1. Fed T-shirt markets in everything.
2. Is he the best dunker of all time? (NYT, text and video). And if so, what does this imply for theories of specialization?
3. “Having sat on top of Texas for like 17 years now, I can tell you this is the most Texas thing ever!”
5. “If anyone is trying to tell you it’s not complicated, be very, very suspicious,” said Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University. “The inclination of economists is Occam’s razor. That’s a harmful tendency in today’s world.” From Walter Frick on inequality at HBR.
6. Ross Douthat on Star Wars and decadence, full of spoilers.
7. Was Robert Johnson recorded at the wrong speed?
#1 – wish that had come out a few days ago – I would have bot for a Christmas present
#7: Apparently there are opinions about Robert Johnson that are “widely held” in Japan.
I’ve never met a European, continental or otherwise, who’s heard of the Allman Bros. And I do ask.
The odd case was about a dead American blues singer who became a huge success in South Africa but died without knowing it. There was a documentary about it called Sugarman recently.
I don’t know why this is a surprise. It depends on what gets shown and accepted in other parts of the world. The cliche’ed case would be the alleged French love of Jerry Lewis. There are British actors who have been mobbed in Eastern Europe because they were in some dire 70s piece of dreck but it was all the people of Albania or wherever were allowed to see.
I am sure that there are foreign things Americans love that their home country finds incomprehensible. I bet that the Japanese have never even heard of Godzilla. And pity the poor people of Kazakhstan.
Actually, the outcome was better than that in Sugarman. He (Sixto Rodriquez) is still alive and was in the film. Still, an amazing story attributable to the information barriers in South Africa. FWIW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixto_Rodriguez
5. Of course, many factors have contributed to the sharp rise in inequality, but attributing it primarily to skills (or lack thereof) puts the “blame” on those without the desired skills, a convenient explanation for those at the top of the income/wealth distribution – whose incredible skills, and virtue, put them there. Whatever. Rationalizations for excessive inequality are much like rationalizations for the hole in the Titanic: does it really matter how it got there when the ship is sinking. Unless and until excessive inequality is mitigated, we will continue to experience financial and economic instability. But it will be mitigated – eventually. Markets have a way of self-correcting excesses, and that includes excessive inequality.
If by “market” you mean “revolution” and people being murdered in their beds.
To an economist, everything is a market.
#4 is interesting. And buried in it is a link to an article about a company that uses yeasts to generate bulk-ish quantitie of what they claim is “spider silk”. If that can be taken a face-value, then it is a really big deal.
I don’t take it at face value. But here is the link: http://www.technologyreview.com/photoessay/541361/spinning-synthetic-spider-silk/
This thing is just going to mushroom.
#7, interesting hypothesis but the last example given, Crossroad Blues, just sounds a heck of a lot more natural at the original (“fast”) speed.
7. Was Robert Johnson recorded at the wrong speed?
Everyone knows that Johnson was intended to be played backwards.
Given the technology of the time, everyone was likely recorded at the wrong speed. I bet Bessie Smith sang up-beat cheerful pop songs but they got the tape machine all wrong.
5) I think there are at least 2 different inequality stories in the US: the top 20% story and the top 0.1% (or 0.01%) story. To assume that both stories have the same drivers may be taking Occam’s razor too far.
+1
“The inclination of economists is Occam’s razor. That’s a harmful tendency in today’s world.”
But isn’t Occam’s Butterknife far worse?
Occam’s Butterknife
https://polymathblogger.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/occams-butterknife/
QUOTE:
Occam’s Razor is the principle that we should prefer the simplest explanation for a given set of facts. Steve Sailer has coined the term “Occam’s Butterknife” to refer to the principle apparently motivating earnest liberals who seem compelled to discuss certain social issues and yet constantly overlook simple but politically incorrect explanations in favor of complicated ones. As one might expect, the New York Times is particularly expert at wielding Occam’s Butterknife…
#2 – who said white men can’t jump?
A 48″ vertical? Sick.
The dunk would be more impressive if he did it off the dribble.
#2…I’ve always thought of slam dunk contests and three point contests as novelty acts. Am I the only one who remembers pro basketball having a H-O-R-S-E contest and one on one contest? What makes Elgin Baylor, Dr. J, David Thompson, and Michael Jordan, great dunkers is that they could pull them off in an actual basketball game. Check out my all time favorite basketball player dunking over…Bill Russell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA6Fx6B7K3A
He can’t be the “best dunker of all time” if he doesn’t play in games. In a game, the dunk puts points on the board, maybe one too many points but that’s another topic. The dunking contests (sounds like something that would take place at a doughnut shop) are judged, like figure skating or gymnastics. There’s no true criterion for whatever points are awarded to determine the winner. It’s up to the subjectivity of the officials. In a game, he probably would have a hard time even scoring on a dunk. Maybe that’s why he’s not playing for the Kentucky Wildcats or the New Orleans Pelicans.
@Donald Pretari maybe you (or someone) could explain to Bill Simmons that Elgin Baylor (among quite a few others) was a much better basketball player than Bill Russell.
