Andrew Hickey

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December 17th, 2014: KIDS WHO SHARE YOUR EXACT NAME, AM I RIGHT?? – Ryan

I read this piece on LabourList today from a Labour candidate in Brighton and I am afraid I couldn't help myself but post a somewhat ranty response in the comments below it.

I thought I'd reproduce it here seeing as it's the longest thing I've written in a while!


What an absolute load of sanctimonious tribalistic rubbish. You didn't "rebuild" the NHS in 1997 and you won't need to "rebuild" it in 2015. It was perfectly functional when your party came to office in the 1990s and will be so next year if you win.

Your comments about cuts should be seen for what they are - hypocritical. The current government has ring fenced NHS spending against their cuts. Tiny rounding errors where money is either not spent in an area or rolled into the next year are screamed about by your party as "CUTS"! But your party made no such pledge about ring fencing the NHS so the readers can draw their own conclusions about what would have happened had you won in 2010.

The administrative problems you refer to regarding the closure of a GP surgery in Brighton is the sort of thing that happens under all governments not just this one. There were loads and loads (and loads) of admin issues under Labour. I remember Tony Blair getting an absolute roasting from a BBC Question Time audience during the 2005 general election campaign when one audience member highlighted how they could not book an appointment in advance and had to ring on the day first thing in the morning when they could often not get through. Blair said he was sorry and it must be particular to that one surgery at which point many more people in the audience spoke up about how they had exactly the same problem across a variety of surgeries. I myself had experienced it too. It was systemic. It was still happening late in the previous parliament when Labour had had over a decade to sort this out. Was that SAME OLD EVIL UNCARING LABOUR??!!! or is it simply that a massive bureaucratic service like the NHS is by definition very difficult to manage and when you have all sorts of targets (some of which contradict each other) administrative failings like this are inevitable. It's nothing to do with the party or parties in power usually. It's just the nature of complex systems.

Your party might have been in power when the NHS was founded but there was a clear pre-war consensus that something like it was going to happen and the Beveridge report which was the foundation of the NHS was produced by a member of the Liberal Party. Your party does not own the NHS like so much of your rhetoric and this piece would imply. It is owned by all of us. And it is not just Labour members and voters who care about it. We all do.

And finally, this is probably a controversial point because Cameron himself has unwisely referred to the death of his son probably too many times in this context but to suggest as you do that Cameron personally does not understand the value of the NHS is simply factually incorrect. Anyone who has had a sick/terminally ill child understands intuitively the value of it. It is very unwise of you to suggest otherwise.

Last week I finally saw The Imitation Game, the movie with Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing.

OK, so for those who haven’t yet seen it: should you?  Here’s my one paragraph summary: imagine that you told the story of Alan Turing—one of the greatest triumphs and tragedies of human history, needing no embellishment whatsoever—to someone who only sort-of understood it, and who filled in the gaps with weird fabrications and Hollywood clichés.  And imagine that person retold the story to a second person, who understood even less, and that that person retold it to a third, who understood least of all, but who was charged with making the movie that would bring Turing’s story before the largest audience it’s ever had.  And yet, imagine that enough of the enormity of the original story made it through this noisy channel, that the final product was still pretty good.  (Except, imagine how much better it could’ve been!)

The fabrications were especially frustrating to me, because we know it’s possible to bring Alan Turing’s story to life in a way that fully honors the true science and history.  We know that, because Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 play Breaking the Code did it.  The producers of The Imitation Game would’ve done better just to junk their script, and remake Breaking the Code into a Hollywood blockbuster.  (Note that there is a 1996 BBC adaptation of Breaking the Code, with Derek Jacobi as Turing.)

Anyway, the movie focuses mostly on Turing’s codebreaking work at Bletchley Park, but also jumps around in time to his childhood at Sherborne School, and to his arrest for “homosexual indecency” and its aftermath.  Turing’s two world-changing papers—On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery and Intelligence—are both mentioned, though strangely, his paper about computing zeroes of the Riemann zeta function is entirely overlooked.

Here are my miscellaneous comments:

• The boastful, trash-talking, humor-impaired badass-nerd of the movie seems a lot closer to The Big Bang Theory‘s Sheldon Cooper, or to some other Hollywood concept of “why smart people are so annoying,” than to the historical Alan Turing.  (At least in Sheldon’s case, the archetype is used for laughs, not drama or veracity.)  As portrayed in the definitive biography (Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma), Turing was eccentric, sure, and fiercely individualistic (e.g., holding up his pants with pieces of string), but he didn’t get off on insulting the intelligence of the people around him.

• In the movie, Turing is pretty much singlehandedly responsible for designing, building, and operating the Bombes (the codebreaking machines), which he does over the strenuous objections of his superiors.  This, of course, is absurd: Bletchley employed about 10,000 people at its height.  Turing may have been the single most important cog in the operation, but he was still a cog.  And by November 1942, the operation was already running smoothly enough that Turing could set sail for the US (in waters that were now much safer, thanks to Bletchley!), to consult on other cryptographic projects at Bell Labs.

• But perhaps the movie’s zaniest conceit is that Turing was also in charge of deciding what to do with Bletchley’s intelligence (!).  In the movie, it falls to him, not the military, to decide which ship convoys will be saved, and which sacrificed to prevent spilling Bletchley’s secret.  If that had any historicity to it, it would surely be the most military and political power ever entrusted to a mathematician (update: see the comments section for potential counterexamples).

• It’s true that Turing (along with three other codebreakers) wrote a letter directly to Winston Churchill, pleading for more funding for Bletchley Park—and that Churchill saw the letter, and ordered “Action this day! Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority.”  However, the letter was not a power play to elevate Turing over Hugh Alexander and his other colleagues: in fact, Alexander co-signed the letter.  More broadly, the fierce infighting between Turing and everyone else at Bletchley Park, central to the movie’s plot, seems to have been almost entirely invented for dramatic purposes.

• The movie actually deserves a lot of credit for getting right that the major technical problem of Bletchley Park was how to get the Bombes to search through keys fast enough—and that speeding things up is where Turing made a central contribution.  As a result, The Imitation Game might be the first Hollywood movie ever made whose plot revolves around computational efficiency.  (Counterexamples, anyone?)  Unfortunately, the movie presents Turing’s great insight as being that one can speed up the search by guessing common phrases, like “HEIL HITLER,” that are likely to be in the plaintext.  That was, I believe, obvious to everyone from the beginning.

• Turing never built a computer in his own home, and he never named a computer “Christopher,” after his childhood crush Christopher Morcom.  (On the other hand, Christopher Morcom existed, and his early death from tuberculosis really did devastate Turing, sending him into morbid-yet-prescient ruminations about whether a mind could exist separately from a brain.)

• I found it ironic that The Imitation Game, produced in 2014, is far more squeamish about on-screen homosexuality than Breaking the Code, produced in 1986.  Turing talks about being gay (which is an improvement over 2001’s Enigma, which made Turing straight!), but is never shown embracing another man.  However, the more important problem is that the movie botches the story of the burglary of Turing’s house (i.e., the event that led to Turing’s arrest and conviction for homosexual indecency), omitting the role of Turing’s own naiveté in revealing his homosexuality to the police, and substituting some cloak-and-dagger spy stuff.  Once again, Breaking the Code handled this perfectly.

• In one scene, Euler is pronounced “Yooler.”

