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Big dismal science.

Thursday, October 31st, 2013

Happy Halloween, everyone.

Dean Karlan lives in New Haven, Connecticut. He gets a lot of trick-or-treaters in his neighborhood: “Residents say the area’s popularity is because the houses are so close together, minimizing the door-to-door travel time for trick-or-treaters.”

Dr. Karlan is also a behavioral economist. So why not combine the two and do science experiments on children?

Last year’s study found that 38% of kids 9 and older who saw a poster of First Lady Michelle Obama chose fruit instead of candy — twice as many as those who made that choice after seeing Ann Romney, wife of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The study indicated that the first lady’s “Let’s Move” campaign, promoting healthy living for children, appeared to be reaching its target audience.

In other experiments, Karlan has found that the more generic the costume is, the more likely it is that the child will choose a see-through bag with candy in it over a non-transparent bag. Karlan has also found that…

…older children would change their stated political party loyalty if it meant getting a little more candy. Younger children, however, could not be bribed, and remained steadfast.

I’d like to see a follow-up to this experiment where children get equal amounts of candy, but those who identify as Democrats have more of their candy confiscated by the researchers.

This year, the study aims to test whether some children are inherently planners — whether they planned their costume ahead of time or procrastinated until the last minute, and whether they have a plan for how they will eat their candy. They’ll weigh their answers against whether kids choose fruit or give into the easy temptation of candy.

One more thing I’d like to know: why isn’t Dubner interviewing Karlan, instead of doing a re-run this week? With all due respect, guys, it seems like you’ve been doing a lot of re-runs recently, and that doesn’t really motivate me to give you money.

(This also reminds me that my youngest niece has gotten to the age where I can start doing science experiments on with her. She’s still a little young for the economics based ones, though.)

Posted in Clippings, Economics, Geek, Sarcasm | Comments Closed

Two for your consideration.

Wednesday, October 30th, 2013

PetaPixel reprints a post (from the LensRentals blog) about a WWII story I’ve never heard before.

Jay Zeamer was a pilot. But he wasn’t a great one. He had problems passing his check tests, especially when it came to the “landing” part. He managed to get into B-17s and started flying as a “fill-in” pilot and on photoreconnaissance runs.

But nobody wanted to fly with him. So he created his own crew by gathering up every…

… misfit and ne’er-do-well in the 43rd Air Group. As another pilot, Walt Krell, recalled, “He recruited a crew of renegades and screwoffs. They were the worst — men nobody else wanted. But they gravitated toward one another and made a hell of a team.”

But they didn’t have a plane. So they grabbed onto a dilapidated B-17 that had been flown in for spare parts and somehow rebuilt it into flying condition. The base commander thought this was a pretty good thing, and intended to assign the plane to another crew.

Not surprisingly, Zeamer and his crew took exception to this idea, and according Walt Krell the crew slept in their airplane, having loudly announced that the 50 caliber machine guns were kept loaded in case anyone came around to ‘borrow’ it. There was a severe shortage of planes, so the base commander ignored the mutiny and let the crew fly – but generally expected them to take on missions that no one else wanted.

Zeamer and crew called the plane “Old 666”. And yes, they took on the missions no one else wanted.

Even among the men of a combat air station, the Eager Beavers became known as gun nuts. They replaced all of the light 30 caliber machine guns in the plane with heavier 50 caliber weapons. Then the 50 caliber machine guns were replaced with double 50 caliber guns. Zeamer had another pair of machine guns mounted to the front of the plane so he could remotely fire them like a fighter pilot. And the crew kept extra machine guns stored in the plane, just in case one of their other guns jammed or malfunctioned.

My kind of guys.

Having a plane with an apparently nutty crew who volunteered for every awful mission not surprisingly made the commanding officers look the other way.

This would make for one heck of a movie. Especially in light of what eventually happened to “Old 666” and her crew. But for that you should go read the rest of the story at PetaPixel or LensRentals.

Meanwhile, by way of Insta (who draws a different conclusion than I do): W. Joseph Campbell, author of Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, writes about Orson Welles, “War of the Worlds”, and the question of whether there really was a mass panic.

Posted in Clippings, History, Radio | Comments Closed

That ’70s post.

Wednesday, October 30th, 2013

Ah, the 1970’s. What a time.

