Odds and Ends

Published
by
chris238
on March 31, 2008
in Mathematics
. 0 Comments

The place is Vegas. The scene: the lobby of any big hotel. You are walking down a row of slots, past the backs of the acolytes. Hands reach up and down like earthmoving equipment. Large asses envelop the stools they perch on. There is a din of bells and clicking gears, but no one speaks.

Then, up ahead, you hear the gush of coins. A small, mousy woman wearing a red tracksuit and trainers is shoveling a big payout into a plastic bucket. You walk past, then moments later you hear another, smaller delivery. It is the same machine. Registering no emotion, the woman sweeps up her winnings and continues. Entranced, you watch. Nothing happens, for several minutes. The coins are absorbed like lozenges into the belly of a hungry beast. Then her machine once more starts burping coins into its tray. Do you (a) arm-wrestle her out of her place and work that same slot, (b) go tell the management that the machine is fixed, or (c) walk on?

A little later you are standing by the roulette table. Hands with chunky rings push squat piles of chips forward as an offering to the gods of chance. There is a blur of chrome and numbers, and after skittering like a water drop on a griddle, the little ball dives into a slice of the wheel: 17. The next spins ends with a 9. Then a 15, and a 23. With growing amazement, you stare at the wheel. The next spin seems interminable, but after dancing around the edge for nearly thirty seconds, the ball drops. 3! Do you (a) bet the farm that the next number will be even, (b) go tell the management that the croupier is crooked, or (c) walk on?

Finally, you head for the door. A man in shades and a midnight blue suit walks up to you and presses a backpack toward you. Through the half-open zipper you can see wads of bills. By its heft, the backpack must contain a very large sum of money. Do you (a) thank him and leave with the backpack firmly in your grip, (b) engage him in conversation and only accept the gift if his name is not Vinnie or Guido, or do you ignore him and (c) walk on.

The correct answer in each case is (c). Vegas turns many billions of dollars of profit each year thanks to the fact that few people understand probability. Addiction plus ignorance is a potent combination. You can leak it out slowly or void yourself in a series of diarrhetic spasms, but the end result is the same. Unless you can memorize a five-deck shoe or are willing to use radio-controlled devices (and risk the smashed joints that discovery would entail), your fate is sealed. It’s quicker to just go to the cashier as soon as you arrive and hand them a check for all you’ve got.

Independent events have independent odds. What happens next does not depend on what came before. Each roll of the dice, each pull of the lever, each spin of the wheel, is a freshly smelt bouquet of chance.

Here in a nutshell are the rules of probability. Keep them in a safe place, next to your PIN numbers and your spare house key. You never know when you might need them. These rules could (probably) save your life.

Probability ranges from 0 to 1. Zero is something that never happens, and 1 is something that always happens. But things that always happen (night following day) and things that almost never happen (free lunches) are not very interesting. Life occupies the zone between 0 and 1, the realm of the uncertain. You can think of probability as a fraction, as odds, or as a percentage, so ¼, 1 in 4, and 25% are all the same.

Different outcomes of the same event are probabilities that must add up to 1. So if we say that shit happens 3 times out of 10, then, lucky us, shit fails to happen 7 times out of ten. The probability of your next child being a girl is 0.52, and so the probability of it being a boy must be 0.48. Every day when you go into work, there is a 94% chance that nothing will happen, a 5% chance you will get a fat raise, and a 1% chance you will get fired. The sum of these must equal 1, or 100%, unless you subvert nature by lying in bed all day reading trash novels and eating bonbons.

You combine the probability of unrelated events my multiplying them. The odds of rain may be 1 in 2. Perhaps the odds of you breaking your leg on any day are 1 in 500. If you have a teenage daughter, the odds of her coming home with her tongue pierced are 1 in 15. So, on any particular day, the odds of you coming home on a rainy day with a freshly broken leg, having just been fired, to find your daughter with a rod in her mouth, are (1/2) x (1/500) x (1/100) x (1/15) = 1/1,500,000. Less than one in a million. That’s nothing to lose sleep over (which wouldn’t stop me…).

Back to the casino. When the old girl in the tracksuit hits paydirt three times, it’s just the random bunching up of somewhat unlikely events. Imagine rolling a die and getting three consecutive sixes. The odds of it happening are (1/6) x (1/6) x (1/6) or a bit less than 1 in 200. That’s pretty unlikely. But if you roll a die long enough, or pull that lever long enough, eventually it will happen. Meanwhile the casual gambler will have frittered away everything they own.

Also, if the odds of even a modest win are 1 in 200, then in a lobby filled with more than 200 slots, some machine is always paying out. We tend to concentrate on the lucky winner and ignore the sea of losers. So leave the old lady alone. Her machine is not special. If you grabbed it, the chance of it immediately rewarding you with a fistful of dollars are as slim as they are on any slot and at any time.

Same with the roulette wheel — walk on. Five odd numbers in a row sounds like a lot. Actually, the odds are ½ x ½ x ½ x ½ x ½ or 1 in 32. We think that a run of odd numbers makes an even number more likely, but that’s where they have us by the short and curlies. The probability of an even number on that next spin of the wheel is, yessireebob, ½. Try it. Take a coin and flip it repeatedly. You won’t see neatly alternating heads and tails, you will see groups and clusters of heads or tails a lot of the time.

As for the man in the nice suit (who may or may not be a made guy) shoving a bag of money at you; he has nothing to do with probability. Common sense says you should pass. Or ethics, if you want to get all lofty about it.

