- Made by Hand: Searching For Meaning in a Throwaway World by Mark Frauenfelder
- The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
- Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes by Jennifer McLagan. By fat she means animal fat.
- No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos
- Wide Awake: A Memoir of Insomnia by Patricia Morrisroe
- Malignant Medical Myths: Why Medical Treatment Causes 200,000 Deaths in the USA Each Year, and How to Protect Yourself by Joel Kauffman
- The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac by Graham Farmelo
- Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler
- China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society by John & Doris Naisbitt. Just a teensy bit more persuasive than The Coming Collapse of China (2001) by Gordon Chang.
- The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimanda Adichie
The Hockey Stick Illusion
Recently a WSJ columnist told this story:
I was chatting with a friend who, over the years, has helped her kids slog through the obligatory science-fair projects.
“The experiments never turned out the way they were supposed to, and so we were always having to fudge the results so that the projects wouldn’t be screwy. I always felt guilty about that dishonesty,” she said, “but now I feel like we were doing real science.”
Yes, science with a human touch. The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford (sent to me by the publisher) is a great book because it tells a great story. That story has a hero (Stephen McIntryre) and a villain (Michael Mann) and illustrates a basic truth about the world: A consensus of the “best people” can be wrong. This point was first made, as far as I know, by The Emperor’s New Clothes. It was later made by the Asch experiment (about line-length judgments). It’s not obvious; Elizabeth Kolbert and her editors at The New Yorker, not to mention Bill McKibben, have yet to understand it. (“No one has ever offered a plausible account of why thousands of scientists at hundreds of universities in dozens of countries would bother to engineer a climate hoax,” Kolbert recently wrote, with the permission of her editors.)Â It’s a sad comment on our education system that I first learned it via self-experimentation. My results showed that an acne medicine that my dermatologist prescribed didn’t work — a possibility for which my dermatologist (in consensus with other dermatologists) hadn’t allowed. As truths go, this one is scary: It means you have to think for yourself. But it is also the most liberating truth I know.
The Hockey Stick Illusion tells how McIntyre, skeptical of Mann’s hockey-stick result (a sharp increase in global temperature to unprecedented levels during the 20th century), tried to get the data and computer code that Mann used. Mann put him off. He still hasn’t released the computer code he used. Mann found a hockey stick where none existed because (a) he used principal-components analysis to summarize a lot of temperature series (bad idea), (b) he used that method in an unusual way, making a bad idea worse, and (c) one of his time series had a serious problem. After McIntyre noticed this problem and pointed it out, the story really begins: How did everyone react? Much as a reader of The Emperor’s New Clothes would expect. Nature denied it. The Washington Post denied it. Most climate scientists denied it (and continue to). Montford started writing the book before Climategate, whose overall message was the same — that climate scientists have been distorting the truth, that the case for man-made global warming is far weaker than they say, that a consensus of experts can be wrong. As Montford puts it,
None of the corruption and bias and flouting of rules we have seen in this story [and in the Climategate emails] would have been necessary if there is, as we are led to believe, a watertight case that mankind is having a potentially catastrophic effect on the climate.
Climategate and the story within The Hockey Stick Illusion are bad news for some very powerful people, such as Al Gore and those who gave him a Nobel Prize, but are helpful to the rest of us. When Big Shot X says “This is incredibly clear, everyone knows this” . . . maybe they’re wrong.
Is English My Native Language?
Here’s the last paragraph of a New York Times book review by Janet Maslin:
“The Publisher” [a biography of Henry Luce] has its parched passages, most notably when it ventures into the thickets of Luce’s “big” ideas. It works best when the man is well within sight. But Mr. Brinkley is dauntless in assessing Luce’s most important accomplishments, like his “American Century” essay and other efforts to tell Americans what American life was like. Life magazine had no temerity about devoting a major series in the 1950s to “Man’s New World: How He Lives in It.” Now that Man’s New World is so different from anything Henry Luce could imagine, his life and times are more poignant than they once seemed.
As I read this, I wondered if English was my native language. It was so hard to understand. Then I wondered if New York Times writers are paid by the big word. “Parched”? “Thickets? At least I know what that sentence means. I don’t know what she means by “Mr. Brinkley is dauntless in assessing…” — dauntless means fearless. Nor do I understand what “Life magazine had no temerity about” means. Temerity means recklessness or boldness. The logic of the last sentence (“Now that . . . “) with its big word poignant also escapes me.
