Thursday, November 30, 2023

History

 

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Type E and Type B errors

 I like this model.  From Who needs Bureaucracy? by Arnold Kling.  The subheading is All of us.  

The opposite of bureaucracy is an organization in which individuals are empowered to make decisions without asking for permission or consulting a rule book. They can use their skills and know-how to solve the customer’s problem or embark on a new project.

Empowerment sounds so much better than bureaucracy. And yet bureaucracy survives. In a competitive environment, particularly in business, we should stop and ask ourselves whether bureaucracy serves a useful function.

When an organization suffers from an error, it will often adopt a rule that is intended to prevent the recurrence of such an error. I like to say that such rules are the pearls that grow in response to the irritation caused by errors.

I think that bureaucracy survives because it prevents certain types of errors. Call these Type E errors, meaning the type of errors that might be made by empowered individuals. The errors that bureaucracy itself makes can be called Type B errors. The utility of bureaucracy depends on the relative cost of Type E errors and Type B errors.

If anyone working in a hospital were empowered to administer medication, then a patient might be killed by someone who is not qualified to administer medication. That would be a Type E error. On the other hand, perhaps a patient could die because a qualified doctor or nurse is not around to administer life-saving medication that a less-qualified hospital worker might have provided. That would be a Type B error. I imagine that Type E errors are more of a problem than type B errors, so that a hospital is better run with bureaucratic rules than as a free-for-all where anyone can administer medication.

In economics, it is a truism that 

If marginal cost of production and the marginal revenue of production are equal, your business has reached its optimal production level. When marginal cost is equal to marginal revenue, efficiency has reached its peak, and you've maximized profits.

This is of course, a dynamic system driven by shifting production costs and market demand, all coordinated via price signals.  Production costs are dynamic and shifting as is customer demand.  Often, in non-transparent fashion.  Management and leadership have to make frequent consequential decisions arising from indigenous and exogenous changes which are always tipping marginal cost and marginal revenue out of alignment with one another.  

Kling's model has an implied similar rule.  

If the marginal net profit of Type E errors is equal to the marginal net profit of Type B errors, strategic effectiveness has been achieved and profits maximized.

As with marginal costs and marginal revenues, there is a tension in the balance between the marginal net profit arising from Type E errors and Type B errors.  Exogenous and indigenous shocks are always kicking them out of alignment.  

The challenge is different though.  Adjusting commercial decisions and fashions of production is hard enough.

Type E and Type B errors though are not about shifting the volume of inputs or modifying the means of production.  Type E and Type B errors are the product of Social Norms, Institutions, Corporate Cultural Norms, and embedded incentive structures.  All can be changed but not easily and not quickly.  Managing the balance between Type E errors and Type B errors is much harder work and not frequently recognized as a distinct model.

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You can never read the same book twice and you should always have plenty to choose from

From Nobody finishes reading my books by Paul Bloom.  The subheading is, Or anyone else's either.  

As of a decade or so ago, when electronic readers became more common, we began to get some insight into people's reading habits.  How much they read of a book, how far in they stop, are there structure or topical issues that lead to abandonment, etc.  

Bloom's article is an entertaining update and his commenters worth reading.  

Several years ago, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax wrote a critical review of my book Just Babies. One of the things that bothered me was that Wax plainly hadn’t read the whole book. She got to the chapter on sex and stopped, with two chapters left to go.

But then I checked, and I realized that the positive reviewers also didn’t seem to make it to the end. Their reviews focused on the first chapters; at best, they skimmed the rest. Actually, by making it to chapter 5 and reading it closely, Wax was unusually persistent.

It’s not just me. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum once complained that reviewers of her book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions focused on the preliminary outline of her theory in the first chapter and ignored all the nuances and qualifications in the many chapters that followed. They apparently didn’t read most of her book.

This bothered me. I’m a fan of Nussbaum and feel she deserves better. Actually, I own this book of hers and read it with pleasure. Well, not the whole book. Just the first chapter. Have you seen how big it is?

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Hardcover) | eBay
How often do people make it to the end of books? The mathematician Jordan Ellenberg did some number crunching, looking at the passages marked by Amazon Kindle readers and estimating what percentage of them finished. This percentage is what he calls the Hawking Index, named after Stephen Hawking’s notoriously unread book A Brief History of Time. Here is the Hawking Index for some popular books:
















Click to enlarge.