It’s natural that our critical thinking skills should be compromised in a place like Las Vegas. They are using classic techniques of psychological warfare. Raucous noise, harsh light, cheap drinks and steak dinners at any time of day and night are designed for sensory disorientation. The effect on the human brain is similar to time spent floating in a darkened tank of blood-temperature water. Sensory overload and sensory deprivation — both will leave you yelling for the happy jacket.

Our response to probability is not wholly rational. When people are offered the choice between betting $10 with a 1 in 2 chance of doubling their money or betting $50 with a 1 in 1000 chance of winning $10,000, they will almost always opt for the latter. Yet the second bet is 500 times less likely to pay off. Even if you made both bets over and over, and occasionally won, you would lose money 10 times faster with the second bet.

The lure of the big payoff always overcomes the small prospect of success. A lottery or sweepstakes is an extreme version of this attraction. (Ed McMahon, even as you read this, may be clambering into a minivan with an oversized check made out to YOU!) In a lottery, $1 buys you a shot at $10 million or more. Never mind that you could buy 10 tickets a week for the rest of your life and have no more chance of winning the big prize than of being hit by lightning.

Maybe a lottery is harmless entertainment. A buck is not much money. To inject a bit of logic into the process, you might never buy more than two tickets. Buying that first ticket increases your chances of winning from zero to a miniscule number. Buying the second ticket doubles the chances. But every ticket after that increases the chances by a smaller percentage, with the same amount of money spent.

I, for example, am supposed to be a smarty-pants, logical scientist. Much to my wife’s amusement, every few months I spend some time filling in forms and moving little stickers for on one of the big sweepstakes drawings. Yet I know deep down that I am as likely to win as I am to discover a process for turning plastic into gold. Which does not ease my compulsion to play these tiny odds.

Gambling is a distraction and a sideshow to the main event: the big lottery of life. As hunter-gatherers, we used to roll the dice every day. No calling out for pizza — gathering each meal risked a tussle with a predator. No handy pills or inoculations — each new food was a potential toxin, and each microbe was looking for new hosts. Life is comparably much safer now. Perhaps we need to take risks to feel alive. Las Vegas bets this is the case 365 days a year, and wins. Odds are you won’t be so lucky.

Calendar Reform

Published
by
chris238
on March 15, 2008
in Astronomy
. 0 Comments

Thirty to forty thousand years ago, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Life was short and brutish, and dentistry had not been invented. Anatomically, people were just like us, lacking only our effortlessly cynical attitude. Try if you can to imagine life before fast food, deodorant, and digital stereo. Unlike us, they were not obsessed by “stuff,” since they could only use what they could carry around. The oldest human artifacts ever found date from this time. They are calendar sticks — portable pieces of wood with notches carved into them to count cycles of the Moon or Sun.

Our ancestors absolutely depended on keeping track of the time. If they foraged during the day, they would have to begin to return to camp before the Sun reached its highest point in the sky. Otherwise, mmmmm, crunchy snack for a saber-toothed cat. Keeping track of the seasons allowed them to predict when to find their favorite foods. These foods did not have names yet, so they were known as “the bright red berry that is sweet but goes right through you” or “small furry animal that tastes like pork gone off.” Each winter the shortening days and shallow slanting rays of the Sun would signal the time to migrate back to the Florida timeshare.

Five or six thousand years ago, tribes around Europe began to build large stone circles. These were multi-use buildings, Stone Age versions of a church or a town hall. The stones were perfectly aligned to mark out the positions of sunrise on the longest or the shortest day of the year. Everyone’s heard of Stonehenge, which rises like a pile of giant kid’s blocks out of a meadow in southern England. Stonehenge is now used only by modern pagans, a free-spirited tribe that annoys the hell out of the Brits who can’t shit anything larger than a BB.

Here’s the trouble with calendars. The time it takes the Earth to spin once on its axis is a day. The time it takes for the Earth to return to the same place in its orbit of the Sun is a year. If there were a whole number of days in a year, keeping track of time would be no big deal.

But there are not 365 days in a year. There are not even 365¼. There are 365.242199 days in a year. So if your calendar has 365 days, you are about 6 hours short. After 100 years, that 6 hours has accumulated into 600 hours, or nearly a month. This calendar will get steadily out of whack with the seasons. OK, you think, let’s do the leap year thing. That brings the average to 365¼ days in a year. But 365.25 is not the same as 365.242199. The tiny difference of 1/100 of a day grows into a whole day after 100 years and ten days after 1000 years.

Why not use the Moon to make a calendar? There are about 29½ days in a lunar cycle. Trouble is, 29½ doesn’t divide neatly into 365¼. It goes 12 times with 11 days left over. So a lunar calendar slips with respect to the seasons at a rate of one month every three years. Every 35 years, a lunar calendar shifts through an entire solar year.

The entire Arab world uses the Moon for their calendar. Check it out in any encyclopedia — the Islamic countries are those with a crescent Moon in their flags. They ignore the Sun for keeping time, which is a cunning strategy in a part of the world where you can fry an egg on the sidewalk most times of the year. As a result, Ramadan and the major Arab festivals could fall on any day of our calendar. Timekeeping depends on direct observation of the Moon (the word moon comes from the Greek metron, to measure). Until the new sliver of Moon is actually observed on the ninth month of the lunar cycle, the minaret hollerers cannot declare party time in Mecca. A few clouds in the wrong part of the sky, and all those camels stuffed with donkeys stuffed with goats stuffed with pigs have to be put back on ice.

