Fitful Murmurs

Bradford Plumer of The New Republic reports:

…a new study by Phil Manning of the University of Manchester has found that, sadly, no, the Velociraptor’s claws simply weren’t sharp enough to tear rip open dinosaur flesh. Instead, biomechanical analysis suggests the raptors used the claws to scale trees, from which they’d pounce down on other dinosaurs and cling tight with their sickle claws, biting and killing all the while.

I don’t understand Plumer’s attitude here.  Sure, the idea of a razor-clawed, possibly-intelligent predator (with more than the usual number of canine teeth) is legitimately terrifying.  But it seems to me that pretty much the only way that you could make these creatures more terrifying would be to have them hide in trees and ambush you from above.  They’re like drop bears, but with bigger teeth, and not as cuddly.  (Although the feathers on this artist rendering above make the raptor look more like a duck than anything, which is, in its own way, unsettling.)

If you want to read a review of U2’s recent shows that focuses more on the music and less on lost satchels and drunken cougars, I’d point you both toward the review of the New Jersey show from The New York Times and toward Howard Barnum’s review of a Toronto show from his Wine, Physics, and Song blog.  Barnum, incidentally, describes the stage in this way:

…a giant pale-green thing, adorned with orange buttons and a tower sticking out the top, that looks like a cross between a giant four-legged beetle and the a lunar lander, and forms a tall canopy over the circular stage.  Under the belly of this thing, there’s a huge circular video screen made of elongate hexagonal chunks, which can be interpreted as the thrust nozzle of a rocket engine.  Half-way through the show, the thing elongates vertically to more than twice its size, revealing that the screens are mounted on diagonally criss-crossing metal rods hinged to each other as in a folding set of coat-pegs, or wash-hanging rack.

All of which suggests that Barnum is rather a smart fellow, although the start to his next paragraph (“We unfortuately missed the opening act, Snow Patrol”)  throws that back into question.

The New York Times published an op-ed last week by a guy named Todd Farley, who used to grade essays for an unnamed standardized testing company.  The stories that he tells would be funny, if I didn’t know that people like him have, at one point or another, held enormous influence over the path of my education.

One of the tests I scored had students read a passage about bicycle safety. They were then instructed to draw a poster that illustrated a rule that was indicated in the text. We would award one point for a poster that included a correct rule and zero for a drawing that did not.

The first poster I saw was a drawing of a young cyclist, a helmet tightly attached to his head, flying his bike over a canal filled with flaming oil, his two arms waving wildly in the air. I stared at the response for minutes. Was this a picture of a helmet-wearing child who understood the basic rules of bike safety? Or was it meant to portray a youngster killing himself on two wheels?

A few years later, still a part-time worker, I had a similar experience. For one project our huge group spent weeks scoring ninth-grade movie reviews, each of us reading approximately 30 essays an hour (yes, one every two minutes), for eight hours a day, five days a week. At one point the woman beside me asked my opinion about the essay she was reading, a review of the X-rated movie “Debbie Does Dallas.” The woman thought it deserved a 3 (on a 6-point scale), but she settled on that only after weighing the student’s strong writing skills against the “inappropriate” subject matter. I argued the essay should be given a 6, as the comprehensive analysis of the movie was artfully written and also made me laugh my head off.

All of the 100 or so scorers in the room soon became embroiled in the debate. Eventually we came to the “consensus” that the essay deserved a 6 (“genius”), or 4 (well-written but “naughty”), or a zero (“filth”). The essay was ultimately given a zero.

And I didn’t even quote the part where he drunkenly grades a dozen essays over the telephone.

Standardized testing has proven again and again to be a terrible indicator of just about anything – student intelligence, how they’ll perform in college, their success in life.  It punishes creativity and rewards uniformity, forces teachers to take time away from more valuable lessons, and is disproportionately advantageous to those kids wealthy enough to afford tutoring.  And yet standardized tests remain the bedrock of our higher education system.  I can’t think about it for too long – the idea of someone scribbling a number on my GRE essays after a two minute perusal is enough to spike my blood pressure.