A lot of good considerations in the article.  My perspective is twofold - there are many books which have 100 pages of content mashed into three hundred pages of words.  It is one thing to be a miner for ideas and data and persevere when you know there is more ore in the seam.  It is quite another to blindly dig when all you are encountering is dross.  

Focusing on favorite authors increases the probability of ore in the seam but it is not an always reliable heuristic.

I would like to be better at searching for and compiling the 25 page article versions which inspire a book length treatment.  The article would be more likely to be read than the book if the article is 80-100% content whereas the book is only 20-30% content.  But I am not good at that yet.

And I do love finding, perhaps one out of twenty, those non-fiction books in which there is a new idea, a new fact, or better interpretation of an already known fact on virtually every page.  Woof, those are good books.

Recognizing that a good personal library ought to be a compilation of both books and articles is one principle that I acknowledge (without yet being good at.)

The second is that just as we never step in the same river twice (Heraclitus), no book is stable.  A book is the product of the physical object and its interaction with the reader.  Different editions lend themselves to a greater or lesser degree to intense and persistent reading or not.  And the reader himself, at any given moment, is more or less inclined to read a particular book, on a particular topic, by a particular author, in a particular fashion, to a greater or lesser degree.  

Books, readers and the reading experience are not static.  There are authors and poets whom I greatly enjoy reading now whom I had no interest in reading forty years ago.  There are some books I prefer based on season, or mood, or my intellectual ruminations, or reading environment, or some other context.

Given that your own personal reading proclivities are always in flux, all you can do is to be well stocked for all your possible reading needs.  I have close to 15,000 books and I am trying to winnow that number down but it is a less than fruitful endeavor.  Almost all books I have bothered to find and purchase are candidates for reading at some unknown time.  There are a few which were definite errors in the acquisition process and I celebrate the few opportunities to demonstrate a false discipline of getting rid of a book.  The reality is that the overwhelming percentage of books remain on the shelves to be read.

Whether I ever get to them or not is a different matter.  It is nice to have them all to hand when the need arises but, as Hippocrates observed:

Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.

All easier said than done.  Having the books, the ideas, the facts within reach is the important first step.  Not all books will be read but all of them might be read if the time is long enough, the crisis less fleeting, the decision more measured.  I revel in all of those bound companions upon the selves, regardless of the probability of them ever being read.  The possibility of the need or desire for better acquantence is always there.  

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Europe is a bunch of states in a trenchcoat pretending to be a foreign policy superpower

A worthwhile update on the status of foreign policy and defense issues in Europe.  The EU and Europe have been grossly dependent on the US on both issues for many decades.  The coordination of interests and obligations has been difficult and has barely worked.  But just barely.  In particular, Europe's willingness not bare a comparable financial burden and especially the willingness of its largest and most prosperous countries to maintain any sort of operation defense capacity has been de minimus.  

Not all countries and not all the time.  And it is certainly true that the US, driven by domestic politics, has been less than consistent in its foreign policy goals.  To the point of fecklessness.  

But given the crisis in the Balkans in the 1990s, the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe has been oddly uncoordinated and passive.  Again with some exceptions.  Indeed, among the smaller nations, there have been herculean efforts and generosity to support Ukraine.  But we need Britain, Germany, Italy, France and the other larger economies to carry their weight and work more closely with one another and with the US to ensure that Ukraine has all that it needs to bring the war to a quicker and better conclusion.  

From Europe is Whistling Past the Graveyard on Defense by Emma Ashford.  The subheading is Why aren't European policymakers hedging more aggressively against the vagaries of U.S. domestic politics?  While it is a useful update, I was most taken with this language.

The attempt to build a coherent, centralized Europe-wide defense tends to fail because of a unique set of pathologies almost entirely encapsulated by Henry Kissinger's famous remark about Europe. Even as it has become far clearer who to call with regard to monetary policy, migration, or trade, there’s still no obvious answer on defense and foreign policy.

The European Union is, to put it bluntly, a bunch of states in a trenchcoat pretending to be a foreign policy superpower. 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Jenness House, Truro, 1934 by Edward Hopper

Jenness House, Truro, 1934 by Edward Hopper 



















Click to enlarge.