Remember Alexander Calder, the noted sculptor? Died in 1976? Well, he had a dealer, Klaus Perls, that he worked with exclusively. It was, by all accounts, a close and very friendly relationship.

Was.

In a recently amended complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court, the Calder estate says the Perlses surreptitiously held on to hundreds of Calder’s works and swindled the artist’s estate out of tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps most surprising, it says that Perls, a dealer with a sterling reputation who campaigned to rid his industry of forgeries, sold dozens of fake Calders. The suit depicts Perls as a tax cheat who stashed millions of dollars in a Swiss bank account, a secret his daughter said she maintained by paying off a former gallery employee with $5 million. She added that Calder had his own hidden Swiss account.

It looks like the Perls family stipulates at least part of these claims, specifically the parts about the Swiss bank accounts. But they also claim that part of the reason Perls had a Swiss bank account is so he could transfer profits to Calder’s Swiss bank account.

In court papers, Mr. Wolfe, the Perls lawyer, said, “Alexander Calder and Klaus Perls were kindred spirits in that they both had an aversion to paying taxes.”

I knew there was a reason I liked Alexander Calder’s work.

The 1970’s were also a time when it was much easier to get your hands on explosives. Especially if you were 17 years old. And if you were peeved at the California Department of Water and Power.

The blast ripped apart a 4-foot-wide steel gate that regulates the flow of water to the aqueduct. Windows were blown out of the gatehouse atop the spill gates and its concrete floor buckled.
About 100 million gallons of water meant for Los Angeles were instead flushed into Owens Lake, which had been dry since the Department of Water and Power opened the aqueduct in 1913.

Nobody was injured. Mark Berry, one of the two men responsible, spent 30 days in juvenile detention. And he now works for the DWP.

(I love this telling detail: “The air was filled with the banana-like smell of nitroglycerin.”)

(And this one: “Berry said his father, as yet unaware that his son was one of the culprits, boasted to a neighbor, ‘If I ever find out who bombed the gates I’ll buy him a steak dinner.'” Gardner Dozois and Edward Abbey, please call your offices.)

(Since I made a “That ’70s Show” reference, I believe I have to link to this Penny Arcade. Especially since I am all about fish out of water prison dramas.)

Posted in Art, California Über Alles, Clippings, Explosives, Law, Sarcasm, TV | Comments Closed

Firing (?) watch.

Tuesday, October 29th, 2013

This is odd, and still developing:

The Dallas Mavericks have, according to reports, “parted ways” with Gersson Rosas, the team’s general manager.

There are two reasons why this is odd:

  1. Nobody seems to be clear on what “parting ways” means. Was he fired? Did he get a better job offer elsewhere? Did he need to spend more time with his family? Did he jump, or was he pushed? All of this is relevant, in that…
  2. …he’s been the general manager for three months.

    Rosas was brought in near the end of July from the Houston Rockets where he was the executive vice president of basketball operations.

    3. Edited to add 10/30: the second day coverage is spinning this as a resignation…

    …triggered by the fact that Rosas — hired by the Mavericks to work in support of longtime president of basketball operations Donnie Nelson — wanted a greater share of control over Dallas’ basketball operations. Concerns about how Rosas would fit into the Mavericks’ front-office structure and accept a supplementary role to Nelson, sources said, surfaced almost immediately after Rosas’ arrival in late July.

    Basically, the argument seems to be that Rosas expected a bigger role in management, but the Mavericks are, first and foremost, Mark Cuban’s team, and Donnie Nelson is his sidekick. Which leaves little to no room for Rosas.

Posted in Clippings, Sports | Comments Closed

Down to the sea in cruise ships.

Monday, October 28th, 2013

NYT headline:

Too Big to Sail? Cruise Ships Face Scrutiny

First paragraph of the article:

One of the largest cruise ships in 1985 was the 46,000-ton Carnival Holiday. Ten years ago, the biggest, the Queen Mary 2, was three times as large. Today’s record holders are two 225,000-ton ships whose displacement, a measure of a ship’s weight, is about the same as that of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

So we have an answer: no, they aren’t “too big to sail”, since the Nimitz-class ships seem to be working just fine.

More seriously, the article is the usual naval gazing about whether cruise ships have become so big that the safety of passengers can’t be guaranteed. This seems to be more of a question about ship design, crew staffing levels, and safety equipment.

