Google Does Not Obey the Principles of Basic Logic

If you search for {pregame}, Google returns 1,670,000 results. If you search for {pregame -crunk} — the Google way of doing {pregame NOT crunk} — Google returns 1,070,000 results. One can immediately deduce from these numbers that there should be approximately 600,000 results for {+pregame +crunk}. A − B = A − A∩B, right?, right?

Nope. Google returns only 4,250 results for {+pregame +crunk}, and only 9,200 for the apparently less restrictive {pregame crunk}. (I'm using curly braces to indicate that I'm not putting quotes around these queries, obviously — I'm not looking for this exact phrase.)

So what the fuck, Google? Where are the rest of the 600,000 pages that contain both "pregame" and "crunk"?!

(First of the two Google Images results for {pregame crunk}:

Second:

See also.

Parenthetical Citation Does Not Make Plagiarism Okay

So I'm reading part of a fairly mediocre book called Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law by Alan Hunt, a Carleton University (Ottawa) professor who also (co-)penned such classics as Foucault and Law and Marx and Engels on Law. I find an interesting reference on p. 322:

The sudden repeal of the sumptuary laws seems attributable, therefore, solely to opposition on constitutional grounds and not to any intrinsic opposition to the sumptuary project itself (Hooper 1915: 447–49).

Hooper 1915 turns out to be Wilfrid Hooper, "The Tudor Sumptuary Laws," English Historical Review 30 (1915): 433–49. The relevant bit:

The sudden repeal of the sumptuary laws seems attributable, therefore, solely to opposition excited on constitutional grounds and not to any perception of their futility or to any reaction in sumptuary feeling.

No, the citation does not excuse dear Professor Hunt. Much of the preceding page's-worth of text in Governance is also pretty much cribbed from Hooper, albeit with more language fiddling; one gets the sense that by the end of the (long) paragraph, Hunt just got bored and started copying. And just as Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism was more egregious because she continued to claim originality even after Scandal 1.0 broke ("I wrote about what I knew, my personal experiences…I’m an Indian-American girl who got good grades from New Jersey, who wanted to go to an Ivy League school, and I drew upon my own experiences, upon quirks of the people around me and my culture, to create my character Opal Mehta"), and just as Victoria "Literally" Ilyinsky's example-thieving was more egregious because she acted like she was plucking the quotations from memory ("who doesn’t remember Fitzgerald’s description of Jay Gatsby: 'He literally glowed?'"), Hunt's Hooper rip-off is — yup — more egregious because he makes himself out to be the real expert.

"The standard account" of the end of sumptuary law, he writes, "is mere invention" — but "there is a longer version of the history of this period that introduces a significant question mark" (321). Hunt's got the straight-up dope, boys and girls! Don't listen to those other historians; they're fakers. Hunt, on the other hand, has hell of dates and legal language; he certainly seems to know what he's talking about. It's not until many sentences down the line that we see the cryptic Hooper citation. Does it refer to just the previous sentence, or to the entire previous paragraph? The answer is the latter, but Hunt profits from the ambiguity; he comes across as the chief scholar. I'd bet a dollar that he never looked at any of the primary sources that Hooper looked at, but he writes as if he did: e.g. "When debate resumed the Bill was passed, the Commons' Journal explaining that 'it repealeth all former laws touching apparel.'" And that's just a horrendous sentence in its own right.

Asshole. I guess I should have expected as much from a Canadian Foucauldian who writes in his preface, "I have used notes in an intentionally informal manner…This book has intentionally been left with many loose ends."

Anyway: back to work.

Another Reason to Believe Bill Clinton Was a Terrorist

Iraqi insurgents, like our erstwhile president but unlike our current one, have generated budget surpluses:

“If accurate,” the report says, its estimates indicate that these “sources of terrorist and insurgent finance within Iraq — independent of foreign sources — are currently sufficient to sustain the groups’ existence and operation.” To this, it adds what may be its most surprising conclusion: “In fact, if recent revenue and expense estimates are correct, terrorist and insurgent groups in Iraq may have surplus funds with which to support other terrorist organizations outside of Iraq.”

