Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Orchids, 1982 by Robert Mapplethorpe

Orchids, 1982 by Robert Mapplethorpe


























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Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Most of what the federal government does is subsidize consumption.

I have for years said that the primary objective of any government is to ensure long term productivity growth.  Everything else desirable follows from real porductivity growth.  No productivity growth and all you get is unpleasant decline.

From Cutting Entitlements by Douglas Holtz-Eakin.  Saying basically the same thing in a different way.

Most of what the federal government does is subsidize consumption. The federal budget is just a big machine that takes money from saving and investment and transforms it into consumption. And the only way economies grow successfully is to defer consumption, save and invest for the future. So, it is stacked to make things perform worse. I want to stack it the other way.

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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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What did the Caspian Sea?

From The Complete Saki, page 8.  

At that particular moment the croquet players finished their game, which had been going on without a symptom of finality during the whole afternoon. Why, I ask, should it have stopped precisely when a counter-attraction was so necessary? Every one seemed to drift towards the area of disturbance, of which the chairs of the Archdeacon’s wife and Reginald formed the storm-centre. Conversation flagged, and there settled upon the company that expectant hush that precedes the dawn—when your neighbours don't happen to keep poultry.

“What did the Caspian Sea?” asked Reginald, with appalling suddenness.

There were symptoms of a stampede. The Archdeacon’s wife looked at me. Kipling or some one has described somewhere the look a foundered camel gives when the caravan moves on and leaves it to its fate. The peptonized reproach in the good lady's eyes brought the passage vividly to my mind. 
 
What is that trigger, “What did the Caspian Sea?”  Clearly some sort of an allusion which would have been clear to an intelligent reader circa 1900-4.  

Researching the question, it seems that there are three possible interpretations.  One is that it is an allusion to a mutoscope, certainly an inappropriate subject in the vicinity of the Archdeacon's wife.  I recall the titillating "What did the butler see?" formulation from my youth in England in the 1960s but I remember no historical context such as Wikipedia provides.  It was merely a received implication that the butler saw something salacious.

What the Butler Saw is a mutoscope reel and an early example of erotic films dating from the early 1900s. It depicted a scene of a woman partially undressing in her bedroom, as if some voyeuristic "butler" were watching her through a keyhole. The film was seen by depositing a coin in a freestanding viewing machine, which then freed a hand-crank on the side which was turned by the viewer. Social standards are subject to change, and by the 1950s this and similar films were considered harmless when compared to contemporary erotica.

The title of this feature became widely used in Britain as a generic term for devices and films of this type. The phrase had entered British popular culture after the 1886 divorce case of Lord Colin Campbell and Gertrude Elizabeth Blood. The trial hinged on whether their butler could have seen Lady Colin in flagrante with Captain Shaw of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, through the keyhole of their dining room at 79 Cadogan Place, London.

The second interpretation is that “What did the Caspian Sea?” is merely word play as in the innocent Delaware song in 1959 by Perry Como.

Delaware
by Perry Como

Oh what did Del-a-ware boy, what did Delaware
What did Del-a-ware boy, what did Delaware
She wore a brand New Jersey,
She wore a brand New Jersey,
She wore a brand New Jersey,
That's what she did wear

One, two, three, four
Oh, why did Cali-fon-ia
Why did Cali-fon
Why did Cali-fon-ia
Was she all alone

She called to say Ha-wa-ya
She called to say Ha-wa-ya
She called to say Ha-wa-ya
That's why she did call

Uno, due, tre, quattro
Oh what did Missi sip boy
What did Missi sip
What did Missi sip boy
Through her pretty lips

She sipped a Minne sota
She sipped a Minne sota
She sipped a Minne sota
That's what she did sip

Un deux trois quatre
Where has Oregon, boy
Where has Oregon
If you wan Al-ask-a
Al-ask-a where she's gone

She went to pay her Texas
She went to pay her Texas
She went to pay her Texas
That's where she has gone

Eins zwei drei vier
Oh how did Wis-con-sin boy
She stole a New-brass-key
Too bad that Arkan saw, boy
And so did Tenne-see

It made poor Flori-di, boy
It made poor Flori-di, you see
She died in Miss-our-I, boy
She died in Miss-our-I
Oh what did Del-a-ware boy, what did Delaware
What did Del-a-ware boy, what did Delaware

Other elaborations of some antiquity include:

How do you make a Maltese cross? (Stick a finger in his eye.)

