Thursday, 6 June 2013
St Martin's Fistula
I've written about St Martin before, so the post-title may lead you to expect something about religious relics - St Lucy's eyes or St Agatha's breasts or 4000 pieces of The True Cross. But you'd be wrong - we're in medical history territory today because it's the 191st anniversary of Alexis St Martins' accident.
He does not get the press of Phineas Gage, who also survived a catastrophic accidental injury, but Alexis St Martin helped medical science in parallel but equally valuable ways. Phineas Gage as any fule kno was working on the railroad all the live long day working on the railroad to pass the time away when he dropped an iron tamping iron too briskly into a hole containing blasting powder, which expoded and blew the 6kg iron bar through his left cheek and out the top of his head to land 25m meters behind him. The story of how this accident contributed to our understanding of brain function and the seat of emotions is for another place and another time.
Because today, is Alexis' special day. St Martin was a coureur de bois who in 1822 was accidentally gut-shot on Mackinac Island in what is now Michigan (joined the US in 1837). An American army surgeon at the nearby army post, patched him up and expected him to die of septicemia over the next few days but the 20 yo St Martin was well 'ard and lived for another 58 years. The gunshot turned everything inside out, as you may imagine, but when everything settled down and healed up, the skin had bonded with the lining of the stomach to create a permanent gastric fistula exposing the stomach contents to the outside. In particular it exposed the contents to the intrusive investigations of William Beaumont, the surgeon. Beaumont persuaded the illiterate Québécois to sign on as his servant and for the next decade required him to chop wood and fetch water and "lie down on this table while I dangle this piece of mutton into your inside-outside while taking notes".
Wednesday, 5 June 2013
Enough, already
Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strip, surfaced on the blogosphere last night. I was effectively MIA for the whole of the 1980s. In Graduate School from 1979-1983, so intent on The Work that I didn't see direct sunlight between Jan and Mar 1979 because I was living in one cellar and working in another and the working day was loonng. In 1983 I made a rather abrupt transition between Graduate School in Boston and my first proper job in England - one of the few transitions in my life that hasn't involved an extended period "resting". Then it was gallop gallop until I retired in 1989 and <poof> the 80s had fled past like frightened and ungraspable sheep. So there are whole tranches of popular 1980s culture that I just missed: including Calvin & Hobbes.
So I was surprised and delirah to find out a little more about the life and times of Bill Watterson. He had been drawing cartoons all through his childhood and as a student but it wasn't until 1985 when he was 27 that he first dreamt up and drew Calvin & Hobbes. They say (I can't say, I was off-planet for the 80s) that this cartoon strip was a raging success, syndicated to dozens (that's 200 dozens = 2400) of newspapers and covering a range of idiosyncratic themes - whatever he felt like, whatever was driving him that day - a bit like a blog hmmmm? "It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves." he said.
Then almost exactly 11 years after he started the strip, he quit. Announced in November that he was doing his last C&W cartoon on New Year's Eve, wrote a letter to the editors of all the newspapers who'd been publishing his coherent exposure of the soul of one artist, drew the valedictory page that is cited at the top of this post and moved on to paint other stuff - woodland landscapes by one account. He disappeared off the celeb circuit at the same time, gave no interviews, tolerated no merchandising and more or less out-Salingered JD Salinger.
I've come across this sort of thing before. We were on vacation in Almuñécar about 20 years ago and dropped into visit a pal of The Beloved, who had escaped the drizzly isles and settled his family in Ojén where he pursued a hard-tack existence for his Art. He earned a few shillings as a jobbing journalist for an English language newspaper in Malaga but that was just for food (for the kids - he didn't rate food much). The extraordinary thing for me was that he able to paint lovely landscapes, lively streetscapes and photo-realistic portraits which he could sell for better money than writing obituaries of ex-pats for ex-pats. He just couldn't bear to prostitute his art unless the family was, if not starving, at least fed up with bread and garlic soup again.
