Flotsam & Jetsam
Recently read:
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Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon
Simon’s account of the year he spent as a “police intern” with Baltimore’s Homicide Division. It’s a pretty amazing book, not least because the Baltimore Police Department actually allowed him to publish it. It’s a clear antecedent to The Wire (and it’s fun to read about some of the real anecdotes which were repurposed for that series), but they’re two very different works: Homicide is journalistic (meaning that what actually happened takes precedence over narrative cohesion—as Simon acknowledges in his afterword), while The Wire is dramatic (and so whatever happens does so purely for narrative purposes).
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The Fuller Memorandum and The Revolution Business, by Charles Stross
The third book in the Laundry Files series and book five of the Merchant Princes series, respectively. They are thematically pretty similar, with bad situations progressively deteriorating, though that seems like more of a departure for the former than the latter. The Fuller Memorandum seems to have traded in some of the cheerful cynicism of the earlier books in the series for existential despair. Personally, this seems like a bad trade, though I wonder if this is intended to match the book’s model (for each book in the series, Stross takes stylistic and thematic cues from a classic British spy novelist: Len Deighton for the first book and Ian Fleming for the second, though I don’t know who the model for Fuller was; Le Carré maybe?). That being said, it is rewarding to finally get some more background on the CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN scenario that Stross has pointedly hinted at throughout the series.
As for the apparent direness of the situation in The Revolution Business, this seems entirely natural from a narrative standpoint: being the second-to-last book in the series, things were inevitably going to reach their lowest point in this book (though it’s unfortunate from a reader’s standpoint that the series has been broken up into so many volumes; it seems like half the words in Revolution are devoted to reminding the reader what happened in the earlier books).
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The Hippopotamus, by Stephen Fry
This is one of the blurbs on the back cover: “Imagine P.G. Wodehouse consumed with lust and suffering from a bad hangover, and you have a pretty good idea of the tone of Stephen Fry’s very funny and wickedly irreverent second novel.” This is an obvious comparison, given that Fry played Jeeves in the BBC’s adaptation of Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster novels, but it suffers from the severe defect that it is impossible to imagine P.G. Wodehouse consumed with lust and suffering from a bad hangover. Nonetheless, Fry does share some of Wodehouse’s genius for both dialogue and untrustworthy but charming narrators and the deus ex machina ending is certainly reminiscent of many of Jeeves’ triumphs. In all, it’s a pleasant read.
Via Schneier, a paper by William Press which demonstrates that “strong profiling” is no better than completely random sampling. Here’s the abstract:
The use of profiling by ethnicity or nationality to trigger secondary security screening is a controversial social and political issue. Overlooked is the question of whether such actuarial methods are in fact mathematically justified, even under the most idealized assumptions of completely accurate prior probabilities, and secondary screenings concentrated on the highest-probablity individuals. We show here that strong profiling (defined as screening at least in proportion to prior probability) is no more efficient than uniform random sampling of the entire population, because resources are wasted on the repeated screening of higher probability, but innocent, individuals. A mathematically optimal strategy would be ”square-root biased sampling,” the geometric mean between strong profiling and uniform sampling, with secondary screenings distributed broadly, although not uniformly, over the population. Square-root biased sampling is a general idea that can be applied whenever a ”bell-ringer” event must be found by sampling with replacement, but can be recognized (either with certainty, or with some probability) when seen.
Based on a fairly quick reading, the paper seems to do what it says on the tin. The optimal strategy might, in plain English, be called “weak profiling”; you do screen individuals with a higher probability of being terrorists (or whatever) more frequently than low-probability individuals, but not in proportion with their probability (and, as a corollary, people who are very unlikely to be terrorists are screened more frequently than they would be under strong profiling). It seems counter-intuitive, but you can’t argue with the math.
Also, note the point about this being true even assuming that the probabilities we assign to people are completely accurate. I haven’t tried to prove it, but I’d guess that under more realistic assumptions strong profiling fares even worse.
Citation needed
The gas pressure inside a siphon pressure vessel drives soda water up through a tube inside the siphon when a valve actuation lever at the top is depressed. Careful regulation of the valve lever is needed by the operator of the siphon to prevent pressurised soda water being released into the drink, which then splashes forcibly upwards, often soaking the operator, or at least causing a social gaffe. [citation needed]
Soda siphons are therefore best kept away from children, intoxicated people, or the infirm, unless streams of pressurised water are to be intentionally used for mirthful purposes.
Eileen Jones is my favorite movie reviewer:
Seriously, it beats me how people managed to develop such an appetite for sloppy sentimentality. With each successive hit feature, Pixar tests the limit of that appetite, and finds that there is no limit. Audiences drink up vats of Pixar’s patented corn syrup in animated film form, smack their sticky lips, and beg for more.
If, like me, you’re an interested but basically unknowledgeable observer of the World Cup, this site’s focus on the tactical side of the game is pretty educational.
“To what?” you might ask
The Jones polynomial is ambient isotopic…[h]owever, the Kauffman bracket polynomial is regularly isotopic.
Lindy West reviews Sex and the City 2:
SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it’s my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. […] If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes.
