AND FURTHERMORE

So I figured the one ray of sunshine in this raincloud of bad luck was that Susie and I would be able to watch the Friday episode of The Young and the Restless, which is always the boffo episode of the week. [OK, OK, so I have watched it every day pretty much for twenty years. I think of it as a very long War and Peace, only without everyone having three names.] But no. This is regional basketball playoff time, so Y&R is preempted. I mean, is this happening to me because I am an anarchist, because I am a Marxist, or because I am an atheist?

THE *&%#%#&(+%# AIRLINE INDUSTRY

Here we are, all packed and primed for Paris. 5:50 p.m. on US Airways from Raleigh Durham, connecting in Philadelphia with a 9:00 p.m flight to Paris. I had already decided where we were going to have dinner our first evening in Paris. Then I get an automated phone call telling me that the 5:50 flight is delayed until 8:00 p.m., which makes the connection impossible.

The first time US Airways can rebook us is SUNDAY.

So, I take off my support hose [useful for counteracting swollen feet on long trips], and ask Susie where she would like to have dinner in Chapel Hill. We will go to Squids, where, if you sit at the bar, you can have oysters for $0.50 each. Susie usually gets half a peck of steamed oysters [no kidding].

I have explained to Christmas Eve [our surviving cat] that we are not leaving yet, and cancelled the cab. I have already done all the laundry and taken out the garbage. aaaarrrrgggghhh!!!

FAREWELL THOUGHTS

As I pack and make last minute arrangements for our Paris trip tomorrow [special instructions for our pet sitter, and such], just a few thoughts on the passing scene.

A troubling report by the Southern Poverty Law Center on the dramatic rise of right-wing vigilante and hate groups, preaching [and in some cases practicing] violence. The SPLC tracks hate groups, and reports a 54% spike in their numbers between 2000 and 2008. This is entirely separate from the Tea Party groups, which are populist protests on the right that, despite some nasty rhetoric, are considered by the SPLC to be quite different from the sorts of nativist violence-drenched groups they track. Contrary to what you might imagine, these groups are heavily concentrated up and down the eastern Seaboard and into the upper and lower South. There is, of course, a long history of such groups in America, but it is at least worth noting that the annual CPAC conference this year [Conservative Political Action Committees] was co-sponsored by the John Birch Society, which for decades was excluded from polite right-wing company because of the sheer paranoid craziness of its founder and members. [For those of you who are candy bar fans, remember that it was the man who started the company that made Mars bars who founded the John Birch Society. Sigh. I really like Mars bars.]

More signs of a revival of energy and determination in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Harry Reid, much maligned and in danger in his home state re-election bid, is talking about revising the filibuster rules come January. A change now would take sixty-seven votes, but in January it will only take fifty plus Joe Biden. Chuck Schumer is going to hold hearings, he says. Obama is in campaign mode for the closing of the deal on health reform. By this time, the political implications of a win are almost independent of the actual content of the bill. In the words of Thomas Hobbes, my favorite source of political wisdom and aphorisms, "the reputation of power is power." If Obama wins on health care reform, he is a winner, and thereby gains political power. He has just announced the intention of tackling immigration reform. You cannot accuse him of ducking the hard issues!

Avatar didn't win. I rather like the fact that Best Director went to James Cameron's former wife. Maybe story does matter. We are a long way from 1952 when The Greatest Show on Earth won best picture for Cecil B. DeMille. [For those who missed it, this was the schlock blockbuster to end all schlock blockbusters, with Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde and the inevitable Charleton Heston. By comparison, The Ten Commandments was War and Peace.]

Since I am not a member of the Mainstream media, I am not obligated to comment on the bizarre tale of Eric Massa and Glen Beck. So I won't.

