Correct me, Lord, but in moderation…

Jeremiah 10:24.

Accounts of error-correcting codes always start with the (3,1)-repetition code — transmit three copies of each bit, and let them vote, choosing the best two out of three when there is disagreement. Apparently this code has been in use for longer than anyone had realised, to judge by this passage from the Jerusalem Talmud:

Three scrolls [of the Torah] did they find in the Temple courtyard. In one of these scrolls they found it written “The eternal God is your dwelling place (maon)“. And in two of the scrolls it was written, “The eternal God is your dwelling place (meonah)”. They confirmed the reading found in the two and abrogated the other.

In one of them they found written “They sent the little ones of the people of Israel”. And in the two it was written, “They sent young men…”. They confirmed the two and abrogated the other.

In one of them they found written “he” [written in the feminine spelling] nine times, and in two they found it written that way eleven times. They confirmed the reading found in the two and abrogated the other. (tractate Ta’anit 4:2, trans. Jacob Neusner)

(h/t Masorti Rabbi Jeremy Gordon, who alluded to this passage in an inter-demominational panel discussion yesterday at the OCHJS. He was making a different point, which for some reason had very little to do with information theory.)

Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding

US Republican-libertarian senator and unofficial presidential candidate Rand Paul has been castigated by true-blue Zionists for insufficient vigour in applauding Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent address to Congress. “I gave the prime minister 50 standing ovations,” Paul said, and that should really settle the matter.

I was reminded of this passage from The Gulag Archipelago:

A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province… It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop?… After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that ob- scure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! … Nine minutes! Ten! . . . Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!…

That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!” (And just what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to stop?)

Operetta diplomacy

I was somewhere between amused and frightened in skimming Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress, finding this passage:

We’re an ancient people. In our nearly 4,000 years of history, many have tried repeatedly to destroy the Jewish people. Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we’ll read the Book of Esther. We’ll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies.

The plot was foiled. Our people were saved.

(APPLAUSE)

Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us.

SPOILER ALERT! How are you going to get people to come to hear the whole megillah in synagogue if you just give away the ending? I love the fact that everyone applauded “The plot was foiled.” And what’s with this “Persian potentate” stuff? I thought the Iranians were supposed to be Islamo-fascists.

Seriously, though, if you’re an Israeli prime minister with a reputation for telling tall tales about your neighbours’ military plans and capacities, and you’re trying to make the case that this time it’s really really serious, maybe you don’t want to reveal right up front that your diplomatic calculations are heavily influenced by a 2500 year old fairy tale with as much inherent plausibility as the plot of HMS Pinafore.

Is Netanyahu auditioning for a bigger role?

Many people are wondering why Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has decided to wreck Israel’s relationship with its superpower patron, a relationship that has been almost absurdly favourable to Israel, uniquely bipartisan and almost unchallenged within the US political establishment. For years he has appeared to be going out of his way to break this bipartisan link, working to undermine US foreign policy, embarrass the president, and show himself and his government to be allied not with the United States, but with the Republican Party. Why? Is it psychopathology or an ingenious scheme? Or both?

Most people who try to explain it (including those who write articles with titles like The real reason Netanyahu is willing to risk Israel’s relationship with the U.S.) tend to posit that the reason has something to do with Israel: Either he is doing it either out of a genuine belief that Obama’s negotiations with Iran threaten Israel’s survival, so demand desperate measures; or that it is a cynical short-term political calculation, intended to shore up his position with the Israeli electorate, particularly now, two weeks ahead of an election. But what if it has nothing to do with Israel’s future, or Netanyahu’s position in Israel, but with Netanyahu’s position outside of Israel?

My thinking here is inspired by a very insightful comment on Greek politics by Matthew Yglesias:

Normally you would think that a national prime minister’s best option is to try to do the stuff that’s likely to get him re-elected. No matter how bleak the outlook, this is your dominant strategy. But in the era of globalization and EU-ification, I think the leaders of small countries are actually in a somewhat different situation. If you leave office held in high esteem by the Davos set, there are any number of European Commission or IMF or whatnot gigs that you might be eligible for even if you’re absolutely despised by your fellow countrymen. Indeed, in some ways being absolutely despised would be a plus. The ultimate demonstration of solidarity to the “international community” would be to do what the international community wants even in the face of massive resistance from your domestic political constituency.