For more, see an excellent piece in Slate, How Accurate Is The Imitation Game?.  And for other science bloggers’ reactions, see this review by Christos Papadimitriou (which I thought was extremely kind, though it focuses more on Turing himself than on the movie), this reaction by Peter Woit, which largely echoes mine, and this by Clifford Johnson.

Christmas traditions are funny things – some of the most fixed turn out to have relatively recent roots, and new ones are manufactured all the time. Witness much hand-wringing this year about the import into the UK of Black Friday, a notoriously busy shopping day that makes sense after Thanksgiving in the USA (people have the day off) but far less over here. Still, it worked, and having successfully taken culturally will surely stick around.
Part of the British Christmas has been a canon of Christmas pop songs – Slade, Wizzard, Shakey, Jona Lewie, Greg Lake, Kirsty and the Pogues, Wham! Et al. The Christmas Canon has been a part of Christmas since I was a kid in the 80s, it feels as firmly set a tradition as you might find. But I suspect that’s an illusion: it’s changing, and the canon as we know it is on the way out.

On Facebook I mentioned that we’d know a generation had fallen from cultural influence when Jona Lewie got booted off the Christmas Canon. This was met with much sadness and shaking of heads from fans of “Stop The Cavalry”, but the point wasn’t that I dislike the song. I was 7 in 1980, disliking the song would be like disliking Christmas itself. It was put on the office playlist last week, though, and it struck me how odd it must seem to somebody who hadn’t been around then – this lugubrious, kinda-sorta new-wavey thing that bobs along all about “nuclear fallout zones” and cavalry. It’s like that one ugly bauble you always hang on the tree because you bought it as a kid: the time will come when you aren’t decorating the tree any more, and the bauble might be quietly pushed to the back, then forgotten entirely.

Still, the Christmas Canon has been robust for years now, and it won’t just be a generational handover that does for it. It’s a combination of factors, and people getting older and not remembering how important Jona Lewie is for the meaning of Christmas is only part of it. What else is ringing the clanging chimes of doom for the soundtrack we knew and loved:

DIGITISATION: The British Christmas Canon goes hand in hand with the CD era. The need to fill up 2 or even 3 discs of Christmas music (including all the American oldies, of which more later) has meant an extended shelf life for a vast B- and C-List of Christmas songs – Chris Rea, The Pretenders, Cliff, et al. – which had to be dusted off every year to fill up space. But now we’re moving into an era defined by playlists, not albums, which means you get to actually pick the Christmas songs you WANT to hear, not the ones EMI can afford to make up the numbers on Disc 2.

STAGNATION: As has been pointed out hundreds of times, only one song has managed to break into the Christmas canon in recent years, and that is Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”. It’s equally important to realise, though, that Mariah’s track is also ENORMOUSLY popular, charting on downloads every year and rivalled only by “Fairytale Of New York” (which gets the edgy vote each Christmas, but is also relatively recent). This is more evidence for the generational-handover theory: the audience wants the only recent smash hit Christmas song before it wants any of the 70s and 80s classics. But Mariah is also American, which brings us to…

GLOBALISATION: The USA had its Christmas song boom in the 40s and 50s – where lounge-y standards like “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas”, “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and, of course, “White Christmas” originated. The Phil Spector Christmas Album feels like a culmination of that. The British Christmas boom was something of a reply to that, and at its zenith the popularity of the 70s and 80s hits meant all but the hardest-core of US standards were relatively neglected. But these days the American experience of Christmas is more culturally prominent – goodbye UK sitcom specials, hello repeats of Elf on Sky Movies – and just as with Black Friday (and Hallowe’en) the UK is falling into line. The golden age of American easy listening Christmas music is firmly back in style, and everyone from Bing to Brenda Lee is as likely to get an airing as Shakey or Slade. (I’ve even heard “Christmas Alphabet” get an airing once again.) And for people under 30, they have the distinct advantage of not being your parents’ pop music.

So in the pub – of course it was in the pub – I predicted we’d see a survival of the hittest effect shake out – an “A-Canon” of genuine untouchables, and a B-List rendered much more flexible by the decline of CDs. What would be in this A-Canon? I judged – based largely on hunchwork and my experiences of the office playlist – that it would include Slade, maybe Wizzard, certainly Wham!, Kirsty and the Pogues, and Mariah. Everything else – McCartney, Elton, Shakin’ Stevens, Greg Lake, and, yes, poor Jona Lewie – faced cold holidays ahead as they were gradually winnowed out in favour of more Americanised Christmas songs.

That’s just my opinion, though – where’s the evidence. Well, this is the first year that the Official Charts Company has released its figures for streaming Christmas songs. What people want to hear and are playing, not just what turns up on compilations. If there is a quiet revolution underway in the Christmas Canon, here’s where you’d see it.

And the evidence is… interesting. Mariah at the top, with Wham and the Pogues rounding out the Top 3. I was right about them, but wrong about Shakey (still clearly A-List at #4). Band Aid is too hard to call – it’ll be played more this year cos they have a version out. Below that top 5, though, we see a cluster of vintage American Christmas songs and Wizzard, with Slade (far lower than I expected), Elton, Chris Rea, Boney M and Greg Lake following behind, and then Michael Buble versions of standards filling out the rest. No Spector (maybe he’s not on Spotify?), no Cliff, and – thank the baby Jesus – no “Wonderful Christmastime”.

We’ll need to wait to next year to firm up the trends here, but it looks to me like something really is happening to Britain’s Christmas soundtrack – a resurgence of interest in older music, with a core of canon favourites solid at the top. And, as I suspected from the beginning, there might be no room at the inn for poor Jona Lewie.

Amy Collier's previous work for The Toast can be found here.

Poodles:

Bloodhounds:

Chow-Chows:

Chihuahuas:

large mops:

Read more What We’ve Done to Wolves at The Toast.

I am excited to announce I will actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States: https://t.co/luY4lCF2cA.

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) December 16, 2014

If nothing else, he’s better at using multiple clauses in a sentence than his brother, but it is a declaration surrounded by a whole forest of ambiguity. He’s not exploring running for President but actively exploring the possibility of running for President, an act of unintentional political philosophy that could lead to disaster if he decides he first needs to fully comprehend the meaning of his decision to actively explore this possibility before even beginning to properly explore where it all might lead to.

Of course, it’s in the nature of US Presidential elections that candidates need to go through all the rigmarole of not actively running so they don’t have to answer any actual questions but can still begin to raise the vast funds needed to see if it’s possible to raise the immense funds required to mount a serious bid for the Presidency. There will likely have been a pre-public exploratory phase before all this, just to make sure things won’t completely fizzle out, which is why there’s a big jump from thinking about running for President, and exploring it. One you do privately, the other you do publicly and are pretty much committing yourself to run barring utter disaster – it’s the political equivalent of the one finger that’s just touching the chess piece after the move, hoping you haven’t missed something really obvious now it’s in place.

Once the candidate has formed the exploratory committee, they’re pretty much running for President, even if they’re still being coy about it. In fact, I can only think of one US politician who explored running for President and then decided not to run – the late Paul Wellstone in 1999 – though there are many who explored, ran and then realised they should have explored more.

Jeb Bush becoming President in 2016 would prove my prediction from 2012 correct, even if I wouldn’t want it to be. I do hope his explorations will include an extended discussion of whether history repeats itself, and if so, just how farcical a process the election would need to be to have him elected by the House of Representatives like John Quincy Adams and who the Andrew Jackson of the twenty-first century would be.