Although most have not resulted in any casualties, the string of accidents and fires has heightened concerns about the ability of megaships to handle emergencies or large-scale evacuations at sea. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, introduced legislation this summer that would strengthen federal oversight of cruise lines’ safety procedures and consumer protections.

I was going to say something snarky about how accidents and fires at sea don’t exactly encourage customers to come back, and about how much damage the “poop cruise” did to Carnival’s brand. But, while you can see a dip in the stock in February, it looks like they hit their 12 month low point just a few days ago, and I can’t tie that to any specific event.

Today’s biggest ship, Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas, has 2,706 rooms, 16 decks, 22 restaurants, 20 bars and 10 hot tubs, as well as a shopping mall, a casino, a water park, a half-mile track, a zip line, mini golf and Broadway-style live shows. It can accommodate nearly 6,300 passengers and 2,394 crew members — the equivalent of a small town towering over the clear blue waters of the Caribbean Sea. It measures 1,188 feet long. Its sister ship, the Oasis of the Seas, is two inches shorter.

Mini golf? I am there, man. (Doesn’t it seem kind of odd that a cruise ship would have mini golf, while mini golf courses all over the country have been closing? I realize that land is probably more valuable for purposes other than mini golf, but as big as these cruise ships are, isn’t their real estate limited as well?)

This is my favorite part:

One result was a set of new global regulations in 2010 called the Safe Return to Port rules. Those require new ships to have sufficient redundant systems, including power and steerage, to allow them to return to port even in the worst emergency. Only about 10 ships built since then comply with this new rule.
“The idea is that a ship is its own best lifeboat,” said John Hicks, the vice president for global passenger ships at Lloyds Register, the largest ship classification society. “The idea is to do everything to keep the crew and passengers on a vessel.”

“A ship is its own best lifeboat.” Where have I heard that before? Oh, yes:

The lack of lifeboats was the result of a combination of outdated maritime safety regulations and the White Star Line’s wish to leave the decks unobstructed so that the passengers could have better views, as well as give the ship more aesthetics from an exterior view . In addition, it was believed that in the event of an emergency, Titanic’s design would enable her to stay afloat long enough for her passengers and crew to be transferred safely to a rescue vessel. It was never anticipated that everyone would have to be evacuated rapidly at the same time.

(Yes, I know I’m citing Wikipedia, but that’s just because that’s the first reference I can easily lay hands on. The argument that lifeboats weren’t needed because the Titanic was her own best lifeboat is mentioned in pretty much every Titanic history I’ve read, so pick your favorite.)

While ships are becoming bigger, the burden on crew members is growing. The Queen Elizabeth 2, which was launched in 1969, had one crew member for about 1.8 passengers. On the Triumph, the ratio was one crew member for every 2.8 passengers. The issue is also complicated by language and communication problems, and a high crew turnover rate that can reach 35 percent a year.

Hmmmm. One wonders what percentage of that “35% percent” turnover is among ship’s officers, crew, and other people who are important for safety? And what percentage is among people like cooks, restaurant workers, maids, and other people who are, shall we say, less important to the safety of a cruise ship?

Posted in Clippings, Ships | Comments Closed

And where did we get such men?

Monday, October 28th, 2013

Brigadier General Robinson Risner (USAF- ret.) has died.

General Risner, who was promoted to the rank of brigadier general at his retirement in 1976, was shot down in September 1965 during a mission to destroy a missile site. Then a lieutenant colonel, he turned out to be the highest-ranking officer at Hoa Lo Prison, which American prisoners of war called the Hanoi Hilton. For the first five years — after which higher-ranking officers came to the prison — he helped organize inmates to make complaints about the conditions and to boost morale.

General Risner spent a total of seven and half years in Hoa Lo Prison, more than three of those in solitary confinement.

One of his major acts of defiance was helping to organize a church service in 1971, even though he knew he would be punished. As guards led him away to yet another spell in solitary confinement, more than 40 P.O.W.’s sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” to show support. He was later asked how he felt at that moment.
“I felt like I was nine feet tall and could go bear hunting with a switch,” he said. In 2001, a nine-foot-tall statue of General Risner was installed at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs to commemorate that declaration.

Posted in Clippings, Heroism, History, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Metal Machine Music.

Monday, October 28th, 2013

Your Lou Reed obits: NYT.