They say that science marches forward. Well, the science of calendars is full of anachronisms and oddities. The Babylonians had a calendar that was accurate to 30 minutes a year over 5000 years ago. Europe did not equal it until 4500 years later. When the Spanish conquered Central and South America, they trashed the local culture and customs (but that gold work is nice, yes, we’ll take that, and here, have some devastating diseases while we’re at it). Yet, among other things, the Maya and Inca calendars were far superior.

If our culture is so advanced and rational, why do we have to remember a little ditty to figure out the number of days in each month? Why did February get left short? Why do the last four months of the year come from the roots of the words for 7,8,9, and 10, when we have 12 months in the year? Why does the year start at the beginning of January? Why does Easter shift around in the calendar, while Christmas always falls on the same day? Who thought up this stuff anyway?

The Romans. In the 7th century B.C., the time of Romulus, the ancient Romans were just one of many warlike tribes scattered through Europe. They kept track of time vaguely, with a calendar of ten months that alternated 30 and 31 days. The year started sometime in March, because that was when the snow in the Alps melted enough for the Roman legions to go off and kick some serious butt.

So the year began with March, named after the god of war. Then came April, after Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. Next was May, after the ancient fertility god Maia. Then June, after Juno, the goddess of women. But the Romans were simple folk. Violent, but simple. After they had run through their gods, they named the rest of the months after the numbers 5 to 10. This calendar of just over 300 days makes a poor apology for a year.

In the 6th century B.C., the emperor Pompilus added two short months of 25 days each to the front end of the year. January was named after Janus, the god of doorways and beginnings, and February was named after the festival of purification. A bit later, the emperor Priscus made more adjustments. He bumped up the length of the first two months.

However, the Romans were incredibly superstitious. Black cats, ladders, broken mirrors, salt tossed over the shoulder — you name it, they had a hand in passing it down to us. Even numbers were bad luck, so the months alternated 29 and 31 days. Under the principle that “shit happens,” the Romans came up with the clever idea of concentrating misfortune in one month. February became the short month with an unlucky 28 days. It was too cold to raise a legion and make war. It was too dark to go to the forum and see a good disemboweling. No Roman would travel at all in February. For the entire month they would hole up and satisfy carnal urges, with occasional trips to the spa or the vomitorium.

This flaky calendar became intolerable by the time of Julius Caesar. Caesar tweaked the calendar to make a neatly alternating pattern of months with 30 and 31 days. (February remained the unloved child with 29 days.) He added a day every fourth or leap year to make the average year last 365¼ days. With an ego as big as the Colliseum, Caesar grabbed the first unnamed month for himself. So Quintilus (the number 5, but the 7th month) became July. Emperor Augustus followed. His ego matched Caesar’s, and so he nabbed Sextilus as his month. Thus we have August. But Augustus saw that his month was shorter than July, so he added a day to it, and then had to adjust other months and the pattern got screwed up forever.

Why do we start the year on January 1st? The Earth repeats its orbit of the Sun endlessly and we could start the year on any day. The real reason was so Christianity could get a jump on the pagans. Since the dawn of time, humans have been Sun worshippers. Stonehenge and all those other rock piles were built to mark the longest and shortest days of the year. The biggest cheers were saved for the time just after December 21st, when the sunset position starts moving back to the north and the Sun makes a higher and warmer arc in the sky.

So early Christian leaders placed Christ’s birthday just after the winter solstice (the Good Book makes it clear he was born much later in the spring). And they co-opted the pagan calendar by starting our year on January 1. It was all a way of making converts to this new religion. This schizophrenia is really apparent in the case of Easter. In the Bible, Easter is set by the lunar calendar and should not always fall on a Sunday. Easter flops around in our calendar because it is the first Sunday after the first full moon that falls after March 21st. And March 21st is — you got it — the spring equinox, another pagan holiday. Orthodox Jews and the Eastern Orthodox group got fed up with this kluge and split off to follow their own lunar calendar.

It must have been a hard sell for those early Popes. You can have Christianity, with cold stone pews, turn the other cheek, and no real fun until the hereafter. Or you can go with paganism, which has lots of body painting, dancing, and free sex. What would you choose?

Paganism still looks pretty good. It’s an official religion in most parts of the United States. So you can claim all eight pagan holidays, the cardinal points of the solar year. In addition to the solstices and the equinoxes, there are the mid-points between them: February 1st, May 1st, August 1st, and November 1st. Most of these have long been forgotten, but we still celebrate the last as Halloween.

Even Caesar’s nifty calendar was not the final answer. It is a bit longer than the Earth’s orbit, and so by the 16th century the calendar was 10 days out of synch. In 1582, Pope Gregory added the bit about skipping leap years in century years unless they are divisible by 400. This gives a most excellent calendar, guaranteed to keep the seasons lined up thousands of years after humans have been wiped out by prions or bombs or whatever other damn fool thing we dream up.

Out of anti-papal pique, the mostly Protestant England and United States put off converting to the Gregorian system for another 170 years. And so April 1st, 1752 was followed by April 12th, as the slack was taken up overnight by government decree. (The mostly Catholic French mocked this late switch by inventing the idea of April Fools day.) Ben Franklin wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac to reassure people over the “loss” of their 11 days. There were widespread riots anyway.