#6 The very fact we expect a movie from 1977 to make a comeback is a sign of decadence, so yeah.
5. So a bunch of cranks want to make one of the seven deadly sins, envy, respectable among the intellectualoids. No reason academics can’t be stupid.
Class hate/envy/war have been the American Democrats’ M.O. since Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson.
They’ve been running this scam (taking from Peter and giving it to Paul) for 180 years and “income inequality” (is that “poverty” or what?) is still the problem.
I remember LBJ’s Great Society/War on Poverty. They wasted more than $2 trillion (in today’s dollars) to “fight” poverty. Guess what: there were as many poor after they wasted all that money. Before that FDR had 12 years in power and his New Deal. That really helped. Before that Wilson gave us the Income Tax and the Fed. That really helped. Jackson force-marched the Cherokee Peoples to Oklahoma and his people had their lands and he vetoed the charter for the Bank of the United States saying it only served the hated Northern rich and that the bank caused inflation and depressions. That really helped.
Now, after 180 years of failed (poor people still exist – PANT!) policies, the class warriors and mass liars hit us with this “income inequality” bullshit. Anybody thinking Einstein’s definition of insanity?
Where’s the failure? They starved less (ate better food), got to be educated, lived in less crappy conditions, got access to health care and a whole bunch of other things.
Addressing income inequality implies ongoing transfers of wealth to those who didn’t play the capitalist game as successfully. The dollar amounts will keep rising for the rest of history, and that need not imply a failure.
>”If anyone is trying to tell you it’s not complicated, be very, very suspicious”
And if anyone is trying to tell you it is so complicated you can’t possibly make the slightest sense out of it without a PhD, be much, much more suspicious.
Everyone in Japan knows Godzilla, although not by that exact name (in Japanese it is a blend of Gorilla and kujira (whale). They probably haven’t seen the American version with Raymond Burr however.
Much more surprisingly, not many Japanese know anything about Torimi Kouki and the DaiNippon Butokukai that he founded in 1895.
Many old records are at off-speeds (making them hard to copy if you play harmonica for example). Jazz musicians from the swing era used to speed up songs (i.e., literally play them faster) at the engineer’s request in order to get them to fit the maximum allowable playing time on 78s. Artie Shaw mentions doing this in his semi-autobiography The Trouble with Cinderella. If Robert Johnson was speeded up mechanically, it might have been for this reason.
“Jazz musicians from the swing era used to speed up songs (i.e., literally play them faster) at the engineer’s request in order to get them to fit the maximum allowable playing time on 78s.” The same is true, allegedly, of the early NYC recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. There’s some support in the recordings they later did in London, for larger diameter British discs. The music is less rattle-and-crash, more graceful, with a hint of swing. When they returned to NYC their recordings there returned to being rather hectic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfrOAlKAG60
#6 I loved Abrams’ Star Wars the same way I love Oscar Peterson’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” or Barenboim’s Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto.
Does that make me a slave to nostalgia?
#7: He actually did get his math wrong. To drop a quarter of an octave you have to drop the frequency by a factor of the fourth root of 1/2. So about 84% instead of 87.5%. (Fascinating theory, btw. The slower ones do sound more natural.)
I found this to be a persuasive argument that Robert Johnson was NOT sped up. http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html
#5
H.L. Mencken (and yes, I know it is a paraphrase):
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”
Seth Winner, who did the mastering for Sony’s Robert Johnson Centennial CD set, says the hum he filtered out was at 60 Hz and 120 Hz just like you’d expect. That’s good evidence that we’re playing the records back at the same speed they were recorded.
Aw, come on. Science is such a spoilsport.
More details from Seth Winner on Robert Johnson’s recording speed:
“Thanks for your interest in this “nonsense”, which I’m familiar with, from this eccentric. The best way to explain it, according to Steven Lasker & Steve LaVere, who engineered and produced the issue in question, told me that they first determined the relative speed for playback by checking the pitch/speed of a number of piano recordings done around the time of both sessions utilizing the same cutting lathes and equipment. Lasker then fine tuned the adjustment of speeds so that the guitar was in pitch. When I got the files from him, I was able to to load them into a program that gave me a “visual” picture of the sound. As what was common concerning electrical 78 rpm recordings is that I could see the 120HZ harmonic hum that leaked into the signal because of poorly regulated power supply design of the period. As you know, in the USA, we use 60HZ alternating current to deliver electricity over long electrical lines. In Europe, its 50 Hz. The picture I was looking at for EVERY file showed that the 1st harmonic (120 Hz) of the 60HZ “hum” present was very prevalent in EVERY selection I worked on….ERGO…Lasker pitched each size correctly. Slowing these discs down to what the “experts” think it should be is not speeds that are logical for electrically driven lathes of the period; a variation within a few revolutions could occur. But the difference that these yo-yo’s claim is beyond logic. The hum never lies….”
#2 we love great dunk not 3 point shots. We need to get rid of the 3 pointer it has ruined the game. The 3 on 2 break used to be a thing of grace and beauty but is no more.
BTW I think some others are just as good as Jordan Kilganon.