Matthew Yglesias

Empathy for the Devil

So the Guardian has these interactive quizzes up that are supposed to give you an "empathy quotient" and a "systematzing quotient" and then demonstrate that women are more empathetic and less systematic then men. Fair enough. Everybody loves a little pop evolutionary psychology. And I was totally prepared to believe that I'm less empathetic than the average person, or even less empathetic than the average un-empathetic man. But the test gave me an EQ of 14 which seems to indicate near-total dysfunctionality. I don't think I'm nearly that bad. Million Dollar Baby made my cry! That's empathy, damnit.

Gladwell Versus Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell, back in the day:

So why aren't we allowed to say that there might be athletically significant differences between blacks and whites? . . .

Black men have slightly higher circulating levels of testosterone and human-growth hormone than their white counterparts, and blacks over all tend to have proportionally slimmer hips, wider shoulders, and longer legs. In one study, the Swedish physiologist Bengt Saltin compared a group of Kenyan distance runners with a group of Swedish distance runners and found interesting differences in muscle composition: Saltin reported that the Africans appeared to have more blood-carrying capillaries and more mitochondria (the body's cellular power plant) in the fibres of their quadriceps.

Malcolm Gladwell, the present day:

Why, for instance, is it a useful rule of thumb that Kenyans are good distance runners? It’s not just that it’s statistically supportable today. It’s that it has been true for almost half a century, and that in Kenya the tradition of distance running is sufficiently rooted that something cataclysmic would have to happen to dislodge it.

The only think I know about scientific study of the genetic origins of Kenyan running ability is from that first Gladwell article, so maybe he got it wrong back then. But the contrast is a bit striking.

UPDATE: Some say they don't see a contradiction here. And, sure, there's not a logical contradiction in the "p & ~p" sense. But if you think that Kenyans are good distance runners because they're biologically superior at distance running it becomes very odd to, several years later, answer the question of "Why . . . is it a useful rule of thumb that Kenyans are good distance runners?" with reference to the idea that a tradition of running is ingrained in Kenyan culture. If Kenyans really do have a genetic advantage in distance running, then that is what makes "Kenyans are good distance runners" a useful rule of thumb. Note also that the earlier article is specifically geared toward observing that there's a taboo around discussing such issues and complaining about the taboo. The later article, meanwhile, reflects the taboo.

Conventional Wisdom Debunked!

Salon:

Women like to talk about feelings and relationships; men do not. Be it self-fulfilling prophecy or biological reality, it's an idea that American culture accepts completely. In the course of doing research for his book "VoiceMale: What Husbands Really Think About Their Marriages, Their Wives, Sex, Housework, and Commitment," Neil Chethik found the stereotype to be true, but only on the surface. During in-depth interviews with 70 husbands scattered across the country, Chethik discovered that men were indeed hesitant to talk about feelings, yet had plenty of ways of expressing them, if you knew where to look. Affection, for instance, can be found in the meticulous way that Roger Warden makes the bed every morning with an extra blanket spread across his wife's side; in Randall Hutchins' glances at his wife as she dozes in the passenger seat; and in pleasure that Jake Morrison takes in his wife's company as they tear the old wallpaper out of their home.

Be that as it may, this is actually supporting rather than undercutting the idea that women like to talk about feelings and relationships while men do not. I don't think anyone's ever been crazy enough to contend that men don't have feelings, it's specifically a question of talking about them. The examples cited here are all examples of just that -- preferring to express emotions through actions than through words.

Arctic Monkeys

In case you haven't heard yet, the New New Thing in music is now official Arctic Monkeys. I've been listening to their stuff, and it seems very good, but I think that others will like it better than I do. In part, this simply reflects my deep-seated and irrational dislike of English people and things which is not widely shared. I appreciate that the Monkeys are part of what I sense to be an increasing trend toward very long, arguably-too-cutesy song titles under way at the moment, i.e. "You Probably Couldn't See For The Lights But You Were Looking Straight At Me." I approve of this trend, though there is a certain risk it will become annoying in the near future.

The Most Serene Republic is good at this, "The Protagonist Suddenly Realizes What He Must Do In The Middle Of Downtown Traffic" is on their Underwater Cinematographer along with "You're a Loose Cannon McArthur, But You Get The Job Done." Their best song, however, carries the simple title "Proposition 61."

Big Media Ezra

May be "no Brad Pitt", but then again, who is? By the standards of professional political punditry he's pretty damn hot.

Why Ask?

Khaled Meshal, exiled leader of Hamas, says his outfit will not "submit to pressure to recognize Israel, because the occupation is illegitimate and we will not abandon our rights." I really don't understand what the point is in having foreign governments pressure Hamas to recognize Israel. For one thing, there's very little chance that Hamas is going to recognize Israel in the short term. Highly public arm-twisting only would see to make a change of heart less likely because it would then appear to be craven knuckling under to foreign demands. And perhaps more to the point, unless Israel is populated with retarded people, nobody would take any Hamas statements made under those circumstances and face value. It's like when your mom orders you to apologize to your little brother, so you grudging agree to apologize but secretly keep your fingers crossed. The problem in the Middle East is a lack of genuine desire for compromise, not a lack of people willing to pretend to want to compromise.

Basketblogging Returns

So . . . trades, what do you say? My read is that Sacramento and Boston are making mistakes.