The French, bless their garlicky little hearts, once tried a rational scheme. After the French Revolution was over and all the loose heads had been cleaned up, the communal government declared a calendar of 12 thirty-day months, plus five festival days. Free of pagan relics, the months had names like Meadow, Mist, and Blossom. The festivals were titled Virtue, Genius, Labor, Opinion, and Reward. There was a ten-day week. Every day had ten hours, each of 100 minutes, each of 100 seconds. It was totally cool and post-modern. The trouble was the rest of Europe, which trundled along with the old system. Commerce became a nightmare. So after twelve years of the experiment, Napoleon kissed the ring and came back into the fold.

So here we are, stuck with pagan relics and Roman ego trips. Surely there is a better way. Me? — I’m signing up with Islam. That lunar calendar sounds pretty good right now.

Half of All Penises

Published
by
chris238
on February 29, 2008
in Mathematics
. 0 Comments

are smaller than average. Not yours, of course. If you are a guy reading this, then yours is no doubt comfortably larger than the mean. Not freak-show huge. Just languid, python-in-the-pants, I’ve-never-had-any-complaints big.

But out there in the world, at the mall, with your lunch crowd, at the water cooler. Half of those guys are concealing weapons that are less than deadly. You would never know it to look at them. They make eye contact, give a firm handshake. But stripped past their skivvies, with their one-eyed johnsons blinking in the light, the awful truth is revealed.

This is not rocket science, but basic math. Take any bunch of numbers, add them up, and divide by the number of numbers: that’s the average, the mean. The numbers spread high and low: that’s the bell curve. To be exactly average is to be special. You are far more likely to either above average or below average. The mean is the line drawn in the sand between the amply and the wimpily endowed.

The numbers are staggering. Of the eighty million adult males in this country, fully forty million have below-average-size penises. Think of the marketing possibilities. Counselors and shrinks could fill their schedules until the next millenium. (On the other hand, a shrink might be the last person you would go to.) Even if no more than a small fraction goes the mechanical route, there’s a vast market for implants and extension devices. Worldwide, we are talking about two billion disadvantaged males. It doesn’t matter that guys have been told, patiently, by women throughout history and by gurus with degrees in both sexual function and dysfunction, that size is not the issue. It’s how you use it. It’s the emotions that go with it. What use is a big penis and a lousy personality. Blahblahblah. In the calculus of the playground or the locker room, the undersized is the second ape, condemned to forever kiss the pink ass of the alpha ape while picking lice from his matted fur.

What can be done? We could redefine average. It already happens in the schools. All our children are comfortingly better than average — the Lake Wobegon effect. Even at university, nearly everyone gets A’s and B’s. Professors are numbed into grade inflation by diminished expectations and laziness, while the universities are too firmly locked to the teat of their tuition money to tell parents that their kid is a lousy student.

All around us, the mediocre has been redefined. Drinks at the movies are Large, Extra Large, and Jumbo, even though the Large would not slake a sparrow’s thirst. Software comes in Standard, Special and Deluxe versions, when in fact it should be labeled No Useful Features, Crashes All The Time, and Only Works On A Computer That You Can’t Afford. Nobody wants to drive or buy a small car, so they are “compact,” or “economy” instead.

This is the worst kind of sophistry. Over two hundred years ago, the brainy (and bearded) German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss worked out the theory of random variations. The average is always well defined. There are always equal numbers above and below the average. A bell curve is a bell curve is a bell curve.

Or we could obfuscate. A length in millimeters is twenty-five times larger than the same length in inches. That would bring the average well into the hundreds. Any particular number in the metric system would mean very little to most people. Who hasn’t stared blankly at their weight quoted in kilos or their height quoted in meters?

Maybe it’s more useful to question the data. Stripped down to the issue of scientific measurement, we could ask: How many penises were measured to deduce the average? Would any random set of people really agree to this? At what temperature were the measurements made? Was it inside a cozy lab, or outside on a brisk winter morning when all men are created equal? Was the ruler laid along the top or along the bottom of the gristly shaft? How was curvature accounted for? Was the penis erect or non-erect? If erect, was the erection rightfully or non-rightfully gained? (Surely there are bonus points to becoming large while thinking of your spouse, and demerits for needing a lower form of men’s literature.) Isn’t it better to measure volume? We could use the displacement method of Archimedes, who jumped from his bath and ran down the street naked, having made a pleasing discovery.

And who are these people who make such measurements? (This is a field where self-measurement would be notoriously untrustworthy — what man doesn’t have an inflated opinion of himself inflated?) Do they go home to their wives and kids and read the paper and watch TV just like someone who fixes cars or sells stocks? Do they wash their hands before dinner? We imagine they are professionals, with a professional’s light touch. Like the doctor who gives the annual rectal exam and keeps up a light patter about baseball and the weather. The least embarrassing solution would be to accumulate data from morgues. Unfortunately, you don’t know which stiffs may have shrunk from fright as they faced their Maker. Perhaps the equipment settles into a more compact configuration knowing it will not be called on again.

The variation of body parts is mostly random. Nature rolls the dice as the genes roll on through the generations. It’s not clear what larger earlobes or red hair have to do with survival, but natural selection takes the scattershot approach and tries everything. So size “down there” is just a variable drawn from the same genetic grab bag that causes some people to have eyebrows that grow together.