I will talk with you from Paris. toujours gai, as the cockroach Archy used to say. [Look it up]

EARLY MONEY IS LIKE YEAST

This saying, for those who don't know, is the origin of the acronym "Emily," as in "Emily's List." And in politics, it is true. Your money has a greater weight in primaries than in the general election, and it has a greater impact early than late. Our attention recently has been focused on Republican primary challenges from the right, but there are beginning to crop up some very interesting Democratic primary challenges from the left. I have recently given $100 to Bill Halter, challenging the extremely conservative Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, and another $100 to Tarryl Clark, running for the Democratic nomination to take on Michele Bachmann. Halter raised a million dollars in forty-eight hours after ActBlue and Daily Kos highlighted his challenge. If you are as frustrated as I by the Blue Dog Democrats who have highjacked health care and other issues, this is a good way to strike a blow for progressive principles. Also, keep an eye on Bart Stupak, who may be challenged in his district by a pro-choice pro-health care Democrat. This is the transformative effect of the Internet.

PEDANTIC QUIBBLE

What point is there in maintaining a blog if you can't post a pedantic quibble from time to time? So here goes.

George W. Bush is rightly mocked by lefties for saying that the American people "misunderestimated me." Fair enough. But every day, it seems, someone in the mainstream media or in the blogosphere misuses the term "underestimate," as in "it is hard to underestimate ..."

Look, if something is incredibly large, expensive, dangerous, beautiful, old, or likely to happen, then it makes sense to say that "it is hard to overestimate" that thing's size, expense, danger, age, or likelihood, meaning "no matter how large, expensive, dangerous, beautiful, old, or likely you estimate it as being, you will probably fall short of how large, etc etc it really is." In other words, it is really hard to overestimate its size, etc. because it is so big, costly, etc. An alternative way to say this is, "You should never underestimate the size, expense, etc etc of that thing, because it is sure to be larger, costlier, etc etc than you think."

Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?

By the way, Bush was wrong. We didn't misunderestimate him. We estimated him as being just about as low as a president could get, and we were right.

WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

I stumbled yesterday evening on a TCM screening of Casablanca, which I can practically lip sync by now. It reminded me to tell you all that on Friday, Susie and I shall be going to Paris for two and a half weeks. It is still rather chilly in Paris, so we shan't have any jardin du Luxembourg picnics, but as always, I shall relax into the delights of the 5e arrondissement. My principal task on this trip will be complete the preparations for our June trip, when I shall host a party for my big sister, Barbara, who turns eighty this summer. Twenty of us, from three generations, will float down the Seine on June 20th having dinner and toasting her. It should be a grand occasion.

Dedicated readers of this blog will know that during our last visit, which is now six months ago, I created a true boeuf bourguignonne, a task that took me two days but was well worth the effort. I am toying with the idea of doing it again, and perhaps even inviting my French cousins, Andre and Jacqueline Zarembowitch, to share it with us.

Assuming that my internet access still works [always an uncertainty, what with France Telecom's fecklessness], I shall continue to blog from Paris, although perhaps not as often. One of the many miracles of cyberspace is that in it the dimension of space does not exist.

A QUIBBLE ABOUT NOTHING OF IMPORTANCE

This blog post has absolutely nothing to do with politics, philosophy, economics, life, the meaning of the universe, or even Paris. It is about Stephen Jay Gould, Joe Dimaggio, statistics, and streaks. It was inspired by the fact that I am currently on a twenty-one game winning streak of Spider Solitaire on my computer, which reminded me of something that has been eating away at me for years. Do you ever shout at the tv screen when someone says something with which you disagree? Do you ever wish that you could reach through the pages of a book and grab Plato or Macchiavelli or Jane Austen by the collar and say, "Now, listen!"? Well, then you may understand why I am writing this post. Even when he was alive, there was no chance that I would ever have a one-on-one with Gould, although I did hear him speak once. Now that he is long gone, I am left with my daydreams -- and with my blog. So here goes.

Stephan Jay Gould, now tragically and much too soon deceased, was a marvelous biologist and science writer, tenured at Harvard along with Richard Lewontin and E. O. Wilson. He was, among many other things, a fanatic baseball lover. In 1988, he wrote a review for the NY Review of Books of a book about Joe Dimaggio's famous 1941 streak -- hitting safely in fifty-six straight games. You can find the review here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/4377

In the course of the review, Gould, drawing on detailed analyses by a number of other famous scientists and mathematicians who were also sports fans, undertook to debunk the popular view -- a myth, Gould claims -- that hitters, basketball players, and other professional sports greats "get hot," "get in the zone," and then are able to sink strings of baskets or get strings of hits or whatever because they are momentarily elevated to a higher place of sports excellence. None of this is true, Gould insists. The occurrence of runs or streaks is -- with the singular exception of Dimaggio's streak -- nothing more nor less than what statistical probability predicts will happen.

