Recently in Literature Category

1. Understanding the 'Russian Mortality Paradox' in Central Asia: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan

Short answer: alcohol and suicide.

2. Lumberjacks as a counterexample to the idea of a "risk premium"

They take lots of risks and don't get paid well for it.

3. Cell size and scale

This is a visualization you won't want to miss.

4. Three guys named Matt

5. The political philosophy of the private eye

A genre that was rendered obsolete in 1961 (but nobody realizes it).

Here. Official opening is Monday but youall get to see it earlier.

Kavalier and Clay impressed me right away, even before I ever even held a copy in my hand, because for a year or so after it came out, I kept seeing people reading it. In the subway, in the park, everywhere. This was a book that people really wanted to read. So I bought it and read it and was duly impressed. It's a great book: DeLillo without the irony, if you will. The book Don DeLillo might have written had he been Michael Chabon and had the interests Chabon had instead of the interests that DeLillo has. Whatever.

More recently, I read (most of) Chabon's first book of stories, A Model World. I was into it for about a story and a half, and then I realized that these were all John Updike stories. Don't get me wrong here--Updike is my hero, and it's pretty impressive to me that he continues to write stories even after he's no longer around. And i don't really hold it against him (Updike) that he, like Gore Vidal, couldn't come up with good book titles. Chabon, though, he's a good titler. But I couldn't get into his book. It was just too weird that he was writing Updike stories.

But then I read Chabon's second book of stories, Werewolves in their Youth. Much better. Good to see someone getting better at what he does.

Thanks for all the suggested titles. My current favorite remains, "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Blog." Although, I have to admit, "Super-Duper-Freakanomics" [sic] wasn't bad either. And, as much as I like the idea of calling it "Mister P," I can't quite pull the trigger on that one.

To respond to some of your comments:

1. No, I can't just post the general-interest entries at the new blog. That would take a lot of the fun out of the current blog. And the Science Blog people don't want me to cross-post more than 4 items per month. I will, of course, link to the new items from the current blog, but it's not as good if I can't cross-post them.

2. I agree that Science Blogs isn't the same as what I'm doing here, that's why I just wanted to post some stuff there, to reach the different audience, without losing what we have here.

3. I don't plan to be doing anything extra with this new blog; I see it more as a place to post a few things that I was going to post somewhere anyway.

4. Someone commented that it's strange for me to ask for a title before deciding on a topic. I thought it was implicit that, by asking for a title, I'm also asking for suggestions on a topic. I guess I'll try two or three posts a week and see how it goes.

Finally, in all seriousness, if nobody comes up with a better title, I'm going to call it "Applied Statistics." And I'll kick it off with a few posts about literature. Consider yourselves warned.

We've been invited to start a blog at Science Blogs. This seemed like a good idea, a way to reach a new set of readers. At the same time, I didn't want to abandon the Mother Blog right here. Recently we've been overflowing with entries, so we decided to start a new blog at Science Blogs and just link back and forth between this blog and that one. Those of you with RSS can just get both feeds. (The Monkey Cage, 538, and New Majority are less of an issue since I can just crosspost.)

Anyway, we have two things to decide. First, what should the new blog be called; second, what sorts of things should we be posting there. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for your help.

P.S. Yes, I know it would be logical to just move the entire blog over to the Science Blogs platform. But I just can't bring myself to do that. Science Blogs is a bunch of bloggers, which is fine, but I'd like my own blog to be centered on my research and teaching, which is here.

My total knowledge of all foreign language is a constant. Back when I learned (some) Dutch, I quickly forgot a corresponding amount of French. Then I learned Spanish and forgot more French and almost all my Dutch. Now that I'm relearning French, I'm forgetting my Spanish. At some point I think I was in an unstable equilibrium in which I knew equal amounts of all three.

P.S. Just to calibrate for you: I'm pretty bad. I can't read the newspaper in any language other than English.

P.P.S. No, this doesn't apply to computer languages. The last time I programmed in Fortran (a few years ago), it didn't cause me to forget any R. And I think if I ever learned Python or whatever, it would only help with these other languages. And, no, I don't plan to ever learn C. I've programmed in assembly language already (for the 6502 in my college roommate's Atari), no need to go back to that.

I just finished three novels that got me thinking about the nature of fiction.

First, How I Became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely. Just from seeing the back cover of the book, with its hilarious parody of a New York Times bestseller list, I was pretty sure I'd like it. And, indeed, after reading the first six pages or so, I was laughing so hard that I put the book aside to keep myself from reading it too fast--I wanted to savor the pleasure. How I Became... really is a great book--in some ways, the Airplane! of books, in that it is overflowing with jokes. Hely threw in everything he had, clearly confident he could come up with more funny stuff whenever, as needed. (I don't know if you remember, but movie comedies used to be stingy with the humor. They'd space out their jokes with boring bits of drama and elaborate set-pieces. Airplane! was special because it had more jokes than it knew what to do with.) Anyway, Hely's gimmick in How I Became... is to invent dozens of hypothetical books, newspapers, locations, etc. There are bits of pseudo-bestsellers from all sorts of genres. The main character ends up writing a Snow-Falling-on-Cedars-type piece of overwritten historical crap. I have to admit I felt a little envy when he recounts the over-the-top, yet plausible sequence of events that puts him on the bestseller list--I still think this could've been possible with Red State, Blue State if we had had some professional public relations help--but I guess that added to the bittersweet pleasure of reading the book.

The other thing I appreciated about How I Became... was its forthrightness about the effort required to write all of a book and put it all together. I know what he's talking about. It really is a pain in the ass to get a book into good shape. More so on my end: Nick Tarslaw had an editor, a luxury I don't have for my books. (I mean, sure, I have an editor and a copy editor, but the role of the former is mostly to acquire my book and maybe make a few comments and suggestions; we're not talking Maxwell Perkins here. And copy editors will catch some mistakes (and introduce about an equal number of their own), but, again, I'm the one (along with my coauthors) who are doing all the work.)

Finally, I should say that, the minute I started reading How I Became..., I happily recognized it as part of what might be called "The Office" genre of comic novels, along with, for example, Slab Rat, Then We Came to the End, and Personal Days. To me, Then We Came to the End was deeper, and left me with a better aftertaste, than How I Became..., but How I Became... had more flat-out funny moments, especially in its first half. (Set-ups are almost always better than resolutions.)

The next book I read recently was The Finder, by Colin Harrison, a very well-written and (I assume) well-researched piece of crap about a mix of lowlifes, killers, and big shots. The plot kept it moving, and I enjoyed the NYC local color. But, jeez, is it really necessary that the hero be, not only a good guy in every respect, but also happen to have rugged good looks, much-talked-about upper-body strength, and of course be gentle yet authoritative in the sack? Oh, and did I forget to mention, he's also the strong silent type? Does the main female character really have to be labeled by everybody as "pretty" or, occasionally "gorgeous"? Is it really required that the rich guy be a billionaire? Wouldn't a few million suffice? Etc.

Still, even though it insulted my intelligence and moral sensibilities a bit, The Finder was fun to read. One advantage of having no email for a week is that it freed up time to relax and read a couple of books.

Anyway, before reading How I became..., I would've just taken the above as Harrison's choices in writing his book, but now I'm wondering . . . Did Harrison do it on purpose? Did he think to himself, Hey, I wanna write a big bestseller this time, let me take what worked before and amp it up? I guess what I'm saying it, Hely's book has ruined the enjoyment I can get from trash fiction. At least for awhile.

Most recently, I was in the library and checked out The Dwarves of Death, an early novel (from 1990) of Jonathan Coe, author a few years ago of the instant-classic, The Rotter's Club. The Dwarves of Death isn't perfect--for one thing, it has plot holes you could thread the Spruce Goose through, and without needing any careful piloting--but it's just great. It's real in a way that How I Became... is not. This is not a slam on Hely's book, which is an excellent confection, it's more of a distinction between a dessert and a main course.

The Dwarves of Death had so many funny lines I forgot all of them. That said, it wasn't laugh-out-loud funny the way How I Became... was (especially in its . Then again, it didn't need to be.

"They thought ASU's brand was too strong to compete with. Incarnate Word is now part of the Communiversity @ Surprise, a newly opened one-stop learning center for higher education in the northwest Valley."

The scooper's trade, indeed.

Lee Sigelman points to this article by physicist Rick Trebino describing his struggles to publish a correction in a peer-reviewed journal. It's pretty frustrating, and by the end of it--hell, by the first third of it--I share Trebino's frustration. It would be better, though, if he'd link to his comment and the original article that inspired it. Otherwise, how can we judge his story? Somehow, by the way that it's written, I'm inclined to side with Trebino, but maybe that's not fair--after all, I'm only hearing half of the story.

Anyway, reading Trebino's entertaining rant (and I mean "rant" in a good way, of course) reminded me of my own three stories on this topic. Rest assured, none of them are as horrible as Trebino's.

From Jeet Heer:

Some examples of business names that don't make sense:

1. Icarus air Travel. Icarus only had one flight and it ended badly.

2. The Abelard School, a private academy. Abelard was best known for sleeping with a student.

3. Gandhi's Fine Indian Cuisine. Gandhi was not a known to be a hearty eater or gourmand.

4. Mecca Jeans. Is it good idea to wear jeans at Mecca?

5. Ponce De Leon Federal Bank. Ponce De Leon supposedly went searching for the fountain of youth. Even though the story is not true, still that's what his name means to most people. Would you trust him with your life savings?

Good points, all.

I don't really think this one is of general interest so I'll put it all below the jump . . .

From a subscription card insert in the New Yorker:

EXTRA! REGISTER ONLINE NOW FOR YOUR CHANCE TO

WIN $50,000 CASH

FROM THE NEW YORKER

I guess I already knew that once they were affiliated with Dennis Miller, the New Yorker had already jumped it. . . .

Here (I found it through a link from Jenny Davidson). Only one update in the past six months, but still, it's the great Luc Sante...

The American Statistical Association organizes a program in which young researchers can submit writing samples and get comments from statisticians who are more experienced writers. I agreed to participate in this program, as long as the authors were willing to have their articles and my comments posted here.

I'm going to start with my general advice after reading and commenting on the two articles sent to me. I think this advice should be of interest to nearly all the readers of this blog. Then I'll link to the articles and give some detailed comments.

General advice

Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I'd recommend rewriting both articles from scratch, using the following template:

1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you've found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you'll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you're talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you'll need to give.