(Note that I don't actually think fiscal deficits matter much, but.)

The group’s estimate of the financing for the insurgency, even taking the higher figure of $200 million, underscores the David and Goliath nature of the war. American, Iraqi and other coalition forces are fighting an array of shadowy Sunni and Shiite groups that can draw on huge armories left over from Mr. Hussein’s days, and benefit from the willingness of many insurgents to fight with little or no pay. If the $200 million a year estimate is close to the mark, it amounts to less than what it costs the Pentagon, with an $8 billion monthly budget for Iraq, to sustain the American war effort here for a single day.

: \

I--I Can't Resist…I Must Obey the Brain!

I just grabbed a fresh bath towel from my closet; the one I had been using was getting a bit soggy.

Unfortunately, the new towel is a bit like Ultra, the Multi-Alien, only instead of having different superpowers in different quadrants of its body, it has different unpleasant smells.

"I've somehow become a weird alien--four of them!"

The Wiksplanation of Ultra is wonderfully affectless:

Because all hit him at the same time, he was changed to have one quarter of his body resemble the four aliens. The upper right of his body was green, hairy, and strong. The upper left was blue and had magnetic powers. His right leg was like a bird's, with a small wing that enabled him to fly. His left leg was a bolt of lightning.

And, while I'm at it, poking around on Dial B for Blog reveals a number of priceless Golden and Silver Age covers:

(The best thing about that one is that I initially thought Robin was commanding Batman to kill himself, and the Brain and the Brain's goon were trying desperately to restrain him. It still kind of looks like that.)

Here Is the Idea: The Award-Winning Dog and Philip K. Dick's Robot Head Are Buddies Who Are Cops Who Fight Crime

Data point number one:

Show dog disappearance creates urban legend

In the nine months since escaping her travel cage at Kennedy Airport, Vivi the wayward whippet has joined the Central Park coyote, high-rise tiger, Harlem Meer caiman and Molly the fugitive feline in New York's ever-growing pantheon of urban animal legends.

She was reported dozens of times, roaming cemeteries with other dogs, or hanging around stores in the borough of Queens, in some cases miles from the tarmac where she disappeared while awaiting a flight home to California on February 15…

Ninja flip. Data point number two, somewhat older:

Google invited Hanson and Olney to demo the [Philip K. Dick] head at company headquarters in Silicon Valley. Hanson had been traveling for weeks, making two trips to Asia and pulling 15 all-nighters in 40 days. "I got on the plane in Dallas at 5 in the morning, after getting maybe 45 minutes of sleep the night before," he recalls. "I stuck the bag containing the robot head in the overhead bin and fell asleep. I didn't even know we were changing planes in Las Vegas. The flight attendant woke me up, and I walked off the plane in a fog — with the robot head still in the overhead bin"…

Hanson suspects the head was either stolen by an unscrupulous baggage handler or fell victim to an overzealous security guard who called in a bomb squad. "That would be a really strange ending," Hanson says, "if the head of a Philip K. Dick robot wound up being exploded by another robot."

In conclusion, I have an idea for a movie.

Venti Is Italian for I'm a Jowly Asshole

I feel a bit like Spider-Man caught in the symbiotic, alien clutches of the black costume: a disturbing change has come over me, and I can't quite figure out why. I am now one of those people who ignore Starbucks's tall/grande/venti nomenclature and order "medium" coffees and the like — straight up.

I don't know how long this has been going on. I noticed it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I think, but for obvious reasons I buried the truth in some dark corner of my psyche, only to be unearthed earlier today when I realized that the barista at my neighborhood 'bucks was sanctioning me — tacitly, of course, but severely withal — for my thoughtless diction:

Me: I'll have a medium coffee and absolutely nothing else.*

Barista: Okay. [Turns to other barista.] Can I get a grande coffee, please?