(Edit: And just after I posted this, I saw this article pondering on the possibility of the both US parties splitting in two, which is surely a sign of us being in 1824 all over again)

Joe Scarborough has been arguing that the media should not be reporting the accusations against Bill Cosby because no law enforcement agency has taken up the charges…which, of course, they can't because the Statute of Limitations has run on them. One might note that Mr. Scarborough is doing much to publicize the charges by insisting they should not be publicized.

Says he, "Any woman can come forward right now and say 'Billy Cosby did this to me 40 years ago' and be on the cover of US Weekly. With no vetting. They will print your story, and maybe it happened. If it did, it's tragic. But if it didn't happen, you get your 15 minutes of fame." There are so many things wrong with that viewpoint…

1. First off, Mr. Scarborough works for a network that presents all sorts of scandalous accusations about people without vetting; which treats the accusation itself as news. All news sources do that these days.
2. Secondly, the reason most of these women didn't come forward when the alleged incidents occurred was that they had good reason to believe that their stories, taken as individual accusations, would not be believed. Several did report them and found that even the police wouldn't go there. It's like with the Al Capp matter. Many women were raped. Nothing got reported in the press even when the victims did get law enforcement to take some minor actions. It was only after Jack Anderson's newspaper column reported on one assault that other victims came forward, a pattern was established and one District Attorney said, "Hmm…maybe we ought to press charges on this matter instead of ignoring it."
3. There are probably a few women in this world who would relish "15 minutes of fame" on that basis but for most, it's a terrible ordeal. They get attacked in the press and by lawyers. They get investigated and interrogated about their sex lives. They open themselves up to legal action for defamation…in this case, going up against great wealth and power. It's also just plain embarrassing for some to be viewed as a victim and it's very stressful, reliving an incident they might prefer to forget. Most sane humans do not want even fifteen minutes of that kind of fame.

I'll probably think of others after I post this. Oh, yeah. People on the news like Joe Scarbrough like to suggest you're a liar. The thing is that we live in an Internet World and if MSNBC doesn't report the charges, the online press will…and at some point, a story may get enough traction there that the so-called mainstream media has to pick up on it. They usually dip into it by saying something like, "There are widespread reports on the Internet that…" and treat the volume of the accusations as news. But they will eventually cover a story like this. And if it was a powerful politician instead of a powerful comedian, Scarborough's show wouldn't even wait for widespread reports on the web.

In my online discussions of transgender representation in media, I’ve mentioned that I expect a degree of transphobia is every medium I read, watch or listen to. That’s simply how pervasive the problem is -- and it may take the form of a joke, an off-the-cuff remark, or a non-essential character created intentionally or unintentionally to perpetuate stereotypes about gender variance or utilizing gender variance to underline said character’s psychosis.

It’s with a heavy heart I’m forced to discuss this long-standing media trope within the context of Batgirl, the one area of geek life I considered to be a safe-zone. Within the pages of Batgirl #37 we come across an impostor posing as Batgirl who ultimately plans to kill her in order to assume her identity. As you might imagine, my eyes nearly rolled into the back of my head, accompanied by an aggravated sigh, when the would-be murderer was revealed to be an individual assigned male at birth.

Continue reading…

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December 15th, 2014: BODIES, AM I RIGHT?? – Ryan

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December 16th, 2014: PALS, AM I RIGHT?? – Ryan

The Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association can’t read and can’t understand the English language. That’s the most charitable explanation for their taking offense at this T-shirt worn by Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hamilton Hawkins:

The Cleveland cops are reacting as though Hamilton’s shirt said “Free Eric Frein” or “I Stand With Dennis Marx” or “Hurray for Dennis Williams” or otherwise expressed sympathy for those anti-police cop-killers. But his shirt didn’t express any such sentiment. His shirt simply read “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford” — two law-abiding civilians who were killed in the city where Hamilton works.

“Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford” is not an insult directed at the Cleveland police. It is a summary of their job description.

What the Cleveland police are saying, then, is that they do not want to do their job. What they have chosen to say, unambiguously, is that they are opposed to “Justice.” That’s a clear sign they’re in the wrong line of work. It makes about as much sense as a group of doctors getting angry about a T-shirt championing “health.”

Specifically, the Cleveland police are going out of their way to make us all aware that they are opposed to “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford.” I would hesitate to accuse them of such an ugly, defiantly unjust position, but this isn’t my opinion of them or anyone else’s evaluation or characterization: This is them, on their own, choosing voluntarily to inform us all that they stand opposed to and are offended by “Justice.”

It’s not clear whether or not this was intended as a mass letter of resignation, but that is the most logical conclusion that can be drawn from Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association President Jeff Follmer’s statement that Hamilton’s shirt was offensive to him and to all the “police officers” he claims to represent. If they’re opposed to and offended by justice, then they can’t want to remain on the job. They must be begging to be relieved of duty.

Grant them that wish. Any police officer who is offended by “Justice” needs to be relieved of the duty to uphold it.

Unfortunately, Follmer’s weird anti-justice, anti-police rant on behalf of these anti-justice “police officers” was not the only news this weekend from the Cleveland police department. There was also this:

Police aggressively questioned the tearful girlfriend of a young black man they had just shot dead as he held a BB gun in an Ohio supermarket – accusing her of lying, threatening her with jail, and suggesting her boyfriend had planned to shoot the mother of his children.

Tasha Thomas was reduced to swearing on the lives of her relatives that John Crawford III had not been carrying a firearm when they entered the Walmart in Beavercreek, near Dayton, to buy crackers, marshmallows and chocolate bars on the evening of 5 August.

“You lie to me and you might be on your way to jail,” detective Rodney Curd told Thomas, as she wept and repeatedly offered to take a lie-detector test. After more than an hour and a half of questioning and statement-taking, Curd finally told Thomas that Crawford, 22, had died.

“As a result of his actions, he is gone,” said the detective, as she slumped in her chair and cried.

Crawford had been shot by police officer Sean Williams, after a customer called 911 and claimed the 22-year-old was pointing a gun at passersby. Surveillance footage released later showed Crawford picking up the BB rifle from a shelf, wandering the aisles and occasionally swinging the gun at his side while he spoke on his cellphone to his ex-girlfriend.

A 94-minute police video recording, released to the Guardian by the office of Mike DeWine, the Ohio attorney general, in response to a public records request, shows Thomas, 26, being interviewed by Curd after she was driven from Walmart to the Beavercreek police department. Curd later told investigators he had not yet been told Crawford only had a BB gun that had been on sale at the store.

It seems woefully inept and irresponsibly cruel that Det. Curd would spend so much time bullying this newly widowed woman about a gun that didn’t exist hours after the police knew full well that Crawford was unarmed when he was killed, but again such massive ineptitude is the best case scenario. Because if the Cleveland police weren’t that much of an appalling clown show — if it was not the case that Curd “had not yet been told” that the gun he’s grilling Tasha Thomas about did not exist — then he was, instead, attempting to coerce false testimony from a crime victim in order to cover up the killing of an unarmed man.

So let’s hope this is just epic stupidity and not sheer evil, because I guess, at some level, that would be slightly less awful, if not any less cruel or lethal.

Either way, add that to Follmer’s insistence that he and his fellow officers find “Justice” to be offensive and it’s pretty clear that these guys lack the capacity and the inclination to do their very important job. Let them go, then. It shouldn’t be hard to find replacements who are at least as competent, and who don’t share their reflexive opposition to justice, then very definition of their job.