2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims.

3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings.

4. Now go back and write the literature review and the introduction.

5. Moving forward one last time: go to your results and conclusions and give alternative explanations. Why might you be wrong? What are the limits of applicability of your findings? What future research would be appropriate to follow up on these loose ends?

6. Write the abstract. An easy way to start is to take the first sentence from each of the first five paragraphs of the article. This probably won't be quite right, but I bet it will be close to what you need.

7. Give the article to a friend, ask him or her to spend 15 minutes looking at it, then ask what they think your message was, and what evidence you have for it. Your friend should read the article as a potential consumer, not as a critic. You can find typos on your own time, but you need somebody else's eyes to get a sense of the message you're sending.

It goes like this: there's something you want to estimate and you have some data. Maybe, to take my favorite recent example, you want to break down support for school vouchers by religion, ethnicity, income, and state (or maybe you'd like to break it down even further, but you have to start somewhere).

Or maybe you want to estimate the difference between how rich and poor people vote, by state, over several decades--but you're lazy and all you want to work with are the National Election Studies, which only have a couple thousand respondents, at most, in any year, and don't even cover all the states.

Or maybe you want to estimate the concentration of cat allergen in a bunch of dust samples, while simultaneously estimating the calibration curve needed to get numerical estimates, all in the presence of contamination that screws up your calibration.

Or maybe you want to identify the places in the United States where it's cost-effective to test your house for radon gas--and the data you have across the country are 80,000 noisy measurements, 5,000 accurate measurements, and some survey data and geological information.

Or maybe you want to understand how perchloroethylene is absorbed in the body--a process that is active at the time scale of minutes and also weeks--given only a couple dozen measurements on each of a few people.

Or maybe you want to get a picture of brain activity given indirect measurements from a big clanking physical device encircling a person's head.

Or maybe you want to estimate what might have happened in past elections had the Democrats or Republicans received 1% more, or 2% more, or 3% more, of the vote.

Or maybe . . . or maybe . . .

What all these examples have in common is some data--not enough, never enough!--and a vague sense arising in my mind of what the answer should look like. Not exactly what it would look like--for example, I did not in any way anticipate the now-notorious pattern of vouchers being more popular among rich white Catholics and evangelicals and among poor blacks and Hispanics (maybe I should've anticipated it; I'm not proud in the level of ignorance that I had that allowed this finding to surprise me, I'm just stating the facts)--but what it could look like. Or, maybe it would be more accurate to say, various things that wouldn't look right, if I were to see them.

And the challenge is to get from point A to point B. So, you throw model after model at the problem, method after method, alternating between quick-and-dirty methods that get me nowhere, and elaborate models that give uninterpretable, nonsensical results. Until finally you get close. Actually, what happens is that you suddenly solve the problem! Unexpectedly, you're done! And boy is the result exciting. And you do some checking, fit to a different dataset maybe, or make some graphs showing raw data and model estimates together, or look carefully at some of the numbers, and you realize you have a problem. And you stare at your code for a long long time and finally bite the bullet, suck it up and do some active debugging, fake-data simulation, and all the rest. You code your quick graphs as diagnostic plots and build them into your procedure. And you go back and do some more modeling, and you get closer, and you never quite return to the triumphant feeling you had earlier--because you know that, at some point, the revolution will come again and with new data or new insights you'll have to start over on this problem, but, for now, yes, yes, you can stop, you can step back and put in the time--hours, days!--to make pretty graphs, you can bask in the successful solution of a problem. You can send your graphs out there and let people take their best shot. You've done it.

But, not so deep inside you, that not-so-still and not-so-small voice reminds you of the compromises you've made, the data you've ignored, the things you just don't know if you believe. You want to do more, but that will require more computing, more modeling, more theory. Yes, more theory. More understanding of what these things called models do. Because, just like storybook characters take on a life of their own, just like Gollum wouldn't die and Frank Bascombe comes up with wisecracks all on his own, and Ramona Quimby won't stay down even if you try to make her, and so on and so on and so on, just like these characters, each with his or her internal logic, so any statistical model worth fitting also has its internal logic, mathematical properties latent in its form but, Turing-machine-like, impossible to anticipate before applying it to data--not just "real data" (how I hate that phrase), but data from live problems. And then comes Statistical Theory--the good kind, the kind that tells us what our models can and cannot do, when they can bend with the data and when they snap. (Did you know that doubly-integrated white noise can't really turn corners? I didn't, until I tried to fit such a model to data that went up, then down.) And you do your best with your Theory, and your simulations, and even your computing (yuck!). But you move on. And you hope that when it's time to come back to this problem, you'll have some better models at hand, things like splines and time series cross sectional models, and you'll have a programming and modeling environment where you can just write down latent factors and have them interact, and you'll be able to include three-way interactions, and four-way interactions, and . . . and . . . you hope that in ten years you'll be fitting the models that, ten years ago, you thought you'd be fitting in five years. And you take a rest. You write up what you found and you write up exactly what you did (not always so easy to do). And a new question comes along. You want a quick answer. You try putting together available data in a simple way. You try some weighting. But you don't believe your answer. You need more data. You need more model. You get to work.

That's how it feels, from the inside.

Original title of article: "Estimating turnout, vote intention, and issue attitudes in subsets of the population"

New title: "Who votes? How did they vote? And what were they thinking?"

Recently I was invited to write an article on the philosophy of Bayesian statistics. For a long time I've been unhappy with the discussions of philosophy offered by Bayesian statisticians and also with the perspectives on Bayesian statistics coming from philosophers. I'd been planning for about fifteen years to write an article on the topic but had never gotten around to it, so I welcomed this opportunity.

I thought it made sense to do some reading, and I thought I'd start with Lakatos, whom I think of as a sort of rationalized Popper (Lakatos actually attributes some of his own ideas to a hypothetical Popper_2). In retrospect, I think this was a good choice. I like a lot of what Lakatos had to say--even though he didn't write much about statistics, or Bayesian statistics, most of the ideas transfer over fine, I think.

But that's not the reason for this note.

I'm writing here to tell you what happened when I ordered the two volumes of Lakatos's collected writings, published by Cambridge under the titles, "The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" and "Mathematics, Science, and Epistemology," paperbacks selling on Amazon for about $50 bucks each. I eagerly awaited their arrival in my mailbox, but when they finally came, and I opened them . . . they were really hard to read! The type was blurry.

I guess they took the original book and did some sort of crappy photoimaging . . . Hey! This is Cambridge University Press we're talking about, reprinting a classic academic book and not even taking the trouble to do it right! What's with that??? I can see that it might be a pain to retype the original book, but can't they scan in the text and reset it? Or, maybe even simpler, take their photoimaged text and run it through some software to unblur it? The current version is a joke, and I was embarrassed to even have it in my office.

I returned the volumes to Amazon and ordered the books from the Columbia library. (That was a pain too, but that's another story. I doubt the readers of my blog need to hear about my problems with the Columbia library.) These original hardcovers are fine. Not the greatest print job in the world, actually--I find the font pretty hard to read--but much better than the blur-o-matic that Cambridge was charging $100 for. (Oddly enough, the printing in my paperback copy of Proofs and Refutations is fine.)

P.S. Yes, yes, I know this is unimportant compared to all the hunger and strife in the world, etc etc. But still . . . what ever happened to professionalism?

I want to talk about some similarities between writing and statistical graphics. Just about everybody knows something about writing, and I'd like to help transfer some of this expertise to thinking about statistical graphics.

The story begins with some ugly pie charts I noticed the other day. I wascommenting on them and suddenly realized . . . the graphs weren't as bad as I thought they were! To be more precise, the graphs had a lot of failings, but the sum total of all these problems wasn't so bad.

Here are the actual charts:

As I wrote earlier, these graphs have lots of obviously-fixable problems, most notably that the wedges aren't labeled directly. Instead, the reader has to go back and forth, back and forth, between the chart and the legend. On the other hand, the information is conveyed unambiguously.

I'd like to make the analogy to sloppy writing--misspellings, grammatical errors, sentence fragments and run-ons, garden-path sentences, distracting cliches, and all the rest. (All these "errors" can be used to good effect. No rule is absolute. For sure, baby. Much of the time, though, I think these really are mistakes rather than intentional use for )emphasis or clarity.)

Why is sloppy writing a bad thing? For example, what's wrong with using "it's" instead of "its," or messing up subject-verb agreement, or losing track of an adverb's pointer, in a setting where the meaning is clear? The problem is that it creates work for your readers, who often have to double back to figure out the meaning. If you're Ezra Pound writing a poem, maybe you want to have that effect, but I don't think it's the goal of most journalists, news bloggers, etc.

OK, back to the pie charts. They could be worse, but they require a lot of work to read. Arguably, this criticism could be thrown at any graph: for example, I love line plots, but if you've never seen a line plot before, you'll struggle with it. The difference is that you can learn to read line plots, but you'll never be able to quickly read the pie charts shown above: no matter what, you have to back and forth between the pie, the legend, the pie, the legend, and so forth, to keep it all in your mind at once.

To push the analogy further, I'm recommending what might be called the George Orwell approach to statistical graphics: the goal is to be clear as a window pane. This isn't the only option, though. There's the Chris Ware style: graphs that are tiny and nearly impossible to read, but if you stare at them for a long time you realize they actually make sense. Or the Martin Amis style: flashy gimmicks that make the graph fun to read even if you don't care so much about the subject. Or the Veronica Geng style: playing it straight while going over the top at the same time. And so forth.

I think some of the confusion that has arisen from Ed Tufte's work is that people read his book and then want to go make cool graphs of their own. But cool like Amis, not cool like Orwell. We each have our own styles, and I'm not trying to tell you what to do, just to help you look at your own writing and graphics so you can think harder about what you want your style to be.

P.S. Yes, yes, I'm sure I have various usage, grammatical, and stylistic errors above. Give me a break, man! It's just a blog entry. More to the point . . . by now you should trust me enough to think, when you see something discordant, that maybe I've done it on purpose!

P.P.S. Another issue is cost or effort. It wasn't necessarily worth it for Tom Schaller to learn a bunch of new graphical tools just to make his blog entry slightly easier to read. In my discussion above, I'm ignoring the investment in time required to think in terms of graphics and to learn the relevant software.

This is not meant as a put-down of Roth; I think Marquand is great.