What Harry Reid Could Learn from Hamas

Anti-corruption is a good election issue, but to really pull off a sweeping political win you need to combine it with support for traditional religious values, toughness on national security, and economic populism. It's a sure-fire formula.

Smackdown

The truly surprising thing about today's unilateral attack by TNR on my beloved TAP is even the liberal New Republic's subscription prices: "Subscribe today for as little as $9.97 to read all of our unconventional wisdom." Why not charge $9.99?

Stalinist Bylines

This old Frank Foer article from 1997 attacking John Podhoretz and the Stalinist aesthetics of The Weekly Standard's back of the book holds up pretty well. But what's really creepy is Slate's Stalinist bylines: "Franklin Foer is a senior editor at the New Republic and a contributing editor at New York. He is the author of How Soccer Explains the World." And so he is, in 2006. But the book wasn't published until years after the article ran, that can't have been the mini-bio originally attached to the article. It starts with post hoc byline revisions, then you're airbrushing people out of photographs, and next thing you know Jacob Weisberg will be sending millions to their death some new media gulag. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Blaming The Offense

Like all respectable, serious basketball fans I have a kind of distaste for one-man offensive shows. That said, the distaste in question has a tendency to get the better of people. Take this from Chris Broussard, for example:

I'm not sure if he named Iverson directly, but I'm told it was clear he was calling out A.I., who dominates the rock and is averaging a whopping 25.8 shots a game, second only to King Kobe. . . .

The irony in this situation is that while A.I. and C-Webb are undeniably productive, they both have major roles in Philly's struggles. The Sixers are 20-20 for one reason and one reason only: They couldn't guard a statue.

They give up 102.9 points a game and allow opponents to shoot 46 percent. In other words, you're always hot, always in the zone when playing the Sixers. . . .

For all of C-Webb's complaints about not getting the ball, the Sixers' offense is not really the problem. Philly is averaging 101.8, second in the league, on 46 percent shooting.

Still, I (and to be honest, most execs around the league) wonder whether you can win big with A.I. dominating the rock so much.

But look, why wonder? There's simply no evidence that the AI-dominated Sixers offense is ineffective. Their 104.6 points per 100 possessions is very good. It's clearly their sub-par 104 points allowed per 100 possessions that's the problem here. Having Iverson pass more wouldn't do anything at all to resolve that problem, and all the successful teams in the league are considerably better than the Sixers at defensive efficiency.

I note this primarily because the Wizards are in a similar position -- mediocre overall performance, above-average offense, below-average defense, and a shoot-first point guard who's always getting criticized for not sharing the ball more. But if defense is the problem , then defense is the problem. Indeed, one of the advantages of having a team that can score effectively largely by relying on a single dominant perimeter player ought to be that you can put good defenders around him without worrying too much about their offensive potency. That the Sixers and Wizards have failed to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by having guys who can score like crazy is the issue here, not that their stars score too much.

81!

Incidentally, Kobe Bryant seems to be a pretty effective scorer.

The Rude Waiter

Interesting piece by Tim Hartford about price discrimination. For the record, I'm fairly certain that the restaurant in question is Galileo, across the street from my office. The waiter is, indeed, extraordinarily rude.

Panthers Suck!

A lot. How come the Giants didn't get to play against this crap? Oh well. I'll be pulling for Pittsburg in the Super Bowl.

Pastrami or Falafel

Security Council resolutions aside, I'm increasingly embittered about Israel, since I think it's killing Jewish culture. As Phoebe Maltz writes:

As someone who's preferred Jewish cuisine is more along the lines of a falafel stand than a foot-high pastrami sandwich (sometimes politics and taste do coincide), the Closing of the American Delicatessen (in America and abroad) does not strike me as a tragedy. If Andrew Sullivan can find support for his politics in "South Park," then allow me to find the same in this: The end of "Diaspora Judaism," of cultural-but-nothing-else Jewry, is upon us. Outside Israel, the only people who care about being Jewish care because they are religious. Those who feel vague pangs of nostalgia whenever they pass a place that sells matzo ball soup will disappear as any sort of tangible group in the next generation, if not the next five minutes. Israel and religion, not neurosis and cured meat, will be what hold the Jewish people together. And this is a good thing.

I agree 100 percent except for the "this is a good thing" business.

In my opinion, the Ashkenazi Jewish cultural tradition that I and most other North American Jews hail from is a great and noble one, one well-worth celebrating and identifying with, entirely apart from whether or not you want to buy some set of goofy myths about God and so forth. But as Phoebe says, it's increasingly dying out; increasingly replaced by the idea that insofar as Jewishness is anything other than a religion (which it certainly is) it's loyalty to a foreign country that one's family doesn't come from one. Alongside the increasing Israelification of secular Jewish identity, Israel has become more-and-more a Middle Eastern country -- located in the Middle East, largely populated by Sephardim, Israeli Arabs, and Druze -- rather than an Eastern European settlement that just happens to be next to Lebanon. For Israel, that's as it should be. It is a Middle Eastern country, after all. That's its destiny. But insofar as Israel fulfills that destinty, what's it got to do with me? I like falafel just fine, but I also like sushi. There's no traditional falafel recipe in my family any more than we have a tandoori chicken recipe. Pastrami has something to do with me, like knish and kosher hot dogs and the former 2nd Avenue Deli in general. Falafel is ethnic food, a delicatessen serves my ethnic food.