All he wanted to do, when we met him, was paint market women. Fat, black-clad, with expressive hands and loud voices, these ladies would never appear on a chocolate-box but their vitality fascinated him. He'd been working for several years trying to render on canvas, or on paper, or the inside of cardboard packing cartons the essence of the commercial transaction. He would start awake in the middle of the night wrenched from a creative dream to take up a brush. As he described it, he said that he was close to resolving the task the gods had set him so long before. Japanese culture was wholly alien to him - his native archipelago was on the other side of the world - but I had this image of a zen-master making (after years of trying too hard) the perfect brush stroke and embracing satori. He'd been there before and he knew that once he'd knobbled his crones and their fantastical hands, he'd sink back exhausted until weeks or months later something else would drive him to the edge of madness.
I believe it's good for scientists to change tacks more often than they do and I'm a serial retiree myself. Any time I spent more than a decade in the same field, I got tired, fractious and unproductive at the back end of the period.
So I was surprised and delirah to find out a little more about the life and times of Bill Watterson. He had been drawing cartoons all through his childhood and as a student but it wasn't until 1985 when he was 27 that he first dreamt up and drew Calvin & Hobbes. They say (I can't say, I was off-planet for the 80s) that this cartoon strip was a raging success, syndicated to dozens (that's 200 dozens = 2400) of newspapers and covering a range of idiosyncratic themes - whatever he felt like, whatever was driving him that day - a bit like a blog hmmmm? "It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves." he said.
Then almost exactly 11 years after he started the strip, he quit. Announced in November that he was doing his last C&W cartoon on New Year's Eve, wrote a letter to the editors of all the newspapers who'd been publishing his coherent exposure of the soul of one artist, drew the valedictory page that is cited at the top of this post and moved on to paint other stuff - woodland landscapes by one account. He disappeared off the celeb circuit at the same time, gave no interviews, tolerated no merchandising and more or less out-Salingered JD Salinger.
I like that, it shows integrity.
All he wanted to do, when we met him, was paint market women. Fat, black-clad, with expressive hands and loud voices, these ladies would never appear on a chocolate-box but their vitality fascinated him. He'd been working for several years trying to render on canvas, or on paper, or the inside of cardboard packing cartons the essence of the commercial transaction. He would start awake in the middle of the night wrenched from a creative dream to take up a brush. As he described it, he said that he was close to resolving the task the gods had set him so long before. Japanese culture was wholly alien to him - his native archipelago was on the other side of the world - but I had this image of a zen-master making (after years of trying too hard) the perfect brush stroke and embracing satori. He'd been there before and he knew that once he'd knobbled his crones and their fantastical hands, he'd sink back exhausted until weeks or months later something else would drive him to the edge of madness.
I like that, it shows integrity.
I believe it's good for scientists to change tacks more often than they do and I'm a serial retiree myself. Any time I spent more than a decade in the same field, I got tired, fractious and unproductive at the back end of the period.
Retire early and retire often!
Tuesday, 4 June 2013
Bob the Gypsy
If I am to continue with a bit of light mentoring of the yoof at CodoDojoColo, I have to get myself Garda-vetted. There is a unit of the Gardai whose task is to root out those whose past renders them unsuitable for the present company of minors. It cannot be a blanket ban on anyone who has a criminal record because a bit of larceny or drunk driving (however reprehensible that may may be) should not preclude you from helping youngsters become better programmers and better people. So I hope I get my appro but the lads at Vetting Central are going to have their work cut out to follow up all the data that I have been required to enter on the form. Jakers, I had difficulty trying to be a scrupulously and completely honest citizen on this question:
Please state all addresses from year of birth to present date
with lines for up to 22 places you've lived. I needed 24 slots because for most of my childhood I was a navy brat - changing homes about every 18 months as my father got new postings. I also needed help from my aged mother because I couldn't remember the street in Kingston, Ontario where we spend a year when I was rising 3. Even she couldn't recall the street although she knew it was #11, in the oldest part of Kingston and opposite a Park that was flooded for skating in the Winter. With that much info and google maps I was able to make a pretty well informed guess about the street. Google Maps wasn't a lot of help tracking down 11 Harold Terrace, Dover, England: a dreadful kip that my poor mother and her three weans had to stay for several months before the Canada gig. There has been a fair bit of urban renewal in the East End of Dover and I'm supposing that the whole Terrace was bulldozed decades ago as a health hazard. The same fate has evidently befallen the wholly memorable Cardiff address - 69 Cistern Street - where my father-'t-law lived with his parents and 12 siblings in the 1930s.