In my bedroom in my flat, there is a picture rail running around the walls. There are small metal hooks hanging from the rail. I hang my coat from the hook nearest the door. Every morning, I try lifting the coat off the hook without touching the hook and every morning, my coat catches on the hook and the hook falls off the rail. I then have to pick the hook up and put it back on the rail. As I put my coat on each morning, I look at my reflection in the mirror and think to myself “Every time I try, and every time I fail.” I’m thinking of becoming a motivational speaker.

Andrew Rawnsley has written a piece about the influence of Northern Irish political parties after May's Westminster election.

The Nigel we need to talk about is Nigel Dodds. Mark the name. For within a few months, he is the Nigel who could be an absolutely pivotal player in the politics of our country. It is not impossible that he could even get to choose who becomes our next prime minister.

It is a salutary reminder that Norn Iron remains part of the UK system, but I think he exaggerates the chances of Nigel Dodds playing kingmaker (not least because Nigel is himself at risk in North Belfast, though I expect he will win). The DUP's price will be modest:

...it’s not places in the Cabinet that we would seek. We ask for nothing for ourselves. We want outcomes that would benefit all of our people. We are not seeking to be part of any Government coalition, but, with an open mind, we are willing to sustain in office, a Government that offers policies and programmes that are in the best interests of Northern Ireland in particular, and the United Kingdom as a whole.

That looks like cash to me, rather than any DUP-friendly constitutional tweaks (over which both Dublin and the Shinners would expect to wield a veto).

In any case, this is all pretty improbable. The chance of the extra 6-10 DUP members (let alone five or six Shinners) holding the crucial votes is not high, as Martin Baxter has so ably mapped out. Even his statistics disregard the fact that the SDLP, likely to retain at least 2 of their current 3 seats, take the Labour Whip, which narrows the zone of DUP relevance still further. Added to that, a Labour deal with the DUP which has the side effect of annoying the SDLP may turn out not to be worth it.

Rawnsley also raises the prospect, excitedly pursued by Brian Walker on Slugger O'Toole, that the five or so Sinn Féin MPs might take their seats in hope of picking up some coalition crumbs. This is vanishingly unlikely. I am sure that it is likely in the medium term that the Shinners will end abstentionism at Westminster, rather more likely than a united Ireland is to come about. But it seems improbable that the price they would demand would be easier for a minority government to pay than any conceivable price demanded by the DUP. The calculation is clear: buy off 8-ish DUP votes, and the Shinners stay away. Buy the support of 5-ish Shinners and the DUP (and maybe also the SDLP) move to the opposite column, for a net loss of at least 3.

Moving farther northeast, I do find it interesting that the current Tory proposals for Scotland are much more generous than the Labour equivalents. Of course the SNP must say "no deals with the Tories" for now; but if Cameron is smart (and I know that reasonable people disagree on that point), he will be preparing an offer that the SNP cannot refuse on 8 May, of radical constitutional reform in return for confidence and supply (like the DUP, the SNP have no interest in sitting in the UK cabinet). I am sure that Cameron at least has read Douglas Hurd's 1970 novel dealing with precisely this scenario...

Martha Sigall worked in the animation business for 53 years as an inker and painter of animation cels. Animators did the drawings in pencil and then it was up to folks like Martha to trace them onto sheets of celluloid and paint them with colors. If you ever saw a vintage Looney Tune or Merrie Melodie made after 1936, you saw Martha's handiwork and she labored for most of the other studios in town at one time or another.

In the last few decades, Martha became a great source for anyone researching the industry. She was sharp and bright and helpful and she had a good memory and — perhaps best of all — the wisdom to say "I don't know" when she didn't know. A lot of spurious history has been written because those who didn't know or remember felt they had to make something up or take a wild guess. Not Martha. She knew so much that it didn't bother her to occasionally say "I don't know."

I had the pleasure of talking with her on many occasions at animation events. She loved the field and she loved the people she worked with and she loved the newer generation of animation creators and animation historians…and we all loved her.

She died this afternoon at the age of 97. Her autobiography, Living Life Inside The Lines: Tales From The Golden Age of Animation can tell you more about her and so can her good friend, Jerry Beck. We'll miss you, Martha.

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December 12th, 2014: This comic was done for Cards Against Humanity's Ten Days or Whatever Of Kwanzaa pack! You sign up and Get surpriSes in the maiL, and thIs yEar tHere is a puzzle! Is this comic part of the puzzle? ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT, right?? You can read all the comics here. Based on redacted news reports, the "Frosty" incident mentioned here happened in late 2012. – Ryan

The conventional view of mysteries…is as an essentially conservative genre. A crime disturbs the status quo; we readers get to enjoy the transgressive thrill, then observe approvingly as the detective, agent of social order, sets things right at the end. We finish our coca and tuck ourselves in, safe and sound….But what this theory fails to take into account is the next book, the next murder, and the next. When you line up all the Poirots, all the Maigrets, all the Lew Archers and Matt Scudders, what you get is something far stranger and more familiar: a world where mysterious destructive forces are constantly erupting and where all solutions are temporary, slight pauses during which we take a breath before the next case.

David Gordon

The other day, I was in the menswear section of the Covent Garden branch of H&M. It’s the one on Long Acre, I think. The menswear department is downstairs and is quite a long, narrow space. There is a bank of tills along one side of longer walls. Running parallel to the bank of tills is a set of display stands which stock sundry items like socks, underwear, gloves and lint removers. This set of display stands creates a sort of channel which is where customers queue while waiting to pay. The stand therefore forms the boundary of the queue, while also serving as an opportunity to tempt customers to make a couple of additional impulse purchases while they wait. It’s a very simple system and one which is used in many shops. I’ve created a diagram to show roughly what the floor plan of the store looks like. The grey cross represents the person serving behind the counter. The red dots are customers:

You can see that my time studying architecture was not wasted.

However, during my visit, the queue channel was not being used. Instead of forming a straight line safely within the confines of the channel, the queue curved around the far right end of the set of display stands and risked spilling out into the main body of the shop:

I assume what happened is at one point, there was no queue. A customer came along, approaching the tills from the right and rather than walking all the way along the display stands and back along the channel, took a shortcut and headed direct to the till. I don’t blame him. I’d probably have done the same, but then a second person did the same and caused this mutated queue form. He’s the person I blame for this. His actions set the template that were then followed by each successive person who joined this “queue”.

You see this sometimes. Maybe it’s a strange dent or slight twist in the line of the queue, caused by some since removed obstruction. A kind of frozen wave. The queue has a form of memory, preserving knowledge about its earlier state and the people who used it. Knowledge unknown to the current people in the who silently maintain its form for future generations of queue users, who will in turn, unknowingly pass it on to those who then follow them.

While there is a sort of beauty in this idea of the queue as a collaborative, unconscious data storage system, it bothered me for practical reasons. If the queue started getting much longer, it would be difficult for people to walk around the shop. I wanted to reset the queue and I was lucky enough to be able to do so. To begin with, I simply tried to wait it out. I hovered around, holding my items, waiting for the queue to clear completely and then I could restart it, correctly this time. However, I soon realised that the amount of people in the store and the length of transaction meant there almost always seemed to be one customer being served with another waiting behind.