Perhaps Maslin has found that if she writes like this her editors will edit her less, not being quite sure what those words mean. I attended many talks at UC Berkeley in which the speaker left out crucial information, such as the meaning of the y axis of a graph. And, virtually every time, no one asked about it – not even the four or five professors present. Gradually I realized why: They were insecure.
Assorted Links
- Why Strict Churches Are Strong by Laurence Iannaccone, an economist. I liked the data but not the theory. (Increased strictness must have dozens of effects. To say reduces free-riding is the crucial one is a leap of faith.) Unusually well-written. Related to my post North Korea and Penn State.
- JK Rowlings is bad-ass, says a friend
- Are celebrities more narcissistic than MBAs?
Thanks to Eric Meltzer and Ryan Holiday.
Why Are Volcano Jokes So Bad?
You may remember What does NASA stand for? Need Additional Six Astronauts. This circulated after the Challenger blew up. In contrast, the volcano jokes I’ve heard are curiously bad:
6. Dear Iceland , We said send cash, not ash.
7. Woke this morning to find every surface in the house covered in a layer of dust and a foul stench of sulphur in the air…. Yes, I’ve been married to that bone-idle slob for 20 years.
8. It was the last wish of the Icelandic economy that its ashes were spread all over Europe .
9. There’s no pleasing the English. The last time they got the Ashes they were over the moon.
10. Went outside today and got hit by a bag of frozen sausages, a chocolate gateau and some fish fingers. Someone said it’s a fallout from Iceland .
Where to Find Umami
Here is a list of umami-rich foods. As regular readers of this blog know, I believe we like umami flavor so that we will eat more bacteria-rich foods. In this list, notice that fresh foods tend to have much less umami than older foods. Cured ham (337 units) is much higher than pork (2.5). Cheese (182-1680) is much higher than milk (1-4). Soy sauce (412-1264) is aged; so is fish sauce (621-1383). Seaweed (kombu) is high (241-3190) but since seaweed is sold dried, I suspect the drying process is at least partly responsible for the high umami content. Marmite (1960) is not aged — but its main ingredient is yeast.
As far as I know, all meat sold commercially in America is aged: it doesn’t taste right until it’s aged. Umami is sometimes described as a “meaty” taste.
Two Months on the Shangri-La Diet
Good results.
In 2 months I’ve lost 13 pounds . . . I have even skipped days due to a hectic work schedule. . . .
I was stopped outside church on Sunday by someone who had noticed the weight loss and wanted to know how I did it. I have still yet to convince my fiercest critic — my loving wife, but at least she’s stopped calling it a placebo!
Tsinghua Student Clubs
Here is a list of Tsinghua student clubs. Some are puzzling or intriguing:
- Student Anti-Cult Association
- Student Collection Association
- Student Du Xing Association
- Student Edge Landscape Studies Association
- Student Informatized Service and Consultation Enthusiasts Association
- Student Insurance Association
- Student Project Management Association
- Student Web Surfing Enthusiasts Association
- Student Xi Lu Association
No restaurant club. Neighboring Peking University has such a club. I wonder what the Student Social Interaction Development Association does. The Student Redology Association is devoted to study of the book Dream of a Red Chamber. I mentioned earlier a student club whose name means “sing your heart”. Here that club is called Student Education Aid-the-Poor Service Association.
The Silver Lining of a Cloud of Volcanic Ash
A New York Times article on the volcanic ash preventing air travel ended like this:
Leo Liao, a Hong Kong businessman who was stranded at the Frankfurt airport, was cheerful and philosophical. “It’s a natural issue,” he said. “Never complain. You can’t change this.”
Not cheerful enough. I once heard Edward Teller, the physicist, give a talk. In the middle, he said if we managed to control the weather we would take away the last topic of civilized conversation. Several years ago Berkeley had the rainiest winter in memory. It was never so easy to talk to strangers — you could commiserate about the rain. The stranded travelers have an unparalleled opportunity to meet people different from themselves, people they would ordinarily never be able to meet.
Oprah Meets Veblen
An assistant manager at Marshall Fields, the Chicago department store, told Gawker the following story:
I was walking through the floor, and I hear a voice call my name. . . . Once she started speaking to me, I realized it was Oprah. Honestly, she is unrecognizable without the spackle/wig. Anyway, she was very nice, and asked me if I would offer my opinion on a china pattern she was looking at for her house. It was Villeroy and Boch (German, middle-range) “Petite Fleur.” Very cute, kind of French-country, with a small, scattered floral design. I said, “What’s not to like?” Oprah responded, “Well, it’s not that expensive, and I don’t want people who come to my house to think I’m cheap.”