So what's the point? I suggest that the "from year of birth" part of this question on the form is officiously intrusive, difficult to complete and so has the effect of encouraging dishonesty - if you can't remember the house number or the postcode it's tempting to erase that part of your life and tell the vetters that you lived longer in the previous address. Investigating the 'investigations' that me and my pals carried out aged 8 is so silly that it calls into question the efficacy and even the desirability of whole vetting process. When you have urban dual carriageways with absurdly low speed limits it encourages folks to break the limit there and by thin-end-of-wedge extension to break the limit and the law elsewhere.
The silver lining of this whole process is that I have been nostalgically stalking the places where I grew up. The pink X marks the spot where, in about 1962, I came off my bicycle head-first over the handlebars and filled my knee with gravel on landing. One piece of that gravel surfaced several years later like the whoosits from Alien. The house on the extreme right is where I was taken to be first-aided by Mrs Thwaites, a trained nurse and mother of a ferocious girl named Siobhan whom everyone except her parents called The Battle-Axe. There you are, that's of no conceivable interest to anyone except me, my sibs and the poor feller who married Siobhan.
Please state all addresses from year of birth to present date
| House No | Street | Town | County | Post Code | Country | YearFrom | Year To |
So what's the point? I suggest that the "from year of birth" part of this question on the form is officiously intrusive, difficult to complete and so has the effect of encouraging dishonesty - if you can't remember the house number or the postcode it's tempting to erase that part of your life and tell the vetters that you lived longer in the previous address. Investigating the 'investigations' that me and my pals carried out aged 8 is so silly that it calls into question the efficacy and even the desirability of whole vetting process. When you have urban dual carriageways with absurdly low speed limits it encourages folks to break the limit there and by thin-end-of-wedge extension to break the limit and the law elsewhere.
Monday, 3 June 2013
Go slow go mall
For the monoglots among us the title is a very clever attempt to meld The Irish with Béarla - go mall = slowly. Today, everyone is being urged to ease off o the go go go pedal on the collective return home after the bank holiday weekend. Some 20 years ago, when we lived Nort'side beyond Dublin, we decided to drop down to visit the family on the Waterford coast. Waterford City is just about 100 miles (160km) from Dublin and the journey could typically take 3 hours to complete. So we got up really early on the Saturday morning and set off before the traffic - the Irish are not collectively 'spring out of the bed of a weekend morning' people. But somewhere out on the Naas Road, our old Vauxhall Astra started to peck and stutter.
By
the time with got to Carlow at 0730hrs we felt that we could/should go
no further without an intervention. So we waited for the Opel garage to
open, but were told that they weren't expecting any mechanics and perhaps we should try John McCartney down by the fire-station. John had been open since 0830hrs as he was six days a week and he had the bonnet open in a jiffy. He reckoned that we were getting air in the fuel line (there was a strange beige froth over the carburettor), that we'd be fine until we got home on Monday, so long as "we took it handy". By that he meant not more than 50mph (80km/h in modern-speak), especially if the road was bumpy.
That all made eminent sense to me because 10 years before I'd been at a scientific meeting in Montego Bay, Jamaica and with a couple of the other delegates decided to catch a minibus to Kingston to see something of real Jamaica. We stood outside the hotel complex and stuck out a hand until a minibus with 8 seats pulled up. There were already 10 people inside excluding the driver and we picked up a mother and her teenage son further down the road. The driver was taking passengers but no prisoners and he fairly hammered along the road regardless of the ropey surface. Well he had frothed up his fuel lines and we had an unscheduled stop opposite a roadside bar, where we had time for a Red Stripe while the bus problem resolved itself. The next leg of the journey was up-and-up over the jungley hump in the island's centre where, with the spring-flattening payload and the hills, gravity forced us to slow down.
Fast-forward to 1993 . . . we closed our bonnet, offered Mr McCartney our heartfelt thanks and folding money, which he refused, and resumed our Southward way "taking it handy". We arrived in time for elevensies. On the way home the following evening, we religiously stayed below the 50mph threshold. The traffic got thicker as it got later and nearer to Dublin but we motored along steadily even when there was open road ahead of us. The whole journey took but 10 minutes longer than it normally did. We didn't worry about such things so much back then, but we surely saved money on fuel as well. It was a surprising revelation: going hell-for-leather on those pre-motorway Irish roads only got you quicker up behind some old dear in an Austin A30 and unable to overtake her for 15 miles because the Waterford Road (which was in the slow process of becoming known as the N9) was so winkly.