Eventually, I reluctantly joined this broken queue. I felt awful. What if someone saw me and thought “Look at that fool, he doesn’t know you are meant to queue along the length of the counter. What does he think those display stands with sundry items are there for if not to shepherd the queue into the most efficient form as well as tempt waiting customers to make impulse purchases?”

The man in front of me was being served. As the guy behind the counter scanned his items, a T-shirt just to the right of the counter caught the customer’s eye. He moved from his position to pick the shirt up look at it. As he moved, so did I, slipping round to the correct position. Instead of behind and to the right, I was now to the left of the customer who soon returned to the counter. When I made my move, I did it under the pretence of wanting to examine some socks in the display stand. I had no interest in the socks. This was just my cover story. The gambit worked. Just seconds after I took my new position, and as the man in front of me was entering his PIN, a new customer arrived and joined the queue behind me.

Two reasons we know that Frosty the Snowman was white:

1. He was made of snow, and snow is usually white.

2. He disobeyed a direct order from a police officer and resisted arrest, yet none of my relatives have posted any long Facebook rants in ALL CAPS arguing that he was therefore a thug who deserved to be gunned down in the street.

The latter point, I think, is pretty conclusive.

Down to the village, with a broomstick in his hand,
Running here and there, all around the square,
Saying, “Catch me if you can.”

He led them down the streets of town, right to the traffic cop;
And only paused a moment, when he heard him holler, “Stop!”

Yep. Definitely white.

At the Miami Book Fair, I was approached by a young man who wanted advice on how to become a professional writer. I asked him if he was a non-professional writer. He said no. But if and when he gets the chance to make a living doing it, he'll start writing. That's the wrong time and reason to start.

I told him he's kind of missed the point of the profession he's looking to get into. You don't start by getting people to pay you for your work. You have a lot of bad writing to get out of your system before you'll produce any of the stuff that's worth money. (And yes, there are the occasional exceptions. There are also people who win the lottery. Don't bet your life you'll be one of them.)

He asked me what I loved about writing and wasn't satisfied with my answer…but I was quite serious. The lesser reason is that I enjoy sitting here, creating something out of nothing, winding up with a script or an article or an essay that someone will enjoy. That I'll also get paid for it is a nice bonus but really, it's that feeling of building something that is the core of my secondary reason.

My primary reason? It's because it's what I do best.

Now, let me clarify that: I don't mean "best" compared to anyone else. I mean "best" compared to other things I might do. I've always been terrible at most activities that involve manual labor, especially if they call for a sense of balance, great manual dexterity or selling. If I ever had to be a salesman, I'd be the kind who couldn't get anyone at a Tea Party convention to buy an Obama Voodoo Doll. I can do math but only in short spurts. (That was another reason, along with those I mentioned in a recent post why I gave up counting cards in Vegas.)

I'd also be terrible in any profession that involved essentially doing the same thing day after day. I know non-writers who look at folks like me and think we do the same thing over and over but unless I'm writing the same story — e.g., Scooby Doo scripts — it doesn't feel that way to me. (And yes, I'm kidding about the Scooby Doo scripts. In fact, one of the things I've enjoyed about them is the challenge of trying to make them not the same story again and again.)

Let's see what else: I can't cook very well. I'm terrible at foreign languages. I don't like driving. I used to be pretty good at lettering and passable at simple drawing but that skill has atrophied since I got a computer with Adobe Photoshop and a lot of fonts on it. I certainly can't sing or dance and my upper limit of "performing" for audiences maxes out when we do "Quick Draw!" at Comic-Con.

And maybe the biggest impediment to me doing anything other than what I do is this: When I'm not writing, my mind tends to wander to what I might be writing if I was home writing. So I'm a writer. And the reason is, honest to God, that I'm lousier at anything else I might be.

Whether I'm as good as or better than others is irrelevant. I figure I'm better than some, worse than some and that's as far as I want to think about that. All I know is I'm better at writing than I would be fixing drain spouts or running a drill press. (To drive that last point home, I have an essay coming up here about how I suffered when I had to take Woodshop in junior high school. To steal an old joke from George S. Kaufman, I managed to make it through without ever grasping the scientific principle of a hammer.)

But, getting back to writing…

There's that quote from Dorothy Parker which I cite here every so often just so I can disagree with it: "I hate writing. I love having written." I don't hate writing and wonder why anyone who did would choose that as a profession. That's like someone who hates dogs becoming a dog groomer. Or someone who hates having to lie getting a job at Fox News.

I love writing. I don't mean I love every assignment, of course. But even the worst one I've ever had to get through was better than going off and becoming a coroner's assistant or the guy who chops up the onions at Fatburger or something.

Which is why my advice to that fellow at the Miami Book Fair was not to become a writer if you have to become a writer. If you just start writing one day because you want to…and if you keep doing it whether or not there's money in it…you're off to a good start. It doesn't mean your work is any good but it does mean there's a better chance of it being good than if you get into it because it looks like an easy buck. For most writers, the buck is not easy and if there's a buck at all, there often are not many of them.

From author Russell Blake:

I just looked at the Amazon top 100. #1 is a trad pub title at $2.99. #2 is a trad pub title at .99. #3 is an Amazon imprint pre-order at $4.99. #4 is Baldacci’s latest at $10.99, #5 is Michael Connolly’s latest at $3.99, #6 is Gone Girl at $2.99, and on and on and on.

For those indie authors who have seen a marked downturn in sales since KU came in, I believe that’s only part of the story. The other is that since Amazon got lower prices from trad publishers, the price of trad pubbed books is through the floor.

Which means that the tried and true gambit most indies have been using, which is selling based on price, at .99 or $2.99 or $3.99 or $4.99, likely won’t work particularly well anymore. Because when you can buy Gone Girl for $2.99 and Connolly’s latest at $3.99, why would most readers buy your book at or around the same price?

. . . .

Readers are now being presented with a host of worthy, readable, high-quality offerings at or below the same prices indies offered their books at, eliminating the bargain perception/edge that indies learned to rely on as a differentiator.

That will translate into crap sales for many, and the effective end to many careers that relied on their work being attractive because it was cheap. In a world where everything is cheap, selling based on price doesn’t work.

Bluntly, if you as an author want to sell books in this environment, you have to do it the old fashioned way: you have to write books your audience will gladly pay for, even if a dollar or two more than the latest Michael Connolly, or Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster. That means you need to up your game, that suddenly story and craft will matter more, and that simply being cheap, with a homemade cover and lackadaisical or no editing, won’t cut it.

That’s awesome news for readers. It’s disastrous news for many indie authors.

. . . .

Now for the good news. As my prior blog discussed, more authors than ever before are earning good money as indies. So it can be done. But those authors are very, very good at delivering a reading experience their following will pay for, and they value their readers above all – they don’t put out slop, they don’t think in terms of “good enough,” and they’re every bit as demanding of their work as the harshest acquisitions editor.

Link to the rest at Russell Blake

Here’s a link to Russell Blake’s books

For those unfamiliar with him, most of Russell’s books are self-published and he writes 7-10,000 words per day.

Russell points out in a part of his post that PG didn’t excerpt that, under the deep-discount clauses present in almost all tradpub contracts, the royalties authors receive from heavily-discounted tradpub books are much, much lower than the already-low ebook royalties tradpub pays for list price ebooks.

Thus, ranking high on Amazon’s bestseller lists at $2.99 doesn’t mean nearly as much money to a tradpubbed author as it does to an indie author.