P.S. Is this what a Twitter post is like? Basically, I'm too lazy to back up my statement here with evidence. But I think that any of you out there who've read both Roth and Marquand will agree upon a moment's reflection that I'm right.

P.P.S. When I'm talking about Marquand, I exclude the way overrated The Late George Apley. I'm talking about real Marquand books like Point of No Return, Wickford Point, etc.

Good airplane reading. Lived up to the reviews.

A correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous asks:

Since you publish a lot of papers, I wonder if you've ever come across this issue. Journal reviews are supposed to be double-blind, but authors always have great familiarity with their own work, and cite it frequently. So what is the sense of sending an "anonymized" review copy to a journal editor when a line like "In a previous paper (Smith and Jones, 1999) we showed that ..." lets you know right away that Smith and Jones are the authors of the paper being reviewed?

I have thought about altering the review copy to make it look we are citing a paper by someone else ["In a previous paper, Smith and Jones (1999) showed that..."]. Should I even worry about this? How do you handle it?

My reply: I don't think it matters much. If the rules say to anonymize the references, then I do so, but I don't really worry whether a reviewer can figure out whether it is me writing the article. From the other direction, I review lots of articles (more than I write, actually), and I am very rarely curious enough to bother trying to figure out (for example, using Google) who is writing them.

What bothers me more, actually, is the idea that somebody out there is submitting a crappy article but citing me in such a way that the reviewers think I wrote it. The other thing I worry about is when I review an article negatively, that the authors might be able to figure out that I'm the reviewer. Or, that someone else is reviewing an article negatively and in the review points to my work, leading the author to think that I'm being the bad guy.

P.S. Somebody once told me about triple-blind submission, where even the author doesn't know who wrote the article. Apparently this is standard in medical research.

P.P.S. More thoughts here.

Henry reports that a colleague of his at George Washington University, Jeffrey Rosen, says he has sworn off blogging for good. But then Henry asks whether Rosen was really a blogger at all: in Henry's words:

A 1,000 word commissioned essay for The New Republic, which goes through its usual editorial processes, is usually not considered a 'blog entry.' . . . I [Henry] will say that I'd prefer not to see the term blogpost become a residual category for 'stuff I wrote which I wish I had thought through a bit more before I hit send.'

I just have two comments on this intra-GW conflict:

1. Does blogging now have higher prestige than magazine writing? It used to be that newspaper and magazine writers were insisting that blogging wasn't journalism. Now we have unpaid bloggers saying that magazine writing isn't really blogging!

2. Given the New Republic's history, I wouldn't say that "its usual editorial processes" counts for much. I'm guessing I have a more rigorous vetting process on my own blog (where the rule is that anyone with access can post any time) than the New Republic has for its thousand-word commissioned essays.

Somehow this all reminds me of a hilarious Veronica Geng piece from 1986 where she riffs on a comment of Barry Goldwater's that "There's no reason we shouldn't have an Italian President--we've had everything else." She goes through a bunch of examples, including "President Thomas Noguchi (the only coroner ever to become Chief Executive)" and the time when "an obscure Pennsylvania coal miner named James Polki got elected President until the Electoral College found out a novice telegraph operator had made a mistake--if you want to call it a 'mistake' that American history includes a hardworking Polish immigrant who held the highest office in the land, temporarily," and, of course, "the way a woman named Dora, or Doreen, occupied the Oval Office in 1920 as a poltergeist." As Geng puts it, "It's just an open secret--like the fact that George Washington was a full-blooded Chickahominy Indian, which everybody knows, even though it never appears in print anywhere."

These are all important methods and concepts related to statistics that are not as well known as they should be. I hope that by giving them names, we will make the ideas more accessible to people:

Mister P: Multilevel regression and poststratification.

The Secret Weapon: Fitting a statistical model repeatedly on several different datasets and then displaying all these estimates together.

The Superplot: Line plot of estimates in an interaction, with circles showing group sizes and a line showing the regression of the aggregate averages.

The Folk Theorem: When you have computational problems, often there's a problem with your model.

The Pinch-Hitter Syndrome: People whose job it is to do just one thing are not always so good at that one thing.

Weakly Informative Priors: What you should be doing when you think you want to use noninformative priors.

P-values and U-values: They're different.

Conservatism: In statistics, the desire to use methods that have been used before.

WWJD: What I think of when I'm stuck on an applied statistics problem.

Theoretical and Applied Statisticians, how to tell them apart: A theoretical statistician calls the data x, an applied statistician says y.

The Fallacy of the One-Sided Bet: Pascal's wager, lottery tickets, and the rest.

Alabama First: Howard Wainer's term for the common error of plotting in alphabetical order rather than based on some more informative variable.

The USA Today Fallacy: Counting all states (or countries) equally, forgetting that many more people live in larger jurisdictions, and so you're ignoring millions and millions of Californians if you give their state the same space you give Montana and Delaware.

Second-Order Availability Bias: Generalizing from correlations you see in your personal experience to correlations in the population.

The "All Else Equal" Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it's not gonna be.

The Self-Cleaning Oven: A good package should contain the means of its own testing.

The Taxonomy of Confusion: What to do when you're stuck.

The Blessing of Dimensionality: It's good to have more data, even if you label this additional information as "dimensions" rather than "data points."

Scaffolding: Understanding your model by comparing it to related models.

I know there are a bunch I'm forgetting; can youall refresh my memory, please? Thanks.

P.S. No, I don't think I can ever match Stephen Senn in the definitions game.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email that began, "Only in crazy academia land" . . .

And then today I was reading an article by David Denby in the New Yorker about the director of The Wizard of Oz, and came across this:

Academics have told me [Denby] that "Oz" is a mythic structure, a descendant of the Odyssey or the Aeneid, but they look at me blankly when I say that the movie is also a summa of nineteen-thirties show business.

What kinds of academics was he talking with?? I'm no expert, but even I know that Dorothy's sidekicks were old vaudevillians.

Denby goes on about how great The Wizard of Oz is. I think it's ok, but I bet that much of its fame arises from it being shown once every year on TV. When we were kids, we would watch it every year. I'm guessing that there are a bunch of other movies made around the same time that are just great, but they didn't get that kind of exposure.

From comments to my recent 538 post, I've learned the following:

1. I don't understand logarithms.

2. I really don't understand logarithms.

3. I don't know how to use Wikiipedia.

4. I don't know that "percent" means "divided by 100".

5. I don't know the difference between correlation and R-squared.

My first reaction is to respond in a snippy and sarcastic way, but when it comes to writing, the reader is (almost) always right: When someone misunderstands something I wrote, this tells me I was being unclear.

This seems kind of horrible:

Fresh out of ideas on what to write about? Your blog muse taking a holiday? Don't sweat it. Ideas are everywhere; you just have to know where to look. We've rounded up ten suggestions to help you uncover a wealth of new topics and blog another day. . . .

That's all we need . . . people blogging who have nothing useful to say!

David Weakliem and I wrote an article that will be appearing in American Scientist, which is a magazine, not a journal. Which means that the article is being edited by an actual editor (Morgan Ryan, in this case). It's great: he read it over and made comments and changes, lots of things that make the article more readable and sensible.

It's fun having an editor. I've written about 250 articles and 6 books, but this is the first time I've ever had a real editor on anything I've written.

P.S. And, no, a copy editor is not the same thing.

Colson Whitehead's new book just came out. I'm only on chapter 1, but it's as hilarious as I was hoping based on the excerpt that came out a few months ago. Maybe I should just stop now to avoid any possible disappointment.

One of the things Brad Paley talked about the other day was the computer program he used to make a visualization of the text of Alice in Wonderland [link fixed]. (Click on the "Alice in Wonderland" link; it's really cool.)

My first question when I saw this was, why is the book presented as a circle rather than a line? The circle places the end of the book at the same place as the beginning. There are some reasons this might make sense--after all, Alice wakes up from her dream at the very end of the book, returning to where she was at the start--but, overall, I don't see the circularity making sense. I asked Brad during his talk, but he did not have time to respond (too many questions were being asked, a problem I'd love to have at my own talks!). He indicated that he did have a good reason, though, so if he lets me know I'll report it here.

People asked what was the point of the TextArc display (other than it looking pretty), and Brad gave a bunch of examples of what the plot showed. In some way it was similar to some of my statistical research efforts, in that the results were impressive but ended up confirming things that made sense and that, ultimately, we already knew. In my case, my colleagues and I found that American Indians are not randomly distributed in the social network; in Brad's case, he found that Alice is a central character in Alice in Wonderland, that the words "Mock" and "Turtle" go together, and so forth. (See here for more.)

When pressed further, Brad justified TextArc as a souped-up index. This made a lot of sense to me: his graph tells you lots of information that's not in a conventional index and also allows you to map straight back to the original text. I agree that it's silly to criticize the program for what it doesn't do. It's an automatic program and does a lot. I'm also impressed by any program written more than 5 years ago that still works!

Anyway, one of Brad's remarks about using this tool to understand text made me think that there are two kinds of books:
1. Books that you want to read straight through, from beginning to end.
2. Books that you use for reference, flipping through and looking for what you need.
The horrible thing is that I write all my books as if they will be read from beginning to end, but I'm pretty sure most people read them as reference books. For most people--even most statisticians--reading Bayesian Data Analysis from beginning to end would be like me reading the instruction manual for my washing machine. I pick up the instruction manual when I need it, and then I look for what I need.

Anyway, I thought this might be relevant to TextArc and similar projects. Maybe Alice in Wonderland is not the best example; it might make more sense to use TextArc for a book such as Bayesian Data Analysis that has a sequence but is primarily used for reference. (I went to the TextArc site but can't find the program; at least, there's no easy way to feed in a book and have it produce the TextArc picture.)

Nathan Yau makes some good points in response to my belated comments on his "5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year."

First off, I'd like to apologize for saying the projects "suck," That was just rude. Would I like it if somebody said that the examples in Bayesian Data Analysis "suck" because they're not completely realistic, or if somebody said that the demos in Teaching Statistics "suck" because they're not tied closely enough to the lecture material? A better thing for me to say would've been: "I don't particularly like these as data displays, but I'm impressed by the effort that went into them, and I'm glad to see these sort of data-based displays getting a broad audience."

In the interest of constructive discussion, I'd like to make a few points.

Just to follow up on Jeff's recent post . . . see here and here (see story #6).