The Velvet Underground, which was originally sponsored by Andy Warhol and showcased the songwriting of John Cale as well as Mr. Reed, wrought gradual but profound impact on the high-I.Q., low-virtuosity stratum of punk, alternative and underground rock around the world. Joy Division, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, R.E.M., the Strokes and numerous others were descendants. The composer Brian Eno, in an often-quoted interview from 1982, suggested that if the group’s first album, “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” sold only 30,000 copies during its first five years — a figure probably lower than the reality — “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.”

A/V Club.

Why, yes, I actually do own “Metal Machine Music“, though I haven’t listened to very much of it. (I bought it as a jape at a former co-worker of mine who thought he could engage in a battle of “who can play the most obnoxious music”; said co-worker seriously underestimated me.)

Posted in Clippings, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 25, 2013.

Friday, October 25th, 2013

I nearly missed this one. The only coverage I’ve seen has been on the A/V Club.

William Harrison, novelist and screenwriter, died on Tuesday.

I was unfamiliar with much of Harrison’s work. Apparently, he wrote a lot of novels set in Africa. But perhaps his biggest claim to fame is a short story, “Roller Ball Murder”, which was published in Esquire in 1973.

Norman Jewison hired Harrison to do a screenplay based on the story. The result:

Posted in Books, Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Quote of the day (also, discussion question)

Thursday, October 24th, 2013

Updating a more recent story, some Maryland state troopers are further upset with state AG Doug Gansler, who they have accused of being a horrible backseat driver, because he called their leader a “henchman” of his political opponents. That’s bad but better than being called a “lackey” or “flunky,” at least according to the results of an alcohol-fueled debate I once had about the hierarchy among minions. Henchmen rank more highly and so bear more responsibility for dirty deeds, or so we concluded. I think.

Okay. So it sounds like the hierarchy may run something like this:

  1. Sidekick.
  2. Henchman. (Or “henchperson”. Or should it be “person of hench”?)
  3. Peon.
  4. Lackey.
  5. Flunky.
  6. Pawn.
  7. Toady.
  8. Minion.

That sound about right to everyone? Discuss in comments. I guess the way I see it, “minion” is the term for both the super-set covering the entire sidekick-henchman-lackey-flunky hierarchy, and the title for the “entry level” position. “Honey, good news! I just got promoted from ‘minion’ to ‘lackey’! Now we can afford premium beer!”

Edited to add: a friend of WCD points out that we left out “toady”, so I’ve added it to the list above. I’m tentatively placing it one step above “minion”.

Also: “pawn” and “peon”. List revised, but the positions given are just starting points for discussion.

Posted in Clippings, Law | 2 Comments »

Notes from the legal beat.

Thursday, October 24th, 2013

The courts are busy. Here’s a couple of quick things:

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Guns, Law | 2 Comments »

Annals of law. (#8 in a series)

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2013

On September 22, 1985, Roy McCaleb was shot and killed in his Houston home. He was sleeping at the time, and was heavily sedated due to recent back surgery and a heart attack.

McCaleb’s wife, Carolyn Sue Krizan-Wilson (as she is now known) stated that the shooter was a man who had car-jacked and raped her 10 days previously, then broke into her home that night…

…threatened her, scraped her with a coat hanger and dripped hot wax on her. He again held a knife to her throat and raped her, she said. The man then took the gun she kept under her pillow, went to where her husband was sleeping and shot him, she said.

Krizan-Wilson went on to claim that, while the intruder was fleeing the scene, he dropped the gun; she said she picked it up and fired a couple of shots at him.

Why am I bringing up this cold case now?

Krizan-Wilson confessed that this whole story was a lie, and pled guilty to killing her husband.

But that’s not why I bring it up.

In exchange for the plea, Krizan-Wilson was sentenced to six months in jail, which will be followed by 10 years probation.

But that’s not why I bring it up, either.

James Stafford, an attorney for Krizan-Wilson said the septuagenarian is suffering from dementia and a host of other health issues and wanted to get past the case against her.

The courts in the state of Texas are taking pleas from people who suffer from dementia? I realize that there’s not a good alternative (how can a person with dementia effectively assist in their own defense at trial?) but there’s something about taking a plea under these circumstances that make me go “What?”

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Norts spews.

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2013

Posted in Clippings, Law, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

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