Reading this article about how MPs who want to climb the greasy ladder to the Ministerial Jaguar have to toe the line continually in Parliament reminded me of one idea I’d like to see tried to try and free Members of Parliament.

We currently have a situation where to be a Minister within the UK Government, you have to be a Member of Parliament – either Commons or Lords. Unlike other countries – the US is probably the best and most well-known example – we don’t formally separate the executive and legislative parts of the government and so David Cameron serves both as Prime Minister and Member of Parliament for Witney. (And if the Tories got a majority but he lost his seat, he wouldn’t be able to continue as PM)

There are many advantages to this system, and for once, it’s not one that Britain is alone in using (Angela Merkel, for instance, represents the constituency of Vorpommern-Rügen – Vorpommern-Greifswald I in the Bundestag). Leaders and ministers need to have that local mandate to be able to serve, and it ensures that ministers are accountable to Parliament. On the down side, however, there are the issues mentioned in the article of MPs having to do as they’re told if they want to get into Ministerial office, and constituencies represented by a senior Minister not getting the same sort of representation in Parliament as those represented by backbenchers.

Now, one way to change this would be to follow the American example and completely separate the two, but that would be a pretty radical change to the system and I’m not completely sure the country is ready for the idea of a directly-elected Prime Minister and executive. However, the French system does suggest a way in which the two can be separated a bit more, and fits in with British tradition too.

Until the First World War, MPs who took a post as a minister had to resign and be re-elected in a by-election if they became a Minister because their circumstances had changed. The French still have a system whereby if a member of the National Assembly is appointed to the Government (and some other constitutional posts) they cease to be a member of the Assembly. However, they circumvent the need for a by-election by using the principle of a substitute. By this process, a person who may become a minister names a substitute at the time of their election – as in Britain, having the individual electoral mandate is seen as important – and if they do take up a role in the government, their place in it is taken by the substitute. That way ministers still need to be elected, but in day-to-day business, there’s a greater separation between Parliament and the Executive.

It’s not the be-all and end-all of constitutional reform, and would need some more thinking through about the wider ramifications, but it’s an idea that might bring some improvements and one I’d be interested to see tried.

From the Amazon Media Room:

Amazon today announced its best-selling books of 2014, best-selling Kids & Teens books, as well as the Most Gifted and Most Wished For books of the year—just in time for last-minute holiday gifting. The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd is the best-selling book overall and John Grisham’s latest novel Gray Mountain comes in at number two. The Heroes of Olympus Book Five: The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan is the best-selling Kids & Teens book, followed by Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul by Jeff Kinney. The Long Haul was also the Most Gifted book this year, while All the Light We Cannot See byAnthony Doerr and Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty were the Most Wished For. The top 20 lists take into account first editions that were published in 2014, consider only paid units, and combine print and Kindle editions.

. . . .

“This year’s best seller lists include a lot of familiar authors and characters—over half of the books on the lists are part of a series,” saidSara Nelson, Editorial Director of Books and Kindle at Amazon.com.

. . . .

The top 20 best-selling books overall are:

1. The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd						11. Unlucky 13 (Women’s Murder Club) by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
2. Gray Mountain by John Grisham						12. Edge of Eternity: Book Three of The Century Trilogy by Ken Follett
3. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr						13. Shadow Spell (Cousins O’Dwyer) by Nora Roberts
4. Twenty Seconds Ago (Jack Reacher, #19) by Lee Child						14. Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
5. Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty						15. Blood Magick (Cousins O’Dwyer) by Nora Roberts
6. The Target (Will Robie Series) by David Baldacci						16. Field of Prey by John Sandford
7. The Fixed Trilogy by Laurelin Paige						17. Written in My Own Heart’s Blood (Outlander) by Diana Gabaldon
8. The Heroes of Olympus Book Five: The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan						18. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul by Jeff Kinney
9. Top Secret Twenty-One (Stephanie Plum) by Janet Evanovich						19. City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments) by Cassandra Clare
10. Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II’s Most Audacious General by Bill O’Reilly						20. Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

. . . .

To see the full top 100 lists of Amazon’s best-selling print and Kindle books of 2014, visit www.amazon.com/bestsellingbooks2014.

Link to the rest at Amazon Media Room

Ian Fleming via MI6:

In the May 1963 edition of the long-running ‘Books and Bookmen’ periodical published by Hansom Books, Ian Fleming penned an essay describing his creative process for the James Bond novels.

People often ask me, “How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have.” I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don’t think there is anything very odd about that.

We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, Casino Royale, there are strong incidents in the book which are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.

. . . .

The first was the attempt on Bond’s life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other one blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one contained a bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which they could escape.

One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smoke screen before throwing the bomb. In fact, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.

Far-fetched, you might say. In fact, this was the method used in the Russian attempt on Von Papen’s life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgarians and they were blown to nothing while Von Papen and his wife, walking from their house to the embassy; were only bruised by the blast.

So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one. I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings.

We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.

Link to the rest at MI6 and thanks to Chris for the tip.

Two harmless bearded men have opened a cereal cafe in East London. Because we live in the internet, lots of people (including Channel 4 News) have pretended to get angry about it:

Guys, it’s just some people selling cereal. Calm down.

This article by Rob Manuel is a bit more balanced:

I wonder if we’re all walking around in a sea of cynicism, fuelled by social media, competitive negative opinions, hating everything?

Maybe it’s eroding our ability to just enjoy something? Maybe we all need to make friends with our inner Cereal Killer Cafe.

I don’t actually understand why so many people seem bothered about the cereal cafe, and the outcry reminds me of the reaction to “$4 toast” (although the truth behind that story is a bit more interesting).

Anyway, thinking about cereal cafes and toast reminded me of an idea I had a while ago: pubs should sell toast.

Pubs should sell toast.

Do you run a pub? Sell toast in your pub. I don’t even want any royalties for this idea. I’m giving it to you as a gift. An early Christmas present. Sell toast in your pub. It’s not even like it involves a huge outlay of cash; you just need to get a toaster¹, a loaf of Kingsmill², some Utterly Butterly³ and a jar of Marmite⁴.

NOTES
¹ According to Which? Magazine, the Breville Aurora VTT475 is pretty good, scoring 81% in their tests, higher than any other 4-slice toaster. “You’ll get a good piece of toast from the Aurora,” Which? wrote about the toaster. “It browns the toast well and covers most of the bread slices in a golden brown hue.” It is apparently a bit slow though, which could be a problem in a pub with lots of orders for toast coming in. “It’s also a slow toaster, taking nearly four minutes on average, to toast fresh bread. So if you do choose this model, you’ll need to time the rest of your breakfast accordingly – or enjoy a cuppa while you’re waiting.”

² Soft White thick cut

³ Or equivalent

⁴ If the “toast in pubs” idea is as popular as I think it will be, it might work out better value to buy one of those big plastic tubs of Marmite rather than a jar.

Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study.

For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease. After a few years, a bunch of different research groups have gotten their hands on it and done all sorts of different studies. In the best case scenario the average study will find the true result – that it’s weakly effective.

But there will also be random noise caused by inevitable variation and by some of the experiments being better quality than others. In the end, we might expect something looking kind of like a bell curve. The peak will be at “weakly effective”, but there will be a few studies to either side. Something like this:

We see that the peak of the curve is somewhere to the right of neutral – ie weakly effective – and that there are about 15 studies that find this correct result.

