On (Mis)trusting an Inspector General

Here's the OIG report on Andrew McCabe:

I tried to get a screenshot of it, but failed.  My problem with it is aesthetic--they're using a very black thick sans serif type font. Its only redeeming feature is it's not monospaced.

"Irreparable Damage"

Viewers with alarm sometimes use the phrase "[x] caused irreparable damage to [y]."

Sometimes that's true, sometimes it's all water over the dam, or water under the bridge.

I'm sure my relatives and teachers in childhood caused irreparable damage to my prospects of every becoming President.  I merely have to point to the fact that I've never become President and my chances of becoming President are now slightly smaller than the chances of both the Washington Nationals and the Washington Redskins making their playoffs.

My point: "irreparable damage" may often be quite correct, but it is not synonymous with "major damage."

Kevin Williamson Is Wrong: Foreseeing the Future

I'm nitpicking here. He writes at the National Review:

"No one in 1985 knew, or really could have known, what computers would be like ten years down the road, or twenty."

(It's in the context of mocking a NYTimes columnist in 1985 who wrote that laptops were a bad idea, and moving from that  to the idea we can't foresee the future so the market beats government.)

Now I remember old laptops. We had a Zenith laptop at work which we took to a training session.  Actually, it wasn't a computer to put on your lap--it was a portable computer, a luggable.   I also remember something else, something called an electronic calculator.  When I worked at my summer job in the summer of 1959 and later, I used an old handcrank manual adding machine. By the end of the 60's electronic calculators had arrived on the scene, and by the end of the 70's we had programmable calculators.  Innovators in county ASCS offices had started to buy the calculators and program them to compute program payments and loan amounts.  I remember a GAO report urging the agency to establish centralized control over them.

Anyway, no more memories.  My point is that by 1985 we had seen the effects of Moore's law; the capabilities of calculators had exploded and their prices had imploded.  We also had seen the progression from mainframes to minis to micro/PCs.  So anyone with any sense of the history of the past 20 years would have known that computers were going to get smaller and more capable.

And someone, like Al Gore, was on the verge of inventing the Internet, or at least see that an obscure military/academic tool needed to be opened to the public.

Misleading Post Title at Technology Review

Why do I say this title,
Robotic Surgery Linked To 144 Deaths Since 2000 is misleading?

Because it turns out that if the surgical patient died after surgery, it was included in the 144. But presumably some patients are going to die after surgery using any procedures, robotic, manual, or extra-terrestial.  The meaningful comparison would be the rates of death after surgery using comparable illnesses/situations.

How History Gets Distorted

The NYTimes in a roundup of interesting stuff mentioned the "EveryThreeMinutes" twitterbot which pumps out a tweet every 3 minutes describing a sale/purchase of a slave in the antebellum South.  This is from the site (not up on Twitter, so don't know the terminology).

Every Three Minutes
@Every3Minutes

[In the United States] a slave was sold on average every 3.6 minutes between 1820 and 1860 ~ Herbert Gutman

books.google.com/books?id=TUtFg…

Looking at the reference, it seems that the person/people between the twitterbot is stretching a bit: "Every Four Minutes" might be more appropriate if you follow normal rounding rules and don't want to go with "Every3.6Minutes".

When you read the reference, available at Google, it's: "Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross", by Herbert George Gutman

Time on the Cross was a 1974 book which changed the historiography of slavery, as noted in the wikipedia site.  Gutman's book and criticism of  TofC is briefly described there.

According to the page displayed by Google, Gutman reasons this way: He asserts that 2 million slaves were sold between 1820 and 1860, a statistic I've seen elsewhere. He goes on to say: " If we assume that slave sales did not occur on Sundays and holidays and that such selling went on for ten hours on working days, a slave was sold on average every 3.6 minutes between 1820 and 1860."  This is the source for Every3Minutes.

Note, however,  that the twitterbot seems to be running 24 hours a day, not 10 hours a day.  Gutman is saying 167 slaves are sold every work day( (10 hours * 60 minutes)/3.6), twitterbot is saying 400 slaves every calendar day.  How much difference does it make: it implies 5,840,000 sales over the 40 years, not 2,000,000.  That's a big difference.

In the twitterbots defense, it's an easy mistake to make. Ordinarily when we say something like: " X people are killed every day by Y", it's 365 days a year, not 200 workdays.  Gutman switched the usual basis in his calculations, presumably to make a more impressive case against Time on the Cross. 

(I could quibble about Gutman's calculations--using his figures I get 3.74 minutes, not 3.6.

40 years times 52 weeks times 6 days a week (= 12480), minus 10 days for holidays, times 10 hours times 60 minutes = 7,482,000 minutes divided by 2,000,000 = 3.741 minutes.  But since I'm going on only the page Google shows me, there may be something I'm missing.)