In 1977, Roman Polanski – then 43 – hired a thirteen year old girl as a model, convinced her mother to leave them alone for a photo shoot, forced her to take champagne and quaaludes, and then performed a number of sexual acts on her – including forced anal sex.  When the case went to trial, Polanski agreed to plead guilty to “unlawful intercourse with a minor” in exchange for getting the other charges – sodomy and providing drugs to a minor – dropped.  After he was convicted, he fled the country and has spent the intervening years hopping around whichever Eastern European country was least likely to extradite him.

Sounds like a crime that warrants some serious jail time, right?  And his arrest on entering Switzerland over the weekend was a victory for the judicial system, right?  Wrong! says The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum, in an article entitled “The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski”:

Polanski, who panicked and fled the U.S. during that trial, has been pursued by this case for 30 years, during which time he has never returned to America, has never returned to the United Kingdom., has avoided many other countries, and has never been convicted of anything else. He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.

He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to flee. But for this decision I see mitigating circumstances, not least an understandable fear of irrational punishment.

Sorry, Anne, but the law doesn’t work like that.  You don’t get to atone for your crimes by being really sorry, or by virtue of your life (as an international fugitive from justice) being really hard.  People who rape children go to jail; missing the Oscars is not an equivalent punishment.

It’s a hard thing to accept, this idea that people who create beautiful things can still act in evil ways.  It doesn’t seem possible that the same person who sang “California Dreamin” could also have raped his own daughter; that the man who made films like Chinatown could have had his way with a drugged-out child; that someone who could make playing football look like dancing could have killed his wife.

But the correlation doesn’t exist.  Artistic talent doesn’t track with moral fortitude.  And the idea that it does is how someone like Polanski can live in relative comfort for decades after he committed his crime and how, after his arrest, people like Applebaum can make this argument – not that he’s innocent, but just that he should not be punished.  And that is really what is outrageous.

Update: In the twenty-minutes or so since I published this I was trying to figure out what it was about this case in particular that set me off.  I wasn’t around during the Manson murders; I don’t have a good sense of how Polanski used to be viewed, or why people might have an attachment to him.  And so the view being espoused by Applebaum – that Polanski should simply be let off the hook – is not only one that I have trouble understanding, it’s one that I didn’t anticipate anybody would make.  And that this viewpoint is being taken seriously is what is really making me angry.  A columnist at The Washington Post – one of the biggest newspapers in the country – is taking to the editorial page to argue that a child rapist shouldn’t be punished, and for no other reason that I can see than, but he seems like such a gentleman.  Or, but the Pianist was such a moving film.  Or, why would they target such an old man, anyway.  And if people want to argue that we shouldn’t be punishing child rapists, that’s fine with me, but I don’t see why they have to be given such a venue as the Post in which to do it.

Nate Silver, who blogs over at 538.com, has been detailing the case against a poll company called Strategic Visions, who refuse to release their polling methodology and whose polls show strong signs of being, well, completely made-up.  The kicker?  They’re the same ones who conducted that poll of the dumb-as-rocks high schoolers in Oklahoma.  And sure enough, when Silver ran the numbers on that poll, they didn’t quite add up.

When I first saw these results a couple weeks ago, they really got my spidey sense tingling. Forget about the overall level of knowledge being low — what I found strange was that there were no students, out of 1,000, who answered as many of eight out of the ten questions correctly. Isn’t there some total nerd in Tulsa, some AP Honors student in Stillwater, who was able to answer at least eight of these ten very basic questions correctly? The distribution seems to be too compact.

(snip)

It seems quite strongly possible, nevertheless, that the students polled for this survey don’t exist anywhere in Oklahoma but instead on a hard drive somewhere in Atlanta. This is a valuable exercise undertaken by the OCPA. But they owe it to the hardworking students of Oklahoma to make sure that their contractor, Strategic Vision, didn’t flunk its own citizenship test.

I don’t pretend to understand the math well enough to properly explain the simulation that Silver set up, but I’m pretty confident at least that he does, and it’s gratifying to see that my admittedly less-refined gut instinct had some basis.

Through accident, providence, and generosity, I ended up at U2’s show at Giants Stadium last night. And I have to say, it was pretty great. I’m a casual fan, though, and not being familiar with their latest work or  back-catalog, I’m not going to try and write a comprehensive review.  Instead, here are some unorganized musings and highlights.

