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Sunday, December 15, 2002 |
Not Quite the Amends I Was Looking for. I just filled out my Settlement Fund claim against the music industry for their price fixing during the last century . You can fill one out, too, if you purchased pre-recorded music between 1995 and 2000. Depending on how many people submit claims, you'll get either $20 (fewer people), $5 (lots more people), or $0 (too many people making the claim under $5 for each person). You have to fill out the form by March 3, 2003. I probably bought something like 500 CDs during those five years, ... [The Shifted Librarian]
I haven't looked at this yet. So if more people fill in the claim, everyone gets less money. On the other hand, if a lot of people fill it in, it becomes clear how disaffected the music-buying public is.
9:51:37 PM Permalink
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TIA as a Diagnostic Problem
Now here's a very interesting item by Benjamin Kuipers, posted to Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list. This short piece is must-reading.
Out of a large population, you want to diagnose the very few cases
of a rare disease called "terrorism". Your diagnostic tests are
automated data-mining methods, supervised and checked by humans.
(The analogy is sending blood or tissue samples to a laboratory.)
This type of diagnostic problem, looking for a rare disease, has
some very counter-intuitive properties.
Suppose the tests are highly accurate and specific:
(a) 99.9% of the time, examining a terrorist, the test says "terrorist".
(b) 99.9% of the time, examining an innocent civilian, the test says
"innocent civilian".
Terrorists are rare: let's say, 250 out of 250 million people in the USA.
(a) When the tests are applied to the terrorists, they will be
detected 99.9% of the time, which means there is about a 25%
chance of missing one of them, and the other 249 will definitely
be detected. Great!
(b) However, out of the remaining 249,999,750 innocent civilians,
99.9% accuracy means 0.1% error, which means that 250,000 of
them will be incorrectly labeled "terrorist". Uh, oh!
The law enforcement problem is now that we have 250,250 people who
have been labeled as "terrorist" by our diagnostic tests. Only
about 1 in 1,000 of them is actually a terrorist.
So we're going to label (at best) tens of thousands of innocent people as potential terrorists. What's going to happen to them? Who's going to have access to this big database of potential terrorists? Will it show up on your credit report? On a security check the next time you get a job? The numbers are probably a lot worse than this if you already have a strike against you, that is if your skin is the wrong color or you go to the wrong church, or know the wrong people, or read the wrong books.
9:38:43 PM Permalink
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Al We Hardly Knew Ye
Gore Rules Out Running in '04. The announcement on "60 Minutes" recast the contest among the Democrats seeking to take on President Bush. By Adam Nagourney. [New York Times: Politics]
It's nuts that he has to decide today, just less than 2 years before the election. I remember that for the 92 election, lots of Democrats pulled out early, figuring that Bush I was a shoo-in because of his high popularity ratings. Good thing that Clinton wasn't chicken. But to have to decide now is ludicrous but necessary because it takes some massiving fund-raising it takes these days.
And after seeing the big guy on SNL last night, it's clear he wouldn't be able to run for president. Doing a Trent Lott "impersonation" was very funny:
"When I said our country wouldn't have all these problems if Strom Thurmond had been elected president, it had nothing to do with segregation. I simply meant that things would've been better because he would've kept white people and black people separate."
7:55:07 PM Permalink
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Food, avoirdupois, writing
One of the things that attempting to lose weight does to you, not surprisngly, is make you think about food a lot. It's clear that a lot of people need to lose weight, and America has always been ripe for diets and diet fads. Look around the blogging world and you'll see a lot of references, especially, to the Atkins diet.
I've commented before that I like the WeightWatchers approach; partly because the weekly meetings are just around the corner from my house, and some neihbors go. But also because it doesn't seem so politically charged as some of the others, and that the choices they encourage aren't part of a fad. Of course, I could just be blind to that.
Anyway, because I've been thinking about food a lot and because I've always liked reading about food, I've recently read three books on eating and to a lesser extent, cooking.
The Raw and the Cooked by Jim Harrison. This is a collection of columns about food. I haven't read Harrison before; in this book I got a little tired of his style, and only took it in small bites, so to speak. An entertaining book, lots about cooking wild game. Didn't work up any appetites, though, strangely enough. I need to read Legends of the Fall, I think.
Outlaw Cook Jim Thorne (though he calls himself Matt in the book, as does Amazon). Harrison calls him the best food writer in America. There's a lot to like about this book. There's a lot of autobiography here, but mostly autobiography about his cooking abilities and appreciation of eating. Some recipes, for fried bread, welsh rarebit, and more, are really fascinating. He's a liberating food writer, in that he gives you license to experiment and teaches a lot about how to think about cooking and eating.
Thorne has peculiar opinions about broth. While it's probably true, as he says, that the broth you buy in cans is nearly as good as a broth you make, I always find it well worth it to make a broth. I was reading his chapters on broth yesterday as I was brewing a really fine broth from the previously frozen remains of our Thanksgiving bird. The broth carried the flavors of the cooked bird well, though it was a trifle salty (because I had brined the bird), and had a lot of subtlety to it. A few cups of it made a nice soup last night, and also flavored a chile I made today. You don't really make broth to save money, but to fill your house with aroma and get flavors in layers the canned broths can only dream of.
The Man Who Ate Everything A collection of Jefrey Steingarten's food columns from Vogue. Again, a lot of autobiography. It's fun to see this guy obsess about things, such as mashed potatoes and ketchup (my favorite chapter is on ketchup). Very good reading. Of the three books, I liked this one the best. Though it might be surprising because his columns come from Vogue, he seems the least assuming of the three, and when he's really good, he's just great reading.
These books are not cookbooks, though they do contain "recipes" which aren't the robotic recipes you find in "cookbooks." Instead, all these guys love their food, and write well about it. Thorne is the one who makes you want to put down the book and head to the kitchen. Steingarten makes you want his job.
12:35:24 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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