Anyways, I find all this regrettable. When I was in Eastern Europe, that felt a bit like my "homeland" -- it's where, after all, my family is from. Israel, where I've never been, always sounds to me like an alien place. This all gets discussed (lampooned, really, I guess) in Operation Shylock under the name "Diasporism" but it makes sense to me. That said, I'm going to try and take my Birthright Israel trip before I lose eligibility and give the Zionists a chance to make their case. But my sense is that Phoebe's probably right and diasporism is dead. I'd like to identify as "Jewish" but if I have to pick between "Eastern European" and "Israeli" I'm going to wind up throwing in with the Slavs and the Lithuanians.

Translations

Petey mentioned this in a comment below, but the dispute over the meaning of Security Council Resolution 242 on the 1967 War is an interesting case study in the problematics of translation. The relevant phrase calls, in English, for "Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict." The Israeli (and American) government interprets this as saying that Israel can't take the whole thing and therefore anticipates a Palestinian state to be built on the vast majority of the Occupied Territories but with Israel allowed to try and hang on to some choice bits.

In French, it calls for "Retrait des forces armées israéliennes des territoires occupés lors du récent conflit." A really literal translation of that into English is "withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from the territories occupied during the recent conflict." The French word "des," in other words, implies the existence of a definite article, which in turn supports the Palestinian view that Israel must withdraw from all of the Occupied Territories.

What further complicates this is that there's some genuine ambiguity here. English and French have different grammatical rules with regard to definite articles. If I wanted to say "I love eggs" in French, I would write "J'aimes les oeufs." In some sense, a literal translation of that would be "I love the eggs." In another sense, though, that's just a bad translation. French is just much more profligate with definite articles than English is. "Eggs" and "the eggs" mean different things in English, but in French you would say both with "les oeufs."

Conversely, the Russian version of SC 242, like the English version, doesn't include a definite article. But Russian never uses a definite article, so this doesn't tell us very much.

Global Warming: Hooray!

This is a freakishly warm winter, is it not? For example, my computer says today's high will be 60 degrees . . . in Boston. I remember when I was in college it would snow in April. You were lucky anytime things popped above freezing in January.

More Truce

MEMRI says bin Laden didn't offer a truce. Instead, he signaled he was open to a truce if America would care to put some terms on the table. MEMRI is not a really reliable source in my view, though there's not an obvious political motive for translating the statement their way, and al-Jazeera's English translation on this point was inconsistent with al-Jazeera's own sense of what should be excerpted, so perhaps they're right.

At any rate, I guess it's silly, but why not offer some terms, then? Since the White House would have the initiative, they could presumably just not offer anything they think is unacceptabe. Bin Laden seems to feel he needs to adopt a public posture of reasonableness, but if it's a bluff then why not call it?

Knicks-Pistons

Obviously, I wasn't expecting the Knicks to beat the Pistons tonight. But seriously. What is this shit? Seriously. They certainly do make the Wizards look awesome in comparison.

UPDATE: Also, wouldn't this (Detroit up 82-57 with 8:05 left in the fourth quarter) be a good time to give Darko some playing time? Maybe if the Knicks pull within 15 you can take him out again.

UPDATE II: At last -- it's Darko time!

What Truce?

Man, these OBL excerpts are frustrating:

We don't mind offering you a long-term truce on fair conditions that we adhere to. We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war. There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America who have supported Bush's election campaign with billions of dollars.

And then it ends. Would it have killed al-Jazeera to run the portion of the tape where Osama said something about the terms of his truce? The people want to know!

UPDATE: Also, come on, nobody gave the Bush campaign billions of dollars. That's off by a couple orders of magnitude.

Bukhara in Queens

I never understood quite why there were a whole bunch of restaurants in Queens run by Jewish immigrants from Central Asia, but when you live in New York you just get used to inexplicable stuff like that. Today, about seven years after I first wondered about this and three years after I totally forgot that neighborhood existed, the Times explains all. Central Asian food is tasty, whereas Russian food is disgusting. The saving grace of Nizhny Novgorod cuisine was the few establishments run by the Central Asian community. And McDonald's.

Do The Math

I really expect better than this from erstwhile number-cruncher John Hollinger: "Players such as Washington's Gilbert Arenas, New Orleans/Oklahoma City's Chris Paul, Boston's Paul Pierce and Seattle's Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis, for instance, all have played at a high level for teams that are well south of the break-even mark." The Wizards have a 17-19! They're well south of the break-even mark in the same sense that Minnesota has a dominating lead in the Northwest conference.

Wrong Double-Standard

Will Saletan says that when you control for the severity of the offense, the rare female sex offenders are actually punished more harshly than male ones. I find that pretty hard to believe, but he seems to have the goods. I've got enough double-standard in me that "victim" seems like an odd description of a 17 year-old boy who's having sex with an older woman.

The Call

Thanks to a timely missed field goal, it would up not mattering, but it should be said clearly that Pittsburg's overruled interception in the Colts game was an outrage. It's one thing for the officials to blow a call. That's bad, but it's bound to happen. It's another thing in entirely for the officials to make the right call and then wrongly overturn it, especially when the replays struck me -- and seemingly everyone else who saw them -- as pretty unambiguous. Pittsburg came frighteningly close to losing the game over that bullshit. I guess I can see why league officials don't want to admit what a giant fuckup that call was, but it was a pretty giant fuckup and someone should say so.

