Everyday Freethought

There is a monthly “Skeptic Salon” run by the Chicago Skeptics, aka a book club. This month’s selection is How To Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff, 142 pages, written in 1954, copyright renewed in 1982. What follows is a short summary.

He talks about the difference between mean (average) and median. He talks about sample response (Yale salaries: Perhaps those who were poor did not respond, thus lifting the reported average to be greater than the reported average), is the sample big enough, changing the axis of charts (starting at 90 instead of 0 for changes between 95 and 100 can make the changes look much larger than they are) to mislead (intentionally or otherwise), using figures to distort: if b is two times as big as A, then the image for B should only be twice as tall or twice as wide. If you make it twice as tall AND twice as wide, you are making B appear about 4 to 6 times larger, and the post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy.

The last chapter he gives hints on how to spot bad or misleading statistics. It is almost a small skeptic primer.

• Who Says So: look for bias from whoever gives you the stat: conscious bias, unconscious bias
• How Does He Know: A survey was sent to a large number of companies, but only 14% responded. The survey was trying to determine if the firms were price gouging. A sample could be biased. It could be too small.
• Did Somebody Change the Subject: Learn to distinguish between the raw figure and the conclusion. More cases of a disease does not mean more people are getting it. It may simply have been misdiagnosed in the past, or people had it but died of something else
• Does It Make Sense: Social Security makes no sense. It is set up to give benefits when people reach the age of 65, but the average life expectency (at the time) was only 63. Nobody will live long enough to get the benefits. Also: Trends will not continue forever as they have in the past: TV ownership was increasing 10,000% from 1947 to 1952. That cannot continue forever.

Image from Wikimedia

Last night I watched an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise titled “Future Tense.” I think it is one of the best episodes of any Star Trek series that I have seen.

I watched the original series and saw all the TOS films. I have seen almost every episode of The Next Generation, and I have seen all of the TNG films except the last one. I have only seen about a third of Deep Space Nine, and I have never watched a full episode of Voyager. I have never owned a television, so I am slacking on my Star Trek viewing. Perhaps someday the Star Trek videos site will have all the episodes from every series available.

I have gathered that a lot of Star Trek fans do not like Enterprise. But do you really think that every episode of TOS was a winner? Also, I think that if Gene Roddenberry had not been involved with TNG for the first few seasons it would not have lasted as long as it did. I think it started to get good in season 3. Deep Space Nine also took a while to get off the ground.

I like Enterprise. One episode I did not like is “A Night In Sick Bay“, although the dream sequence with Pothos’ funeral was hilarious.

Off the top of my head, my favorite TOS episodes are “Balance of Terror” and “The Enterprise Incident“. My favorite TNG episodes are “The Best of Both Worlds“  (I think just about all the Borg episodes were good), “Yesterday’s Enterprise“, “Booby Trap“, “All Good Things…“  and “Parallels“. I also liked “Masks“, although I know most people did not. Nothing wrong with taking risks.

If you are going to jump into “Future Tense”, you should probably watch all the episodes about the Temporal Cold War.

Enterprise does have the same prequel paradox the Star Wars prequel trilogy had: It takes place in an earlier time and all the technology is supposed to be less advanced, yet all the technology looks more advanced.

Image from Memory Alpha, copyright owned by CBS,  presumed to be allowed under Fair Use

On 2006-04-18, I attended a lecture at DePaul by James Kunstler, an author and podcaster who has written on Peak Oil. I found out about it after I started attending the now-defunct Chicago Peak Oil Awareness Group.

I kept my notes. Each paragraph is a page from my notes. I have chosen to type them in as I wrote them, so some of the sentences will be a bit choppy.

Contributes to NYTimes Sunday magazine. Stocks up today, oil prices up to. Mostly: implications of peak oil. What are we going to do? Hubbert: Made predictions in the 1950s, said USA would peak in 1970s, was laughed at. 1973: Foreign countries take over, 1980s: OPEC loses leverage. Long Emergency: Includes climate change (like Katrina). Oil and insurance companies are rethinking Gulf of Mexico. We must make other arrangements. There will be no “hydrogen economy”. Alternative energies cannot run WalMart, Disney World and highways. “Teh Heroic suburbs”. Cheney said the American way of life is non-negotiable. This is a false message; things will be negotiated for us.

Some say subrubia is okay because people like it and people choose it. The question will not be what do we like but what is possible. Suburbia: cheap energy, cheap land. We put our wealth into a way of life with no future. Suburbia is “entropy made visible”. Dirty secret: basis of American economy is the housing bubble. The mortgage mill industry has replaced actual industry. We have put so much into this; the psychology of previous investment produces denial behavior. America’s leading religion: worship of unearned riches, getting something for nothing. Our society wishes for rescue remedies.