So, just like in those bygone days: Take It Handy this evening.
That all made eminent sense to me because 10 years before I'd been at a scientific meeting in Montego Bay, Jamaica and with a couple of the other delegates decided to catch a minibus to Kingston to see something of real Jamaica. We stood outside the hotel complex and stuck out a hand until a minibus with 8 seats pulled up. There were already 10 people inside excluding the driver and we picked up a mother and her teenage son further down the road. The driver was taking passengers but no prisoners and he fairly hammered along the road regardless of the ropey surface. Well he had frothed up his fuel lines and we had an unscheduled stop opposite a roadside bar, where we had time for a Red Stripe while the bus problem resolved itself. The next leg of the journey was up-and-up over the jungley hump in the island's centre where, with the spring-flattening payload and the hills, gravity forced us to slow down.
Fast-forward to 1993 . . . we closed our bonnet, offered Mr McCartney our heartfelt thanks and folding money, which he refused, and resumed our Southward way "taking it handy". We arrived in time for elevensies. On the way home the following evening, we religiously stayed below the 50mph threshold. The traffic got thicker as it got later and nearer to Dublin but we motored along steadily even when there was open road ahead of us. The whole journey took but 10 minutes longer than it normally did. We didn't worry about such things so much back then, but we surely saved money on fuel as well. It was a surprising revelation: going hell-for-leather on those pre-motorway Irish roads only got you quicker up behind some old dear in an Austin A30 and unable to overtake her for 15 miles because the Waterford Road (which was in the slow process of becoming known as the N9) was so winkly.
So, just like in those bygone days: Take It Handy this evening.
Sunday, 2 June 2013
Summer Books 2013
It's June, it's coming up for Summer, so maybe I can suggest some books to read while waiting for it to arrive? None of these books were published this week, nor yet the week before but they're all in English, so you don't need to master Sanskrit or Latin to appreciate these antient classics. And if any of these come at you, dear reader, from left field, then so much the better!
The Tangled Wing: biological constraints on the human spirit by Mel Konner. I bought this 2nd hand hardback in graduate school for its subtitle. Konner was one of the Harvard team who , with Marjorie “Nisa” Shostak, went to the Kalahari to study all aspects of life among the hunter-gathering !ung san. He was particularly interested in child development and years later published nice book based on a PBS TV series called Childhood. TW deals with aspects of the human condition – there are chapters called Lust, Hate, Anger, Gluttony – and shines the light of evolution to show how 500,000 years of living a hand-to-mouth existence in a small groups has shaped (hard- or at least firm-wired) how we are today and how and why we respond to situations the way we do.
Periodic Table by Primo Levi. Like the Tangled Wing in its one word chapter headings – Gold, Lead, Cerium – each element serving as a hook to hang a tale: some fictional but many from Levi’s own life in the chemical laboratory, in wartime Italy and in Auschwitz. The Spring, I plucked a brilliant anecdote from this book in one of my classes at The Institute and after class, one of my students confessed she had an unread copy at home. I urged her to read it and the next week she said she was half way through . . . and stoked.
On Food and Cooking: an encyclopedia of kitchen science culture and history by Harold McGee. If you ever asked why the quantities of a recipe are given just so but wondered what the allowable variation is, then this is The Book. Why a touch of copper improves but a trace of fat destroys meringues; why kneading is necessary; how many sorts of edible emulsion there are and how to create them. Illustrated with informative pictures and amusing anecdote.
Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. I heard about this at an evening seminar series on teaching and learning held TCDin the 1970s. Went out and bought it (I still bought new books in 1974) the next day. More than any one book, this pointed me at home education and critical thinking, although the process was 25 years in the gestation. Any other book by Neil Postman is worth a gander if you want to re-think your unconsidered certainties – Amusing Ourselves to Death for a start.