Implicit corrections are absolutely the most pernicious form of clerk-on-customer verbal aggression. A cat I know from small(ish) times often gets a coffee–cum–espresso shot at Starbucks — something that's not even on the menu and hence something I kind of resent him for ordering (see "Neuroeconomics, Basically," Confessions of a Keyhole 13 Nov. 2006) — and baristas pretty much always reply by calling the drink, in passing and without the slighest shred of chalance, a "red eye." So what is he supposed to do? If he orders a "red eye" as such, he runs the risk of encountering the one barista who is not familiar with the term; that barista will probably pee in something. Besides, one doesn't want to cast oneself as too much of a knowing insider; it's slimy and pretentious. But if he keeps ordering a coffee with a shot of espresso, he runs the risk of coming off as a naïf, and an especially slow one at that — the baristas at Starbuckses that he frequents might start to wonder why this doofus can't twig to the fact that a "coffee&espresso" is just as bitter under another, more efficient, name. The implicit correction always produces dilemmas of this form without offering any guidance as to which tine of the fork it would be preferable to impale oneself on.

But my case is a simpler one: I know how to order properly; I just keep failing to do so. And come to think of it, this behavior pattern goes beyond Starbucks. When I was buying a soda the other day — a situation I'm rarely in — I asked for "Pepsi" at an establishment that only served Coke. In an act of almost divine mercy, the cashier made no comment and just got me a Coke; but, as if to let me know that I couldn't just get away with this kind of thing, my lady love gleefully pointed out my error. I can't even recall now if I had realized what I had done before she mentioned it. Has the disease progressed so far that I no longer even notice the symptoms?

What's wrong with me? Is this part of growing up — riding roughshod over the fine distinctions of commercial discourse? I've long associated this kind of attitude with old people, actually: some jowly windbag at a diner or something folding up a menu in bewilderment and impatience and barking out, "Just give me a burger! All I want is a regular burger. Jeez, can't you just get a burger anymore?" Similarly jowly types are often heard to carp about Starbucks in particular: it's impossible, they claim, to get a no-frills coffee (a manifest falsehood), or at least difficult to figure out how to order one amidst all the other complex and enticing options (closer to the truth). And once they manage to track down the regular coffee, they're certainly not going to debase themselves by uttering something as frou-frou as "grande."

Of course, the tall/grande/venti thing is kind of silly. It's hard to see what Starbucks gains from it; some brand consultant probably told them that it helps capture "mind share" or something, but any effect on the bottom line (which I'm pretty sure I've heard some people call "the top line" recently) is no doubt impossible to measure. Still, the nomenclature exists, and as far as I can tell it's not going away any time soon. An attentive, observant, and respectful person ought to swallow his or her objections and just go with it, if only to make things easier for the barista population.

But I'm an old, angry dude now, apparently, so what do I care?

*Okay, I admit it: I also got one of those big chocolate-chip cookies. Stop looking at my body that way.

Basically Just a Riff

One of the strange things about the idea of "life coaching" is that, even though we usually speak of coaching with reference to team sports, life coaching is a thoroughly individualistic affair. But why should this be so? A life coach should be in charge of a whole life team! Kind of a death squad. But with one obvious difference.

The difference is death.

Capitalism for Cutie

One of the 20 best sentences I've ever read in an academic economics journal:

E/P − Y (the Fed model) has some power, but again only because it is a poor man's E/P.

—Clifford Asness, "Fight the Fed Model: The Relationship between Future Returns and Stock and Bond Market Yields," Journal of Portfolio Management 30.1 (2003): 11–24 [I don't have the exact page number].

While I'm on the topic: I honestly don't understand how economists and the like can get a computer to draw a line of best fit through some points (i.e. ordinary least-squares regression), compare the values on the line to the observed values, and then, if the two sets of values are close to each other, claim "forecasting" power. They didn't forecast anything yet — the only test of that will come, you know, tomorrow and the day after and beyond. "Forecasting" the past is way easier than forecasting the future, especially when you get to take into account all the historical data, not just the stuff that would have been available to you at any given point in the past. Which suggests a much more interesting test, one that I'm sure has been thought up (and discarded?) by many others but which I nonetheless don't remember encountering in the past. To wit: you have some theory about how, say, the P/E ratio predicts stock returns. What would that theory have predicted the market return would be in 1972 — given the historical data available in 1972, and nothing else? How much better or worse does the prediction become when you get to do the regression based on the whole span of historical data? Basically, the idea would be to forecast historical values using only the information that people in the past would have had on hand. Then you'd know if, in the past, you would have been a good forecaster, which might give a better sense of whether, in the future, your predictions will be worth a damn.