Beyond MLK

Surely nobody wants to take anything away from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s impressive achievements. Nevertheless, I always feel that the cult of King serves in an unfortunate way to obscure the fact that the Civil Rights movement wasn't something one dude dreamed up in mid-1950s Alabama and achieved over the next ten years. We're looking at a long, long, long struggle, dating back to the 19th century, involving the work of many, many, many noteworthy figures. The logical thing to do would be to follow up with a link-rich primer on non-MLK civil rights leaders over the years, but frankly despite the bug in my bonnet about the topic I'm a bit ignorant on the subject myself.

That said, here's some stuff about A. Philip Randolph whose work in the pre-MLK era was absolutely vital in laying the groundwork for the civil rights movement as we know it. I liked this movie about Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. a lot when I saw it on TV, although Showtime movies aren't necessarily the best source of information. It's also worth noting that this is by no means a story of linear progress. Under the administration of the vastly overrated Woodrow Wilson, racial equality suffered some serious setbacks, though efforts at countermobilization against Wilson's policies eventually helped the country move forward. As E.J. Graff emphasizes, one thing King and other civil rights leaders constantly had to contend with was not only the active hostility of white supremacists, but the casual indifference of white "moderates." Hubert Humphrey at the 1948 Democratic Convention offered an example of real leadership rather than mere theoretical support for equality:

There are those who say to you -- we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late. There are those who say -- this issue of civil rights is an infringement on states rights. The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of state's rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.

I live basically across the street from Washington, DC's African-American Civil War Memorial, a monument to some very early leaders in this fight. My neighborhood, Shaw, is named for Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the white officer who commanded the first black combat troops in the Civil War, and whose portrait hung right by the table where I used to eat freshman year in college. I don't know that there's a "point" here, as such, just some links and stuff.

Jewish Mothers

Cut from the same cloth:

Some 3.5 million of today's Ashkenazi Jews — about 40 percent of the total Ashkenazi population — are descended from just four women, a genetic study indicates.

I'm not sure I totally understand the relevant issues, but I think this may undercut efforts to devise complicated evolutionary explanations for some distinctive Ashkenazi traits. With such a high proportion of the population descended from this handful of people, some purely incidental attributes of these women could be expressed at very high levels among the Ashkenazim on average for no particular reason.

Teenage Nightclub

For teenagers New York City can be a frustrating experience: the nightlife is legendary, but aside from the occasional poetry slam or under-18 show at a rock club, they can't legally enjoy any of it. Over the last few years adult nightclubs around the country have introduced teenager-only nights, giving young people an alternative to the fake ID route to fun. Some clubs in New York have followed suit. On Fridays in Manhattan, Spirit, in Chelsea, has an under-21 night, and Exit in Midtown is 18 and over; Avalon, in the former Limelight space, is 18 and over Thursday through Sunday. But Crush is among the first nightclubs created solely for teenagers.

Story here. For one thing, New York is a great place to be a teenager. Being a teenager, per se, is just a kind of frustrating experience. This also sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. High school kids snorting coke in the bathroom, etc.

MVP My Ass

Wow. That first drive wasn't looking so good for the Redskins. Then -- Shaun Alexander to the rescue! Perhaps it's just been my separation from the NYC media, but I feel like there's been insufficient griping about the fact that Tiki Barber rather clearly had a better season than Alexander.

Glory Road

This was enjoyable enough to watch on an early Friday evening, but it's really something of a bizarre film. Basic narrative elements like a conflict that lasts more than one scene seem to go missing. The team doesn't seem to need to overcome anything in particular to achieve greatness. It's just that by recruiting black players and putting a lot of them on the floor, Texas Western manages to field a really great team that cruises through the regular season and then, just as you would expect, faces some tough games in the NCAA Tournament. The other thing is that, to a contemporary audience, it's just almost impossible to believe that people were ever so racist as to not believe that black people could play basketball well. You're so trained in the contemporary mindset where the "racist" view is that black people are intrinsically better at basketball and the "anti-racist" view is that black people just happen to be better at basketball that nothing about this seems plausible. When you look at Kentucky's five white dudes on the court against Texas Western's five black dudes, Kentucky looks intuitively like the underdogs no matter how many times the movie instructs you that they're the favorites.

Pistons-Spurs

What's the deal with San Antonio "cravenly servicing" Detroit last night? Unlike Christmas Day, the defending champs seem to be about out of excuses this time. At home, with Ginobili in the lineup, and it wasn't even a close fight. Maybe the SBC Center / AT&T Center name swap through them off.

Subjectively Over The Hill

Superficially, it seems that I've still got most of my life ahead of me. Subjectively, though, I'm done for:

My favorite psychology chapter is one that asks why, as we get older, the years seem to go by faster and faster. Carefully designed experiments suggest there is actually an explanation for this annoying impression. As we age, our biological clocks run slower and, since our clocks are running slower, the world seems to speed up. Depressing as this may be for those of us long past the subjective midpoint of our lives (which turns out to be about 20 for someone who lives to be 80), it could be worse. Ingram describes a man with a brain tumor that affected his biological clock who quit driving and watching television because traffic seemed to be rushing at him at an incomprehensible speed and television nattered on faster than he could follow.

This explains, I suppose, the well-known phenomenon of the annoying relative or other adult acquaintance proclaiming that a child is "growing up so fast" while the child feels himself to be growing up slowly.