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Wednesday, November 29, 2023

History

 

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An Insight

 

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A terse summing up

 

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Post-Bongo polls

I can't explain it to myself but I love this headline.

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Dear Departed, 1946 by Marvin Cone (American, 1891-1965)

Dear Departed, 1946 by Marvin Cone (American, 1891-1965) 















Click to enlarge.

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Tuesday, November 28, 2023

When those that want to govern wish to do so extrajudicially.

Many of our issues today seem products of the earlier Obama Administration.  To the point that some critics refer to this as Obama's third term with Biden cast as a puppet under the control of all the old Obama retreads in the current administration.  Maybe.

Regardless of that argument, I do keep recalling some words spoken by Michelle Obama right at the beginning, perhaps during the run up to Obama's election.  She was a clarion call for the central planner and coercive governance.  It was alarming then and is alarming now as we witness an administration more and more willing to curtail civil rights and imprison those with whom they disagree.  Less and less committed to freedom of speech and more antagonistic to equality before the law.

Something I read today made passing reference to Michelle's speech and I finally went out to find it.  From “Barack Will Never Allow You to Go Back to Your Lives as Usual.” by Jim Geraghty.

Last night I appeared on Hugh’s show, and his producer Duane mentioned a Michelle Obama speech at UCLA. Captain Ed talked about this a bit, but I hadn’t seen anyone transcribe the part of the speech where it gets a little… unnerving. It starts at about 8:41 in the audio.

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

I’m sorry, nowhere in the Constitution does it authorize the President of the United States to demand anyone shed their cynicism. And I’m all for people pushing themselves to be better, but I don’t think the President demanding it is the way to go about it.

And what if we kind of like our lives as usual? What about Americans’ freedom to be uninvolved and uninformed?

The links to the original Michelle Obama speech are in the article.  

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History

 

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IYI in the senate

I clicked through simply from curiosity.  This must be a misrepresentation!  What is the real deal?  From Elizabeth Warren Wants the Government To Investigate America's 'Sandwich Shop Monopoly' by Christin Britschgi.  The subheading is The owner of Jimmy John's and Arby's has bought Subway, and a Massachusetts senator has concerns.

As it turns out, no, this is an accurate headline reflecting the real situation.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) thinks the government should investigate America's alleged "sandwich shop monopoly."

"We don't need another private equity deal that could lead to higher food prices for consumers," Warren tweeted Sunday. She was responding to a Politico piece reporting that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is probing the private equity firm Roark Capital's $10 billion acquisition of Subway.

Roark already owns the sandwich-serving chains Arby's, Jimmy Johns, McAlister's Deli, and Schlotzky's. Warren said that adding Subway to that list could create a "sandwich shop monopoly."

There is an outpouring of commentary providing both economic theory and economic historical research demonstrating the incredible witlessness of being a US senator with an anti-market obsession.  The direct responses to her tweet are entertaining.  The importance of taking a stand against Big Sandwich is roundly ridiculed. 

Reminds me of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Skin in the Game.  

You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.

 Later he simplified it to the more succinct category - IYI, Intellectual, yet idiot.  

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Demonstrating an otherwise impossible unawareness

I am seeing more and more of this and I do not know whether it is a frequency illusion or random chance or symptomatic of something deeper.  

Someone with, presumably, a solid education in a position of power or influence revealing deep unawareness of context, misinterpretation of facts or simply obliviousness.  Miguel Cardona (PhD from Connecticut University) would have been thirteen at the close of Ronald Reagan's administration. Right on the cusp of being reasonable that he should actually remember some of that history and dismissing it as him just being a kid.  Regardless, his entire career has been in government and education.  You sure would have thought he knew the full context of Reagan's quote.

Maybe his testimony was written by a young staffer who did not know better and he didn't have a chance to check the transcript before he testified.  Or maybe he just verbally fumbled.

All seemingly unlikely explanations but at least somewhat plausible.

A few weeks ago I saw something similar in an interview with Bill Maher.  It was some reasonably fundamental reality which seemed improbable and unlikely to him but is widely know to everyone else.  I don't remember the topic but an analogy would have been had he claimed that the defund the police movement had not affected policing.  It is widely known and understood by most people and ardently and ideologically denied by a few.

There were at least a couple of other instances in the past month.

Smart people professing or accidentally revealing that they are completely unaware of something which is widely known by everyone else.  