But there are also about 5 studies that find that the drug is very good, and 5 studies missing the sign entirely and finding that the drug is actively bad. There’s even 1 study finding that the drug is very bad, maybe seriously dangerous.

This is before we get into fraud or statistical malpractice. I’m saying this is what’s going to happen just by normal variation in experimental design. As we increase experimental rigor, the bell curve might get squashed horizontally, but there will still be a bell curve.

In practice it’s worse than this, because this is assuming everyone is investigating exactly the same question.

Suppose that the graph is titled “Effectiveness Of This Drug In Treating Bipolar Disorder”.

But maybe the drug is more effective in bipolar i than in bipolar ii (Depakote, for example)

Or maybe the drug is very effective against bipolar mania, but much less effective against bipolar depression (Depakote again).

Or maybe the drug is a good acute antimanic agent, but very poor at maintenance treatment (let’s stick with Depakote).

If you have a graph titled “Effectiveness Of Depakote In Treating Bipolar Disorder” plotting studies from “Very Bad” to “Very Good” – and you stick all the studies – maintenence, manic, depressive, bipolar i, bipolar ii – on the graph, then you’re going to end running the gamut from “very bad” to “very good” even before you factor in noise and even before even before you factor in bias and poor experimental design.

So here’s why you should beware the man of one study.

If you go to your better class of alternative medicine websites, they don’t tell you “Studies are a logocentric phallocentric tool of Western medicine and the Big Pharma conspiracy.”

They tell you “medical science has proved that this drug is terrible, but ignorant doctors are pushing it on you anyway. Look, here’s a study by a reputable institution proving that the drug is not only ineffective, but harmful.”

And the study will exist, and the authors will be prestigious scientists, and it will probably be about as rigorous and well-done as any other study.

And then a lot of people raised on the idea that some things have Evidence and other things have No Evidence think holy s**t, they’re right!

On the other hand, your doctor isn’t going to a sketchy alternative medicine website. She’s examining the entire literature and extracting careful and well-informed conclusions from…

Haha, just kidding. She’s going to a luncheon at a really nice restaurant sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, which assures her that they would never take advantage of such an opportunity to shill their drug, they just want to raise awareness of the latest study. And the latest study shows that their drug is great! Super great! And your doctor nods along, because the authors of the study are prestigious scientists, and it’s about as rigorous and well-done as any other study.

But obviously the pharmaceutical company has selected one of the studies from the “very good” end of the bell curve.

And I called this “Beware The Man of One Study”, but it’s easy to see that in the little diagram there are like three or four studies showing that the drug is “very good”, so if your doctor is a little skeptical, the pharmaceutical company can say “You are right to be skeptical, one study doesn’t prove anything, but look – here’s another group that finds the same thing, here’s yet another group that finds the same thing, and here’s a replication that confirms both of them.”

And even though it looks like in our example the sketchy alternative medicine website only has one “very bad” study to go off of, they could easily supplement it with a bunch of merely “bad” studies. Or they could add all of those studies about slightly different things. Depakote is ineffective at treating bipolar depression. Depakote is ineffective at maintenance bipolar therapy. Depakote is ineffective at bipolar ii.

So just sum it up as “Smith et al 1987 found the drug ineffective, yet doctors continue to prescribe it anyway”. Even if you hunt down the original study (which no one does), Smith et al won’t say specifically “Do remember that this study is only looking at bipolar maintenance, which is a different topic from bipolar acute antimanic treatment, and we’re not saying anything about that.” It will just be titled something like “Depakote fails to separate from placebo in six month trial of 91 patients” and trust that the responsible professionals reading it are well aware of the difference between acute and maintenance treatments (hahahahaha).

So it’s not so much “beware the man of one study” as “beware the man of any number of studies less than a relatively complete and not-cherry-picked survey of the research”.

II.

I think medical science is still pretty healthy, and that the consensus of doctors and researchers is more-or-less right on most controversial medical issues.

(it’s the uncontroversial ones you have to worry about)

Politics doesn’t have this protection.

Like, take the minimum wage question (please). We all know about the Krueger and Card study in New Jersey that found no evidence that high minimum wages hurt the economy. We probably also know the counterclaims that it was completely debunked as despicable dishonest statistical malpractice. Maybe some of us know Card and Krueger wrote a pretty convincing rebuttal of those claims. Or that a bunch of large and methodologically advanced studies have come out since then, some finding no effect like Dube, others finding strong effects like Rubinstein and Wither. These are just examples; there are at least dozens and probably hundreds of studies on both sides.

But we can solve this with meta-analyses and systemtic reviews, right?

Depends which one you want. Do you go with this meta-analysis of fourteen studies that shows that any presumed negative effect of high minimum wages is likely publication bias? With this meta-analysis of sixty-four studies that finds the same thing and discovers no effect of minimum wage after correcting for the problem? Or how about this meta-analysis of fifty-five countries that does find effects in most of them? Maybe you prefer this systematic review of a hundred or so studies that finds strong and consistent effects?

Can we trust news sources, think tanks, econblogs, and other institutions to sum up the state of the evidence?

CNN claims that 85% of credible studies have shown the minimum wage causes job loss. But raisetheminimumwage.com declares that “two decades of rigorous economic research have found that raising the minimum wage does not result in job loss…researchers and businesses alike agree today that the weight of the evidence shows no reduction in employment resulting from minimum wage increases.” Modeled Behavior says “the majority of the new minimum wage research supports the hypothesis that the minimum wage increases unemployment.” The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says “The common claim that raising the minimum wage reduces employment for low-wage workers is one of the most extensively studied issues in empirical economics. The weight of the evidence is that such impacts are small to none.”

Okay, fine. What about economists? They seem like experts. What do they think?

Well, five hundred economists signed a letter to policy makers saying that the science of economics shows increasing the minimum wage would be a bad idea. That sounds like a promising consensus…

..except that six hundred economists signed a letter to policy makers saying that the science of economics shows increasing the minimum wage would be a good idea. (h/t Greg Mankiw)

Fine then. Let’s do a formal survey of economists. Now what?

raisetheminimumwage.com, an unbiased source if ever there was one, confidently tells us that “indicative is a 2013 survey by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in which leading economists agreed by a nearly 4 to 1 margin that the benefits of raising and indexing the minimum wage outweigh the costs.”

But the Employment Policies Institute, which sounds like it’s trying way too hard to sound like an unbiased source, tells us that “Over 73 percent of AEA labor economists believe that a significant increase will lead to employment losses and 68 percent think these employment losses fall disproportionately on the least skilled. Only 6 percent feel that minimum wage hikes are an efficient way to alleviate poverty.”

So the whole thing is fiendishly complicated. But unless you look very very hard, you will never know that.

If you are a conservative, what you will find on the sites you trust will be something like this:

Economic theory has always shown that minimum wage increases decrease employment, but the Left has never been willing to accept this basic fact. In 1992, they trumpeted a single study by Card and Krueger that purported to show no negative effects from a minimum wage increase. This study was immediately debunked and found to be based on statistical malpractice and “massaging the numbers”. Since then, dozens of studies have come out confirming what we knew all along – that a high minimum wage is economic suicide. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses (Neumark 2006, Boockman 2010) consistently show that an overwhelming majority of the research agrees on this fact – as do 73% of economists. That’s why five hundred top economists recently signed a letter urging policy makers not to buy into discredited liberal minimum wage theories. Instead of listening to starry-eyed liberal woo, listen to the empirical evidence and an overwhelming majority of economists and oppose a raise in the minimum wage.

