collect them all!

Posted on Sunday, 2005 December 25 by Anton

In a review of a biography of Lillian Hellman, The Economist used the phrase “at the height of the first cold war in 1952.”

I’m always the last to know. Is this usage widespread? When was the height of the second cold war?

Posted in history | Leave a comment

of bicycles and water-beds and cabbages and kings

Posted on Friday, 2005 December 23 by Anton

Jerome K. Jerome – or his fictional counterpart “J.” – says in chapter 5 of Three Men on the Bummel:

  I do not regard the conveyance of useful information as my forte. This belief was not inborn with me; it has been driven home upon me by experience.
  . . . [six pages] . . .
  Therefore it is that I have come to restrain my passion for the giving of information; therefore it is that nothing in the nature of practical instruction will be found, if I can help it, within these pages.

Chapter 10 touches on the advertising of bicycles:

. . . one feels [looking at such posters] that, for perfect bodily rest combined with entire freedom from mental anxiety, slumber upon a water-bed cannot compare with bicycle-riding upon a hilly road. No fairy travelling on a summer could could take things more easily than does the bicycle girl, according to the poster. . . .

Water-bed? thought I. Everyone knows™ that Robert Heinlein (1907-88) conceived the water-bed as we know it when he spent some time in a hospital bed, and wrote it into Stranger in a Strange Land. So what did the word mean in 1900? I turn to the OED (something I do less often than you might imagine).

3. A water-tight mattress partly filled with water, designed to serve as a bed for an invalid.

. . . with quotations beginning in 1853.

We learn something every day. Not always something useful, but something.

Posted in general | 2 Comments

fifty-two choose five

Posted on Thursday, 2005 December 22 by Anton

So I was writing a little allegorical paragraph which invited the reader to imagine a poker game in which a dispute arises over whether a flush beats a straight or not. “(The one holding the straight,” I explained, “is a math nerd who assumes that the rank reflects the probability.)”

But it’s a lucky thing I stopped to make sure. There are 10×45 = 10240 possible straights, and only 4×13!/5!8! = 5148 possible flushes. Yet somehow I’ve believed for most of my life that a straight is more unlikely than a flush, and the ranking of flushes over straights a mere arbitrary anomaly. I wonder how the heck I got that idea.

(I’ve temporarily removed poker from the spam list so that you can respond to this without excessive awkwardness. If after clicking the button you find yourself looking at the FBI’s homepage, you’ve found another word on the list.)

Posted in mathematics | Leave a comment

first in a series of one

Posted on Tuesday, 2005 December 20 by Anton

Choose your own joke!

Pillow is fixed, and I’m still

  • broke.
  • variable.
  • floating.

(He’s hiding under my bed.)

Posted in pets | Leave a comment

after this I’ll try to leave the TwoPercenters alone

Posted on Tuesday, 2005 December 20 by Anton

In an otherwise generally sound call for separation of church and state, 2%Co had this to say about democracy in Dixie (1789-1865):

. . . These slaves didn’t always like their lot in life, but according to your logic, Mrs Gong, they should have just shut up and slaved away. Hey, rule by the majority, right? They even had a nifty way of making sure that the white folks stayed in the majority — they made black folk equal to only 3/5 of a person. What a great deal! . . .

I put my quixotic toe in:

I’m surprised to see this [common] misconception propagated by such enlightened people. . . . If the slavers had their way at the Convention of 1787, slaves would have been counted fully, not 3/5. It was the Northerners who wanted slaves counted for zero. . . .

After going around a couple of times, 2%Co apparently agree with this point (though to avoid conceding that I said something accurate they present it as their own), but insist that it supports their original statement — and threaten to delete any further posts from me. It appears that they have done so, so I’ll repeat my conclusion here (as best I can recall it):

Now I admit I’m not clever enough to see how these statements can both be accurate, viz that it was in the interest of the same faction to reduce the representation of slaves in the census and to increase it; or why, given that slaves had no vote, any nifty trick was needed to ensure they remained a minority. If you can resolve this seeming contradiction, I’ll be delighted at learning something new; if you can say “oops” and move on, I’ll be impressed with your integrity. Since you refuse to do either, I guess I’m left with the hope that another reader – if you have any – will help me out.

Posted in constitution, history | 8 Comments

the anarchist gets his back up

Posted on Monday, 2005 December 19 by Anton

On Thursday, I somehow stumbled onto the site of The Two Percent Company (hereinafter “2%Co”), “an informal group of folks who are concerned about the current direction of our country and our world.” Maybe I followed a mysterious link, maybe I was searching for something else; at any rate, the page I found was a critique of the Libertarian Party’s platform. (2%Co rightly point out that the LP contradicts itself on family matters, a subject from which I recuse myself, as I’m unlikely ever to be a father.)

On several points, 2%Co said in effect “this is just plain stupid” without giving any hint of argument. So I wrote:

Have you ever tried *asking* a libertarian why they don’t expect disaster to result from implementing their platform? Or do you just assume that none of them have ever thought beyond the sound-bite?

2%Co’s reply said in part,

Assuming for a moment that you are a Libertarian (we could be wrong, since you haven’t told us that you are), . . . .

I gave a summary of my history with the Party (1990-6), adding:

On principle I’m an anarchist, because otherwise I’d advocate coercing others to actively support (at least through taxes) schemes that they may find repugnant, and that revolts me. But in practice I imagine I’d be comfortable with a “meso-libertarian” regime.

Their mail also led me indirectly to their blog entry on the same subject, and I posted four brief comments there. Rather than respond to my specific remarks on gun control, medicine, devolution, neutrality, immigration and transportation, 2%Co chose to make an issue of my anarchism (which I had not mentioned there); and like an ass I took the bait. In an attempt to bring that thread back on topic, I’ll confine further remarks on anarchism to my own blog. Most of you will likely find it dreary reading. Continue reading →

Posted in politics | 5 Comments

the double standard

Posted on Monday, 2005 December 19 by Anton

Some conservatives, like my old schoolmate Eric Rasmusen, say that rather than excluding tainted evidence (i.e., evidence acquired in violation of the Fourth Amendment) from trials, courts ought to admit whatever credible evidence exists and punish the cops for the illegal search. Eric makes an interesting point about the exclusion policy:

That is a remedy that is useless to someone whose house was searched who was innocent of any crime, since the evidence wouldn’t be useful against them anyway. Rather, our current policy is to only compensate guilty criminals, and, by putting the the compensation in the form of evidence suppression, to compensate them precisely to the extent that they deserve punishment. The compensation has no relation whatsoever to the degree to which the search was illegal.

Radley Balko says:

For my upcoming paper on no-knock and short-notice drug raids, I’ve researched probably close to a hundred examples of botched drug raids, where cops clearly conducted a middle-of-the-night raid on an innocent person or family. Thus far, I haven’t found a single incident in which police themselves were ever charged with a crime for either raiding the wrong home, or shooting someone once inside.

Can this practical immunity be changed by a wave of the wand? What DA will prosecute a cop for bringing in, y’know, someone that the DA wants to prosecute? (Does England still allow private prosecutions?) What jury – routinely screened of anyone likely to question authority – will convict a cop who, like Starsky & Hutch, bends the rules a bit for the greater alleged good?

Posted in constitution, drugwar | 3 Comments