It feels like a real phenomenon but perhaps it is only an illusion.  I'll have to pay attention and see how often it occurs.

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Winter at the Painter’s House, 1942 by Sven Erixson (Swedish,1899-1970)

Winter at the Painter’s House, 1942 by Sven Erixson (Swedish,1899-1970)






























Click to enlarge.

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Monday, November 27, 2023

Journalism and class

From The McDonald's theory of why everyone thinks the economy sucks by Nate Silver.  The subheading is Americans are spending as much of their paychecks as ever on fast food — and everything else.

The mainstream media has been working hard to advance the message of a booming Bidenonomics economy where inflation is in the rear view mirror and everyone doesn't understand just how well they are doing.  The MSM is hot on the idea that there is a lot of misinformation that it is their duty as administration apparatchiks to correct.  

Silver, in his usual data-based fashion explores the issue.

I eat fast food.

Not often, but also not rarely. Maybe once or twice a month in a late-night munchies context. Maybe another couple times when I’m at an airport or something. And I don’t just eat at the highbrow “fast casual” restaurants like Shake Shack, although I like them. I am also well-acquainted with the Taco Bell menu.

I wonder how often Jeff Stein and Taylor Lorenz — the authors of a recent Washington Post story on customer perceptions about the economy — eat from chains like McDonald’s and Taco Bell. I’m guessing it’s not very much.2 Because despite their attempt to frame consumer perceptions about high fast-food prices as “misinformation”, it’s in fact a category where there’s been a big increase in how much consumers are spending, and one that tells us a lot about why Americans are unhappy with the economy overall.

Here’s their story. An Idaho man posted a TikTok video of a McDonald’s order of a burger, fries and a Sprite that cost $16.10. What Stein and Lorenz want you to believe3 is that people are being misled by videos like these. The man ordered a “novelty item”, they say — a limited edition smoky double quarter pounder BLT (sounds yummy). But a Big Mac is much cheaper, they say:

The average Big Mac nationally as of this summer cost $5.58, up from $4.89 — or roughly 70 cents — before Biden took office, according to an index maintained by the Economist. That’s up more than 10 percent, but it’s not $16.

This is a weird and somewhat non-sequitur framing. For one thing, there actually has been quite a bit of inflation in Big Macs. According to the data they cite, Big Mac prices increased by 14 percent over the wo-and-a-half year period from December 2020 through June 2023. That’s not that bad compared to other goods and services; the overall consumer price index (CPI) increased by 16 percent over the same period. But, it’s still pretty high, and Big Mac prices had been fairly steady for years before 2020.

Also, since Stein and Lorenz are accusing consumers of falling for a cherry-picked data point — the Idaho man’s order — it’s worth noting that prices in the broader category of food away from home have grown faster than inflation overall, increasing by 18 percent over that window. It shouldn’t be hard to understand why people are unhappy about that.

That’s not the most important point, though. Instead, it’s something a little more subtle: people aren’t just paying more, they’re spending more. Put another way, they’re not just paying more for the same basket of goods — how the government defines inflation — they’re also putting more and more expensive goods in their basket.

It is a worthwhile read because it is both nuanced and consequential.  

He does not focus on the other implication which is that much of the misreporting from the mainstream media might not be primarily due to ideological fervor or ignorance (though those traits are probably contributive.)  

There has been, in the past three decades, more and more of a class divergence between the remaining journalists and the American public.  Journalists increasingly tend to be from privileged backgrounds, have elite university educations, live in big cities, cobble together reasonably high incomes, hobnob with the well endowed and the well-placed.  As Silver hints, Lorenz and Stein are not of the same class of those experiencing the type of inflation which most Americans experience.  In some ways this a rehash of the kerfuffle in 2017 when it became apparent how foreign pick-up trucks were to journalists despite pick-up trucks being the largest category of vehicle sales in America.  

We need more class diversity in our newsrooms and there are plenty of candidates whose positions might be more usefully filled by people with different class markers (and more numerate.)

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Civil rights require the rule of law but universities are terrified of enforcing the law

From Where Free Speech Ends and Lawbreaking Begins by Ilya Shapiro.  The subheading is The First Amendment does not give carte blanche to intimidation and harassment, writes Ilya Shapiro.

