Missed connections for A-holes

We made small talk in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s. You said that you literally could not live without the salsa you were buying. I wish we could talk again. You used “literally” incorrectly. It really pissed me off. I wish you could literally not live without that salsa, because then I’d take it from you.

* * * 

At a bar celebrating my friend’s birthday in midtown. You were wearing Google Glass. I tried to mouth, “You look like a moron.” Did you record that?
 

From Ethan Kuperberg at The New Yorker: Missed Connections for A-Holes.

There are already outlets for this type of passive aggressive l'esprit de l'escalier, though. Twitter, Facebook status updates, the Yelp trauma narrative.

Mock not Stephen Dorff

Matt Ridley on the National Health Services' war against e-cigarettes:

If somebody invented a pill that could cure a disease that kills five million people a year worldwide, 100,000 of them in this country, the medical powers that be would surely encourage it, pay for it, perhaps even make it compulsory. They certainly would not stand in its way.

A relentless stream of data from around the world is showing that e-cigarettes are robbing tobacco companies of today’s customers — and cancer wards of their future patients. In Britain alone two million now use these devices regularly. In study after study, scientists are finding e-cigarettes to be effective at helping people quit, to show no signs of luring non-smokers into tobacco use and to be much safer than their noxious competitors.

So what in heaven’s name explains the fact that Dame Sally Davies, the government’s chief medical officer, when asked by the New Scientist in March what was the biggest health challenge we face in Britain, named three things, one of which was the electronic cigarette? That’s like criticising contraception because you prefer abstinence.
 

I confess to a few chuckles at occasional sightings of Stephen Dorff's TV ads for Blu, an e-cigarette brand. Now I regret that. The older I get, though, the less ideological and the more pragmatic I become.

By the way, where’s the left in all this? Smoking is increasingly concentrated in lower socioeconomic groups. How can we get e-cigarettes into the hands of the poor quickly? The high up-front costs of e-cigarettes (followed by lower ‘running’ costs) means their take-up by poorer people has been slower. Why are libertarians doing all the hard work?

Next time you hear somebody say that they worry about the potential risks of e-cigarettes, remind them of Voltaire’s dictum — don’t let the best be the enemy of the good.
 

Stephen Dorff > Jenny McCarthy.

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Alien

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is a film with the courage of its silences and ellipses. Most easily categorized as a species of science fiction, it deftly evades verbal explanation and explicit continuity. It is in fact based on a well-received science fiction novel by Michel Faber, concerning an alien being who has been sent to northern Scotland in the guise of a woman to pick up and trap men for consumption by other aliens. But Glazer seems to have ended by omitting most of the narrative content of his source, taking away backstory and motivation bit by bit until what is left is deliberately fragmentary and open-ended.

 

Another good review of Under the Skin, this by Geoffrey O'Brien in The New York Review of Books.
 

Why have thoroughbreds topped out in speed

Roger Pielke at FiveThirtyEight explores some possible reasons why thoroughbred racehorses seem to have peaked in speed.

One possibility, advanced by Denny and others, is that thoroughbred race times may have leveled off because the narrow genetic diversity of racehorses limits the genetic diversity in the pool of potential thoroughbred champions. Modern thoroughbreds are descendants of a small number of horses (less than 30 in the 18th century), and 95 percent are thought to trace their ancestry to a single horse, The Darley Arabian. Today, there are fewer than 25,000 thoroughbreds born each year in the United States. Compare that with the more than 7 billion people worldwide.3 The size of the human population may simply lead to a greater number of potential athletes with extreme speed.

And humans could be even faster if we didn’t engage in any other athletic pursuit aside from racing. David Epstein wrote in his book “The Sports Gene” that while it’s unclear whether speed is innate or nurtured, one important reason for Jamaican athletes’ success in short-distance races is that in their country, “every kid is made to try sprinting at some point.” In the United States, at least, many of the fastest runners are lost to other sports, and thus never have a chance to reach their potential as runners. Epstein cites Trindon Holliday, now a kick returner for the New York Giants, who in college outran future Olympic bronze medalist Walter Dix at 100 meters at the 2007 USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships. Who knows how fast Holliday might have become as a full-time professional sprinter? Humans who race also have many opportunities to train, specialize, experiment and innovate. Those efforts are apparently still bearing fruit in some track and field events.
 

It's an analogy so take it as more clever than elucidating, but I see parallels with genetic diversity and intellectual diversity. Having a team with a broader set of backgrounds, ideas, and strengths seems a way of avoiding groupthink, a form of the local minimum trap that results from genetic diversity in athletic accomplishment.

Teach your garden to weed itself

From an excerpt from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book Think Like a Freak:

Van Halen's live show boasted a colossal stage, booming audio and spectacular lighting. All this required a great deal of structural support, electrical power and the like. Thus the 53-page rider, which gave point-by-point instructions to ensure that no one got killed by a collapsing stage or a short-circuiting light tower. But how could Van Halen be sure that the local promoter in each city had read the whole thing and done everything properly?

Cue the brown M&M's. As Roth tells it, he would immediately go backstage to check out the bowl of M&M's. If he saw brown ones, he knew the promoter hadn't read the rider carefully—and that "we had to do a serious line check" to make sure that the more important details hadn't been botched either.

And so it was that David Lee Roth and King Solomon both engaged in a fruitful bit of game theory—which, narrowly defined, is the art of beating your opponent by anticipating his next move.

Both men faced a similar problem: How to sift the guilty from the innocent when no one is stepping forward to profess their guilt? A person who is lying or cheating will often respond to an incentive differently than an honest person. Wouldn't it be nice if this fact could be exploited to ferret out the bad guys?

We believe it can—by tricking the guilty parties into unwittingly revealing their guilt through their own behavior. What should this trick be called? In honor of King Solomon, we'll name it as if it is a lost proverb: Teach Your Garden to Weed Itself.
 

I'd read the brown Van Halen brown M&M story before in Atul Gawande's wonderful book The Checklist Manifesto, but this excerpt contains one story I hadn't seen before, about the medieval ritual of adjudicating by some horrific ordeal.