that it's a clichéd and shallow role.

Anyway, the story: an interdimensional fissure at the bottom of the Pacific has been spawning gigantic homicidal monsters ("Kaiju"), threatening coastal cities and (ultimately) all of humanity. Humanity, in turn, invents giant humanoid fighting machines ("Jaegers") to battle them. Due to sci-fi mumbo-jumbo, the machines are controlled via psychic link by a couple of pilots, who (a) must be sympatico and (b) have a knack for controlling giant Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. Things go well at first, but the Kaiju evolve to a point where they regularly defeat the Jaegers sent up against them. So humanity faces an existential crisis: I hate it when that happens.

The answer, of course, is to rehabilitate a long-shot disgraced hero, Raleigh Becket, whose previous outing against a Kaiju resulted in the death of his brother pilot. He is teamed with a spunky little Japanese girl, Mako Mori, who's trying to avenge the death of her family.

There's a lot of other stuff going on too. Two scientists are trying to get a handle on the Kaiju, one by mathematical analysis, the other by trying to mind-meld with a recovered Kaiju brain. This also loops in Ron Perlman, a black market dealer in recovered Kaiju parts. Comic relief.

But, bottom line: although the special effects are pretty good, they are on top of dialog and plot that seems to come out of a 60's Japanese Godzilla movie. I don't get what the big deal was supposed to be.