The Greeks by HDF Kitto. It you read this book, you won’t have to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. All that philosophy and practical hints about how to think and how to decide what’s important is here laid out by Kitto without the distressing descent into madness and without all the motorcycle maintenance. The Greeks is a hymn to the apogee of western civilisation: supported by slaves dying in horrendous circumstances in silver-mines it must be said, but nevertheless it gives us, even 2.5 millennia later, some idea of how to live:
The Tangled Wing: biological constraints on the human spirit by Mel Konner. I bought this 2nd hand hardback in graduate school for its subtitle. Konner was one of the Harvard team who , with Marjorie “Nisa” Shostak, went to the Kalahari to study all aspects of life among the hunter-gathering !ung san. He was particularly interested in child development and years later published nice book based on a PBS TV series called Childhood. TW deals with aspects of the human condition – there are chapters called Lust, Hate, Anger, Gluttony – and shines the light of evolution to show how 500,000 years of living a hand-to-mouth existence in a small groups has shaped (hard- or at least firm-wired) how we are today and how and why we respond to situations the way we do.
Periodic Table by Primo Levi. Like the Tangled Wing in its one word chapter headings – Gold, Lead, Cerium – each element serving as a hook to hang a tale: some fictional but many from Levi’s own life in the chemical laboratory, in wartime Italy and in Auschwitz. The Spring, I plucked a brilliant anecdote from this book in one of my classes at The Institute and after class, one of my students confessed she had an unread copy at home. I urged her to read it and the next week she said she was half way through . . . and stoked.
On Food and Cooking: an encyclopedia of kitchen science culture and history by Harold McGee. If you ever asked why the quantities of a recipe are given just so but wondered what the allowable variation is, then this is The Book. Why a touch of copper improves but a trace of fat destroys meringues; why kneading is necessary; how many sorts of edible emulsion there are and how to create them. Illustrated with informative pictures and amusing anecdote.
Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. I heard about this at an evening seminar series on teaching and learning held TCDin the 1970s. Went out and bought it (I still bought new books in 1974) the next day. More than any one book, this pointed me at home education and critical thinking, although the process was 25 years in the gestation. Any other book by Neil Postman is worth a gander if you want to re-think your unconsidered certainties – Amusing Ourselves to Death for a start.
The Greeks by HDF Kitto. It you read this book, you won’t have to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. All that philosophy and practical hints about how to think and how to decide what’s important is here laid out by Kitto without the distressing descent into madness and without all the motorcycle maintenance. The Greeks is a hymn to the apogee of western civilisation: supported by slaves dying in horrendous circumstances in silver-mines it must be said, but nevertheless it gives us, even 2.5 millennia later, some idea of how to live:
“Their
ideal was not a specifically knightly idea, like Chivalry or Love; they called
it aretê - another typically Greek word. When we meet it in Plato we translate
it 'Virtue' and consequently miss all the flavour of it. 'Virtue', at least
in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; aretê on the other hand is
used indifferently in all the categories and means simply excellence. It may be
limited of course by its context; the aretê of a race-horse is speed, of a
cart-horse strength. If it used, in a general context, of a man it will connote
excellence in the ways in which a man can be excellent - morally,
intellectually, physically, practically.
Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter,
a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who
knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send, and
he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a
young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing,
wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears
by a song. He is in fact an excellent all rounder; he has surpassing aretê.”
That'll see us through till Labor Day and still leave time to cut the grass, catch some rays and have a few barbecues.
An Educational Philosophy
Uh-mmm and a little bit more.
Once Ed was able to like himself he was released from the secret prison of self-contempt. Then he did not have to prove superiority any more by the ordinary methods, including giving. He could receive and understand and be truly glad, not competitively glad. Ed’s gift for receiving made him a great teacher. Children brought shells to him and he gave them information about the shells. And they had to learn before they could tell him.
In conversation you found yourself telling him things – thoughts, hypotheses, conjectures – and you found a pleased surprise at yourself for having arrived at something you were not aware that you could think or know. It gave you such a good sense of participation with him that you could present him with this wonder.
Then Ed would say, “Yes, that’s so. That’s the way it might be and besides -- “ and he would illuminate it but not so that he took it away from you. He simply accepted it.
