didn’t do it, wasn’t there, can’t prove nothin’
Wall Medical Group, of San Francisco, sent me a statement with a “previous balance” of $1537. This was the first I’d heard from them, so I’ve no clue what the $1537 is for. (I have had no medical treatment other than dentistry since 2003.) Their billing department does not return my calls.
Remind me, next time jury duty rolls around, to bring a folding chair.
Mom is in town, and yesterday we went to the Arts & Crafts exhibit at the de Young.
One of the wall placards says, “The problems caused by free trade and the Industrial Revolution had been recognized since the 1830s . . . .”
The part about free trade is easy to debunk: the first triumph of the British free trade movement was the repeal in 1846 (motivated in part by the Irish famine) of the protectionist Corn Laws.
The plight of the working classes before that is familiar from Oliver Twist (1837–9) and A Christmas Carol (1843), but since I can’t see how industrialization itself could cause it, I prefer to blame the Inclosure Acts which dispossessed small landholders and thus depressed wages (while the Corn Laws kept food prices high). The new industrialists naturally took advantage of cheap labor, but one cannot reduce wages by offering employment.
Netflix (or should I say N3tfl1×) got the first season of Numb3rs this week, and I watched the first four episodes with mixed reactions. On one hand, any popular presentation of mathematics in the real world is a treat. But would it be so hard to cut some of the tritest Television Drama Moments in favor of a fuller explanation of the math and some acknowledgement of its limits?
The pilot episode is the best of these. Charlie the mathematician sees a map of attacks by a serial rapist and says, I cannot predict where the next attack will be but I can tell you where he lives. He takes a crash course in criminal psychology from his brother Don the detective, generates a model of the rapist’s behavior, and announces with 96% confidence that the rapist lives in the yellow zone on his map. (Later he insists that 96% is equivalent to certainty.) The map is the output of a single “equation”. In his place I would try several different models and see where their conclusions overlap, but there’s no sign that Charlie even tries varying the weights in his model.
Episode 4 “Structural Corruption” is nonsense. Charlie takes some measurements of a skyscraper’s movement in wind, and announces that the structure is flawed (without saying why he thinks so) but he doesn’t know how. He whips up a software model of the building — it would have to be a very simple model — and extrapolates what would happen in a major earthquake; and from this extrapolation, if I understand right, he infers that the flaw is in the foundation. Huh?
When economists draw supply-demand charts, they put the independent variable (price) on the vertical axis and the dependent variable (quantity) on the horizontal, contrary to the usual practice in physics and pure mathematics. It’s surprisingly hard for me to adjust my thinking to that: causality ought to go the other way, dammit.
In the popular press, I think, the independent variable is horizontal if it is time, otherwise (e.g. in bar charts comparing several populations) usually vertical.
What other conventions are Out There?
Today’s spam catch included the titles
How evocative!