Why Can't I Get These Assignments

The conclusion of Caitlin Flanagan's long article on blowjobs is both wrong and also almost silly, but it's very long and mostly hilarious. I have a web subscription to the Atlantic and I can't figure out if this is free content or not. To pluck out a good excerpt at random:

Blowjob nation has also been blamed on "abstinence only" sex-education programs. In this line of thinking the evil Republicans have made such a fetish of the intact hymen that teenagers—parsing the term "sexual abstinence" with Jesuitical precision—have decided to substitute oral sex for intercourse, thereby preserving their technical virginity. I'm no fan of these programs. In light of advances in birth control and the economic advisability of delaying marriage until after the college years, sexual purity seems a goal best advanced by those religions that advocate it, not by our public schools. But even if "abstinence" is at stake, why would girls voluntarily turn to giving blowjobs? Whatever happened to the hand job? Whither the dry hump? Why do girls prefer the far more debasing, uncomfortable, and messy blowjob? And why are they apparently giving them out so indiscriminately? These are questions that none of the usual suspects can answer.

Wherever there's a girl gone wild, there's a gender-studies professor not far behind, eager to blame her actions on the patriarchy. One of these is NYU's Julian Carter, who says that oral sex among young teen girls is part of a complex power dynamic, one that is familiar to people who know how Carol Gilligan's influential book In a Different Voice has dominated feminist thinking. Says Carter: "It's precisely at this age of early adolescence that … girls' sense of self-worth changes dramatically … this is when they are finding out they have less power within a patriarchal system …" According to Carter's theory, the girls are apparently suffering from a severe form of Stockholm syndrome, and have reacted by performing oral sex on their wily captors.

The problem with this idea is that surely the patriarchy was far stronger and more oppressive in the 1950s. But you don't find Betty—or even Veronica—cravenly servicing Archie and Jughead.

Not even Veronica!

Gilberto

John Carrol writes:

Part of their dilemma as a team is their star, Gilbert Arenas, obviously a major talent. He's a point guard, but not really a point guard. He's putting up big numbers, but is he making others around him better, or just making himself better? I don't have the answer.

There's obviously something to these sorts of doubts about Arenas, but the thing to keep in mind is that offense isn't really the issue for the Wizards. They score 103.3 points per 100 possessions, good for 10th best in the league. That's not great, but insofar as this year's Wizards team is disappointing compared to last year's, last year's team was pretty firmly in the "somewhat above than average" category and 10th best is good enough for somewhat above average. On defense, they're terrible, allowing 104.7 points per 100 possessions, good for 23rd in the league. Defense, and defensive rebounding, not Arenas' shortcomings as a pure point guard, is the issue here. Give the Wizards an average level of defensive efficiency, and they're a playoff team.

Comparisons Revisited

Reader JH sends along this column where Chuck Klosterman argues that Adam Morrison is, in fact, a Larry Bird-esque player, pressure not to compare every good white forward to Bird be damned. We then get an interesting digression on the topic of comparisons and facial recognition patterns even enter the picture. Now it should be added that a non-racial element of the problem here is simply that comparing any college player to one of the NBA's all-time greats is a dangerous business. The pattern of hailing black swingmen as "the next Michael Jordan" only to be disappointed is well known. It's also not always quite clear what that comparisons mean. "X may be the next Michael Jordan" could mean simply that x has some chance of displacing Jordan as the Best Player Ever, wherein LeBron James would seem to be the most plausible candidate. Nevertheless, LBJ's game isn't especially Jordan-esque. Similarly, someone could have a Bird-like game without being as good as Bird was, which is where I think you'd have to say the odds are on Morrison.

So True

Turns out I look just like Leonardo DiCaprio. Face recognition software probably still has a ways to go. Discriminating between faces comes very easily to human beings, but it's evidently a harder computational problem than your ability to do it easily would suggest. People have a special bit of brain hardware dedicated specifically to the problem of recognizing other human faces, which is why we can do it well. But we have trouble discriminating between, say, chimpanzee faces while chimps have the reverse problem.

Our New Intel Overlords

"The result of massive R&D effort involving thousands of engineers." That would be the new unholy blend of Intel chips and Mac stuff, apparently. Word is the news ones are very fast. That notwithstanding, it's occurred to me over the past few months that my current computer (12 inch PowerBook G4) is actually pretty near my computing-speed-horizon needs. Everything I do on a regular basis already goes really fast. The only things that seems to me to happen with substantially less-than-ideal speed either relate to games (and Macs are a game wasteland for software reasons anyway, so why worry) or for screwing around with video compression. But since I've never had what I would call an actual reason to be compressing video files on my computer, I started having this looming feeling that I wouldn't be able to justify further frivolous computer-related spending. And then, earlier today, what happens but an actual reason comes up to compress some video files (more details later).

And while the computer got the job done, it was a bit . . . slow. Only MacBook Pro can save me. That said, if they actually want to get me to buy one, they're probably going to need to make a 12 inch version. I sort of wonder why the much-rumored Mac Media Center didn't emerge. That seems like it would be pretty easy to throw together and if it really worked and cost about what a Mac Mini runs you, I would buy one. More to the point, from a business perspective something along those lines would seem to be in keeping with Apple's transition into being a successful digital media player firm that happens to own a minor personal computer business.