1.  My friend and I were loitering in the parking lot before the show when we were approached by a young woman with a laptop.  “Would you like to sign up for Bono’s ONE organization?” she said.  “There’s no financial obligation, you’ll just occasionally get emails asking you to add your voice to various causes.”  She held the laptop out hopefully, but, sensing we were waffling, she said hurriedly, “You can make up a name and email if you want.  I just want to get some more sign-ups tonight.”  And that’s how Mr. Jeff Goldbum (isthebest@hotmail.com) became a member of Bono’s ONE organization.  I rather imagine this is how those ACORN workers got into so much trouble.

2.  Giants Stadium has apparently decided that young men are more likely to smuggle drugs, guns, and other implements of destruction into these kinds of events, and so they’ve summarily barred men from carrying in any kind of bag at all – a policy I wasn’t made aware of until a security guard pointed at my satchel (read: man-purse) and shook his head.  I argued with him, pointing to the equally-voluminous purses that women were strolling inside with, but it was to no avail, and finally I ended up stashing the satchel under a silver Honda CR-V, where it and a few of my bulkier possessions were presumably run-over and then scavenged later in the evening.  This was my first encounter with the cruel sting of sexism, and let me tell you: it hurt.

3.  People from New Jersey get drunk in a way that is completely different from the way that normal people get drunk.

4.  The Edge is possibly the least-technically-talented player to ever be lead guitarist in a world-famous rock band.

5.  U2 has an astonishing number of really excellent songs.  As someone who’s paid little attention to them, I was a little surprised at how many of the songs I knew every word to, how many had been so culturally ingrained that, even for me, they were like second nature.  They put on a great show, too, energetic and keenly aware of their audience and trying as hard as possible to please them.  U2 also has the strange ability to take men – tough men, men who haven’t cried since the third grade and who call each other names like “bud” and “big guy” – identify with unabashedly sentimental lyrics.  It’s a weird thing to see middle-aged, blue-collar New Jersey men crooning along with lines like, “I have kissed honey lips / Felt the healing in her fingertips”.

6.  There were 60,000 people at this show at between $80 and $300 a head, which is a truly enormous amount of money per show.  A hefty chunk of that is obviously going to the tech guys, and let me tell you, they are putting it to good use.  The technical wizardry behind this show was mind-boggling.  The sound, despite being piped through a dozen twenty-foot-tall speaker stacks, was perfectly mixed and clear – no part was slighted.  The lights were perfectly timed to the songs.  And then there was the stage itself.  Bono referred to it as a spaceship (as in, “we’re the ones up here on this spaceship, but I promise we’re not taking off without you”) but it didn’t look like a spaceship at all; with its four spindly, segmented legs, it was more reminiscent of the lower exoskeleton of a massive insect – something from Starship Troopers, perhaps.

7.  Lastly – At one of the first concerts I went to in college, the first semester of my freshman year, Ryan and I had an encounter with a girl who was utterly, bewilderingly inebriated.  She shouldered her way the the front row of the crowd, leaving a vodka vapor trail in her wake, and proceeded to so alienate the crowd around her with her dance and general booziness that the crowd saw fit to reprimand her and propel her to the back once again.  It was a remarkable performance, and for it she earned the private nickname of “Drunk Chick” from Ryan and I.  But as I attended more concerts I realized that Drunk Chick was more an archetype than an individual, and time and time again I encountered her unstable brethren in venues across New York City. The woman seated next to me at Giants Stadium last night, while a generation older than the original Drunk Chick, was, if not her actual mother, than at least her Spiritual Mother, and as I regarded her – slack-jawed, swaying slightly, yelling “woo!” every couple of seconds – I felt a strange kind of tranquility steal over me.  These days I’ll take any sense of constancy that I can get, and the Drunk Chick At The Concert above all else is dependable.

As Fast Company reports, a guy named Dan Zarella – who is obviously blessed with an inordinate amount of patience – sorted through roughly 9 million tweets and 45 million retweets, looking for what made any particular one particularly retweetable.  (If you’re one of those people who hates Twitter, you’re going to want to stop reading this post.)  He came up with nine core aspects of a successful retweet, which FC summarize nicely in their post.  Some of them are obvious – if you really want your content to be picked up, tweet at 4pm on a Friday:

But I was gratified that tweets that used correct grammar and punctuation – as well as longer, more complex words – were also more likely to be retweeted.