Gambling is reparations for Anerican Indians. Technology != energy. Kunstler went to Google. Lots of games, snack stations, executives and engineers dressed like skateboarders. It was an infantile company. pay attention to “tech == energy”. Airlines is the first industry that will go down. We will use what we can, but not the way that people think, perhaps on a neighborhood/district basis. We will live more locally. No more WalMart, or 300 mile Caesar salad. “Rocky Mountain Institute”: trying to produce a hybrid car. That promotes the idea that we can be a car-centric society. Social implications: Motoring will become less democratic. We must restore American railroad system. This would have the biggest effect. The infrastructure is there. Bolivia would be ashamed of our rails system.

We need a project to boost confidence. We should not be passive victims of history. Trains, barges and boats are more efficient than trucks. “The downscaling of America”. How we feed ourselves, trade, inhabit terrain. Globalism is transient, it needs cheap energy and world peace. We are seeing more friction between countries fighting for oil. China is much closer to Central Asia. Crop yields will go down. Crops will be grown for people. Kunstler does not know what the other arrangements will be. A lot of economic losers will be around. A lot of turbulence in the former middle class. Fascism: Americans will beg to be pushed around. You will be lucky if the feds answer the phone. Kuntsler thinks it will not be an orderly transition. It may get violent. Living standards will go down.

WalMart will be toast in 10 years. They are really very fragile, just a warehouse on wheels. “Bargain shopping”, but what is the bargain? Mega-city: Cities will contract, centers will densify, especially along waterfronts We will get more serious about boats. Buildings are being made to be heated with natural gas. Many Midwestern cities are contracting now. Buildings will be 5 floors and under. Cities will be gothic/medieval in scale. We will have electricity if we are lucky. Mechanics will be very necessary. Now we are in automobile slum. “The public realm” will come back. Knowing your history allows you to face the future with confidence. It gives you a hopefil present. We have places not worth caring about. Suburbia is not worthy of us.

He saw a bumper sticker on a Ford Expedition that said “War is not the answer.” If you drive an SUV, war IS the answer. Young people will be forced to be heroic. We are a nation of clowns. We will need to get serious. We used to be an earnest people, no wishing for the Powerball lottery. Public speaking will be an important skill. We need a serious discussion about nuclear. Heating houses will resolve themselves in 5 years. 1890s: 10% of the workforce was servants. Urbal/rural distinction may become very sharp again. Subrbia muddled the distinction. In 25 years, electircity may not be around.

Many laws mandate suburban sprawl. Phoenix, Arizona will shrink a lot, due to energy and water. For Las Vegas, the excitement will be over. The problem with pushing biofuels is that assumes we will have an orderly transition. It may be disorderly. Marketing, PR may not be around much longer. Adults do not engage in wishful thinking. There is a failure of authority, and of the legitimacy of authority. College may be elitist again.

Image from Wikimedia

Vanilla Coke Zero is the best thing ever. I drink a lot of it. A lot. So much that I think I need to cut back.

Usually when you do something too often, YOU are the last person to realize you do it too often. So I REALLY need to cut back. Especially since I do not have a job right now.

Advatage of drinking: Tangy vanilla kick.

Disadvantages: I can spend a lot of money on it, there is the environmental impact of the cans, I go to the bathroom a lot, aluminum on the brain.

I hate to say that there are more disadvantages than advantages. I am trying to only drink six cans a day. Before I was drinking 12. That is way too much.

2012-01-30_08.25.04 Update:

Another advantage of buying Vanilla Coke Zero is I would be helping out a company that I have stock in.

Although it would be much better if you bought more Coca-Cola than me. So go buy some tangy Vanilla Coke Zero.

Image from Wikipedia, main product page on Coca-Cola site

I listen to a few of the podcasts that are part of Leo Laporte’s TWiT network. One that I went through is Maxwell’s House, which was discontinued.

One episode that I really liked was episode 63, A Review Of The U.S. Space Program. Ray Maxwell was an engineer and helped design and build a few of the rockets that were part of the Apollo program. It is a really good episode. Go listen to it.

In this episode, he talked briefly about the launch of Sputnik, and the effect it had on the USA. There was a big push for math and science. He said something that really struck me: There were no debates about evolution back then. I kind of wish I was around back then.

He and the host pined for the good old days of science. They thought that perhaps if there was another competing superpower that people would be more willing to support science. I wonder if many people in the USA today know that China has put a few people into space.

Viva science!!