The bottom line is that twitter will spread the 3.6 minutes figure more widely, and it will become a concrete fact to be used in making history come alive, despite its inaccuracy.

It's Pi Day--Not

Both Post and Times have pieces today on Pi day, the idea that today's date, 3/14/15 expresses the first digts of Pi.  Aside from providing an excuse for mathematicians to place pieces in newspapers (otherwise a rare occurrence) and perhaps for pie shops to sell a few more, , it's a stupid idea.  In a rational world (i.e., in Europe) today's date would be 14.3.15 or 14.3.2015, with the data in ascending order.  In a rational world there would never be a Pi-day.

Persnickety Grump Today

A Ph.D. does not know the difference between "cache" and "cachet":

"that Ph.D. cache..."  from a blog post on Ferguson.

Puffing Agriculture Just a Tad

From the Farm Bureau's New York website:

"Agriculture is New York‘s most important industry. The farm economy generated $4.45 billion in 2008."  It goes on to cite New York's 35,000 farms

From this site

New York's gross state product in 2001 was $826.5 billion, 2nd only to California, to which financial services contributed $282.9 billion; general services, $190.2 billion; trade, $103.5 billion; government, $81.2 billion; manufacturing, $77.7 billion; transportation and public utilities, $59.3 billion, and construction, $17.4 billion. The public sector in 2001 constituted 9.8% of gross state product, tied with New Jersey for the 5th-lowest percent among the states where the average was 12%.

Powerpoint: Gee We Knew That in 1991

Megan McArdle rants about the misuse of Powerpoint, including reading the slides and having the font too small to read.  My reaction: My boss, SP, and employees knew better than that 20 years ago.

Nitpicky Morning

First Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution writes "cache" when he means "cachet" and then Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy writes "principle limit" when he means "principal".  Standards is gone all to hell.

Framing the Issue

How issues are framed is important.  "Extending tax cuts on taxpayers under $250K" is different than "extending tax cuts on income under $250K"

As an example of how easily even liberals slip into the wrong language:, the first sentence of a Huffington Post post:

"Last week, CBS News released a poll finding that 53 percent of adults preferred to extend the Bush-era tax cuts only to those making less than $250,000, twice as many as preferred to keep the cuts for everyone."

How difficult would it be to say "... only to income of less than $250,000, twice as many preferred to keep the cuts for all income."

Is Obama First Cook?

Must be getting grumpy in my old age, but my first reaction to Obamafoodorama's gush over Michelle's speech at HHS is to ask how much cooking she and Barack are doing these days.  A good feminist should have gone for a two-fer--it's time for more home cooking by men.  I have to admit I didn't watch it, and from watching her speak in the past I'm sure she was effective. But the Obamas are now upper class, which these days means servants, and preaching from the upper class sometimes grates.

The Image and the Reality

The image is, Chicago is a violent place.  The reality is, Chicago's homicide rate continues to decline.

The image is, guns are magic, pull the trigger and your target goes down.  The reality, as shown in a video from Toledo, is that most bullets don't hit anything alive (I heard 17 bullets found in the bar, no casualties).  The same is true in war--in Iraq II our troops were using thousands of rounds to kill one person.

Most Annoying Headline Today

In Treehugger: Undisturbed, Prehistoric Sand Dune Discovered at Michigan State University.

I specifically object to "Prehistoric"--it's too broad.  I live in the watershed of the pre-historic Potomac River. I've forgotten most of my geology, but it almost sounds as if the dune might qualify for this headline: "Sand Dune at MSU Survived Last Glacier, and Man". If it really is a sand "dune", that to me implies it was created by wind. It could be a sand "bar", created by water during the ice age.

Is There a Nitpickers'Anonymous?

I need a 12-step program. I was casually surfing the Growing Power site (the Chicago/Milwaukee urban farming operation that's gotten ink and a MacArthur Genius Award) and ran across this:

"At Growing Power it becomes worm food. We collect

over 20,000 lbs. of brewery waste from Lakefront Brewery every week

for compost or 1.4 million tons of waste annually."

20,000 lbs a week is 10 tons, or 520 tons a year according to old math. To be fair, I suspect some enthusiastic humanities student was writing the blurb (look at all those "o" sounds), and had a mind lapse when setting down the units of measure).

The World Is Overrun by the Young

Just saw Josh Marshall on the TPM RSS feed misspell Nikita Khrushchev's name twice. Not that I miss the Cold War, you understand.

Nobel Don't Guarantee Good English

Via Greg Mankiw from an AP story:

Nobel economics prize winner Paul Krugman said Sunday that the beleaguered U.S. auto industry will likely disappear.

"It will do so because of the geographical forces that me [sic] and my colleagues have discussed," the Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist told reporters in Stockholm.

In Krugman's honor, I'm establishing a new label.