Prediction is risky. Big people generally have big body parts. But statistics and stereotypes may not apply to individuals. Ladies, you can be misled. There are black men out there with little button mushrooms and Asian men with baby’s arms holding apples in their fists. Pity the poor guy with big hands who gets lots of dates but no call backs. And sometimes big boots mean big feet and that’s all.

Mister Rogers was right. Everyone is special in some way, even if it is an obscure talent like curling your tongue or popping your elbows. You may come up short in one area and hit the long ball in another. This sounds like cold comfort for the smaller-than-average; a tag that says “smallish penis, but a great dancer” or “poorly endowed, but cooks a mean Spanish omelet.”

A furtive obsession with size obscures the fact that most penises are actually quite similar. The bell curve peaks near the average and falls steeply to tails on either side. So the great majority of measurements are close to the average and there are few at very high or low values. Does the difference between a batting average of .270 and .280 matter? Is someone who earns $1000 more than you do better than you? Are you better than someone who earns $1000 less?

Maybe the outlook at one of the ends of the distribution is not as bad (or as good) as you think. Suppose you were puny enough that penetration was an abstract concept. You might be able to parlay it into sympathy, like Howard Stern. At the very least, you would discover the extraordinary capabilities of the human tongue. If you were truly gigantic, certainly there would be a career waiting for you in films whose long suit is thrusting and moaning. But what if you were an actuary or dry goods salesman. Isn’t as obnoxious for a man to be defined by his shaft as it is for a woman to be defined by the flesh lobes that precede her into a room. There are also the practical problems: finding a good tailor, protection during exercise, dealing with the sudden demands on blood flow.

And guys? Women are right. Size doesn’t matter. (Up (or down) to a point.) Technique matters. Listening matters. Making an emotional connection matters. But hey, that’s another story.

And Ye Shall Heed

Published
by
chris238
on February 15, 2008
in Physics
. 2 Comments

the Laws of Thermodynamics. For it is written that in the beginning was a nameless void, and out of the void emerged a tumult of fire and brimstone and photon and proton. Neither structure nor form was on the face of the deep.

The Lord created gravity, that He might have something to look at as the eons ticked by. And Lo, galaxies and stars and planets came to pass. One planet He called Earth because that is what it was made of. The Lord saw that the beasts and fowls and fishes of the Earth were not created equal. And the hairless creature with opposable thumbs and large frontal lobes was chosen to receive the Word.

But He saw that they were frail and flaky creatures that frittered their time away in the mall and the video arcade and the sports bar. He recognized the limitations of His creations. And He sighed and He reduced His list of rules from ten to three.

Commandment Number One: Thou shalt not create energy. Everything that happens has an effect and a cost. For it is written that there is No Free Lunch. That which lights your house and runs your car must deplete the fossil fuels of the world. That which makes you richer must make someone else poorer. Exercise not, and the energy you take in must make its way to your fleshy lobes. Each Big Mac and each Mister Softee shall end up in the love handles.

Commandment Number Two: Thou shalt not violate the trend toward disorder. Shit Happens. That which is nicely sundered will not stay that way for long. Hair gets mussed, keys get lost, CDs and spice jars get shuffled. And it is written that you shall spend much of your life saying “Has anyone seen my…” Like a shuffled deck of cards, the disordered will never become ordered. And the Lord called this Entropy.

Commandment Number Three: Thou shalt not exempt thyself from the first two commandments. No matter what bright light illuminates your dawn, you will in the end be burnt to a crisp or tossed into a shallow pit and eaten by maggots. And while you may procreate and spread your seed, the same fate awaits those who follow. And should you find a cure for aging and mock the Lord with immortality, the Sun will one day die and shelter life no longer. Fear not, that still gives you five billion years to spend in the mall and the video arcade and the sports bar.

And the Lord used strange vessels to bring his message to the people. His messengers were brainy middle-Europeans with bushy beards and names like Boltzmann and Clausius. They spake with thick accents and wrote in heiroglyphs and had questionable personal hygiene. But the Lord saw that they understood entropy. And they were blessed.

For it is written that the cream shall not unstir from the coffee. And the shattered glass shall not rise and assemble itself on the edge of the table from whence it came. And the single sock in a drawer will not be reunited with its brethren. And a fart that has been scattered by the four winds shall not reassemble into a noxious cloud (praise the Lord).

Wail not over the descent of your body parts. It is written that breasts will sag and jowls will fall. Skin will wrinkle and desiccate and bones will become brittle and break. Wail not over the loss of your brain cells: all that you learned will one day be forgotten. Entropy Shall Not Be Denied. For you may have your Shit Together and you may exult in your Attitude. But time will pass and you will think and act like a child once more.

Entropy was loose in the land. And the people saw this. And they were very afraid. They had worked mightily to bring a semblance of order to the world. Files had been put in alphabetical order, vestments folded and placed in receptacles, canned goods stacked in rectilinear rows. Everything had a name or a number. Everyone had to take his or her turn. People flocked to join the cult of Neatness, that they might fight the demon of disorder.

And the people sought to deny the Word of the Lord. They tried to get something for nothing with pyramid selling and gambling and routine pilfering of office supplies. They attempted to reverse the signs of aging. Many were those who used the wrinkle cream and the hair dye. Many more were those who went under the knife for chin tucks and breast implants. And liposuction was a force in the land. They thought they could exercise without breaking a sweat. In their foolishness they imagined they could tone their muscles, even as the Nikes sat unused in a hall closet. They indulged their gluttony by inventing synthetic forms of fatty food. For they were beholden to the Twinkie and the donut.