Although his creativeness lay in receiving, that does not mean that he kept things as property. When you had something from him it was not something that was his that he tore away from himself. When you had a thought from him, or a piece of music or twenty dollars or a steak dinner, it was not his – it was yours already, and his was only the head and hand that steadied it in position towards you. Association with him was deep participation with him, never competition.
I wish we could all be so. If we could learn even a little to like ourselves, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away. Maybe we would not have to hurt each other just to keep our little ego-chins above water.”
And a shorter follow-on quote from Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner about another inspiring book.
There are several things that we want to say about this stunning piece of prose; the first, that it is stunning, and that we understand thoroughly your impulse to abandon the book before you and seek out Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Five days and three books later….
The reason why we set up HEN was that The Gu'ment was pushing through the Education Welfare Act to regulate non-school attendance and we (there was an above average count of Birkenstocks, pony-tails, suckling mothers of toddlers, and ricecakes at any of our meetings) were concerned that our kids would be treated the same as truants from the housing projects. The right of Irish children to receive their Constitutional right to "a certain minimal education" was vindicated by the National Educational Welfare Board and the new Act obliged us all to register our intention to home-educate and suffer an inspection. We hid out in the mountains for 10 years but eventually we grassed ourselves up to the Feds and registered with the NEWB. We felt a certain amount of trepidation at the prospect of the National Educational Welfare Officer coming to visit.
EWO thinks:
Where is the education here?
Curriculum? [X]
Syllabus? [X]
Timetable? [X]
History? [X]
Geography? [X].
The children don’t seem to have a maths lesson from one week’s end to the next. I grant that they can read pretty well. No hand-writing classes though: the children seem to use capital and lower case letters completely indiscriminately. Is that an f or a t? They can hum Amhrán na bhFiann but they only know some of the words…harumph…and the parents are no better.
And lickety-spit we’d be up before the beak.
So what did go on educationally upside our mountain for 17 years before the girls left for their own bright future? The label might be
Autonomous Learning (AL)
Autonomous Learning with Books (ALB)
Reading at the Dinner Table (RDT)
Would you Please STOP Reading at the Dinner Table (XRDT).
The acronyms lend a wool-pulling patina of distinction, authority and erudition (DAE) to a process that had a lot in common with an ordinary hoover or sponge.
The stuff that was being soaked up in our house was so extensive, so eclectic, so extraordinary that it would be a fatuous impertinence for me to have tried to direct it. I try* but it is so very difficult for me to give (information) without strings in the way that Ed Ricketts was able to do. Our children are such sociable folks that inevitably they would try to draw me into their conversations with their universe of knowledge. They taught themselves to read, there were skip-loads of books in the house, but it was often easier to ask The Da than lug a heavy book off the shelf. So my educational ‘philosophy’ was to give them the answer (if I thought I knew it, begob) – and a little bit more. But (try to) STOP before their eyes rolled up and over their heads and settled on their shoulder-blades. Because they are sociable folk and rather tolerant, they would oftentimes listen if I got enthusiastic about something, which may or may not have stemmed from a question or statement from one of them. Because they have rather finely tuned crap detectors, they were quick to see the difference between “this is something I know that is really neat” and “this is something that you should know”.
It’s a risky strategy this home education, and it’s a strategy rather than something tactical or short-term. Many's the time we'd wake up in the middle of the night worrying that we might have failed to do the best for our children by indulging ourselves in this minority experiment. But then, it would be light. The birds would be singing. The girls would awake in their beds but with their heads invisible, one behind Asterix the Gaul and the other behind Fun to Learn German. 0930hrs? It must be a European Studies class.
Footnotes, jokes, addenda:
* Which reminds me of the old joke (eeee the old ones are the best ones). Johnny comes home from school with his first report card. “Trying” writes the teacher, and the parents are moderately pleased. The second report “Still trying”, is likewise greeted with equanimity if not enthusiasm. The third report, however, is “Very Trying”.
Saturday, 1 June 2013
Drunkard's Walk - reviewed
The Drunkard’s Walk: how randomness rules our lives by Leonard Mlodinow. Vintage Books 2009. Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/drunwalk.