Jeff and John were bugging me about this so I thought I should give a quick summary:

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science: Most of my stuff goes here. We also have several other contributors who unfortunately don't blog very often. When they do blog, they usually have something good to say. I used to ask my students and postdocs to blog here when I was on vacation, but then I found out they were spending hours writing these blog entries, which seems to be contrary to the spirit of the thing.

Fivethirtyeight.com: I've recently started posting political things on Nate Silver's site. Nate's super-cool--recall that one of the reasons I became a statistician was from reading Bill James, and Nate is definitely of that breed--and also this allows me to reach a different audience than I'm reaching here.

Newmajority.com: David Frum's conservative site. This started with an article I wrote a few months ago on the lessons for conservatives from the 2008 election. I am occasionally posting here when I have something relevant for this audience, whether it be a bit of number crunching specifically relevant to something newsworthy, or a more general point about political polarization or whatever. I do not see my research as inherently liberal or conservative (or moderate, for that matter), and I (naively, I'm sure) feel that politics would improve if all sides have a clearer view of public opinion.

The Monkey Cage: A blog run by John Sides, Lee Sigelman, and others, focusing on political science research. I post there sometimes (generally crossposting on this blog) and also participate in discussions there.

Overcoming Bias: I post here sometimes because it's fun (albeit frustrating) to try to communicate with a bunch of people with whom I probably disagree with on 95% of all issues. Robin Hansen is an interesting guy and it seems worth keeping these communication lines open, even though I feel I'm speaking a different language from most of the participants there.

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Boris set up this website for our book and we kept a blog going here, with frequent posts in the month leading up to the election and the month or so following. Since then I've been putting all my political posts here at Statistical Modeling (or at the other sides mentioned above), so there's no need to keep up with that one.

Rachel and I also set up a blog for my course last semester; that worked pretty well for communicating to students, and I think I'll do it again, but that's not relevant to discussions of public blogs here.

I think I can handle the first 5 blogs above. I can't really see reducing beyond that, given the goal of reaching diverse audiences. Of course what I really want is for everyone to read the Statistical Modeling blog--but I recognize that not everyone is fascinated by discussions of statistical graphics, R code, causal inference, and so forth. I'll tell you one thing: this is the only blog where you'll get my musings about literature!

Morgan Ryan sent me this quote:

"Perhaps the most perplexing part of the study lay in the attitude of the statisticians, who showed no enthusiastic confidence in their own figures. They should have reached certainty, but they talked like other men who knew less. The method did not result in faith. . . . at last, a scholar, fresh in arithmetic and ignorant of algebra, fell into a superstitious terror of complexity as the sink of facts." --Education of Henry Adams

J. Robert Lennon writes that he is "rarely disappointed by a book's ending. Almost never, in fact. If I like a book all the way through, I almost always like the way it ends, too . . ."

I know what he means, sort of, but what about The Bonfire of the Vanities? I loved that book while I was reading it, but the ending was so weak that, for me, its lameness sort of leaked backwards into the body of the book, so that, once it was all over, I didn't retrospectively like the book at all! Partly this was because what I liked about the beginning and middle of the book was the sense that I was seeing all these different facets of the world, and somehow the ending took something away from this.

From a discussion of Richard Ford and John Updike:

I can't think of a single good title among all of Updike's stories and novels. OK, I guess The Witches of Eastwick isn't a bad title. But that's about it. Nothing in the oeuvre to match the title, The Sportswriter.

Philip K. Dick was another writer who couldn't come up with a good title to save his life. Hemingway, though--he knew how to write a title. Over and over again, he came up with winners. It's a real skill.

It was only years after publishing Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks that I realized I should've called it Learning Statistics: A Bag of Tricks. Maybe it was years after writing Rabbit, Run, that Updike realized he should've called it Anhedonia or whatever. (And the sequels: Rabbit Redux and the rest . . . great novels, but awful, awful titles. What was he thinking??)

Raymond Carver's titles are good, but that impresses me less since I'm not so impressed with his stories. George V. Higgins's titles were OK--not bad, mostly not great--but his novels had some classic last lines. He really knew how to sum it up, often with a character making a devastating offhand remark.

After writing this, I scanned my bookshelves. Most of the books on the shelf have good titles. Apparently it's just not that hard to do. Looked at from that perspective, there's almost something heroic in Updike's inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to come up with more than one or two good titles among dozens of books and hundreds (probably thousands) of stories. and articles.

P.S. Gore Vidal is another great writer who can't seem to come up with a good title to save his life. Cheever, on the other hand, could really whip 'em off: The Swimmer, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, and all the rest.

Aleks pointed me to this dead-serious tutorial from www.usa.gov. Among the amusing bits:

"Blogs require talented writers, as blogs are just another form of writing. You can't have a good blog without a good writer, with knowledgeable opinions or information."

"How often will it be updated? The latest best practice shows that when a blog is first posted, it should be updated every day for the first 30 days (to establish a consistent relationship with the search engines). After the initial 30 days, it should be updated at least 2-3 times a week to stay high in the rankings."

"Avoid slang and arcane terms, unless you define them."

"Never use "click here" or similar terms."

"Read your link aloud--is it easy to enunciate?"

And, my favorite:

"Choose words that have as few syllables as possible."

On the upside, I learned that Montgomery County, MD, Division of Solid Waste has a blog titled "Talkin' Trash." Quite a bit snappier than "Statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science," I gotta say.

P.S. To be serious for a moment, I think they could've replaced most of their guidelines by a single bit of writing advice I once heard:

Tell 'em what they don't already know.

I love stories and for a long time have wanted to put together a little book of my favorite statistics stories. I know this is not something that would ever reach David Sedaris levels of popularity (to say the least) but at least it would give me some good material to use at the beginning of class or for other times when I want to engage students in a way that's not too taxing for them. (In the meantime, I recommend that all of you who teach statistics or methods classes begin each of your classes, while the students are walking in, with a 5-minute discussion of whatever the latest items are on this blog.)

Anyway, I have a new story right here for ya.

The other day I was reading a story in the New Yorker that had what I consider the now-standard pattern of starting the reader with no information about the key characters so that it takes awhile to figure out who the narrator is and how he relates to the scene. (After a few pages I got the sense that he was a well-off doctor in his fifties or sixties on a vacation with his wife and some friends.)

Anyway, here's my beef. I've always found this sort of style annoying, in comparison to the more traditional opening ("Once upon a time there was a well-off doctor in his sixties named James. One day he went on a vacation with his wife and some friends . . ."). At the same time, I've been conditioned to think that the "New Yorker"-style opening is better, more true to life--after all, in real life, people aren't generally introduced to you with a "Once upon a time"!

But then I was thinking that maybe this New Yorker style isn't so natural. These stories are generally told from one character's perspective--and, from that perspective, you would actually know someone's name, age, etc. It's not so natural at all to have to spend the first part of a story figuring out who's talking to whom.

My new take on this is that this style is a cheat, a way of creating a feeling of mystery and suspense without doing the work to create actual mystery and suspense. Actual mystery is when there's a situation you should be able to understand, but you don't, there are some missing pieces that you're trying to figure out. Actual suspense is when you want to know what happens next. Fake mystery and suspense is when you're just confused and don't know what's happening.

For example, the movie North by Northwest is actually mysterious and suspenseful. But not because it's a cheat and everyone's in a fog and you don't know who's who; it's because you're in the position of a character who knows who he is, but he doesn't know what's going on around him. That's a little different, in my opinion. Similarly with, say, John Le Carre: there's lots of things that, as a reader, you don't understand, but you're clear right away on who's saying what.

Or, for that matter, Mister New Yorker, John Updike, who begins a story with, "The Maples had moved just the day before to West Thirteenth Street, and that evening they had Rebecca Cune over, because now they were so close." Lots of hidden meaning there, but none of this artificial confusion where you're basically thrown into someone's brain at a random moment and not given any background. Following John Updike (or, for that matter, John O'Hara), I think the real challenge is giving the right amount of background--not too much, and not too little. Zero is not usually a serious option, in my opinion.

But, if you're writing a story that really has no mystery and no suspense, then starting by giving the reader no information can be a good way to give the illusion of depth.

P.S. Just to be clear, I'm not complaining about the "start in the middle" approach where the story begins and then you use flashbacks or other revelations to give a sense of how things all got started. That makes a lot of sense to me. What I'm bothered by is the particular trick of not identifying anything explicitly about the main characters so that the first part of the story involves the reader having to figure out the basics.

P.P.S. Sorry for ranting again. Yes, I know, I know, nobody's forcing me to read this story. But these questions of style interest me.

P.P.P.S. These issues also arise when writing statistics books.

I received a free copy in the mail of an introductory statistics textbook; I guess the publisher wants me to adopt it for my courses. The book isn't bad, actually it's pretty good: it follows the "Moore and McCabe" format, starting with descriptive statistics (up to correlation and regression), then a bit on data collection, then probability, then statistical inference, and at the end chapters on various more advanced topics.

I showed the book to Yu-Sung and he said: Wow, it's pretty fancy. I bet it costs $150. I didn't believe him, but we checked on Amazon and lo! it really does retail for that much. What the . . . ? I asked around and, indeed, it's commonplace for students to pay well over $100 for introductory textbooks.

Well. I'm planning to write an introductory textbook of my own and I'd like to charge $10 for it. Maybe this isn't possible, but I think $40 should be doable. And why would anybody require their students to pay $150 for a statistics book when something better is available at less than 1/3 the price?

This won't be easy, because I'm planning to write an entirely new kind of intro book, starting from scratch. But why hasn't someone written a more conventional book at a cut-rate price? Or maybe they have, and I just haven't heard about it?

It just mystifies me that, in all these different fields, it's considered acceptable to charge $150 for a textbook. I'd think that all you need is one cartel-breaker in each field and all the prices would come tumbling down. But apparently not. I just don't understand.

P.S. More thoughts here.

I received the following email:

**, Co-Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer of **, wants to use the following quote in his upcoming presentation:

"The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple, it operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences."

** would like to attribute the quote to the rightful author but is having difficulties in locating its origin. Can you please clarify if this is something that you said, and if so, where and when you said it? If you did not say this, then can you please tell us who was its original author? Thank you in advance for your help.

I replied:

What I wrote about the law of unintended consequences is here and here. The paragraph you give below is from Alex Tabarrok and is given in the first link above.

It's a little scary that the most famous thing I ever wrote was actually written by someone else!