Is this a standard technique? an erroneous one? What am I missing? Is it the fact that, throughout the early to mid-20th century, most stock traders had access to rudimentary time machines?

Google Image result #33 for "time machine":

LIVEBLOGUPDATE: Yeah so when I read more of the quoted-from article, I saw a reference to "out-of-sample forecasting." After googling this for about a minute and a half, I'm fairly certain that it's exactly the kind of thing I was proposing directly above. Some technical details can be found in a Word document that came up as the second search result. I wish I could take this as a sign of my brilliant econometric intuitions, but, like I said, the basic idea is pretty basic. There goes my fake Nobel prize (all the econ ones are fake — you knew that, right?).

Quote of the Day, Michael Sanchez Edition

From a review of a book called The Lacanian Delusion penned (the review, that is) by my current intellectual hero, Cosma Shalizi (a physicist by trade and polymath by choice):

Clearly this [the book's criticism of Lacan's treatment of physics] is better than Lacan's tissue of horrors, but not…without problems of its own, principally stemming from ignorance of mathematics and physical science…This is not, I hasten to say, anything in itself to be ashamed of, or even mildly bothered about — unless you happen to be talking about mathematics or physical science. Lacan, evidently, knew next to nothing about them — on p. 44 Roustang quotes Lacan as saying that "Einstein's little formulae…align inertial mass with a constant and some exponents," which is so far from actual relativity as to be not even wrong. Roustang makes no such howlers, but still I get the impression of a grimly serious duel conducted with whiffle-bats.

Quotes of the Day, Morning E-Mail Edition

Spam update: the quality of the unsolicited political commentary I've been receiving has declined:

The European Union is a product of Europe.

And I'm not sure it has the right idea about the human sciences:

According to the linguistic theories developed by Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, portable media players, iPod Video, mobile phones, and PDAs can all play video

But it sure can express existential dread (or is it hope?) with the best of 'em:

Do you qualify to help? as humans we still share emotions that transcend any linguistic explanation or .

Meanwhile, I almost did a spit take while listening to the following lyrics from Young Jeezy's "Let's Be Real" (let's!):

You ain't the authentic
You like the carbon copy sent through the fax machine
Back through the fax machine
I'm like the Atlantic Ocean
You n***as is seashells
I'm like a heart-to-heart, n***a
You like a e-mail

: O

And Irreplaceable Items

In the course of sweeping away some domestic detritus, I happened to look over the alleged "Liability Exclusions" claimed by US Airways in that pamphlet-y thing that they use as an envelope for the boarding pass. That they deny all responsibility for passengers' valuables is, of course, to be expected — but what purpose is served by enumerating (non-exhaustively, they are at pains to point out) all the different things you might break or ruin 20,000 feet up?

US Airways assumes no liability for valuable or commercial items, including but not limited to: currency, negotiable papers/securities/documents, spirits, books/manuscripts/publications, optics [?], keys, blueprints, sound reproduction equipment and related items, jewelry, silverware, precious metals, natural fur products, antiques/heirlooms/collectibles, precious metals/stones [um…twice?], photographic/cinematographic audio/video equipment and related items, computer hardware/software and related items, electronic components/equipment and related items, artistic items, lifesaving medication, business samples/equipment/documents [business…samples?] and irreplaceable items.

But what about turtles?

I also read the following items as commands or pieces of advice, which turns out not to be correct:

• Have a condition, which is not apparent, that would prevent you from performing the duties listed;…
• Do not wish to perform the exit seat duties in the event of an emergency;
• Do not speak, read, or understand English.

Done and done. I wish they would be nicer to me, though:

• You lack sufficient mobility, strength, or dexterity in both arms and hands, and both legs;…
• You lack the ability to read and understand printed or graphic instructions in English [to be fair, is there such a thing as a "graphic instruction in English"?];…
• You lack the ability to impart information orally to other passengers in English;
• You have a condition…

Gasp! But, but…I thought it wasn't apparent!