When I first read the headline, I almost skipped the article because it sounded like some pro-censorship mainstream media piece wanting to censor speech of which it did not approve.  But then I saw it was by Shapiro who is an ardent free speech advocate and so I read it.  His article is basically a refresher as to what is covered by free speech and what constitutes a crime.  Everyone ought to read it as a good philosophical refresher (or introduction for some) as well as a practical guideline as to how to uphold free speech and how to protect it by enforcing the law when people go beyond the bounds of free speech.  

Much of the repugnance of the pro-Hamas demonstrations is not just their message but that the universities and municipalities are tolerating unlawful behavior which infringes the free speech of others.  The solution is to enforce the law.  

Pro-Palestinian groups have harassed and even assaulted Jewish students; protesters have interrupted courses and taken over buildings; Ivy League professors have called Hamas’s attack “exhilarating” and “awesome”; students have torn down posters of missing Israeli children; others have chanted—and even projected onto university buildings—slogans, like “from the river to the sea,” “globalize the intifada,” and “glory to our martyrs.”

In response to such activities, universities have suspended or banned student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. Alumni have pulled their donations and publicly stated that they won’t hire students who signed letters blaming Israel for the massacre. Republican lawmakers have suggested revoking the student visas of those participating in anti-Israel protests.

This obviously sets up the challenge.  We want maximal support of free speech within the law which requires extreme patience with noxious speech.  There is always a temptation to encroach on free speech when it is noxious speech.  Tempting as it might be, that should always be avoided.

Instead, the focus should be, as Shapiro highlights, on policing where free speech shifts into illegal behavior and violence.

Much of what we’ve witnessed on campuses over the past few weeks is not, in fact, speech, but conduct designed specifically to harass, intimidate, and terrorize Jews. Other examples involve disruptive speech that can properly be regulated by school rules. Opposing or taking action against such behavior in no way violates the core constitutional principle that the government can’t punish you for expressing your beliefs.

Shaprio then goes through several categories such as the distinction between speech and conduct; speech versus disruption; professorial free speech versus creating hostile educational environments; the rights of foreign nationals versus those of nationals; university acceptance of illegal protest behavior despite its abrogation of Title VI Civil Rights responsibilities, etc.  

It is worth reading the whole article as a refresher, for all the links, and because all the philosophical issues are tied to real incidents at universities over the past month.  

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Two Puritans, 1945 by Edward Hopper

Two Puritans, 1945 by Edward Hopper



















Click to enlarge.

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Sunday, November 26, 2023

The unseen doers transcend the chatterers

A serendipitous sequence of recollections which build to an observation.

I saw a brief mention of Malcolm McLean, the North Carolinian who revolutionized transportation, shipping, and global trade beginning in the 1960s with his introduction of containerized shipping. 

Malcolm Purcell McLean (November 14, 1913 – May 25, 2001) was an American businessman who invented the modern intermodal shipping container, which revolutionized transport and international trade in the second half of the twentieth century. Containerization led to a significant reduction in the cost of freight transportation by eliminating the need for repeated handling of individual pieces of cargo, and also improved reliability, reduced cargo theft, and cut inventory costs by shortening transit time. Containerization is a major driver of globalization.

McLean personally, corporately, and the industry collectively spent billions over four decades radically upgrading the physical nature and attributes of the logistics industry.  In addition to reduced breakage, reduced pilferage, more efficient use of scarce cargo hold space, dramatically reduced dockage labor costs and time, containerization effectively cut shipping costs by 95%.  Without the efficiency, security, effectiveness, and cheapness of containerization, global trade today would be a shadow of itself.  The world would be dramatically poorer.

Seeing the piece about McLean made me think of Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution.  

Norman Ernest Borlaug (/ˈbɔːrlɔːɡ/; March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009) was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

Borlaug received his B.S. in forestry in 1937 and PhD in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position with CIMMYT in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations.

Borlaug was often called "the father of the Green Revolution", and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation.

From the 1960's onwards, Borlaug's research and ideas not only substantially reduced the number of people dying from starvation they also materially increased agricultural productivity.  

Borlaug helped innovate food production and McLean made it cheap to ship everything, including food, wherever things are needed and wanted.  

And hardly anyone knows their names.  They had a huge impact on the world's built environment, on the world's commerce and prosperity, and they had a huge impact on the world's well-being in terms of both morbidity and mortality.  And all behind the scenes.