One constant of Netanyahu’s career has been his (for an Israeli politician) exceptional venality. Of course, Netanyahu (or any Israeli leader) has no future in Europe, or major international bodies; but the US is another very big world, and making himself the pet anti-terrorist Jew of the Republican Party could be a highly remunerative post, far more valuable in Shekels than anything that his home country can offer. And if he ends up destroying Israel in the process, he’s all set up to blame left-wing anti-Semitism allied with Islamo-fascism. It will be brilliant for business.

The first statistician

I like to share with beginning statistics students the aphorism of C. R. Rao

Uncertain knowledge + knowledge about the extent of uncertainty in it = Useable knowledge

And it just occurred to me that the extreme limit of this dictum is that if you are infinitely uncertain, if nothing is knowable, the knowledge of that fact in itself is highly useable. The realisation of which would seem to make Socrates the first statistician:

Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him. (Apology, translated Benjamin Jowett)

Abercrombie cool

I don’t know anything about Abercrombie & Fitch. I know it’s a chain of stores that sell clothes, I’m sure I’ve seen their stores, but I’ve never been inside them. Everything I know about their brand comes from an 80-year-old satire by James Thurber that begins

 I always try to answer Abercrombie & Fitch’s questions (in their advertisements) the way they obviously want them answered, but usually, if I am to be honest with them and with myself, I must answer them in a way that would not please Abercrombie & Fitch. While that company and I have always nodded and smiled pleasantly enough when we met, we have never really been on intimate terms, mainly because we have so little in common. For one thing, I am inclined to be nervous and impatient, whereas Abercrombie & Fitch are at all times composed and tranquil…

Take the one recently printed in an advertisement in this magazine. Under a picture of a man fishing in a stream were these words: “Can’t you picture yourself in the middle of the stream with the certain knowledge that a wise old trout is hiding under a ledge and defying you to tempt him with your skillfully cast fly?” My answer, of course, is “No.” Especially if I am to be equipped the way the gentleman in the illustration is equipped: with rod, reel, line, net, hip boots, felt hat, and pipe. They might just as well add a banjo and a parachute….

I was reminded of this in reading about a case that is currently being considered by the US Supreme Court, in which Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has charged the company with religious discrimination, after it refused to hire a Muslim woman, because her headscarf would conflict with the Abercrombie dress code. (As the law would require reasonable accommodation to be made for religious observance, the legal case turns on the relatively uninteresting question of whether the district manager who made the decision, and who reportedly said  “if we allow this then someone will paint themselves green and call it a religion”, is really the last man left in America so uncontaminated by media representations of Muslims that he is not even aware that Muslim women often wear headscarfs as part of their religious practice.)

According to court documents,

Abercrombie described its brand as “a classic East Coast collegiate style of clothing.” When Elauf applied for a job in 2008, the Look policy included prohibitions on black clothing and “caps”; these and other rules were designed to protect “the health and vitality of its ‘preppy’ and ‘casual’ brand.” As Justice Alito put it during oral arguments, Abercrombie wants job candidates “who [look] just like this mythical preppy or … somebody who came off the beach in California.”

From fly-fishing in an east-coast stream to a beach in California. You’ve come a long way, baby!

Do all babies look alike?

And if not, why don’t they have any privacy rights with regard to their photographs?

Here is the illustration provided by the BBC on its home page for a report on the decision to approve fertility procedures that take genetic material from three different people:

Not a three-parent baby, but they are expected to look similar to this one.
Not a three-person baby, but manufacturers promise they will look similar to this model.

One wonders what purpose this photograph serves. Are there readers who see the headline and think, “Wait, babies, I’ve heard of them. Can’t quite remember what they look like…” In what sense is this an illustration of the article? It’s not even a newborn infant. They might as well have shown a 90-year-old lady, because making three-person babies inevitably leads to the eventual creation of three-person 90-year-olds. It might be even more relevant to show an elderly person, because that’s the goal: the purpose of the procedure is to improve the health and longevity of the humans so conceived.