And if you are a leftist, what you will find on the sites you trust will be something like this:

People used to believe that the minimum wage decreased unemployment. But Card and Krueger’s famous 1992 study exploded that conventional wisdom. Since then, the results have been replicated over fifty times, and further meta-analyses (Card and Krueger 1995, Dube 2010) have found no evidence of any effect. Leading economists agree by a 4 to 1 margin that the benefits of raising the minimum wage outweigh the costs, and that’s why more than 600 of them have signed a petition telling the government to do exactly that. Instead of listening to conservative scare tactics based on long-debunked theories, listen to the empirical evidence and the overwhelming majority of economists and support a raise in the minimum wage.

Go ahead. Google the issue and see what stuff comes up. If it doesn’t quite match what I said above, it’s usually because they can’t even muster that level of scholarship. Half the sites just cite Card and Krueger and call it a day!

These sites with their long lists of studies and experts are super convincing. And half of them are wrong.

At some point in their education, most smart people usually learn not to credit arguments from authority. If someone says “Believe me about the minimum wage because I seem like a trustworthy guy,” most of them will have at least one neuron in their head that says “I should ask for some evidence”. If they’re really smart, they’ll use the magic words “peer-reviewed experimental studies.”

But I worry that most smart people have not learned that a list of dozens of studies, several meta-analyses, hundreds of experts, and expert surveys showing almost all academics support your thesis – can still be bullshit.

Which is too bad, because that’s exactly what people who want to bamboozle an educated audience are going to use.

III.

I do not want to preach radical skepticism.

For example, on the minimum wage issue, I notice only one side has presented a funnel plot. A funnel plot is usually used to investigate publication bias, but it has another use as well – it’s pretty much an exact presentation of the “bell curve” we talked about above.

This is more of a needle curve than a bell curve, but the point still stands. We see it’s centered around 0, which means there’s some evidence that’s the real signal among all this noise. The bell skews more to left than to the right, which means more studies have found negative effects of the minimum wage than positive effects of the minimum wage. But since the bell curve is asymmetrical, we intepret that as probably publication bias. So all in all, I think there’s at least some evidence that the liberals are right on this one.

Unless, of course, someone has realized that I’ve wised up to the studies and meta-analyses and and expert surveys, and figured out a way to hack funnel plots, which I am totally not ruling out.

(okay, I kind of want to preach radical skepticism)

Also, I should probably mention that it’s much more complicated than one side being right, and that the minimum wage probably works differently depending on what industry you’re talking about, whether it’s state wage or federal wage, whether it’s a recession or a boom, whether we’re talking about increasing from $5 to $6 or from $20 to $30, etc, etc, etc. There are eleven studies on that plot showing an effect even worse than -5, and very possibly they are all accurate for whatever subproblem they have chosen to study – much like the example with Depakote where it might an effective antimanic but a terrible antidepressant.

(radical skepticism actually sounds a lot better than figuring this all out).

IV.

But the question remains: what happens when (like in most cases) you don’t have a funnel plot?

I don’t have a good positive answer. I do have several good negative answers.

Decrease your confidence about most things if you’re not sure that you’ve investigated every piece of evidence.

Do not trust websites which are obviously biased (eg Free Republic, Daily Kos, Dr. Oz) when they tell you they’re going to give you “the state of the evidence” on a certain issue, even if the evidence seems very stately indeed. This goes double for any site that contains a list of “myths and facts about X”, quadruple for any site that uses phrases like “ingroup member uses actual FACTS to DEMOLISH the outgroup’s lies about Y”, and octuple for RationalWiki.

Most important, even if someone gives you what seems like overwhelming evidence in favor of a certain point of view, don’t trust it until you’ve done a simple Google search to see if the opposite side has equally overwhelming evidence.

I don't have a lot to say about the Sony hack, which seems to still be ongoing. I want to highlight a few points, though.

1. At this point, the attacks seem to be a few hackers and not the North Korean government. (My guess is that it's not an insider, either.) That we live in the world where we aren't sure if any given cyberattack is the work of a foreign government or a couple of guys should be scary to us all.

2. Sony is a company that hackers have loved to hate for years now. (Remember their rootkit from 2005?) We've learned previously that putting yourself in this position can be disastrous. (Remember HBGary.) We're learning that again.

3. I don't see how Sony launching a DDoS attack against the attackers is going to help at all.

4. The most sensitive information that's being leaked as a result of this attack isn't the unreleased movies, the executive emails, or the celebrity gossip. It's the minutiae from random employees:

   The most painful stuff in the Sony cache is a doctor shopping for Ritalin. It's an email about trying to get pregnant. It's shit-talking coworkers behind their backs, and people's credit card log-ins. It's literally thousands of Social Security numbers laid bare. It's even the harmless, mundane, trivial stuff that makes up any day's email load that suddenly feels ugly and raw out in the open, a digital Babadook brought to life by a scorched earth cyberattack.

   These people didn't have anything to hide. They aren't public figures. Their details aren't going to be news anywhere in the world. But their privacy has been violated, and there are literally thousands of personal tragedies unfolding right now as these people deal with their friends and relatives who have searched and read this stuff.

   These are people who did nothing wrong. They didn't click on phishing links, or use dumb passwords (or even if they did, they didn't cause this). They just showed up. They sent the same banal workplace emails you send every day, some personal, some not, some thoughtful, some dumb. Even if they didn't have the expectation of full privacy, at most they may have assumed that an IT creeper might flip through their inbox, or that it was being crunched in an NSA server somewhere. For better or worse, we've become inured to small, anonymous violations. What happened to Sony Pictures employees, though, is public. And it is total.

   Gizmodo got this 100% correct. And this is why privacy is so important for everyone.

I'm sure there'll be more information as this continues to unfold.

EDITED TO ADD (12/12): There are two comment threads on this post: Reddit and Hacker News.

Caron Lindsay writes on Liberal Democrat Voice:

Senior Liberal Democrats are getting very rattled by the rebellion. I'm hearing tales of angry rows and confrontations with rebel peers being told that they are damaging our General Election chances as if being associated with a measure like this wouldn't. It sounds like peers have had the sort of pressure put on them that would make even a Labour whip from the Blair days blush.

I hope that the Lib Dem peers will continue to vote against the changes Chris Grayling wants to make to judicial review. They are right and Lib Dem MPs, with the honourable exception of Sarah Teather, are wrong.

As so often, I am left puzzling at the what the Lib Dem leadership is trying to achieve. There has been no explanation given to party members; there is nothing about judicial review in the Coalition Agreement.

The Liberal Democrats have spent years making themselves the natural party for people who support civil liberties. In 2007 Nick Clegg even vowed to go to prison rather than carry an ID card.

Now we have abandoned those voters and are looking to win the support of people who think the courts are on the side of the criminal and judges are too soft - or something like that.

At the heart of this mess, I suspect, lies the idea that a party can continually reposition itself. Find out what the voters want and start saying the same thing. If the philosophy you fought the last election on is no longer popular, then junk it.

The trouble is, this approach to politics does not work. The old voters you have abandoned, with some reason, feel let down. The new voters do not trust you.

So let's have a bit of Liberal ideology here. Lib Dem peers should hold firm.