How do you make a Swiss roll? (Push him down a mountain.)

Other innocent permutations might be:

What did the Caspian See?  He saw the Persian Golf.

What did the Caspian See?  He saw the Queue Wait.

 What did the Caspian See?  He saw the Arabian Dessert.

What did the Caspian See?  He saw the Kazakh Stand.  
 
But if so, it is hard to understand the social consternation.  Seems like there is more going on here than innocent word play.

se16teddy has an erudite suggestion based on Kazakhstan.  The third interpretation might be:

What did the Caspian see?
She saw the Kazakh's stand.

Extract from the definition of stand (noun 1) in the OED:
5d. = erection (n. 4). slang. 
 
1867 Rosa Fielding in S. Marcus Other Victorians (1966) v. 227 He had a tremendous cock-stand, and felt that if it was not allayed pretty quickly that he must burst. 
 
1868 tr. Martial Index Expuratorius 88 Maevius who while sleeping only gets A piss-proud stand that melts away on waking. 
 
1903 J. S. Farmer & W. E. Henley Slang VI. 346/1 Stand,‥(venery).—1. An erectio penis.

All possible.  Relying on Occam's Razor, I'd have to go with "What did the Caspian Sea?" functioning as a call on the lewdness of "What did the butler see?"

There are other rabbits that could be chased in this brief passage.  The look of peptonized reproach?  Invoking perhaps the discomfort of bad digestion.  

Kipling's reference (or someone's) to "the look a foundered camel gives when the caravan moves on and leaves it to its fate"?  I can't find that in Kipling or elsewhere.  But it is an evocative image.  

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Bias of flipped coins

Hmmm.  The claim from Nate Silver is that flipping a coin is not truly random and that a flipped coin will land heads up 50.5% of the time.  Specifically, from A random number generator determined the “favorite" in our forecast by Nate Silver.  

From the model’s standpoint, though, the race is literally closer than a coin flip: empirically, heads wins 50.5 percent of the time, more than Harris’s 50.015 percent.

The fundamental claim seems quite plausible.  Are all coins equally weighted along the front to back axis?  Is there a bias in terms of whether people initiate the flip with heads or tails up?  Does the technique of flipping affect the outcome?  All plausible questions.

If it were true that a coin favors Heads by 50.5% of the time, I would have thought that to be common knowledge.  Since I have never seen that claim before, it makes me curious.  What is the empirical reality?  

Nate Silver is a pretty careful writer, so I am surprised at what I find.  It seems he is accidentally mischaracterizing the research.  

As far as I can tell, the research is answering a slightly different question than that which Silver asks.

Silver is asking something along the lines of:

Given a real coin, what percentage of the time will it land Heads?  And the answer according to him is 50.5%

The research seems to be:

For any coin that is tossed vigorously and high, and caught in midair (rather than bouncing on the ground), what is the probability that it will land with the same face as it was launched?  The answer is that there is a 50.8% chance that such a coin will be caught with the same face showing as launched.  

That is a reasonably distinct difference.  Maybe Silver has better sources that answer his question but his links go to research that is answering the second question.  

The original research back in 2007 was Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss done by Persi Diaconis, Susan Holmes and Richard Montgomery and then further reported in The Fifty-One Percent Solution.   Further research, Flipped coins found not to be as fair as thought by Bob Yirka, backed the original Diaconis findings.  Further reporting in Scientists Destroy Illusion That Coin Toss Flips Are 50–50 by Shi En Kim.  

The original research used a mechanical flipping device while the 2023 research used humans.  Different methodologies, similar results.

Whatever the currency, if you can see the face and call that before it being flipped, you will be correct 51 percent of the time.  

Which is interesting knowledge but with limited utility.  

For day-to-day decisions, coin tosses are as good as random because a 1 percent bias isn't perceptible with just a few coin flips, says statistician Amelia McNamara of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, who wasn't involved in the new research. Still, the study's conclusions should dispel any lingering doubt regarding the coin flip's slender bias. “This is great empirical evidence backing that up,” she says.

There is a bias with flipped coins and it is 51% towards the top surface when flipped.  However, given that the face is often not visible, that the coin is not always caught in the air, and other minor factors, the actual bias will fluctuate unpredictably and therefore the flipped coin is functionally random.  The bias is less than the operational noise in the process.

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Konjikido in Snow, Hiraizumi, 1957 by Kawase Hasui

Konjikido in Snow, Hiraizumi, 1957 by Kawase Hasui






























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