On JFK

Jonah Goldberg:

I WISH [Jonah Goldberg]
Alito would find a way to mention that Senator Kennedy's brothers trampled the civil liberties of American citizens far more thoroughly than anything the Bush administration has even been accused of. He could just casually mention the wiretapping of Martin Luther King or perhaps Bobby's work for Joe McCarthy. It would be great fun, but probably a strategic error.

I'm normally a huge proponent of bashing JFK -- America's least-deserving liberal hero -- but that's really unfair. Herbert Hoover was wiretapping Martin Luther King, among other abuses, and had become so entrenched an abusive that nobody in a pretty long string of Presidents found a way to reign him in. Meanwhile, the point about the Bush administration isn't necessarily that it's going in for Hoover/Nixon-style abuses. The point is that their trying to gut all the rules that are in place to prevent such abuses from happening, and reverting to the "trust us" standard that led to massive abuses in the past. That will, sooner or later, lead to massive abuses even if it hasn't already, and even if it has already led to Nixon-level problems we probably won't know for sure for years.

"Knowledge"

On a non-sports note, I keep trying to talk myself into believing that Operation Ivy's "Knowledge" is a better song than Green Day's cover of it on 1039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours since I regard my actual opinion on this question as lame, but I just can't do it. Generally speaking, I like Green Day a lot more than I'm comfortable admitting.

Why Block?

Gregg Easterbrook makes his annual case against the blitz:

On 158 long-yardage downs there were 113 instances of conventional defense and 45 blitzes. Offenses averaged 4.3 yards gained per play against conventional defense and 8.7 yards per play against the blitz. Offenses scored three touchdowns against conventional defenses, a 2.6 percent touchdown rate, and three touchdowns against the blitz, a 6.7 percent touchdown rate. Offenses gained 19 first downs against conventional defense, a 16.8 percent first-down rate, and 15 first downs against the blitz, a 33.3 percent first-down rate. Conventional defense forced 27 kicks, a 23.8 percent forced-kick rate; blitzing forced four kicks, a 8.9 percent forced-kick rate. Conventional defense achieved five takeaways, a 4.4 percent turnover rate by the offense. Blitzing achieved two takeaways, an identical 4.4 percent turnover rate by the offense. Conventional defense scored one touchdown for the defense, while blitzing produced no defensive touchdowns.

One could raise a lot of questions about the methodology here, but it seems at least plausible. It also seems to me that if this analysis is correct, offenses can gain an edge by having all five eligible receivers run passing routes rather than, as customary, using tight ends or backfield players as additional pass protection. In essence, when everyone's running a route, every play is the functional equivalent of a blitz -- the quarterback usually needs to throw fast, but somebody's always open. I read Michael Lewis' article about Texas Tech's unorthodox offense a while back and that's roughly what they do. It's a highly effective strategy in the NCAA Football 2006 video game, at a minimum. That said, effective video game tactics often don't work so well in the real world.

Overreaction

This seems seriously overwrought to me:

Except no one can predict where Eli Manning and the Giants go from here and no one can speak to the mystery of sports destinies better than Archie Manning, the patriarch who spent his N.F.L. career just trying to survive the many shortcomings of the New Orleans Saints. . . .

When the Giants return next season, Manning will be a year older, but so will the veteran linchpins, Barber and Michael Strahan. The Giants have so much invested in Manning, in the belief that he will be their Elway, their Marino, a difference-maker like his big brother Peyton. There is no timetable, however, and no way of knowing what the Giants will look like once Manning arrives.

There are no guarantees in the NFL, but next year's Giants will almost certainly be better. It's not as if there's no middle ground between Eli being as good as Payton Manning and sucking. He'll almost certainly play somewhat better next season than he did this season, and he played okay well this season. Yes, Tiki Barber will be one year older, but his most recent season was his best-ever season, so there's no reason to fear a large decline. And more to the point, the Giants ended the season with a linebacker corps decimating by injuries. It's hard for any team to do well when injuries come at inconvenient moments. Ask the Bengals after losing yesterday, or the Patriots after magically turning their season around by getting their players back.

Best or Worst?

Anthony Lane is at his best, writing-wise, when making fun of movies he didn't like, so I'm by no means surprised that he overwhelmingly dedicated his 2005 year in review column to making fun of all the movies he didn't like. But it seems to me that if you seriously want to judge whether or not a given year was a good or bad one, movie-wise (or album-wise, or novel-wise, or whatever) that the stuff you think is bad is totally irrelevant. All that really matters is how many things were produced that will stand the test of time. Mediocrity is no better than awfulness on that score.

The Capital of Self-Deprecation

Kerry Howley interviews Ana Marie Cox:

reason: Your protagonist refers to D.C. "special olympics of sex." Is that just an overall impression you've formed? Did you have some special olympians in mind?

Cox: That was my overall impression. I am so glad I came to D.C. married. I can't imagine how awful it would be to be single in D.C.

The number one topic of conversation in DC is how terrible it is that all anyone wants to talk about is work. After that, comes talking about work. Third, is this kind of thing, discussion of how ugly/unstylish/uncool/whatever Washington is. That sort of thing always makes me wonder: Compared to what? Compared to New York, the disses are almost invariably true. Down here there's less style, less hott, less cool. But compared to, say, Boston it's not true at all. I haven't really lived in any other cities, so I couldn't say much beyond that for sure, but it's definitely my suspicion that my experience is truer to reality than all this constant self-deprecation and Washington is just kind of average coolness-wise. Talking shit about the city in which you regard, of course, is a convenient way of implying that the talker is Awesome without coming out and saying so.

