P.S. A Column On Things

Voting has never been easier

Until after the election, this item will be at the top of my column.

Here are the relevant focus-grouped mottoes: Democracy is stronger when we all vote! Your Neighbors Are Waiting For You To Vote!

These links apply to the entire country:

It is now trivial to Get Your Absentee Ballot

In case you live in a place where some people are trying to throw you off the voter rolls, check on your status and register if need be:

Am I registered to vote?

Feel free to share to share this item with others:

Short version (suitable for posters and written letters): tinyurl.com/1psacot1

Long version: Voting has never been easier

 

Start of Oct. 14 Column. More or Less Continuous News Service since 1998

Grandkids: Grandson: Small Witticisms

* We were talking about something I do regularly. I said “Most of the time…” and my grandson jumped in to complete the sentence:  “it never works.” A nice twist.

* I was singing the Army Song (When the Caissons Go Rolling Along) and mentioned there were four branches of the military. My grandson asked, “The people are twigs?” I apparently had not explained branch was a metaphor.

* He asked why hell was a kind of bad word.  I told him prudish people sometimes said “H-E-Double Hockey Sticks.” He then schooled me on reincarnation, which he clearly understand well.

Twenty-Six Years Later: PSACOT

(A reprint of my annual anniversary item, with small adjustments).

As of Oct. 16, it's been 26 years since my online revival of this 53-year-old column. (As published, as a Typepad Entry) Online for 26 years! (with a small six-year gap in the middle). I’ve written almost 1,000 columns, successors to an idea born in MIT’s objectivist student newspaper, ERGO, on September 23, 1970, six days after my 18^th birthday. (see entire first column here)

When I started this column online, "W" was still the second-rate governor of Texas, Sara Palin was busy running Wasila, and John McCain was angry. W is still second rate, Palin isn't running anything, and John McCain is gone.

I was still working for CMP (computer journalism company), and had invented the weekly podcast, back before Ipods (the lack of which definitely cut into our audience). My heart beat by itself and I weighed 270 pounds. In short, things were different.

In 1998, during the Clinton impeachment, I either had to start a column or check into a mental institution. PSACOT gave me a forum in which to express, to an audience (no matter how small) my feelings about that political circus. [As a one-time U.S. history teacher, I am forced to note that Andrew Johnson's impeachment was a rabid partisan witch hunt, as was Clinton's. Only Nixon's near-impeachment was bipartisan--and only Nixon resigned. And only Trump was charged twice for crimes he actually committed.]

The column/blog has since evolved into a combination of diary for my family and me and bulletin board for my clever friends--in short, a personal column. Like, but not as good as, former San Francisco Chronicle columnists Adair Lara or Jon Carroll. Or Doug Baker of the Oregon Journal.  Or, to take a national example, former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, considered the mother of the personal column concept (even though Stanton Delaplane and Charles McCabe of the San Francisco Chronicle actually beat her to it--but of course, if it hasn't happened in New York, it hasn't happened).

PSACOT is also a revival of sorts. My MIT readers would remember the original P.S. A Column On Things, which ran in ERGO, MIT's objectivist newspaper from September 1970 to March 1971, and The Tech, MIT's semi-official student newspaper, six times from March 1971 to May 1971. Those were among my happiest days as a journalist. If I had truly understood the fulfillment a personal column gave me, perhaps I would have fought harder to keep it when Bob Fourer killed it, or I would have revived it when I became editor-in-chief two years later, or tried to practice the craft as an adult (and become the father of the personal column).

In any case, I expect to still be doing this next October; I'll meet you here.

Life Predictors (2)

Last week, I began a discussion of predictors.

...Grades as a predictor of life success

The evidence is ambiguous; there is some correlation between good college grades and life success, but there are other equally good predictors, some of which don’t correlate 100% with college transcripts, according to Forbes.

…Grades as a predictor of happiness

This is essentially 100% anecdotal, except maybe for the Harvard Study of Adult Development—although it is possible Harvard students are not typical people.

Personally, grades seemed to have an inverse correlation with happiness. As a freshman, I observed that scientists and engineers (likely with 4-point GPAs) did not seem to be thrilled with life, while “soft science” and “non science” people (likely lower GPAs) seemed much happier. I didn’t need the grades to be a scientist or engineer, so I didn’t earn them because I wanted to be happy.

To be continued…

Quotes: Usually, Not Really Part 2

What generally happens is that the came of Telephone that used to be the route for quotations, tended to shorten and polish them.

* Voltaire almost certainly never exactly said “I disapprove of what you say, but i will defend to the death your right to say it.” Still, it is a favorite of a vanishing breed: newspaper editorial pages.

* Mark Twain almost certainly never said, “If you don’t like New England weather, wait a minute.”

* During the years when I regularly walked the Harvard Bridge between Boston and MIT, I loved the quotation, attributed to an Arctic explorer that “the coldest I have ever been is on the Harvard Bridge in February.” If anyone actually ever said that, the Internet doesn’t know about it.

* For most of my life I have been attributing “People who talk of the dignity of labor have never done any” to AFL-CIO leader George Meany. I still contend he said it, even though the Internet disagrees. Turns out it is from G.B. Shaw’s Man and Superman. I suggest the version I recall is pithier than the actual exchange.

Poet Octavius Robinson: “I believe in the dignity of labor.”

Chauffeur Enery Straker: “That's because you've never done any, Mr. Robinson.”

AI By The Rules

There are many things I heard at MIT that I barely understood, including most of second-term Calculus.