And today I am seeing articles such as Microsoft Infrastructure - AI & CPU Custom Silicon Maia 100, Athena, Cobalt 100 by Dylan Patel and Myron Xie and Links for 2023-11-20 by Alexander Kruel.  They are reporting on a series on planned investments by Microsoft over the next few years.  From Patel and Xie:

Microsoft is currently conducting the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen. While that may seem like hyperbole, look at the annual spend of mega projects such as nationwide rail networks, dams, or even space programs such as the Apollo moon landings, and they all pale in comparison to the >$50 billion annual spend on datacenters Microsoft has penned in for 2024 and beyond. This infrastructure buildout is aimed squarely at accelerating the path to AGI and bringing the intelligence of generative AI to every facet of life from productivity applications to leisure.

Whether AGI pans out and with it Microsoft's gamble, we have much the same going on as with Borlaug and McLean.  A multi-decadal transformation of infrastructure and production to the betterment of everyone but largely unseen, unnoted and unremarked.  

It feels like 95% of our daily discourse is sheer propaganda and noise, or ill-considered opinions about dubious or irrelevant things and only 5% has to do with anything important.  In contrast, the things that have made 95% of the difference in modern lives are almost undiscussed at all.  

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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The Caravan Park, 2007 by Jeffrey Smart (Australian, 1921-2013)

The Caravan Park, 2007 by Jeffrey Smart (Australian, 1921-2013) 

















Click to enlarge.

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Saturday, November 25, 2023

Well, ain't that the truth

From East Coker by T.S. Eliot.

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Data Talks

 

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View from a Window, 1909 by Spencer Gore

View from a Window, 1909 by Spencer Gore





























Click to enlarge.

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Friday, November 24, 2023

The end is where we start from

I visited an Indian Hindu temple today, spending several  hours there with an Indian friend who spent the time explaining the intricacies and attributes of the temple and the ceremonies.  At one point we sat before a central area before images of Indian sacred figures.  At the close of the ceremony, you walk multiple times around the central chamber, as an act representing the centrality of religion and the sacred to one's life.  As we walked, Eliot's words were called unbidden to mind from Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Then, later in the poem,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Réflexion bleue dans la fontaine du Pradet, 1917 by Henri Lebasque (1865-1937)

Réflexion bleue dans la fontaine du Pradet, 1917 by Henri Lebasque (1865-1937)




















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Thursday, November 23, 2023

History

 

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An Insight

 

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Thanksgiving by the numbers

Ignoring the earlier (1607) Jamestown, Virginia settlement which was an entirely different dynamic, the English settlement of North America beginning with the Mayflower at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620 has always been noted as markedly different from other European incursions and settlements on the North American continent.  Elsewhere conquest and commerce were the driving force and the participants were largely or exclusively male.  Women came later; families much later; civilized settlements of families last of all.  

The Pilgrim, and later Puritan, settlements in New England were religious certainly, but were also the migration of families permanently into new lands.  Whole families arrived together at the very beginning, sometimes representing a significant proportion of the towns and counties they left behind.  Indeed, the British Crown was stuck with a dilemma.

On the one hand, the throne was strident to the point of brutality in their repression of religious non-conformers, those who did not adhere with great consistency to the teachings of the Church of England.  The Crown also did not want, indeed could not afford, a loss of population at a time of many monarchical rivalries in Europe.  The English monarchy did not want Puritans but also did not want them to leave.

And the government made it difficult for the Pilgrims to leave through imposition of taxes and regulations and port controls.  

Family-based emigration meant that the emigrants were non-representative and distinct.  They were wealthier, better educated, more literate, more skilled and more varied in their skills than any other comparable European settlement group of the time.  In addition to their experience as a religious movement, many of them already had experience living in a foreign land and experience with community self-governance.  

Or at least that is the stereotype.  Is it the reality?  Were families more prevalent?  Its always worth checking the numbers.

Apparently so.  There were 102 Pilgrims on the Mayflower.  69 of them were traveling in families.  And that is probably an undercount.  We know who traveled in family units with shared family names but some number of the single men were almost certainly relatives but with different names (a nephew of a sister for example).  