Unexpected

I opened up an issue of ESPN The Magazine and was reading something about some rookie on the New York Rangers. Looking at his photo, I thought to myself, "didn't that guy live next door to me freshman year?" And, yes, it seems that's the guy. This sort of thing was what I thought of when I was quite kindly named by New York Magazine as one of their top people under 25 who are going to be famous or some such thing. Plenty of people under 25 -- LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, etc. -- are already way more famous than I'll ever be under even the most optimistic assumptions. I didn't go to much of a sports school, but apparently Dominic Moore plays in the NHL and Ryan Fitzpatrick has started in NFL games. Intellectual pursuits will get you nowhere in life. Besides which, my dad published a novel when he was 16. There's your over-achiever.

Match Point

My most cinephilic friend claimed not to like this movie, but since it was obviously great I don't really believe them. It reminded me that I think 2005 has seem a truly unfortunate trend toward artistically ambitious filmmakers trying to take on The Big Issues, a trend that based on a preview of what looks to be a Hungarian holocaust movie seems to be continuing. Maybe it's just me, but I think film is, as a medium, spectacularly ill-suited to coping with political issues. I say more Match Point, more The Squid and the Whale, more Me and You and Everyone We Know and less fraught tales on intrigue in the Middle East or exposés of the shocking truth that Nazis Were Mean People.

Upsets

I agree with Tyler Cowen that there's something a bit odd about this:

Eli Ben-Naim, Sidney Redner and Federico Vazquez at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico decided to look at unpredictability of results - how often a team with a worse record overcomes an apparently superior one - as the best measure of how exciting a league is. "If there are no upsets, then every game is predictable and hence boring," says Ben-Naim.

I don't think it's upsets and "unpredictability" per se that make a league exciting. You could add a halftime coin toss to the NFL such that the winner of the toss gets 13 points -- that would make football less predictable and more upset-prone, but not more exciting. Watching a game whose outcome is unpredictable because the teams are evenly matched is exciting. Watching a game whose outcome is unpredictable because the officiating isvery bad is stupid. An upset is exciting when it reveals that an underestimated team is better than people assumed (see the 2003 NBA Finals) but not so exciting if it's just due to a large degree of randomness. More to the point, evenly matched teams are exciting when the quality of play is high. A Knicks-Hawks matchup is exciting if you happen to have emotional ties to one of the teams, but not to a third-party observer. A Spurs-Mavericks matchup is exciting to anyone who cares about basketball.

Tragedy

The Second Avenue Deli is closing. This is terrible.

Team USA

Allen Iverson, it seems, wants to play Team USA Basketball. That strikes me as ill-advised. Scoring point guards in the Iverson mode, including Washington's young Gilbert Arenas, can be incredibly valuable in "real world" basketball situations. That's because most teams simply have to devote a lot of minutes to putting not-so-good players on the floor. Under the circumstances, a guy who can effectively do two jobs is a real asset. Indeed, anyone who can score a shitload of points is a serious asset. But it should be no problem for Team USA to have five well-rested very good players on the floor at all times. Under those circumstances, it makes a lot more sense to specialize. You really want your point guard to be the best passer available. If he's not as good a scorer as someone else might be, it's not a big deal since you'll have plenty of other great scorers on the team.

On the other hand, the mere fact that you have star players asking to get put on the team even though they're asking for a higher commitment level than ever before is an excellent sign. Realistically, as long as there are a sufficient quantity of guys out there that serious about winning the gold, the international talent gap hasn't narrowed nearly enough to stop America.

Hook 'Em!

Score one for naive analysis.

UPDATE: "We didn't get no respect from the media," says Vince Young. I respected them! I'm in the media!

Iran

I'm watching a report on Iran on ABC. One thing the correspondent gets into is their president's apparent belief that he had a vision from God while addressing the UN. The correspondent notes that this view is considerably more controversial than his holocaust denial. Then he interviewed an Ayatollah in Qom who said the president's statement was "wrong" and possibly "treason." Then he ends with a little ditty on getting harassed by the security services. Still, at the end of the day he wasn't so harrassed that he couldn't deliver his highly critical voiceover from downtown Teheran. Nor is the crackdown on freedom of the press and free speech so tight that this Ayatollah guy couldn't accuse the president of possible treason in an open, taped interview with an American television network. Which isn't to deny the obviously authoritarian character of the Iranian regime, but I think when people talk about this they often lose perspective. This isn't a level of authoritarianism that deserves to be mentioned as being on the level of Saddam-era Iraq or North Korea.

Good Fences, Good Neighbors?

Hundreds of angry Palestinians streamed into Egypt on Wednesday after militants with stolen bulldozers broke through a border wall, and two Egyptian troops were killed and 30 were wounded by gunfire in the rampage.

About 3,000 Egyptian Interior Ministry troops who initially had no orders to fire swarmed the border but were forced to withdraw about a half-mile, said security forces Lt. Sameh el-Antablyan, who announced the casualties.

Good times. Israelis must be laughing all the way to the bank on that one.