I'll never fly again.

Neuroeconomics, Basically

There is a restaurant in the food court at LaGuardia Airport called Joey's NY Pizza. Or maybe they spell out "New York"; I'm going off receipts here. Regardless, Joey does something I've never seen before. A section of the menu is labeled "Pizza by the Slice" — standard enough. But the first slice listed is "Margarita" [sic], and it only gets fancier from there. Damn, I thought when I first saw the menu: only expensive pizza, nothing "plain." But I could clearly see that Joey & co. (there was no Joey) had just taken a big ol' plain cheese pizza right out of the oven. Could this pizza be purchased? Was it a figment of my imagination? Did all of my transactions here have to be mediated by the language of the menu, or could I defy authority and go beyond?

As it turns out, yes. The two people ahead of me on line ordered cheese pizza (I prefer to call it "plain," but cashiers always say "cheese" back to me, even though of course "cheese" does not uniquely identify any one variety of pizza, but I guess they're afraid of selling anything self-consciously common-or-garden (why do the English say that but not us?)) with no problems and, as far as I could tell, no anxiety. Assholes.

Joey's also did the thing where they charge around $3 for one big slice, which is somewhat smaller than two normal slices but in the same ballpark. Ordinarily I'd order two slices, but in this case it was just ridiculous. I assume a consultant somewhere along the line told them that most people don't order two slices but would pay to eat, say, 1.45 slices' worth (merged into a single slice) if given the chance, because they wanted to eat more than a single slice all along but never had the opportunity to do so because the quantum nature of pizza forced them to eat in discrete units. The most bizarre case of this kind of business behavior that I've experienced was in the North End this summer — a pizzeria sold pizza in units of two, always two, but called that a single slice. Trust me, though, there were two distinct slices, cut with that rolly/cutty wheel and everything. But they insisted on calling it one slice and not selling any subdivisions thereof. This is probably how some subset of people acted right after whichever early 20th-c. experiment demonstrated that the atom had an internal structure of its own. All "No way man I'm not selling you any electrons. I don't know what that is. All I have is atoms. That is the basic, indivisible unit of matter." "But I just want one eighth of a pizza pie." "Pizzas are almost not pie-like at all anyway." "String theory!" "String cheese."

I spoke about this subject at this length or greater at my recent job interview. That was probably not for the best.

Democracy: Maybe Still a Good Idea (?)

The election results yesterday represented a victory for both the Democrats (they won things!) and TradeSports.com (apparently its prediction markets called almost every if not every race correctly). Since I favor both prediction markets and not going to war with Iran (which said in April that it has "40,000 trained suicide bombers ready to strike Western targets" (a quote from the linked article, not from anyone Iranian, I don't think)), I am almost kind of happy.

In a way, though, it's actually harder to understand this election that it was to understand 2004's. I'm sure some people who voted in 2004 didn't vote in 2006, blah blah, but the overlap must be huge. So who are these people who thought Bush & co. were super-cool two years ago but have since changed their minds? Were they paying attention at all? I can (almost) understand voting for idiotic and repulsive reactionaries on hardcore, principled grounds. But how can you be like, yeah, this year I don't hate gays that much, kinda not that into terrorism being bad, black ppl maybe kewler than i thought in '04 lol? I can only imagine voting for (social) conservatives out of some bizarre but deep-seated commitment to stupid ideas; I can't really enter sympathetically into the thinking of someone who supports a social-conservative agenda half-heartedly and desultorily. These people are out of their fucking minds, but the only thing crazier than siding with them all of the time is siding with them only some of the time.

A ≠ B

So apparently Saddam Hussein is going to be hanged (unless he wins his appeal, which I find unlikely). The New York Times reports:

Spontaneous celebrations broke out across Iraq in spite of an around-the-clock curfew imposed on the capital and other regions. People fired pistols and assault rifles into the air in a common gesture of jubilation.…Even some Shiite police officers joined in the revelry, firing their weapons in the air.