They could have used their stock photograph of weirdly lighted lab technicians pipetting something into a test tube instead.

I’m wondering, who is this baby who is standing in for a “three-person baby”? I’m used to seeing children have their features blurred out in news photos. But, of course, this one was presumably a “volunteer” model. One baby can stand in for all babies. (As long as it’s white, of course.)

Counting to zero

I was amused by the comments made by right-wing American TV news personality Bill O’Reilly, who referred to his time in the Falklands “war zone” because he reported on an unruly protest in Buenos Aires after the war ended. He supported his position by quoting a NY Times report that referred to a police officer firing five shots, without mentioning that the shots were fired “over the heads of fleeing protestors”.

Rich Meislin, the Times reporter who wrote the article, said on Facebook that as far as he knew no demonstrators were shot or killed by police that night. On Monday, Mr. O’Reilly said he was just reading clips from the piece during the Media Buzz interview and that official reports on casualties there were difficult to obtain.

One could imagine that in a dispute over the exact number of protesters shot or killed you might say that the official reports were “difficult to obtain”. It seems like an odd defence when people are claiming that the exact number was zero, since, of course, in that case there would be no reports on casualties to obtain. “I do remember that there was tension between the authorities and the crowd,” [CBS correspondent Charles Gomez] said, but added that he “did not see any bloodshed.”

Humans have a separate system for unconsciously apprehending the numbers of items under about four, called subitizing, that is distinct from the conscious process of counting. The idea of “counting” one or two items seems ridiculous, and counting zero items exaggerates the comic effect. I was reminded of a scene in the second volume Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, The Restaurant at the end of the Universe. Ford Prefect and his friends have accidentally stowed away on a space ship programmed to crash into the local sun (as part of the light show for a rock concert). Zaphod Beeblebrox yells “Ford, how many escape capsules are there?”

“None,” said Ford.

Zaphod gibbered.

“Did you count them?” he yelled.

“Twice,” said Ford.

 Update: In another interview O’Reilly continued to conflate the Falklands War with the unruly demonstration in Buenos Aires:

“A lot of people died,” said O’Reilly, nodding his head. “You bet.”

“On both sides, both the British and the Argentines,” Browne said, appearing to reference the broader war rather than the protests.

“Nine hundred deaths on the Island,” O’Reilly said. “And we don’t know how many in Buenos Aires.”

We don’t know how many. The number is generally reckoned to be around… zero.

Powerless

The Oxford Mail moans in a recent headline that the Oxford city council is “powerless to prevent the spread of graffiti”.

MORE than 1,000 cases of graffiti scrawled on private property are blighting Oxford…

That sounds pretty bad. What sort of extraordinary, perhaps dictatorial, powers would the council need to be granted in this state of emergency, to enable them to rescue us from this blight? The article continues that the graffiti cannot be removed

 because firms are not paying to have them removed, the city council’s graffiti team has warned.

“But 99 per cent of them don’t pay because of the cost and they think they shouldn’t have to.

“There are more than 1,000 jobs on my database we can’t touch –and we have the equipment and the training to deal with them.”

The council charges £27 an hour on top of £15 per square metre for the removal of graffiti from privately-owned property.

It seems strange to formulate this in terms of “lacking powers”. My guess is that if they considered it to be a sufficient problem for the public welfare that they wanted to use tax money to fund the cleanup, very few property owners would wish to hinder them. They lack the power to force the property owners to pay because most of the public agrees that, having been victimised by the graffiti writers already, the property owners don’t deserve to be punished with the compulsory expense of cleaning it up.

This is the city council acting like a private company, advertising its graffiti-cleaning service. But a private company would never think to formulate its inability to attract customers willing to pay £27 an hour for its property-beautification schemes as “we are powerless to carry out our plans because 99 per cent of our potential customers don’t hire us because of the cost and they think they shouldn’t have to,” and whine about how unreasonable that is, because “we have the equipment and the training”.