Trends

One of Tom post's today linked back to his 2005 predictions, one of which was: "Everyone stops drinking mojitos and starts drinking caipirinhas." My recollection is that the mojito-caipirinha transition was underway in New York during the summer of 2002. There were plenty of mojitos around, but the general sense was that they were "over" and the caipirinha was the hip thing to be drinking. So now I'm confused: Is this an instance of me being ahead of the curve, Tom being way behind the curve, or is today's trend-cycle so fast that mojitos went out and then in again in the intervening time?

College Mania

This thing I flogged the other day about the increasing gender gap in college seems to have some legs. Steve Sailer notes that arguably the issue here isn't a "shortfall" of men on campus, but the presence of too many women. Certainly it's the case that even as earnings opportunities for non-college men have diminished somewhat, non-college men still tend to be in dramatically better shape than non-college women with relatively well-compensated semi-skilled work tending to be overwhelmingly male. Generally speaking, it's my sense that as a society we've tried to respond to the post-1970 explosion of inequality by broadening educational opportunities rather than directly addressing the issue. Consequently, we've seen a ton of "credential inflation" whereby every job that doesn't suck has been redefined so as to de facto require a college degree whether or not such education is really applicable to the task at hand. The main exception has been in the overwhelmingly male building trades where the old attitude of requiring people to have the relevant skills but not a ton of "education" still prevails. Needless to say, as a recent plumbing problem brought home, the guy who came over to resolve the issue has a skill set that I dare say is a good deal more useful than anything I learned in college.

And Another Thing

I've watched zero games of USC football this season, so I don't really know what I'm talking about. That said, I've been pondering the ex ante plausibility of the following propositions:

1. USC has on its roster an incredibly good quarterback, an astoundingly good tailback, and a second tailback who's incredibly good.
2. USC has an incredibly good offensive line.

Number two sounds much more plausible to me as an a priori matter. Now that said, I haven't seen the team play and plenty of other people, including highly trained NFL scouts, have seen them play and concluded that number one is the correct answer. And, of course, Messrs. Bush, Leinart, and White will all be in the NFL soon and we'll learn a thing or two from that. But I have my doubts.

Rose Bowl Prediction

I'm going to dissent from what I take the consensus to be and say that Texas is going to beat USC tomorrow. I offer the following naive analysis. Texas scored 611 points this season, USC scored 600. That's a narrow edge for Texas. Texas allowed 175 points this season. USC gave up 256 points. That's a non-trivial edge for Texas. Meanwhile, everyone seems to agree that Texas' special teams are a lot better than USC's. Upshot -- Texas wins. As I say, an admittedly naive analysis. Strength of schedule, etc. But still, sometimes the time comes for a naive analysis.

Movie Angst

Colin McGinn seems to be a bit of a weirdo:

The hero of "The Power of Movies" (Pantheon, 210 pages, $24) is a middle-aged academic full of neuroses. He has an overpowering disgust for the human form, "all armpits and bodily fluids - hairy meat, basically." But he is nonetheless a creature of animal desires; when he goes to the movies, he loves to watch "almost anything with vampires in it - or Denise Richards suitably attired." In a nightmare, he arrives at an Oxford high-table dinner dressed inappropriately and is unable to find a clean glass for his drink. In another dream, he complains that dating is hard because he is "not Brad Pitt." The highbrow and lowbrow do daily battle in this man; he lectures on philosophy and - just like Wittgenstein, as he consoles himself - escapes whenever possible to a "mindless movie" to satisfy his "base self."

I assume that he, like yours truly, is eagerly awaiting Underworld: Evolution's opening night.

Pinkie Surgery?

Marcus Camby will spend two weeks out for surgery on a broken pinkie. Wtf? I've broken a several fingers in my day and it always just got splinted and taped. I think I've even played basketball (admittedly, on the elementary school, rather than professional, level) with a taped broken finger. It's not as if the guy has a really finesse, pinkie-oriented game with a delicate outside shot that would be thrown off-kilter by a fucked-up finger. You can't really rebound with a broken thumb, sure, but the pinkie?

Yao-In, Yao-Out

There hasn't been a good Yao Ming apologia here for a while, but Marc Stein observes:

Remember all those nasty things folks said about Yao when Rockets went 0-8 with T-Mac out? It's getting closer to apology time: Houston is just 1-5 when Yao is hurt.

Whereas with both Yao and T-Mac playing, the Rockets are a very good basketball team.

Hate To Say I Told You So

Jason Zengerle notes that decent folks are having reason to regret John Ashcroft's departure from the Bush administration. I called this right away back in late 2004 when Ashcroft's retirement was first announced.

The most salient fact, in retrospect, is this. Ashcroft, like Colin Powell, was appointed to the cabinet to help Bush politically. Both had independent constituencies. At the time, there was some Christian Right skepticism of Bush, and no Christian Right skepticism of Ashcroft. Ashcroft was brought on the team to reassure the Christian Right. Powell was there to reassure moderates. Both were, in virtue of having independent stature and constituencies, capable of such things as independent thought and holding principles other than the Greater Glory of George W. Bush. With them gone, the administration now consists entirely of people who owe their careers merely to Bush's benevolence. Rumsfeld, yes, had a real career before Bush, but he was washed up. Condoleezza Rice is in a lot of ways the clearest example. She often seems to know what she's doing and want to be a good Secretary of State. But this only shows itself at the margins. When push comes to shove, she gets shoved -- hard -- and will defend the most indefensible views imaginable. The fate of the Republic now rests largely on the shoulders of Arlen Specter, which should give nobody much comfort.