The Lord saw this and was vengeful. And He smote them with Cancer and Alzheimer’s and Mad Cow Disease. He sent down cosmic rays to scramble their DNA. He sent tumults from the sky, swirling winds with names that followed the alphabet, to rearrange their belongings. But His best trick was when he told them to be fruitful and multiply. For when they procreated, they sewed the seeds of Entropy.

Lo, even while there is peace in the house, discontent is heard in the land. A dwarfish multitude is descending from the hills. Behold the kindergartners. Like a plague of locusts, they move from room to room. Din and discord follow them like a cloud. That which was ordered is torn asunder. That which was clean is besmirched with Crayola and grime and booger. And there shall be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. And you shall cast them out into the wilderness from whence they came. But they shall return.

The Good Lord did not gloat when he saw this chaos. But even He could not resist a good Smirk.

Chicken Little

Published
by
chris238
on January 31, 2008
in Astronomy
. 0 Comments

was right. The sky really is falling. Maybe not today or tomorrow. And not necessarily on you. But eventually, and without a doubt, a big hunk of space junk will fall out of a bright blue sky and ruin our collective day. A hard rain is gonna fall.

Big meteorites are the cruel trick that space plays on life. Like the kid at playschool that waits until you have painstakingly built the Lego city and then smashes it to the ground. Evolution is the slow process of accumulated change where organisms adapt to the world and take their place in the Chain of Being as either an eater or an eatee. Nothing dramatic, one generation looks much the same as the next. It takes many millions of years to grow a claw, or a penis, or a wing. Then in comes a big piece of space junk and overrides natural selection by wiping out a good chunk of life’s rich diversity.

The Romans called it decimation — the random removal of ten percent of the population. They would march into a newly conquered town full of skulking goths or visigoths and kill one in ten just to maintain fear and public order.

Out there in space it’s like a big old grinder. Asteroids and big chunks collide and make debris of smaller pieces. Collisions are rare because the space between space rocks is so large, but over billions of years large gets ground down into small. The result is a sparse interplanetary beach, with a few boulders, a bunch of pebbles, and countless grains of sand.

This stuff rains in on Earth at speeds of tens of thousands of miles per hour. Luckily the atmosphere burns up most of the small chunks. Yet every day, a trillion or so dust motes from space settle onto the Earth’s surface, and about a million sand grains fall. How do we know? After all, dirt from space looks just like dirt. Scientists go down to the perfect blue-white ice pack of the Antarctic, and the space dust is just lying on the surface. Nothing else there, except the occasional penguin. So they push sticky rollers up and down the ice to trawl for the dust, like crazed Zamboni drivers on an ice rink.

Larger space junk is rare, but more worrying. Every week or so a car-sized chunk careens toward us. Most of these break up or detonate in the upper atmosphere, with the force of a Hiroshima blast. In the early 1960s, during the frosty depths of the Cold War, both sides noticed these atmospheric blasts. Each side assumed the other was welshing on arms agreements, and nervous fingers were poised over buttons. Scientists figured it out and the Dr. Strangeloves went back to their bunkers. But debris from space nearly pushed us over the nuclear brink.

About once per century a rock the size of a small apartment building slams into the Earth and makes a crater five football fields wide. The last time it happened was in Siberia in 1908. An area of forest the size of a big city was leveled and tremors were felt as far away as London. Siberia is big and empty so almost no one was killed. Some herdsmen were burned, one was thrown into a tree, and a few were thrown off their porches. Many more must have felt the blast and looked with new respect at their jug of potato vodka. With the last jolt nearly 100 years behind us, you can do the math. We’re due.

Then there are the big sonsofbitches. About every million years, a meteor the size of a small mountain hits Earth and flattens an area the size of Belgium or New Jersey. Such an impact would be seriously bad news (unless you have no sympathy for really bad drivers and really bad sports teams), releasing an explosive force equal to a billion tons on TNT, or the sum of all the world’s arsenals. Hundred-foot tidal waves would sweep across the oceans, throwing enough dust into the atmosphere to dim the Sun and cause massive crop failure and famine. And these are not the really big impacts.

Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. Oh, all right. Every hundred million years, give or take ten million, a monster the size of a city nails the planet. The oomph is ten million times that of Mount St. Helens blowing its top. There’s nowhere to hide. Thousand-foot tidal waves circle the world over and over. Global forest fires rage. The sky darkens long enough to disrupt the food chain. Plankton die and grass withers. Extinction. Bummer.

Sixty five million years ago a monster rock slammed into the Gulf of Mexico. Its effect would even have penetrated the margarita daze of the partiers in nearby Cancun. For tens of millions of years, mammals had scurried around nervously in a reptile’s world. Then the Big One falls and the dazed mammals are left to inherit the world and eventually spin off an unfinished experiment called humanity.

It makes you think about destiny. Somewhere out there is a silent assassin sailing through space with our number on it. The events that will bring it on a collision course with the Earth have not yet taken place. Maybe it is a comet. On one of its passages from the deep-freeze of the solar system it gets a nudge from Neptune then a tug from Jupiter and then it’s trawling through the inner regions where the terrestrial planets dwell. Many orbits later, its trajectory will cross that of the innocent Earth. As an outfielder races across the grass toward the lazy arc of a fly ball, the two objects will meet in space and time.