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” Mark Twain
The day after I finished The Drunkard’s Walk, we were driving along in the car and I asked the family if they had any idea of how many people died in the events of 9/11. The Beloved was the only one prepared to play and her estimation of 2000-and-something was close enough to merit a silver star. But I then took a leaf (p.159 to be exact) out of Mlodinow’s book to suggest that the Wikipedia answer of 2,974+19+1 (the last as the result of lung damage from dust inhalation) was too low by about 1000. Because fear of flying was being given extra attention in the 2001 weeks following 11 September, LOTS more Americans decided to drive long distances to go about their business rather than take the plane. Accordingly, there was an excess of about 1000 road-deaths in the following months compared to the same period in 2000. The Beloved’s response to this piece of information was something to this effect: “You wonk, only someone detached from reality would think in those terms AND go on to make the calculations”. And my rhetorical riposte was that there were 1000 Americans who’d be alive today if they were willing to do the math rather than drift through life buffeted by emotive responses to a troubling and potentially dangerous world. As it happens the girls were booked to fly to London on 14/09/2001 to celebrate Dau.II’s 6th birthday in Legoland. We did briefly consider wimping out and cancelling the trip but they went and had Legoland almost entirely to themselves – no queues, great fun, not to be missed.
Here’s one example of this book's embrace of the counter-intuitive: in 1989, Mlodinow applied for life insurance and was asked to take a blood test (for HIV). A week later he was refused cover and later told by his GP that it was 999/1000 certain he’d be dead within the decade. The doctor had reasoned from this statistic: the HIV test shows positive when the blood is in reality not infected in only 1 case out of 1000. But this confounds two probabilities: a) the chance of testing positive if you’re not HIV-positive and b) the chance of not being HIV-positive if you test positive. They sound like they’re mirrors of each other but they’re not. Mlodinow is after all American, white, heterosexual and doesn’t share needles. In that cohort the rate of HIV is about 1 in 10,000. The rate of false positive is, as above, 1 in 1000 or 10 in 10,000. So if you test 10,000 such blokes you’ll reveal one bona fide HIV carrier, 10 healthy men who will have difficulty getting insured and 9,989 who are genuinely not carrying the virus. All things being equal, therefore, if you test positive you’re ten times more likely to be HIV-clear than HIV-carrier. So don’t rush off to get measured for your coffin.
Mlodinow uses similar reasoning to demolish the case against Sally Clark who in 1999 was banged up in chokey convicted of murdering her two children after they had succumbed to SIDS. The prosecution in that case had called as an expert witness a consultant, but mathematically incompetent, paediatrician who calculated that the chance of two babies dying of SIDS was 73 million to 1 and the jury had been led to conclude that therefore the most reasonable explanation was murder. Subsequent statistical analysis indicated that as infanticide is even rarer in our society than SIDS, it was 9 times more likely that the unfortunate children had been victims of cot-death and eventually their mother was released. And if you want it in pictures there is an excellent TED talk by Peter Donnelly about the case: http://tinyurl.com/notsids.
Here’s another weird finding. The high-point of the baseball calendar is an event called the World Series. Americans are endearing that way, as if baseball is played in Germany, Botswana and China. This championship requires that two very good teams compete against each other until one or other has won 4 games. The mathematics indicates that if, in some cosmic sense, one team is better than the other in the ratio 55:45, nevertheless the weaker team will win the cup/pennon/crown 4 times out of ten. It also suggests that you’d need a series of 269 games (and they say cricket is slow) to achieve any statistical certainty about which team really was better.
Most importantly for RecEiression Inc., Mlodinow reviews some of the compendious literature on the psychological baggage that we’ve been carrying around since the Paleolithic. A major drive is that we are predisposed to make sense of the world by maintaining, almost at any cost, the illusion that we are in control, so we are adept in finding patterns, particularly positive results, in random data. Mlodinow shows that, although financial fund managers believe they are entitled to a hefty fee, they are really no better at spotting winning stocks than a fly landing on the listings in the Financial Times. This has an all too relevant bearing on the zany salaries that are (still!) paid to banking executives and other nabobs of the Irish state. If you could pick from a pool of executives who would accept a salary of, say, 50% of what the chairman of Any Other Bank considered his due, you’d probably do no worse by your share-holders.