Now, I learned long ago that it is almost always a mistake for an amateur to try to tell a professional his or her business. If I shop for antiques occasionally on a Sunday, it is not likely that I am going to spot a valuable piece of furniture in a shop whose owner -- who buys and sells furniture all day long for a living -- has failed to appraise correctly. Inasmuch I could not sink a set shot even if Shaq picked me up and held me over the basket, I would think twice about telling Michael Jordan that he is wrong when he says that he was "in the zone" and couldn't miss. When professional athletes claim that they are sometimes hot or are in the zone, we fans ought at the very least to accord their report some evidentiary value.

The core of Gould's argument is a fact well known to mathematicians but usually misunderstood by the innumerate, namely that in random distributions of some property in a sequence, runs or streaks are much more common than one might intuitively anticipate. So, if you are a .300 hitter, Gould says, sheer chance dictates that every so often you will have a hitting streak that strikes everyone in the stands but the statisticians as a sign that you are "hot." Not a bit of it, Gould replies. That is just what you would expect of a .300 hitter. Obviously, he observes, a .250 hitter will have such a streak less often. The player's claim that he got the hits because he was hot or in the zone is just false, for all his conviction.

I think that this argument [you have to read Gould's lovely review to get all the details] is based on a rather simple but fundamental logical error. [Now you see why I wanted to reach through the page and grab him by the lapel.] Here is the point: the statistical argument is based on the assumption that there is such a thing as being a .300 hitter, which is logically different from being a batter who hits .300. Being a .300 hitter, for the purposes of the statistical analysis, is like being a bag of marbles 30% of which are white and 70% of which are black. If you repeatedly choose marbles from the bag at random, you will indeed get some long runs of white marbles more often than intuition tells you that you ought to. That is the sum and substance of Gould's point.

But being a .300 hitter is not like being six feet tall or having naturally curly hair. It is not a property you have prior to, and independently of, playing the game of baseball. It is at least possible -- and the pros repeatedly claim that it is true -- that the great players have the ability to concentrate, shut out every irrelevant stimulus, sharpen their reflexes, and raise their level of performance. That ability is a part of what makes them great players.

There is a great story about Ty Cobb that illustrates this point. At the age of sixty, Cobb participated in an Oldtimers' Game, organized as a feel good exercise in fan adoration. When Cobb stepped to the plate to hit, he turned to the oldtimer who was catching and politely asked him to step back a bit, because he could not trust his hands to keep hold of the bat and he didn't want to hurt him. The catcher stepped back a few paces, whereupon Cobb laid down a perfect bunt and beat it out to first. Even in an exhibition, he cared more about winning than about anything else. [It is that feature of Cobb's character that leads the ghostly players in Field of Dreams to vote not to ask him to join them in their pick-up games on Kevin Costner's old-time field.]

The players themselves claim that there are times when they can call on that extra level of performance, and times when they cannot. Furthermore, it is at least plausible that an initial statistically random series of successes -- hits, or baskets -- can trigger that extra effort in them, so that they feel themselves to be in the zone. That is what can enable to hitter whose natural talents might lead a talent scout to expect a .280 batting average to pull himself up to .300. If we could measure a player's "natural" batting average, just as we can count the proportion of white balls in a sack, and then compare it with the average he actually achieves, we could judge whether he is "falling short," "living up to his potential," or "developing a hot bat." But in fact neither we nor Gould can carry out that measurement ex ante. So we are left to judge a player's
ability" by his batting average ex post, and that simply does not permit us to test the claim that he sometimes "gets hot." We are left to rely on the reports of the people who really know best, namely the players themselves.

So, Stephen Jay, if there is a heaven for wonderful writers, I hope you are reading this. Dimaggio's streak is still a marvel, but I insist that sometimes Michael had hot hands.