The first year of settlement, as is widely known, was brutal, landing on an unfamiliar and unanticipated shore much farther north than intended, much later in the year than planned and with much less time to prepare for what turned out to be a hard winter.  Of the 102 Pilgrims who landed, only 51 survived into the new year to celebrate the first Thanksgiving in the fall of 1621.

The winnowing was especially heavy among the adult women.  As best I can calculate, of the 102 Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in November 1620, 51 remained alive to celebrate that first Thanksgiving in 1621.

Of the 102 Pilgrims who arrived:

54 were adult men, 29 of whom died that first winter.  They had a death rate of 54%.
21 were adult women, 13 of whom died that first winter.  They had a death rate of 62%.
28 were children, 7 of whom died that first winter.  They had a death rate of 25%.

69 of the 102 passengers traveled as members of 23 families, constituting 67% of the passengers.  32 of the 69 died that first winter, with a death rate of 46%.

Of the 18 married women, 13 died (72%) that first winter, only 5 survived.  Among the survivors was my 10th great-grandmother, Mary Brewster.   

12 of the fifteen married women who had children with them on the voyage died, a death rate of 80%.  

9 of the fifteen men who children accompanying them on the voyage died, a death rate of 60%. 
 
Those numbers are horrific.  However, the 25% death rate among children is striking for how low it is in comparison to the total.  It is even more striking because three of the seven child deaths were three very young siblings (the More children) who were traveling without their parents on the ocean journey.  In other words, the survival rate (84%) of children actually in families was dramatically higher than for everyone else.

While the death rate among women is distinctly higher than for men, it is, in the scheme of things, not especially surprising given the realities of the time.  A good portion of women were already pregnant when they boarded the Mayflower, (indeed, Oceanus was born at sea and two or three more soon after arrival).  The stress of the journey in combination with food shortages, little shelter, harsh environment, and poor communal hygiene would have made pregnant women especially vulnerable.  

Of the 23 families, 5 came through with no one dying.  In five instances, everyone died.  In six families, both parents died leaving five orphaned children between the ages of 12 and 18.  

Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War by Nathaniel Philbrick is an especially good account of the voyage and the first fews years of survival on these far distant shores from anything those Pilgrims had ever known or experienced.  

For all the trials and tragedies of those first years, it is striking to read the biographies of the survivors.  Time and again you have some later dying at 50, 60, 70 years of age and with five, ten and fifteen children.  Dark tribulations preceded dramatic outcomes.  

I write this in memory of my mother Virginia Latting Bayless who passed away this Spring.  She was a keen genealogist all her years.  In the past decade, I took on more of the research for her and, as in this case, the sort of analysis which sheds light on realities which are sometimes hard to comprehend.  We would have had a good conversation about all the details and what they meant.  I do and will miss those calls with her.  

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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City, 2023 by Jeremy Miranda (USA)

City, 2023 by Jeremy Miranda (USA)
















Click to enlarge.

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Wednesday, November 22, 2023

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Moonlit Night in the Village by Artist Sergey Dorofeev

Moonlit Night in the Village by Artist Sergey Dorofeev




















Click to enlarge.

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Tuesday, November 21, 2023

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Either write things worth reading, Or do things worth the writing.

From Poor Richard's Almanack, 1738 by Benjamin Franklin.

If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.

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Data Talks

 

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A Square in Girona, 2023 by Aldo Balding (British, b.1960)

A Square in Girona, 2023 by Aldo Balding (British, b.1960) 





























Click to enlarge.

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The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech and religion.

In the past, I have come across some of the words of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson.  

From his decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette regarding compelled speech:

As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be…Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

Justice Antonin Scalia, no mean stylist himself, described Jackson as "the best legal stylist of the 20th century."  

I stumble across these items this morning and start rooting around for more information about the words and works of Jackson.  Of course, Wikiquote is a good starting point.  For a man who was United States Solicitor General, United States Attorney General, and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, as well as the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, it was worth paying attention to his opinions.

In this wretched moment when the administration is so eager to eviscerate the First Amendment and has been so ardent in pursuing technology companies to become an arm of the federal government to restrict speech and has sought so enthusiastically to create new agencies tasked with policing speech and more specifically tasked with determining what is true enough for citizens to be allowed to hear, these words from Jackson are a balm.

The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech and religion. In this field, every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.

Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516 (1945) p. 323 U. S. 545

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Monday, November 20, 2023

History

 

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An Insight

 

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