So shooting guns in the air = happiness. All right. A little dangerous, perhaps, but it kind of makes sense. Three paragraphs later, however:

In the Sunni Arab city of Samarra, a stronghold of support for the Sunni-led insurgency, hundreds of demonstrators marched through the streets in violation of the curfew. They carried photographs of Mr. Hussein, who was born in the same region, and fired guns in the air in anger.

Lesson: when you see Iraqis firing guns in the air, do not automatically get your iPod out and your freakum dress on. It is possible that they are in anger. Proceed with caution.

Sidenote: the #2 definition for "freakum dress" on UrbanDictionary.com is at pains to point out that "This was thought of by Martin Lawrence, not Beyonce." The definition is tagged with the phrase "fuck-him dress," but if you click that, you're immediately taken to one of the 22 definitions of "orlando bloom." Seriously.

The Only Reason to Be a Journalist Is the Prospect of Writing Paragraphs Like These

"Some of the money was spent in contacting the Russia mafia as we tried to clone mammoths," Hwang told the court during a hearing this week.

"But you can't say that [on the expense claim] so we expensed it as money for cows for experiment."

Headline: Korean scientist paid mafia for mammoth (via Warren Ellis). Yup: that South Korean guy who said he cloned a human embryo but didn't apparently also attempted at some point to create what I can only assume was an army of mindless mammoth warriors ready to do his bidding. But I guess the Russian mafia has cornered that market (???).

Also:

"Do you know how hard it is to secure four or five animal ovaries at butcher shops? You need to keep the workers there happy," he says.

Eww — sexy.

Subject: wither [as in, the state will wither away?]

I'm afraid I'm going to have to share some more spam. I promise I won't do this every time I receive an unsolicited microcap-stock recommendation, but this particular message is especially glorious. I can't help but think that the beautiful oscillation from high-toned radical rhetoric to programming lingo and back is intentional and designed. It's like when movies cut repeatedly back and forth between linked scenes…Incidentally, for those not in the know, PHP (which somehow stands for Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server-side scripting language.

The nation is in a mood for change, but what we really need is vociferous demand for revolutionary and restorative transformation. php at once, with no warnings…When will you hear the truth? I use this mainly to convert Photoshop roughs so I can show them to clients. When will you hear the truth?…

The path to the Second American Revolution is best reached by working- and middle-class Americans controlling their discretionary spending…Howard Dean contacts me regularly to find out how my case is proceeding. There are now very few restrictions on where you can create folders and upload files. Some people may simply give up after seeing an error message…

Right now you are being fed a load of economic propaganda by both the Bush administration and most mainstream media. There are now very few restrictions on where you can create folders and upload files.

Just start typing and your text will appear below. This is a potentially much more dangerous stance.

Dangerous indeed. Don't give up after seeing an error message, comrades; no matter what the Bush administration and the mainstream media say, you can create folders and upload files wherever you want to. Just start typing; only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: PHP at once, with no warnings!

This Was Classic Jeffries

Unsolicited email is kind of the new dreams: really interesting to the recipient, boring to everyone else. All the same, I can't help but share the following spam subject lines, which seem to add up to a pretty damning critique of yours truly:

• Subject: capitulation Marxist (10/26/06 10:52 AM; it repeats the line "mobi will die with a whimper" three times)
• Subject: island camerawoman (10/26/06 8:43 PM; "Is there a noticeable curve to your cock? Does she think she deserves it for something?" [This is especially strange because there's a line on Cody ChesnuTT's Headphone Masterpiece to the effect of "a hard dick with a curve / That's all you deserve."] "My cell-phone rang, and, sure enough, it was Jessi. This was classic Jeffries. But this one sounded suspiciously like a Klingon.")
• Subject: cat kitten cute baby (10/17/06 9:41 AM)
• Subject: copulate parochial (10/11/06 12:47 PM; "You may already know if you lean toward optimism or pessimism regarding your views on life.")
• Subject: reverent (11/2/06 5:42 PM; "Things that happened years ago that are embarrassing to me are brought up time and again.…I am miserable, so miserable. Gmail without Mac OS X Mail? This land will be joined to the Gaza strip.")