Do you have an irrational fear of meteoric impacts? Let’s look at that. The rarest condition is a level 1 phobia — the fear of mass extinction by a catastrophic collision. Its most acute sufferers glance nervously upward every few minutes. They make no long-term investments. They know that the impactor will travel much faster than sound, and they imagine it is streaking towards them. In their minds, they freeze the instant when it is poised just overhead; a mountain looming in the sky as they walk to the Quickie Mart.

Relax. Take a load off. At one event in tens of millions of years, the chance of the Big One in our lifetimes is tiny. The human race is much more likely to be taken out by its trashing of the environment than by a rock from the sky. Anyway, our weapons guys have got it covered. Out at Los Alamos and Livermore, they have thought about this a lot, since Ivan has been de-fanged and we have all these useless piles of plutonium glowing among the yucca and mesquite of the western deserts. Astronomers scan the skies to look for anything large headed in our general direction. We then use supercomputers to calculate the orbits. Only if a big object is truly headed our way do we send out the nukes to save the day. It’s got to be done delicately, with a bank off to the side like a good pool shot. Nailed head-on we face a hail of deadly bullets instead of a single cannonball.

Level 2 phobia is fear of medium-sized impacts. Every thousand years or so, a country or region of the world is thrown into turmoil when the sky is lit up by meteors and people die as a few big chunks get through the atmospheric shield. Is it a coincidence that a new major religion springs up about every thousand years?

If you suffer from this fear, the only therapy is to start your own cult. Find some chunk of eastern Oregon that isn’t already taken by militias and declare yourself the Bhagwan of Tunguska. File for tax-exempt status and gather as many gullible minds as you can. (Plan on turning many people away…) As for the form of your new religion, the constitution pretty much allows you to roll your own. A mixture of yoga, micro-brewing, and free sex is highly recommended.

The fear of a personal impact is a level 3 phobia. Every year, about 100,000 chunks of space rock that are small but big enough to kill you hit the Earth’s surface. Most of them fall into the oceans and most of the rest must hit land that does not happen to have a person standing on it. But every now and then, someone’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. What are the odds?

In 1650, a monk in Milan was praying when he was killed by a meteorite. That God, he’s such a kidder. This century, we know only of a dog killed in Nahkla, Egypt in 1911. (Dogs reading this are probably thinking, what does he mean “only.”) There have been close calls. An Alabama woman was asleep when a meteorite came through the roof and ricocheted off her hip, burning her badly. Mrs. Hodges survived to become the person with the best ever story to tell at a cocktail party. Two houses in the same small town of Wethersfield, Connecticut were hit within a span of eleven years. In 1992, Michelle Knapp’s 1980 Chevy Malibu was hit in the trunk by a 30-pound meteorite. The space rock fused with her car, so collectors offered $69,000 for the whole thing.

Maybe you’re getting twitchy by now. But that’s not a long list given the huge number of people in the world. Your odds of dying from a meteorite impact are about the same as your odds of dying from botulism. You are 100 times more likely to die in an air crash and you are 10,000 times more likely to die in a car crash. We all gotta go sometime, and it might be better to be taken out this way. It’s quick, it’s relatively painless, and you would get commemorated in the name of the bolide that hit you. Beats an old gravestone covered with moss and dog pee any day.

Let’s face it, we’re not very rational about risk. We lock our doors at night, then drive without a seat belt. We watch our cholesterol count, then have unprotected sex. So if you still have some residual phobia, here are practical tips to avoid being nailed by space junk:

1. Don’t fly. The atmosphere is your friend, burning up most of the rocks that meet us from space. When you fly, you place yourself above most of that cushioning layer. Plus do you really think those guys up front ever concentrate on what they’re doing?

2. Sleep standing up. Surface area is the problem. The bigger the target, the bigger your chances to getting hit. So lose a few pounds by all means, but also reduce your impact area by favoring the vertical over the horizontal. Mrs. Hodges had no one to blame but herself. Try sleeping in your closet hanging in a sleeping bag.

3. Build a bunker. After midnight, the Earth’s forward rotation combines with its motion through space to increase the chances of a meteorite making it to the ground. In the early morning hours, and during any meteor shower, you are far better off surrounded by cans of Spam and your favorite CDs in the bomb shelter.

Sweet dreams and don’t look up!

Depends on Who You Talk To

Published
by
chris238
on January 15, 2008
in Mathematics
. 0 Comments

What do you really think? About anything. Are your opinions your own, or are you influenced by the popular culture? We all drift in an amniotic fluid of inputs from print media, TV, radio and the Internet. We are surrounded by a relentless white noise of marketing and advertising. How much information is contained in this barrage? How much of it can we trust?

The first human societies had “experts” who everyone went to for advice, information, and wisdom. In different parts of the world, these people were called shamans, priests, village elders, or witchdoctors. Since old people had limited use in a subsistence culture, becoming an information specialist was a good career move. Otherwise, you could be pushed out on an ice floe or left in a cave as jackal bait.

Then the city-state was invented, and information became centralized. Rulers used messengers to deliver their proclamations and town criers to read them out. There was no print media because hardly anybody could read. Casual information was exchanged in the tavern or the marketplace. But moving information around was slow and hazardous. There’s an old nursery rhyme about a horse that loses a nail and so loses a shoe and so loses the rider. As a result, a message is lost and the battle is lost and a war is lost and a king loses his throne. Flaky information flow was the norm over most of human history.