I don't see the humor here, but two different people emailed this to me so I think there's some sort of legal requirement that I blog it. . . .

John Lanchester asks this question about video games. I have a few observations to add:

1. When I was a teenager, my friends and I spent tons of time at the arcade, just throwing quarters into videogames. (I always preferred pinball, but videogames were more available.) I haven't played a videogame in decades and have zero interest in doing so. (This is not something I'm necessarily proud of, just a statement of fact.) And now I can't figure out what about videogames was so appealing to us, back then.

2. Different people read different sorts of books, often with little overlap. Stephen King, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, etc., are the super-sellers, but lots of people would read one of these and not the others--and lots of readers don't read these blockbusters at all. In contrast, everybody who's into movies is aware of the latest major releases, and it's my impression that people who would rarely read a bestseller of the Stephen King sort would still watch a big-budget movie.

To put it another way: My impression is that the default for reading is to pick something in a niche that you're interested in, but the default for movie watching is to start with the blockbusters and then go from there.

3. But with old movies, I think it's different. Back in the old days, everybody might watch whatever old movie was being shown on TV that night, but what with videos people will now make their choices. And if a movie is old, the whole blockbuster thing seems irrelevant.

I don't know exactly how video games fit into all this; I just wanted to point out that the same audiences seem to expect different things from different media.

Seth asks the above question. I have a couple of thoughts:

1. It's hard to write a book that's easy to read. As Seth points out, it's a Venn diagram situation: you're looking for the overlap between three groups of people: those who know the material, those who can write well, and those who are willing to put in the effort to write a book.

2. Some subjects are so urgent that they're worth writing--and reading--about even if hard to read. For example, if you're a terrorist and want to build an A-bomb (or, to use another example, if you're a social scientist and you want to use quantitative methods), sure, you'd prefer clear instructions, but something that's hard to read is still much better than nothing.

3. What's hard for you to read might be easy for somebody else. An extreme example is foreign language or the passage of time. But, beyond that, there's familiarity. For example, I find the news section of the newspaper much easier than the comics to read. The comics are much simpler, but I'm not familiar with them, and to read them I have to enter all these different stories. In contrast, news stories follow a predictable pattern: drought in the Great Plains, people blowing each other up in the Middle East, and so forth.

4. Standards differ. Bayesian Data Analysis is considered by many to be well-written but it's much less easy to read than Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models, which in turn is, I'm sure, much less easy to read than the collected works of Len Mlodinow. But, then again, Mlodinow is harder to read than Stephen King. If Stephen King wants to write statistics books, that's fine, but I'm afraid that would wreck things for the rest of us. It would set the bar too high.

5. And, of course, some people write books to be hard to read on purpose. James Joyce and so forth. If you, like me, aren't a big James Joyce fan, just pick your favorite writer who you find challenging to read (in a good way).

John Updike just passed away, and coincidentally I noticed a story by him in the most recent New Yorker. Well, actually the story was by someone called "Antonya Nelson" but it was clearly a John Updike story. Not angry enough to be a John Cheever story, not clipped enough to be a Raymond Carver story, not smooth enough to be a Richard Ford story. Based on this evidence, I expect we'll continue to see new Updike stories for awhile.

P.S. I'm a big fan of Updike. Rabbit, Run is my favorite.

A few days ago, I discussed an interesting article that said that it's actually not so unusual for countries to be multilingual. Ubs disagrees:

Although there is more to nationalism than just language, the idea of identifying a political state with a single language is a central idea of nationalism. When you contemplate why it is that today we expect any state to have a single language and think of Canada or Belgium as "weird" (and don't forget Switzerland), what you're really contemplating is why the nation-state has become dominant in the modern world.

Among those who study such things, the standard and mainstream thesis is that there is a fundamental incompatibility between a multinational state and a modern state. Historical evidence is abundant that nationalism tends to occur simultaneously with industrialization, and there are plenty of plausible reasons why this should be so. In a traditional society, where the economy is primarily agricultural and power flows hierarchically, a local noble who does not speak the language of the capital is at no particular disadvantage; in a modern society, where production is aimed for the market, literacy is essential to economic success, and political power flows through a central establishment, he is disenfranchised.

Historians continue to debate the exact nature and significance of the connection between modernization and nationalism, but no one can ignore the question. The two central examples are the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The 19th century history of both states is completely dominated by their efforts to reconcile the multinationalism with modernization. The Ottoman Empire remained multinational and as a result failed to effectively modernize. The Habsburg empire did modernize but was unable to remain multinational.

The notion that language became a problem in Habsburg lands only after the end of World War I, as your quoted excerpt seems to imply, is ridiculous. The language problem dominated the empire's politics from its founding in the Napoleonic wars until its defeat. Following the links, I see that Kamusella's book is 1,168 pages long, so I'm sure he has plenty to say about this, but if his thesis is merely that multilingualism is extinct in central Europe because the mean British, French, and Americans "delegitimized" multilingualism, then either he is naive or he thinks we are.

I would say -- and I believe this is a pretty mainstream view -- that the multilingual nature of the Habsburg empire (and likewise the Ottoman) put it at a disadvantage vis-à-vis nation-states like France and Britain. As a result it was unable to recover after defeat as Germany did. The victors of World War I did not "choose to delegitimize" Austria-Hungary; they defeated it, and they destroyed it. The bundle of smaller states that filled the void were created not in the pursuit of any unilingual ideal, but simply for the usual geopolitical reasons.

It is true that Wilson paid lip service to the idea of drawing state boundaries to match national identities, but this premise was used only where it was politically convenient. It was easily abandoned in South Tyrol, Sudetenland, and Asia Minor, among other places, and the victors' preservation of bilingual Belgium was the very opposite of delegitimization. The principle behind the carving up of Central Europe after World War I was not any "ideal of ethnolinguistic homogeneity", but rather an attempt to secure all the economically productive property under the political control of the victors.

But I digress. Reading the post again, I think I probably don't disagree with Kamusella nearly as much as I initially thought I did. I think the excerpt and the context in which it was presented rubbed me the wrong way.

The point is that if you had "always thought of monolingual countries as a default rather than a construct", you were absolutely right. At least for any modern state.

Far be it from me to argue with someone who can not only use the expression "vis-à-vis" in a sentence but also knows how to put the accent into an email. But . . . what about China, India, and the former Soviet Union?

P.S. Ubs also points out:

If you say "monolingual" you're mixing languages (not that that hasn't been done before): Bilingual, multilingual, unilingual; polyglot, monoglot (and I suppose, though I've never heard it, "duoglot").

I'll try "unilingual" on for size. (I can't bring myself to say "monoglot," given that "polyglot" sounds weird enough as it is.

In a discussion of her recent Aikenesque historical novel, Jenny links to a reviewer who liked the book but didn't think the fantasy elements fit in so well with the rest of the book. In this case, the fantasy part involved communication between living and dead people ("spiritualism"). Jenny then links to Colleen Mondor, who also liked the book and said that she didn't mind the fantasy element since she (Colleen) has talked to dead people herself.

On this particular point, I have no problem with people talking with dead people. But I'm skeptical about claims that the dead people are talking back.

Here I'm talking about real life, not fiction. I certainly agree that fiction can be "true to life" even while violating recorded history or the laws of physics or just about anything else. Think about Stephen King, for example. I imagine there must even be some stream of science fiction (if you'd call it that) centered around, not new technology or alternate history or fantasy, but violations of logic and continuity. For example, a guy goes out of the house wearing a red shirt and later it's green. Or he gets in his car to go to work, but when he gets to work, he's getting off the bus. That sort of thing is impossible by anyone's standards--of course I'm excluding rational explanations, blackouts, Mission Impossible-style kidnappings and staged sets, etc.--but in some ways it's true to lived experience. (Yes, I realize that some of Philip K. Dick's books are sort of like this--for example, Time out of Joint--but here I'm thinking of even more extreme continuity violations, the sort of thing you'd see in a poorly made low-budget movie where somebody lost the script.)

Anyway, my point in bringing this up is to separate any disagreements about the ability of dead people to talk, from the larger question of getting human insight (or at least a good story) from something that not only didn't happen, but couldn't happen.

P.S. All this blogging is a clear sign that I have lots of work I've been putting off! One thing that happened is we just moved (around the corner). Our new apartment has an airy living room with lots of bookshelves, and sitting here seeing all the books gets me thinking more about literature. . . .

Here's the introduction to Jenny's new book, which is all about the pure nature/nurture distinction, "pure" in the sense of being uncontaminated by the scientific perspective of modern biology. In that sense it reminds me of The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitallism before Its Triumph, by the great Albert Hirschman.

Reading this intro reminds me that authors often say that nobody reads the introduction, but in my experience a lot of people do. One way I can tell is that reviews sometimes pick up on items mentioned in the intro, another way is that people pick up on personal info in the acknowledgments.

I was also reminded that the first Jenny you told me about her book-in-progress, I thought she said the title was "Braiding" (it was her mid-Atlantic accent), which oddly enough wouldn't be a bad title for the book.

It's funny how often such malapropisms are possible; for example, I had a friend who once said she just wanted to bleed into the woodwork. Another time she said she wanted to get on the right tract. In the case of Braiding the malapropism came from the listener not the speaker, but I think the principles are the same.,

Helen DeWitt links to this interesting exercpt from a book by Tomasz Kamusella about the politics of language in central Europe. The basic idea is that we're all too used to thinking that a country should have a single language, and the exceptions (for example, Canada, Belgium, old-time Austria Hungary) seem weird to us. For example, it's always seen as a big joke in the U.S. that some people in Canada insist on speaking French. China shouldn't be a joke but, hey, they all speak "Chinese," right? And India doesn't really count because they're all supposed to speak English. Anyway, India's not just a country, it's most of a subcontinent, so that's different. And African countries have "tribes" so that doesn't really count either. And, sure, they speak 23 languages in Guatemala, but the official language is Spanish, so that's fine, right? Back when Russia was the U.S.S.R., I certainly had no idea that they spoke Ukranian and all those other languages there. And of course lots of people in the U.S. get upset that people insist on speaking Spanish here.