In 1971, my friend Ken Pogran drew a diagram on a white board that basically outlined the Internet. I didn't understand.

In both listening to (mostly) and talking to (a few times) Patrick Winston and Marvin Minsky, they described the “rules-based” version of Artificial Intelligence. I remember one of them (not sure which) said it would take a million rules to give a computer the common sense of a 5-year-old.

Heads So Nice They Ran Them Twice

Who's editing CNN's phone ap? Chatgpt?

 

 

This and That

A Few Briefs
Shake and shake the briefs bottle. None will come, and then a lot'll.
…
Paul and JD in the Funnies
I must be more common than I thought. Fusco Brothers: “The snow of your beauty is piling up on the mountain of my heart, and I'm predicting a lovalanche.” (and JD Vance showed up in Bizzaro: “My answers weren’t wrong, they were thought experiments.”)
…
Lee, Again
Of Lee, long-time friend/reader Neal Vitale notes, “You might want to connect the film with the recent Civil War, where the protagonist is modeled after Miller.” Consider it connected.
…
Oreos
Opulent Round Edible Object. Thanks to Semi-Rad. See what you made me do? I said I’d stop stealing his links, and yet here I am…link-light without him.
…
Fake Hit Songs
Some songwriters specialize in creating songs for TV and movies that sound like they might have been hits in some specific era. Tom Hanks discusses that in an oral history of That Thing You Do.

End of October 14 Column (No. 951)

Start of October 7 Column. More or Less Continuous News Service since 1998

Grandkids: Grandson: A Visit to Abba

I had promised to make a sno-cone at our house, and wanted to expose my grandson to Peter and the Wolf.

Turns out our icemaker’s “crushed” ice is barely crushed at all. Even running it through the Cuisinart barely improved it. It was a grade B sno-cone (flavored with hazelnut syrup), but he told me he liked it, and he tends to be quite honest on the subject of food likes and dislikes, so I believed him.

Because his music teacher has taught him to identify a number of instruments, I decided to play Peter and the Wolf  for him―the classic young person’s introduction to the orchestra. At first, I played Sir John Gielgud narrating it. I thought they would show each instrument as it played. Nope. So I switched to the classic Disney Peter and the Wolf, which showed the instruments briefly, then showed the story. As soon as the wolf swallowed the duck, you knew it was alive because that’s what happened in Red Riding Hood.

Life Predictors (1)

In science and medicine, a proxy is a way to measure something indirectly. You can’t measure infection at home, so you use body temperature as a proxy. You can’t measure the time and quality of sleep at home, so your phone uses temperature, movement and breathing as a proxy.

When I was fundraising for The Tech’s centennial celebration, the MIT development office told me you couldn’t directly predict willingness and means to give (except by past performance). So they told me (perhaps in jest) to concentrate on people whose first name was a last name, as they tended to be better off and more likely to be able to donate.

This matched my experience. I went to the office of Rutherford P. Johnson (not his real name) and made a pitch. When I was done, he wrote out a three-figure check (well, actually, he had his assistant write it and he signed it) made out to the centennial fund, care of MIT.

In this discussion, one must be aware of the fallacy of Post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, because of this). Or, as it is often put in science and statistics, “correlation is not causation.”

It was first explained to me as, “All murderers have eaten mashed potatoes, so all people who eat mashed potatoes become murderers.” It turns out that only a tiny fraction of people eating mashed potatoes commit murder.

The next two parts of this will discuss life predictors I have seen, experienced, known and heard of.

To be continued

Quotes: Usually, Not Really (1)

Virtually every quotation you know is either misattributed or inaccurate. Neither particularly matters. They last as quotes because they resonate with truth. Getting them exactly right or precisely attributed doesn’t make them any worse at expressing truths or humor.

For example, my freshman advisor told me:

“If you don’t stop spending so much time at the newspaper and the radio station you will have a mediocre academic career, taking the path of least resistance, just slipping by everything.”

Years later, when I started telling the anecdote, I quoted him as warning me that I was in “the twilight of a mediocre academic career”. It was only recently, when I discovered my freshman journal, that I realized I was misquoting him. I still tell the anecdote that way, because it is better. It appears in my 50^th reunion book from MIT.

Misattributed quotes used to stay alive on the fact that that you generally can’t prove the negative. The Internet makes available nearly every word written by a great person, so at the very least you can say, “There is no record of them saying or writing that.”

To be continued

Meme O' The Week: Typographer's Delight

Either you get this one or you don't. Thank you Steve Vaughn via LinkedIn

Movie Review: Lee *****

It took Kate Winslet seven years to make this female-centric bopic of Lee Miller, a WWII combat photographer for British Vogue magazine. Who was, incidentally, a woman.

I was thrilled to see women everywhere in the credits: director Ellen Kuras, producers, writers, cinematographers. You go girls. You go, audience.

Almost all the reviews mention this real incident from Miller’s life: when she joined the troops in Hitler’s Munich apartment, she had her picture taken soaking, disrespectfully, in his bathtub. It’s a great scene in a great movie, even though you know it is coming.

Many of the handful of men in the movie with speaking roles don’t start out well, although most eventually come around. This film blows the Bechdel Test out of the water.

There is a framing device: Lee being interviewed. The last scene exposes two classic tropes of American film-making, but if I told you, that would be a spoiler. If you’re a regular film goer, prepare not to be surprised.

There are 20 producer credits, of whom five are women, including both the "real" producers from the PGA (Producers Guild of America). One PGA producer, to my surprise, was Winslet. How many guilds does this woman belong to? Two of the three screenwriters are women.