Now we live with instant information. News of every tin-pot dictator, every mid-strength earthquake, every celebrity trip to the laundromat, is right at our fingertips. The only people without Web sites are the homeless. But has this really led to wisdom and democracy? As we drown in media input, we need someone to sort it all out for us. The gatekeepers of the information society are as powerful as ever.

A long time ago, if you wanted to gather information, you did the job right. The Domesday Book was a numbing list of person and everything larger than a jam jar in England 1000 years ago. Our modern census is based on the same idea. The Supreme Court has ruled that every person must be counted in a census, even though the government hasn’t figured out how to keep everyone standing still while they count.

These days, the gathering of information relies on sampling. Instead of asking everyone, you ask every other person or every tenth person. You then assume your sample is typical of the larger population and draw conclusions as if you had really asked everyone.

Scientists use sampling all the time, then they use induction to generalize and draw a broad conclusion. Fragments of certain people’s DNA are being used to figure out how the human genome works, but the knowledge will be quite general because all DNA works the same way. The medical advisory that smoking causes cancer is based on studies of a few thousand smokers. This inference is valid for all 20 million smokers, but it is not deterministic: some smokers will die cancer-free and others will die of cancer that is not caused by smoking. Astronomers know that there are about 50 billion galaxies out there, but not because they have counted them all. With large telescopes, they drill “core samples” and then count galaxies in only a few directions. Then they use the fact that our neighborhood in the universe is not special and calculate the number across the entire sky.

Sampling can be tricky. Let’s say about 10% of all people are left-handed. Out of five randomly selected people in a room, it is unlikely that any would be left-handed. Even with ten people, you might get no lefties. To properly measure the fraction of lefties, you need dozens or maybe a hundred people. A small sample can be unreliable.

The Harris and Gallup polls use only a couple of thousand people to infer the intentions of over 100 million voters. Yet whatever the flaws in the sampling techniques, we can be reassured by the fact that in the end, everyone gets to vote. So our form of government must return people who represent the vibrant, multi-cultural spectrum of American life, right? Or is it a statistical anomaly that most of us are represented in Washington by rich, gray, male, tight-assed lawyers and businessmen?

Sampling also depends on who you talk to. Aliens could drop in a room with five people in it and decide that all humans are right-handed. They might visit Beverly Hills and conclude that everyone has a dye job or a boob job. They might visit Manhattan and deduce that in-your-face pugnaciousness was our defining attribute.

So you should be suitably suspicious when you read that “nine out of ten dentists recommend new Dentagleam with Chromium.” Who are the nine dentists? Name them. Did they have to search the whole country for these 9 stiffs or are they truly representative? How many of them have stock in the Dentagleam parent company? How many of them have kids at Stanford or Harvard on Dentagleam scholarships?

But discussing only the techniques of marketing and advertising is like dwelling on characteristics of the elephant without mentioning the great steaming pile it has left behind.

Does anyone really think that $199.95 is a bargain compared to $200? What use is “3 for the price of 2” when each of them is 50% more than it would have cost individually. Any damn fool can jack the base price up then add a big discount sign. Who do they think they’re kidding? Let’s have some truth in advertising for a change. “It’s overpriced. Deal with it.” Or “If it didn’t wear out so quickly, how could we sell more?” Or “Loads of useless features, but we hope you’re too dumb to notice.”

They have used our sports heroes to sell personal hygiene products and junk food. They have stolen the classic rock songs to sell cross-trainers. They have cloaked their schlock in images of beauty and nobility. We just suck it up, paying top dollar for certain clothes and shoes just to get the little logo. Fashion plate or sandwich board?

The major TV networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox (aka. Larry, Curley, Moe, and Shemp) — control about 30 billion advertising dollars per year. As niche cable companies proliferate, the “Big 4” control a shrinking wedge of the viewing pie. Think of them as balding men fighting over a comb. Still, $30 billion dollars is not exactly chump-change.

This $30 billion is deployed, plus many billions more in costs for developing new shows, based on data from a very modest sample of Nielsen families. These thousand or so households are randomly selected and their viewing habits are tracked for a week. The selection is random but the sampling is carefully designed to mirror the great viewing masses, more Peoria than Pacific Heights.

Networks worry about the methodology as much as they worry about the small sample. Neilsen families used to fill in viewing diaries, but suppose they fibbed about what they watched? They might litter the log with entries like Masterpiece Theater and Agriculture: A 12-Part History, when they were actually glued to Yet More Inane Home Videos and Wrestlemania XXIII. Is it possible that TV ratings make us seem more highbrow than we are?

So the Neilsen Company now delivers a box which sits on top of the TV and automatically records the viewing choice. But wait, say the advertisers! What if the TV is on but they are not watching? The next step is to add a little video camera to the box, which is preprogrammed with digital images of all family members. Clever software can recognize if young Kevin is slouched in front of the tube, or whether Dad is filling his face with Cheetos and Miller Lite. But what if the family so apathetic that the dog controls the remote?

Marketers and pollsters could gather more and more data on larger samples of people. Or they could acknowledge that most people like the same things and go with that flow. They could use their copious data to look for the person who is truly average in their tastes. Someone who could truly represent us all. Imagine elections boiled down to a single voter. Advertisers could concentrate on this single amalgam of all our preferences — Unibuyer. Let Unibuyer make the choices, the rest of us could then live in a thrillingly ad-free world. Just a thought.