Kamusella writes,

Although the Western European pedigree of politics of language is at present conveniently forgotten, the phenomenon of language politicization is said to be now most visible in Central Europe. It is so because after World War I, the formerly multilingual Western European powers of France and the United Kingdom with the support of the United States chose to delegitimize the existence of Austria-Hungary on the account of its multilingualism and multiethnicity. By the same token, the victorious powers legitimized various ethnonational (formerly, often marginal) movements, which defined their postulated nations in terms of language. The national principle steeped in the ideal of ethnolinguistic homogeneity allowed these movements to carve up Central Europe into a multitude of ethnolinguistic nation-states. What followed with vengeance was forced ethnolinguistic homogenization pursued to assimilate 'non-national elements' within a nation-state. . . .

The declaration of more than one language per person was not permitted, which by default excluded the phenomenon of bi- and multilingualism from official scrutiny. The logic of this exclusion stemmed from the conviction that a person can belong to one nation only. By the same token, declarations of variously named dialects, already construed as 'belonging to' a national language, were noted as declarations of this national language. . . .

And then some statistics:

Nowadays, in comparison to the majority of extant polities worldwide, most of the nation-states of Central Europe are unnaturally homogenous in their ethnolinguistic composition. Non-Polish-speakers constitute less than 1 percent Poland's population, non-Magyar-speakers amount to 2 percent of Hungary's inhabitants, non-Czech-speakers are less than 3 percent in the Czech Republic's populace, non-Romanian-speakers constitute less than 11 percent of Romania's inhabitants, and non-Slovak-speakers amount to less than 15 percent of Slovakia's populace. . . .

I like to say I speak 1 3/4 languages. I wish I could speak more. But, until reading this, I'd always thought of monolingual countries as a default rather than a construct. Interesting stuff.

I was going to write that I used to write articles in Latex and now I write them in Word (for some examples, see here), and then speculate about how the change in format might change how and what I write.

But then I thought that more background could be useful.

1. The pencil-and-paper era. Back when I was a kid I used to write everything by hand. I was proficient with the eraser. In high school I developed a style where I'd outline the English compositoin first and then write it.

2. Typewriter. In college we had to type our papers. Which I did, using my little typewriter (which had been my sister's before that), until . . .

3. Mark's homemade word processor. My college roommate was a CS major and had an Atari computer. I persuaded him to write a word processor in 6502 assembler, and I ended up using it more than he did.

I took a couple of English classes that required a paper every week or so, and to get everything done, I developed a system whereby I first diagrammed my plan on a single sheet of paper using circles and arrows, then wrote a series of outlines, the last of which had at least one sentence per paragraph of the final paper. I'd then take that outline, sit at the computer, and type up the paper pretty much in one take.

4. Troff. I wrote my senior thesis on a campus computer which printed out really nice--not that yucky dot-matrix stuff. I formatted it using Troff.

5. Pencil and paper again. For homework assignments in graduate school I went back to pencil and paper. I was still doing graphs by hand on graph paper (but that's another story).

6. Latex. One of my colleagues told me about Latex, and this quickly became my standard. When I wanted to write an article, I'd take an old latex file and map out sections and subsections, then fill in different parts when I was ready. I did it this way for several books and a few zillion articles.

I have to admit, I've never learned Bibtex, so I spend lots of time cutting and pasting bibliographic references.

7. Html. A few years ago I started this blog (originally intended as a way for members of our research group to communicate with each other). I often use the blog to record thoughts that later are published more formally. Writing in Html puts these thoughts in a different shape than what was happening in Latex. More conversational, less locked into a formal structure.

8. Word. Recently, for some reason I've been writing articles (and our forthcoming book) in Word, which doesn't work so well when I have formulas but somehow seems smoother otherwise.

The medium does affect the message. In many ways I'm dissatisfied with my current approach of composing at the keyboard. Maybe I'll try pencil and paper outlining for awhile.

Oh, yeah, . . . happy new year.

P.S. There are a bunch of comments below, but none of the commenters addressed my point, which was the way in which the typesetting or word processing environment affects the style of writing (and the choice of what to write about). Lots of suggestions about Latex implementations, but this is really beside the point here.

I read the recent story by Colson Whitehead in the New Yorker. It was hilarious. I'd never read anything by Whitehead before. Now I want to go back and read whatever else he's written.

Alessandra Stanley writes in the New York Times, regarding the protagonists of two recent economic and political scandals:

Even their names, Madoff and Blagojevich, have a Dickensian ring, like Skimpole or Pardiggle.

Madoff? Blagojevich? These don't sound very Dickensian to me! I have to admit that I've only read a few of Dickens's books, so maybe I'm missing something. But these names sound more "ethnic" (as we used to say) than Dickensian. I think the real question is, if Alessandra Stanley things Madoff and Blagojevich have a Dickensian ring, are there any names that wouldn't sound Dickensian to her?

P.S. By comparison, here's a list of names that really do sound like they belong in a Dickens novel.

Helen DeWitt writes:

I had this book sitting on my shelf for awhile--I must've bought it used at some point--called Keys to the City: Tales of a New York City Locksmith. I recently brought it with me on a trip and read it on a plane. The book was ok and had blurbs from David Sedaris and the New York Times, but . . .

I was in a bookstore the other day and picked up Richard Ford's most recent sequel to The Sportswriter, opened to a random page, and read the following sentence:

I'm eager to go, though still light-headed.

That's just so Bascombe! It's amazing how one sentence selected at random captures the style so well.

A colleague was asking for suggestions for teaching a course in the comic novel. Beyond the obvious (Waugh, Wodehouse, Roth, Nabokov), I thought of:Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene. Twain is another obvious call, except that his funny novels are also serious. The funniest non-serious thing I know of by Twain is Adam's Diary, but that's just a short story. We also discussed End Zone by Don DeLillo. And I've also heard that Gulliver's Travels is pretty good; I've never read it. I also think much of The Sportswriter and Independence Day by Richard Ford are hilarious, but I don't think they'd be classified as comic novels.

My latest thought is Little Children by Tom Perotta. It's an excellent book but it's not a great work of art, but that's the point: when teaching a class, maybe it's better to have something where the seams show a little.

P.S. See comments below. Also, Bridget Jones's Diary. And some kids' humor book: not something like Lemony Snicket that's supposed to be good, but something more lowbrow such as Goosebumps or Captain Underpants, to get a sense of what people think is funny. Also, something funny but completely non-novel-like, for example Chris Rock's book. Students can compare how the comic novels differ from the quick jokes.

Sign in the Chicago L:

Soliciting and Gambling are Prohibited on CTA Vehicles

I had no idea this would be a concern.

I was writing something in MS Word on the election and I suddenly noticed . . . all my instances of Obama had that red underline, indicating a misspelling. Oddly enough, neither McCain nor Kerry were flagged in this way. I wonder how long this will last. . .

P.S. "Palin" is also flagged by the spell-checker but "Biden" is ok.

P.P.S. Movable Type is currently flagging Obama, Palin, and Biden, but not McCain or Kerry.

I was reading a book by William Manchester--he's great, by the way, just like George V. Higgins said--and then I started thinking about his alternative name. I'm thinking that "Henry Birmingham" is the best match.

P.S. Or maybe "Rich Williamson" is better. But I think that the Dick/Bill parallel is best. "Rich" is more like "Will."

J. Robert Lennon writes about the end of the publishing industry, a story in which the improbably named "Binky Urban" plays a role. The most interesting aspect, to me, is the difference between having a paying job and not. It's gotta be so difficult to do your work in a setting where you feel you need to make money from it in order for you to keep doing it.

Great ending. And, now that it's over, it reminds me even more of Jonathan Coe. Just one thing is bugging me now: what did the people in that office actually do for work. I mean, I know that it's on purpose that we're not told, but I'm still curious.

I just started the last section of Ed Park's Personal Days--this final section appears to be a long rambling letter of the unreliable narrator type such as concludes The Rotter's Club--which reminds me of a particularly asinine passage in the incredibly overrated Godel Escher, Bach, which for some horrible reason I remember after nearly thirty years, where Hofstadter writes about how, when you read a book, you know you're coming to the end, which affects your expectations, unlike in real life stories or in a movie of indeterminate length, when the end can come as a surprise. The natural solution for a book would be to pad it with an indeterminate number of empty pages--not completely blank, of course, that would be too obvious, but with sentences that are clearly different from the main story. Hofstadter fatuously concluded that this would be impossible: to be convincing, the fake story would have to be close enough to the real one that, essentially, it would be part of the main narrative. But that's completely wrong: it would be easy enough to just have an only barely related story at the end, and then when the main story really did end, for example on page 240, the author could just have a paragraph saying, "This is the end of the story. The rest is padding," or something like that. I mean, you're not expecting the reader to look too carefully at the end matter: either it's really part of the book and the reader wouldn't want to lose the suspense, or it's fake matter, in which case the reader would still like to preserve the suspense of the story's actual length.

But that's not what I was planning to write about. What does Personal Days remind me of (besides it being a remake of Then We Came to the End)? The similarly alphabetically-structured Kafkaesque office nightmare story office nightmare Forlesen, for one thing. Although, oddly enough, Gene Wolfe was a Republican when he wrote that story, I think. The focus is different, though: the office takes up almost all of Forlesen's life time, but his family is ultimately what is central and nobody in the office is real to him; in Personal Days, only the office is real; the characters have no families.

My favorite things in Personal Days so far are the management-speak in the Jilliad and the goofy three-syllable restaurant names.

I pretty much couldn't keep the characters straight, even when I was reading the book. But I suspect this is part of the point. We'll see how I feel when I'm all done.

P.S. I am still training myself in writing with precision: two paragraphs above where it says "My favorite things," I originally had the sloppier "The best things." On the other hand, editing a blog entry is almost the definition of a waste of time. On the other other hand, I like to think this keeps me in practice for more important writing efforts.

P.P.S. I think I am ideally qualified to use the term Kafkaesque, having never read anything by Kafka except the first two pages of that story they give you to read in high school, where Gregor Samsa wakes up as a bug. I've read too much Orwell to be comfortable with "Orwellian."

P.P.P.S. Can blogs do hypertext? The Hofstadter digression in the first paragraph above belonged just where it did, but it's a distraction from my main points. I'd like to be able to enter it as some sort of clickable sidebar (without going to the trouble of setting it up as its own blog entry, which I just don't want to do)?

See here.

I'm about halfway through Personal Days and I'm pretty sure Ed Park is a Democrat. Or something like that, maybe a Green party member or whatever, but certainly not a Republican. Why? Is it just statistical reasoning, he's a youngish writer who lives in NYC? I think it's more than that, there's something about the book that screams "Democrat." Not that a Republican wouldn't make fun of corporate culture but it would be done in a more affectionate, Christopher Buckley-style way.