Image from Maxwell’s House, part of the TWiT network

Stuff I found while cleaning my apartment:

• old poetry
• 2 dollar bill from 2003
• 2 dollar bill from 1976 (they have not changed much)
• south vietnamese 20 dong note
• 1973 west german coin
• pictures of my sister taken when she was a baby
• A nickel that I used a few times as a guitar pick that flattened by putting it on a train track and letting a train run it over

Being an open-source user, I am not too thrilled with Microsoft, or our society’s dependence on their software. At some point I started coming up with nicknames for Microsoft products.

• Word: Curse, Turd
• Excel: Excrete, Degrade
• Visio: Visceral, “Visio? What the dilly, yo?”
• PowerPoint: PowerTrip, SourPoint
• Microsoft: MicroSoviet
• Visual C++: Visual Handcu++s
• C#: C Schmuck, C Slop, C Stiffed, C Stuck, C Suck, C Stupid (has there ever been a dumber name for a programming language?)
• SharePoint: SchmuckPoint, SharePiss, SharePit, SharePuke, SharePutz, SharePunk, Sh*tPoint, SludgePoint, SnarePoint, StiffPoint, StinkPoint, StuckPoint, SuckPoint

Collect all ten and get your Secret Indemnification Decoder Ring

Recently there have been a few lists ranking cities. The Milken Institute put out one. The Brookings Institute put out one that was reported in Business Insider: Most Miserable Cities and Least Miserable Cities. Also the Urban Institute put out a list on their MetroTrends website (I found out about this one from the twitter feed of the Urbanophile).

A lot of the lists are pretty equal. They look at things like the unemployment rate, the real estate market, gross metropolitan product, and recent trends in those statistics. Texas cities have done well, California did badly, Illinois did okay (but kind of on the bad side of okay).

When I would tell people that I was thinking about moving to Texas, a lot of people would regurgitate the fact that Texas has no state income tax. A lot of people seem to think that lowering taxes is the answer to all our problems. And the source of all our goodness. But is that true?

On one of the lists, Seattle ranked pretty low. Las Vegas scored the lowest. And everything in Florida scored near the bottom. Washington, Nevada and Florida have no state income tax. If no state income tax was the answer to all the world’s problems, then why aren’t those states doing better?

On top of that, some of the states that have no income tax (like Texas, South Dakota, Wyoming and Alaska) get a lot of money by leasing land to oil and gas companies. Which sounds kind of socialist to me.

Image from Wikipedia

I found out about a web comic called A Softer World. They put captions on photos. They usually use the same photo for different panels, changing the size or emphasizing different sections. Some of them are funny, some are bizarre, some are disturbing, some are a combination. It’s like Doonesbury meets Post Secret.

So here is mine for this week:

Panel 1: Her family in Spain is driving her crazy

Panel 2: Maybe when she comes back she will decide to stay for good

Panel 3: Does she want to have children?

Image from Wikimedia

One thing that has been bugging me recently is that a lot of what is going on in technology is stupid and pointless. I think the big issues facing not only the USA, but the world as a whole are peak oil and climate change. If we don’t find something to replace fossil fuels, I think we will backslide technologically and deal with a lot of societal and geopolitical tensions.

Hedge funds and banks on Wall Street hired people with degrees in math and physics to develop software that figured out ways to trade more profitably. I think society would be better off if mathematicians and physicists actually worked on math and physics. And the financial-industrial complex nearly drove society off a cliff. So much for the idea that the best and brightest know how to allocate resources effectively. Or that they were all that bright to begin with.

The free market may be good at solving short-term wants, but it does not seem very good with long-term needs. Perhaps in a country where more people look at the web sites for Fox News and ESPN than The Oil Drum or Oil Price it’s a futile quest.

I was at a startup conference about six months ago here in Chicago. It seemed like most of the companies were “building mobile social networks so you can send your tweets to your friends’ iPhones.” I felt like playing “Worthless Copycat Technology Bingo”. There was one that was trying to commercialize a new process for manufacturing solar panels. Pretty much everything else was Garbage 2.0. One was a social network for men so they can get together and do manly things. They had pictures of guys playing cards, and mountain biking, playing video games. What they offer that you couldn’t get from Meetup, Craigslist or Facebook was unclear to me.

There were a few articles a few months ago on Business Insider about a presentation by Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, on their hiring practices. It went on and on about how they want “A-players”, and how to reward them, blah blah blah. A few commenters pointed out that it’s absurd for Netflix to talk about how they want the smartest people. All they do is rent movies; they are not curing cancer. Given that the stock price has gone from $300 to $66, that their plan to split the company in two was withdrawn after about 3 weeks, that they took a lot of heat for raising prices dramatically and that they are losing subscribers, I think it’s fair to ask if Mr Hastings deserves even mediocre employees.

If you are not solving an A-problem, then you don’t really need A-players.

Image from Kristian Dela Cour on Flickr