Neither the Flesh-Kindcaid nor the SMOG readability tests are perfect, of course, but they are useful methods of analyzing the basic complexity of any given passage.  And indeed, I’ve noticed that, even with the 140-character restriction, Twitter users are surprisingly grammar-conscious.  (This is related somewhat with the “Writing in the Internet Age” post from a couple weeks ago.)  Take, for example, these representative samples from the current Twitter pubic timeline:

I’m sorry to hear that Richard.

I heard on the news Google was hiring people to work from home. Here is the news article

Oh, yay! I’ll be looking forward to that.

1998-2003= everything good that happened in music. Rock that saddle creek button

I’m not saying these are words of incredible wisdom (the second is almost certainly spam, and the last should expand her musical horizons a bit).  And I also don’t mean to say that every tweet is clear and well-written.  But to a large extent tweets tend to display an attention to grammatical detail that’s admirable, and greater than what a lot of grammar mavens (to borrow a phrase from Steven Pinker’s insanely fascinating essay “Grammar Puss”) would have us believe.

And because I don’t want to write another blog post about Twitter right away: this real-time Twitter trend map is pretty cool, and you can spend a lot of time clicking around to see what people all over the world are talking about.  (Glee seems to be pretty big in Australia.)

Last Saturday The New York Times published a strange little article that was simply excerpts from the last words of a number of Death Row inmates.  They were presented without context, explanation, or attribution, and from this presentation emerged a strange kind of poignancy.  Some are oddly poetic (“Death row is full of isolated hearts and suppressed minds.”).  Some are cliche (“I want to tell my mom that I love her.”).  Still others are like short stories in and of themselves, pithy but mysterious in their vagueness (“Where’s Mr. Marino’s mother? Did you get my letter?”).  And the first one on the list just kills me – “Go ahead?” – it’s something about that question mark.

The death penalty is one of those topics that I struggle with, to a far greater extent than most other contentious issues (abortion, gun control, torture) that crop up in politics.  I think that the fact that we have accidentally killed innocent people is argument enough against it, and more broadly I don’t think that the state should ever kill its constituents.  But I know that there are crimes so heinous that, if they were committed against someone I love, I would want to kill those responsible.  In the end I usually think it’s better to keep people in that kind of state – with that kind of raw emotion – away from the law, and not sanctify the things that they do; I don’t think the state should kill people based on the whim of one who’s grieving.  That’s what I think – most of the time.

This is a tough question, and I’m not dealing up any answers here.  I was just surprised to be forced to confront them by this strange little article, bereft of context, and I thought that aspect of it, at least, was valuable.

I don’t know how many of you read this blog via an RSS feed, and that irks me.  So I set up a Feedburner feed for this blog, which works the same way that the current feed does but gives me considerably more sophisticated information on who’s viewing what on this blog and how.  So, if you’re subscribed to my RSS feed, please unsubscribe and set it up at this address instead: http://feeds.feedburner.com/FitfulMurmurs

The rest of you, carry on.

Through routes I won’t trouble you with I stumbled upon the Name Voyager at The Baby Name Wizard.  It’s a pretty cool visualization tool, and one of the things that it lets you do is see the popularity of your name over time.  Here’s mine:

This confirms what I’ve long suspected: the name “Kyle”, having lurked little-used for most of history, underwent an explosion in popularity that peaked almost exactly when I was born.  I quite like my name, as it happens, but apparently so did many, many parents in the late-eighties, and in high school it wasn’t uncommon for me to be in classes with one, two, or – in one memorable case – three other Kyles.

Another group created the Job Voyager based on the same visualization scheme, and it shows you the popularity of jobs in the United States between 1850 and today – information that’s interesting to people not named Kyle.  For example, this graph drives home the tremendous change in the American farming industry – in 1850, 44% of American males worked in the farming industry; in 2000, that number was around .07%.

And I quite like the graph of the bartending profession, in which Prohibition is clearly shown:

Anyway, the visualizations are really fun to play around with, so click through.