I'm not saying every artistic-type writer is a Democrat. For example, I don't know anything about David Foster Wallace's politics, but based on what I've read of him, he could've been a Republican. He probably wasn't, but he had that elitist thing going on.

David Mamet, he's a famous Democrat-turned-Republican, but I think it's fair to say that all along he could've been either. Updike's in the middle of the road, Gore Vidal is to the left of the Democrats but I could picture him as a Republican, sort of. . . .

OK, this is getting pretty pointless. . . clearly it's getting too close to the election for me . . . I'll have to finish Personal Days and tell Jeff whether I recommend it. Caroline read one page and said, hey, isn't this just like that other book you read about those people in an office? I said, yeah, but it's a great theme, surely big enough to hold two good books. I showed her the scene with Grime's typos, I'd been laughing aloud at that, but she didn't quite see the point. Perhaps it was only funny after the pages and pages of implicit setup.

Cool.

She writes "sox" instead of "socks." What's that all about? Is this an accepted alternative spelling? (I wouldn't quite recommend the book, but it is also interesting in other ways.)

Marshal Zeringue asked, and I replied:

When I was about 9 years old, I read just about every book of fairy tales in the library. 398.2 in the Dewey decimal system, I remember it well.

Here.

When the sign says the train will be 0:05 late, it won't be 0:05 late. If it were going to be 0:05 late, they wouldn't say anything at all. In reality it will be 0:30 late. But they won't say it will be 0:30 late, because that would mean the train will be 1:30 late.

I got off a good line when I got on the train. I stepped in, saw a retirement-age couple already seated, and asked, Philadelphia? They said, yeah, that's where they're going, but they're not sure either, they hope they're in the right place. I said, yeah, I think this is right. (Pause) And, if there's one thing last week's news has taught us, it's that you can trust a guy in a suit.

That got a laff.

Ads in the Newark train station

A big picture of a hot-dog guy holding a mustard-slathered beauty, next to the words: You Want Cancer With That? Medical research shows hot dogs increase your risk of cancer... [An ad for some law firm that's suing food manufacturers.]

The Retreat at Princeton
Inpatient Alcohol and Drug Treatment for Executives & Professionals
www.RetreatAtPrinceton.com

Phil pointed me to this. Very nice. I have to get someone to program my emailer to do something similar...

I read Richard Cook's biography of Alfred Kazin recently. It was surprisingly interesting--I say "surprisingly" because Kazin didn't live a particularly eventful life. I wanted to read the book in the first place because I like a lot of Kazin's writing and I wanted to understand how the pieces fit together. One thing I learned is that his sister married Daniel Bell. Not that the book featured any interesting anecdotes about Bell; still, it was satisfying to see the map filled in. I was struck by how financially precarious Kazin's life was. After the late 1930s, he was never poor, but it was a long time before he had a permanent job. There definitely seems to be a conceptual divide between those of us with steady jobs (the sort that pay us even if we're not really working) and people who start each year from baseline of zero income and have to earn every penny. (Well, I guess Kazin had book royalties, but I don't suppose that was enough to pay the rent.)

My favorite writing of Kazin's are his book reviews, especially of post-1950 literature, which is what I'm most likely to have read and to be able to relate to. (I just can't get into that Henry James stuff.) I'd love to read more of that. I have a collection of his reviews that came out around 1962, and it's excellent. (Not perfect; he sometimes irritates me with a smug all-knowing attitude of condescension, but most of the time it's interesting. For example, I got a lot out of his essay on John P. Marquand, even though Kazin is less of a fan of Marquand than I am. My take on this: Marquand made it look so easy that his skills were hard to appreciate until decades later, when nobody has come along to replace him.)

Cook takes a lot from the memoir, "What I Saw at the Fair," that Kazin's third wife, Ann Birstein, published a few years after Kazin's death. I went to the library and picked it up and gave it a quick read. She was still mighty angry at Kazin, even to the end, when she found out that he'd sold a collection of letters, including many from her, to the New York Public Library. It's gotta be a weird feeling to go to the library and come across your own decades-old letters.

"What I Saw at the Fair" is readable and interesting, but running through it is a funny idea--I'd call it pre-modern--that people's true essences are reflected in their physical appearance. Character after character is introduced as ugly or beautiful, and almost always this is an indicator to the inner being. This strategy works for Dickens, and in addition I'm willing to believe that there's some correlation between inner and outer beauty (especially given that both are in the eye of the beholder). But I know enough people to know that any such pattern is far from universally true. In reading Birstein's memoir, I was continually wondering whether she really believed that beautiful people are nicer, that ugly people compensated by being nasty, that Hannah Arendt was really "a Nazi," Along the same lines, she disparages Norman Mailer's machismo because his penis was small.

But what really struck me about Birstein's memoir is that she strongly identifies herself as a writer--she's published several novels--and she knew lots of writers and intellectuals, including Sylvia Plath, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and the aforementioned Daniel Bell--but she expresses no interest in any of their writings. Birstein's anecdotes about these people are interesting, but I'm surprised to see no discussion of their literature or their ideas. Perhaps this is her revenge on them for ignoring her writing all these years. In any case, I think she missed an opportunity. It would be like writing a book that takes place in the Giants' locker room and not talking about football. Birstein identifies being a writer with fiction writing and thinks it's funny that Kazin called himself a writer when he was only a critic. "A Walker in the City" has some beautiful phrases and images, but to me it doesn't read as smoothly as a good novel or even as smoothly as good criticism.

Kazin told Birstein that he couldn't love her if she weren't a writer (or something like that; I don't recall the exact wording), but he didn't show much respect for her actual writing. But maybe that has to do with Kazin's career as a critic of classic writing. If he was comparing to Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, etc., then it's no surprise that Birstein came off second best.

This brings me to a more general point. Birstein appeared to evaluate people based on their looks (or, perhaps, retroactively evaluated people's looks based on how much she liked them). Kazin perhaps evaluated Birstein unfairly because, as a writer, she was no Saul Bellow. Do we all do this sometimes? I evaluate statisticians based on their ability--not necessarily technical ability (although that's part of it) but more on whether they "get it" and can solve problems. And the statisticians who are really good at this? I like them as people, almost without exception. Conversely, I get irritated by statisticians who can't do it--especially those who seem to pump up bad ideas or disparage good ideas--I tend to think of them as lesser on a personal level. Some of this is legitimate, I think--part of being a good person is to recognize how one can be most helpful to others--but I probably lean too far in this direction. Even people who are nearly universally disliked, if they're good statisticians, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. But if I don't like their ideas, it's hard to avoid disliking them.

For a sillier example, I remember reading in Susan Cheever's memoir that John Cheever rated people based on how strong were the drinks they served. Higher alcohol content = better person. And in playing pickup frisbee, I think that, on average, you'll be more liked as a person if you're a better frisbee player. (Although maybe in basketball it goes the other way...)

P.S. What happened to Kazin's first wife? After they broke up, she didn't want to get back together with him--a reasonable enough decision, especially considering how his life proceeded in the years after--but then I was mildly curious what happened with her after that, and the biography didn't say.

Following up on my Lauryn Hill question (and thanks much, Scott Cunningham, for the detailed answer there): what's the deal with Matthew Klam. The stories in "Sam the Cat" (2001) are hilarious, and they also give the impression that Klam could just whip them out. Since then, though . . . almost nothing. Klam has a bizarrely professional-looking webpage but not the output I'd expect. What's the deal? Maybe author/blogger J. Robert Lennon knows?

This is pretty funny. J. Robert Lennon reports that "Random House has decided to insert the following clause into its boilerplate contract for children's authors:"

If you act or behave in a way which damages your reputation as a person suitable to work with or be associated with children, and consequently the market for or value of the work is seriously diminished, and we may (at our option) take any of the following actions: Delay publication / Renegotiate advance / Terminate the agreement.

I'm wondering if this could be included into contracts for statistics books. If, for example, you publish an article in a leading statistical journal in which you have an unreadable graph, or present results to 8 significant digits when 2 will do, or if you run your simulations for a million iterations without even trying to see if 1000 would've sufficed, then your textbook could get yanked off the shelves!

P.S. No, publishing a false theorem shouldn't count.

According to Wikipedia the current population of South Ossetia is 70,000.

Do people really still use this word? From the context, Cowen appears to be using it to mean "French person" rather than "French man," so maybe he is being ironic? I admit to some nostalgia for various old-fashioned ethinic descriptors that aren't exactly offensive but still don't really get used anymore, such as Chinaman, Jewess, Turk. Something like an old Sam Spade novel where "the Turk" comes out of an alley with a knife, or whatever. Recently I've been hearing Latinos (Hispanics) refer to themselves as "Spanish," which is kind of cool.

OK, time to get back to work.

Seth had this discussion where he quoted Nassim Taleb's Black Swan book, to which someone commented that Taleb's books are "unreadable," to which Seth responded:

If The Black Swan is “so unreadable” why has it been so popular?

Now this is an interesting question. Not so much about The Black Swan (which I liked) but about the more general question of whether a bestseller must be readable. Obviously, readability helps, but are popular books "readable"? I can think of two issues:

1. Books such as "A Brief History of Time" or, to take Michael Kinsley's famous example, "Deadly Gambits," which people buy but never get around to reading.

2. Books which seem supremely readable when they come out but don't age well. A lot of bestsellers are like that, I imagine. If you go back to a bestseller list from decades ago, I think you'd see books that would not be so easy to read today. What I'm getting at is that "readability" is not just a property of the book, it also depends a lot on the reader.

Stephen Burt's recent article on Philip K. Dick was quoted with approval by Jenny Davidson, but I wasn't impressed. For one thing, Jack Isidore regrooves tires, he doesn't retread them. Also, I don't think Burt did a good job at addressing how funny Dick's books are--even Scanner, which is so serious, is also hilarious. Finally, I don't get the bit at the end of Burt's essay where he speculates on other science fiction writers whose work could be collected in the Library of America. Maybe Dick would be better characterized with authors such as James Jones who create recognizable worlds using whatever literary tools they happen to have at hand.

P.S. Link above fixed.

See here.