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” Mark Twain
The day after I finished The Drunkard’s Walk, we were driving along in the car and I asked the family if they had any idea of how many people died in the events of 9/11. The Beloved was the only one prepared to play and her estimation of 2000-and-something was close enough to merit a silver star. But I then took a leaf (p.159 to be exact) out of Mlodinow’s book to suggest that the Wikipedia answer of 2,974+19+1 (the last as the result of lung damage from dust inhalation) was too low by about 1000. Because fear of flying was being given extra attention in the 2001 weeks following 11 September, LOTS more Americans decided to drive long distances to go about their business rather than take the plane. Accordingly, there was an excess of about 1000 road-deaths in the following months compared to the same period in 2000. The Beloved’s response to this piece of information was something to this effect: “You wonk, only someone detached from reality would think in those terms AND go on to make the calculations”. And my rhetorical riposte was that there were 1000 Americans who’d be alive today if they were willing to do the math rather than drift through life buffeted by emotive responses to a troubling and potentially dangerous world. As it happens the girls were booked to fly to London on 14/09/2001 to celebrate Dau.II’s 6th birthday in Legoland. We did briefly consider wimping out and cancelling the trip but they went and had Legoland almost entirely to themselves – no queues, great fun, not to be missed.
Here’s one example of this book's embrace of the counter-intuitive: in 1989, Mlodinow applied for life insurance and was asked to take a blood test (for HIV). A week later he was refused cover and later told by his GP that it was 999/1000 certain he’d be dead within the decade. The doctor had reasoned from this statistic: the HIV test shows positive when the blood is in reality not infected in only 1 case out of 1000. But this confounds two probabilities: a) the chance of testing positive if you’re not HIV-positive and b) the chance of not being HIV-positive if you test positive. They sound like they’re mirrors of each other but they’re not. Mlodinow is after all American, white, heterosexual and doesn’t share needles. In that cohort the rate of HIV is about 1 in 10,000. The rate of false positive is, as above, 1 in 1000 or 10 in 10,000. So if you test 10,000 such blokes you’ll reveal one bona fide HIV carrier, 10 healthy men who will have difficulty getting insured and 9,989 who are genuinely not carrying the virus. All things being equal, therefore, if you test positive you’re ten times more likely to be HIV-clear than HIV-carrier. So don’t rush off to get measured for your coffin.
Mlodinow uses similar reasoning to demolish the case against Sally Clark who in 1999 was banged up in chokey convicted of murdering her two children after they had succumbed to SIDS. The prosecution in that case had called as an expert witness a consultant, but mathematically incompetent, paediatrician who calculated that the chance of two babies dying of SIDS was 73 million to 1 and the jury had been led to conclude that therefore the most reasonable explanation was murder. Subsequent statistical analysis indicated that as infanticide is even rarer in our society than SIDS, it was 9 times more likely that the unfortunate children had been victims of cot-death and eventually their mother was released. And if you want it in pictures there is an excellent TED talk by Peter Donnelly about the case: http://tinyurl.com/notsids.
Here’s another weird finding. The high-point of the baseball calendar is an event called the World Series. Americans are endearing that way, as if baseball is played in Germany, Botswana and China. This championship requires that two very good teams compete against each other until one or other has won 4 games. The mathematics indicates that if, in some cosmic sense, one team is better than the other in the ratio 55:45, nevertheless the weaker team will win the cup/pennon/crown 4 times out of ten. It also suggests that you’d need a series of 269 games (and they say cricket is slow) to achieve any statistical certainty about which team really was better.
Most importantly for RecEiression Inc., Mlodinow reviews some of the compendious literature on the psychological baggage that we’ve been carrying around since the Paleolithic. A major drive is that we are predisposed to make sense of the world by maintaining, almost at any cost, the illusion that we are in control, so we are adept in finding patterns, particularly positive results, in random data. Mlodinow shows that, although financial fund managers believe they are entitled to a hefty fee, they are really no better at spotting winning stocks than a fly landing on the listings in the Financial Times. This has an all too relevant bearing on the zany salaries that are (still!) paid to banking executives and other nabobs of the Irish state. If you could pick from a pool of executives who would accept a salary of, say, 50% of what the chairman of Any Other Bank considered his due, you’d probably do no worse by your share-holders.
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