Lots of stories for little kids have kings and queens, not many seem to have presidents, prime ministers, mayors, etc. I don't fully understand this. I mean, I see that these stories are traditional, or imitate traditional forms, and so it makes sense that you'd have a king or queen rather than a president. But there are lots of other traditional forms of government. You can see some examples in children's literature, but they're clearly exceptions. (For example, the wolves in The Jungle Book have a tribal council, and the animals in Winnie the Pooh don't have any government at all.) I guess what I'm asking is: How did the standard storybook world become codified, the world with a kingdom, a king and a queen living in a castle riding horses etc? Even in the late Middle Ages in Europe when, I suppose, such places really existed, there were lots of other, different, sorts of places nearby. How and when did the storybook kingdom became canonical? Maybe Jenny can answer this question--it seems to fall within her bailiwick.

P.S. More discussion in the comments to Mark Thoma's blog here. My favorite comment is the first one: "If Mr Gelman doesn't like kings and queens in childrens' stories maybe he should write some stories himself." You'd think that a commenter to an economics blog would've heard about the division of labor! I tell stories to kids, but I write for adults.

More to the point, there are lots and lots of stories without kings and queens, from "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" on down. What struck me, though, was how kingdoms are canonical. For example, Sesame Street is filled with original stories--not folktales or anything like that--and by default they are often set in kingdoms.

I just finished two novels that both take place in London and were written by demographically similar authors. The Post-Birthday World is a book that I'd read an amusingly dismissive review of (I can't remember where; I thought it was the London Review of Books but it wasn't) but then I saw the paperback in the train station and flipped through it and it looked pretty good. It was indeed pretty good. I can't say that the characters really ever seemed like real people, but it was hard to put down and also thought-provoking. I liked that it moved slowly enough that the characters had a chance to mull things over. The Last Samurai was recommended to me by Rachel. I have to admit that I skipped all the parts of the book that were in foreign languages but I suppose they added to the atmosphere nonetheless. The two main characters seemed completely real, also the book was very funny. There was also some of that cool unreliable-narrator thing going on, where one of the two main characters (the adult one) seemed self-deluded. Highly recommended.

I don't know if I agree with this. I enjoy writing, but what I really enjoy is goofing off. If my books could write themselves, I'd choose that option.

But it is true (for me) that only through the writing does the content come out. I don't really know exactly what I want to say until I write it.

This just came in the email:

As you are likely aware, this past February one of the two Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems in the Science Center data center failed completely as the result of a short circuit. . . .

It's a good thing they had two of them!

Note that . . . Interestingly . . . Obviously . . . It is clear that . . . It is interesting to note that . . . very . . . quite . . . of course . . . Notice that . . .

I'm sure there are many more that I've forgotten. Most of youall probably know about most of these, but I don't know that many people know to avoid "very."

Hey, this looks interesting . . . Inderjeet Mani, of Mitre Corporation, will be here on Monday, speaking on Interpreting Fictional Narrative: Crossing Some Ancient Frontiers. Here's the abstract:

While progress has been made on computational understanding of the flow of time in non-fictional genres, there has been little attention paid to time in literary texts. I will discuss a new project that examines the intersection between computational linguistics and narratology. I argue that understanding time in fiction requires not only the construction of timelines, but also a grasp of how characters, and readers' attitudes towards them, evolve. Accordingly, one needs to represent the goals and outcomes of characters' actions, superimposing a model of plot as an additional layer on top of the timeline. The theory models narrative progression in terms of changes in an ideal reader's emotional reactions to particular characters as the plot unfolds. In addition to examining samples from well-known literary works, I will discuss progress to date on an annotation scheme for plot and character evaluations.

Perhaps someone from the Classics department can come and comment on how this relates to the ancient theories of tragedy, comedy, etc. I also wonder how his theories work with explicitly time-organized fiction such as that of Jonathan Coe and Richard Ford (and I guess we could throw Wordsworth in there too), as compared to more straightforward narrative.

The talk will be 1:30 PM, Monday May 12th in the Back Open Conference Area of the CS Building. (enter the CS Building within Mudd and ask the receptionist to direct you back).

Jane Dark writes here about movies taking only 100 minutes whereas, on TV, "The Wire is about 65 hours long, divided graciously into five location-based chapters. Movies are now the short form, television the long form." I've never seen The Wire (we live on the 7th floor, no reception) so I can't comment on this example, but the discussion reminds me of the fractal nature of soap operas: in any couple of episodes, so much is happening, but then if you tune in a year or two later, everything's still at the same place. Presumably this is to make things interesting to people who watch every day, while still allowing people to miss an episode.

I'd also comment, regarding length, that single novels are generally agreed to be better than series novels. There are exceptions, sure, and you could argue that some sets of novels (for example, Charles Dickens or Anne Tyler) have enough common themes that they function as series. But Dark is specifically talking about the ability to develop character over the long form. For some reason, you don't usually see novelists doing this (again, you have exceptions such as Richard Ford, John Updike, and Philip Roth). One reason, perhaps, is that part of the fun of a work of literature is the chance to meet new characters. Much as we'd like to see our favorites reappear in future books, there's something that seems to be missing in a mere continuation. So I think there is something missing in Dark's argument.

We live in an age of literary abundance. There are so many great storytellers out there, we don't need to rely on a few characters over and over again, as we have to do in a bedtime-story world in which one's limited power of invention invariably results in the same few characters and formulations shuffled around like a deck of cards.

P.S. It appears that in 1997 Jane Dark apparently saw 52 movies more than I did, so I defer to her expertise.

P.P.S. She also amusingly analogizes Dubai to Michael Jackson, loosely adapting the economic theory that free money corrupts the soul (to which I generally agree, but it doesn't stop me from taking government grants, on the theory (which I sincerely believe to be true in this case) that I'll do thing differently).

P.P.P.S. Hey, I like bread and water. If it's good bread, that is.

P.P.P.P.S. Jenny points me to this.

One of my favorite instances of numeracy in literature is William Saroyan's story, "70,000 Assyrians," which I read in the collection, Bedside Tales. The story is typical charming early-Saroyan: it starts out with him down-and-out, waiting on line for a cheap haircut, then he converses with the barber, asking if he, like Saroyan, is Armenian. No, he replies, he's Assyrian. Saroyan says how sad it is that the Assyrians, like the Armenians, no longer have their own country, but that they can hope for better. The barber says, sadly, that the Assyrians cannot even hope, because they have been so depleted, there are only 70,000 of them left in the world.

This is the numeracy: 70,000 is a large number, a huge number of people. It's crowds and crowds and crowds--enough for an entire society, and then some. But not enough for a country, or not enough in a hostile part of the world where other people are busy trying to wipe you out. The idea that 70,000 is a lot, but not enough--that's numeracy. People can be numerate with dollars--for example, $70,000 is a lot of money but it can't buy you a nice apartment in Manhattan--but it's my impression and others' that people have more difficulty with other sorts of large numbers. That's why this Saroyan story made an impression on me.

I recently read Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational and wrote down my comments as I read. After the jump, you can read these thoughts.

Rachel sent me this link. I don't know what sort of novelist would have a blog about statistics, but since we blog about art and literature, I guess it's only fair. Also she links to Ben Goldacre which is a good sign.

P.S. DeWitt responds here to my question.

John posts some anagrams of Qualy:

La fussy jade laity requited,

Edify equity, readjusts...la-la.

Eyeful stye, radial? Just quaid.

Rad, sad eel, justify equality.

Just quaid, indeed. I couldn't of said it better myself.

It seems strange to say that presenting data without explanations is tabloid science. I think of "tabloid-like" as going the other way: theories without data.

What should we call our book? A possible title is:

"Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: How Americans are Polarized and How They're Not"

Or maybe,

"The Red State, Blue State Paradox: ..."

We've been told that a subtitle is a good idea, but it would be good for the main title to be crisp.

Perhaps we have to think outside the box and forget about the red/blue thing, I dunno.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance. We'll give a free ice cream cone to anybody who comes up with a good idea!

P.S. The book is intended for a general audience. It'll be coming out around Labor Day.

P.P.S. One concern is that I don't know of a lot of popularly successful books with 8-word titles (and that's not even counting the subtitle). One to three words would be best, I'd think.

From Meet the Press, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes:

Well, look, just as these politicians on the campaign trail are borrowing and absorbing patterns and evolving, so too speechwriters. They look at the best speeches in history. It's inevitable that those patterns are going to be get in their heads. And you know, we can't make too much of this. This is the spoken word. It's different from the written word, and it becomes part of what's in there. As you said, there's not that much in their heads anymore that's coming in that's new. So all that's in there is what was there before.

The author of the great Santa Land Diaries is reduced to telling a non-story about his business-class trip to Paris??? I have to admit it was always a concern, that an author whose shtick is to tell his true-life stories, that at some point he'd run out of material. I don't really know the solution. Maybe he could suck it up and try to write some fiction based on serious reflections on his life experiences? Maybe he could do some journalism and get good stories out of other people?

My guess it, the New Yorker would be only doing him a favor by rejecting some of these pieces which are so far below his standard.

Then again, we're talking about a magazine that defines Dennis Miller as the king of comedy . . .

I got the following odd announcement in the email:

This book, by Joshua Ferris, is brilliant hilarious. Sort of a cross between Geoffrey O'Brien and Don DeLillo, only funnier. Or like a fast-forward Richard Ford without the smugness. It's impressive to me the way in which novel-writing technique has improved in recent decades. I mean, John Updike was pretty slick, but Ferris (and, for that matter, Ford) really seems in total control of his material, even in comparison to the masters of the previous generations. Sure, there was Nabokov (and, in his own way, James Jones), but that's about it from back then. Now there seem to be a lot of novelists who really know what they're doing in this way. (I think Jonathan Coe could have total control of his material too, if he really felt like it. He seems like Mailer or (Martin) Amis in his desire to shatter his own smooth surfaces.)

P.S. Sorry for only mentioning white males. I'll try to do better next time. Veronica Geng? Alex Haley? Joy Luck Club?

P.P.S. I recommended "Then We Came to the End" to a friend the other day. She hadn't read it, and I'm not sure if she knew what it was about, but, oddly enough, she knew the author's name. I'm not likely to remember an author's name if I haven't read the book (especially since it was his first). She did, however, return the favor by recommending I read something by Jane Austen. I don't think I've read any pre-Dickens novels, and she teaches a whole classful of this stuff. Mark Twain is the earliest writer who reads to me as if it could be written today, but she said that Austen is like that too.

I received the following (unsolicited) email: