Mathematics After The Fall

Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category

Zombies: A Good War

What makes a good novel? Zombies? Well, not necessarily. We can look at results, first. There are plenty of lists of best fiction works, at least in English. There’s even a meta-site than combines 10 different lists, some popular, some literary, some juried. Only one book, George Orwell’s 1984, appears on all ten lists. Though I very much like that book, it’s difficult to call something The Best. Looking through, some of the Top 25 I really enjoy, some I find decent, some I haven’t read, and some I find poor.

The point of this essay is not to critique top books, though. It’s to think about what makes a good fiction novel. I agree with this summary:

In fiction, the writer’s job is to entertain, to draw an emotional response from the reader. The reader is often looking for suspense, action, and to go on a journey they have not been on before, one they will not easily forget. Readers want to get drawn into and experience the story for themselves. They want characters they can relate to and form a personal connection with. But most importantly, they want a good book. One that leaves them anxiously awaiting each turn of the page.

J. K. Rowling did well in the Harry Potter series. I own all seven novels in hardback, and attended release night parties for books four through seven. People flock to her believable otherworld, her website comes in six languages, and she might be a billionaire. That’s a lot of believability.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t call the Harry Potter books great fiction. Great fiction makes an additional leap. It becomes questioning, moral, problematic. It can transform. It’s a dangerous leap, though. Setting out to write a meaningful novel often leads to contrived situations, undeveloped characters, and the loss of immersion. The idea becomes a mediocre parable. This type of book gets taught in high schools quite often, but it’s not great. I consider Lord of the Flies an archetypal example of moral as story. It just hammers away. For me, it lost credence.

The hot theme for potential immersion, and perhaps that transformation, is another transform – the Zombie. Today’s entry into the genre is An Oral History of the Zombie War, World War Z, by Max Brooks. Mr. Brooks has said that he enjoyed a book about World War II, The Good War by Studs Terkel, and decided upon the same format.

It works. Combined with his earlier, more humorous work The Zombie Survival Guide, this is an immersive world. The role playing scenarios for All Flesh Must Be Eaten practically write themselves. For more casual readers, the characters feel different. The Chinese doctor sounds different from the American warrior, who differs from the Russian priest, and so forth. None of the interviewed has the full picture, so we get little pieces. That’s interesting.
The stories vary, too. Some, like escaping the first Cape Town rush, are typical horror. Others, like North Korea, are straightforward development. They’re fun, but not noteworthy. The better stories show the fruits of Mr. Brooks’ research. I was fascinated by the underwater fighting suits, which are apparently in service today. The combat scenes, both in defeat and reconquest, are cool too. There are several little jokes, like about LaMOE survivalists.
Things start to get really good when we reach psychology and how people respond. This makes the book more than a set of war stories, though I’m afraid that the movie adaptation might lose these scenes in favor of more Whiz Bang Kaboom! Unlike, say Independence Day, the American Big Speech doesn’t lead to slow universal applause. Some people just, well, give up. I’ve seen things like ADS eternal sleep, not as severe, but I understand. Other folks make errors in panic, even though they should know better. The military, for instance, suffers from the sin of pride.

At this point, we have a good book. What makes this great? What moves it from a 2 or 3, up to a 4 out of 5? The Redeker Plan. It’s been a week since I first read the idea, and it’s still on my mind. I reread the interview last night, the first one of Turning the Tide. At Robben Island in South Africa, the details are given to us by Xolelwa Azania – in translation, Forgiven South Africa. Written by Paul Redeker, the plan begins with a safe zone, protected as possible with natural barriers, to clear and reorganize. (I’m guessing some of the Northern Cape and the northern Western Cape.) The tricky part, well, is that not all citizens are evacuated into that area. Space and resources are limited. Instead, beyond the safe zone, there were other colors. White zones meant infestation; green for military, purple for refueling, red for asset protection. Then there was Blue. Remaining citizens got moved there, with a few supply drops and trainers. No military support, though, as they had to make their own stand. The key was to gain time, as “every zombie besieging those survivors will be one less zombie throwing itself against our defenses.”

It worked, generally, better than the other ideas. The Redeker Plan saved countries, and a large extent of the human race. But how do you write that plan? How do you put it into place? Can you be forgiven? Xolelwa? I’m very unsure that I could. Mr. Brooks considers that question through his characters. It’s not just the Stockdale Paradox, which deals with a person’s life. It’s also more than field leadership. It’s something I just don’t know. The characters struggle, too.

There’s no simple response to the Redeker Plan. In it, World War Z moves from story to problem, the leap that makes this more. That dilemma, as is said, that even in a good war, “God help you, man.” “God help us all.”

Life and Death and One Second After

It’s been not the best summer in my Louisville. Most people I know in this town are associated with Bellarmine, and in the summer I don’t see them as often. I don’t receive as much invigorating interaction with students. It’s lonely. The pressure of the PhD increases daily. Furthermore, I’m having trouble working because I have an ear infection this week. (That’s why there are three posts in 10 days.) Completely clogged I am, so sleeping is tough, and I can’t research in Chicago. I don’t trust my hearing to drive long distance.

Things could be much worse, nevertheless. For instance, I read a post last week that was both seriously loving and seriously painful. Here it is. It’s from the wife of the Survivalblog founder, and it begins thusly:

I am in a very unusual situation. I’m in my mid-40s, but I’m dying. My doctors have told me that I have less than two months to live. So I have been working on my “bucket list.” One of the items therein is finding a new wife for my husband, to marry after I go to be with the Lord.

What a tough choice, eh? I’ve been thinking about that post since I’ve seen it. One small response, well, isn’t envy, but I wish someone would care enough about me to write an ad for someone “sincerely seeking a life-long commitment with a loving husband”. Plus, I would need enough daily page views to get responses. twelvefruits.com has fewer visits in a year than survivalblog.com has in a day. Despite my hosting company, the very competent Lunarpages, offering $25 in Facebook ad credits, and $25 in Google adwords credits, I think I’d need a bit more notoriety.

Fortunately, most of my thoughts have not been so narcissistic. I pray a lot for them, as I do for couples in trouble. I wish them well.

Because I’ll be flying a lot this month of August, including my first other continent, I’ve also been checking out flyer information forums. At flyertalk, travelers demand upgrades out of coach. “Friends don’t let friends fly coach,” one says. One thread is “New meaning to battlefield upgrades”. They’re wrong, of course. I’m not looking forward to so much time in a small seat, but that’s not This plane is a battlefield upgrade, part of this well written sad tale. I’m crying not just because it might help clear my Eustachian tube.

Then, I can make two clicks on the Esquire.com site and reach pictures of curvy Christina Hendricks. What a strange thing, this Internet.

A strange thing, indeed. Saturday morning I was walking to the bank to pick up my rand for the trip, a little annoyed because I got charged about 10%, worse than the fee at most currency exchanges. I’ll know better next time. Anyway, my path takes me by a church; people were walking out and the bells were ringing. Saturday morning meant wedding or funeral, most likely funeral. Then I saw the hearse. On the way back, the procession headed to the cemetery. I realized that I could figure out who I was silent praying for, via the Internet. William Meredith Pierce it was. 83 years old, married 58 years, a healthcare administrator he was.

And I remembered that I have to write my will before I head to South Africa.

Today’s book review sort of continues the summer theme of harsh choices (previously including World’s Most Dangerous Places, Patriots, and the Great Influenza). For once, I’m in line with Hollywood, I guess. Right now you can even Choose Your Own Apocalypse.

The book is One Second After, a novel about survival after an EMP attack. The main author is history professor Bill Forstchen. If you’re worried about the other name on the front cover, it’s not so bad. Yes, I know that Dr. Newt Gingrich is sorely misguided, a so-called champion of conservative values despite divorcing twice and carrying on an affair while attacking President Clinton. Apparently, he was this year received into my Catholic Church despite the divorces, affairs, and other nasty stuff. I’d like to believe in transformative power, but then again there are plenty other evil elements in the Church.

That said, it’s alright because Dr. Gingrich wrote just the forward, not the whole book. Main author Dr. Forstchen is a widower, I think.

As for the book, there are a lot of good points. Because the author writes about the area where he lives, including the college where he teaches, geographic detail is excellent. Black Mountain, North Carolina reads like a place I can see. The people, which I suspect are fictionalized real folk, also have interesting qualities. They might show their emotions heavily, bringing up old grudges too quickly, but they distinguish themselves easily. Things seem fun for a bit, then get nastier and nastier. The people are interesting, enough to get me to read the book in one four hour sitting. That’s rare, and makes the book well worth a 3 out of 5. It’s not for everyone, and has a couple flaws, but for horror, survival, or alternate fiction fans, I would recommend it.

Let’s discuss the issues that made me think, EMP and choices. The book assumes a very strong EMP effect. To explain, EMP stands for Electromagnetic pulse. A nuclear device detonated at the right low space height will release a very strong wave of electromagnetic radiation. High voltages passing through the atmosphere will cause electrical equipment to burn out, including power stations and transformers. Is this a real threat? YES! As part of a nuclear test in 1962 called Starfish Prime, a US bomb caused streetlights to fail and other electrical damage in Hawaii, 900 miles away. A different test damaged early communications satellite Telstar 1, and the Soviets also had internal results. Countries built simulators. There’s a government EMP Commission and there was a hearing in 2008.

The problem is knowing exactly how much damage would be dealt by an attack, and at what distance. Unclassified estimates vary widely; I suspect the good stuff is under wraps. In the book, Dr. Forstchen assumes very severe results. Basically everything with computers and electrics is broken, including almost all post-1970 cars and communications equipment. This adds to the desperation of the tale. Unfortunately, it detracts from the plausibility. For instance, there are standards for emergency buildings. The metal shells of cars and buses provide decent cage protection. Even a metal file cabinet is a potential Faraday Cage that might deflect some of the pulse. Don’t get me wrong here. Lots of damage will occur. Long distance power lines are in serious peril. Phones might survive, but the transmission towers will likely be burnt. Things will be a terrible mess. However, the book’s catastrophic mess requires a failure of all communication, including radios and military preparation. That’s a bit much, and a weakness of the text.

The positive counterweight, though, is that the author follows through on consequences. Even in a more moderate scenario, electricity remains unavailable for weeks to months as lines get replaced. People that rely on refrigeration, like those with insulin, will have issues. Phone service does not exist. While the satellites still circle the Earth, we have trouble communicating through them. Things will change. Food delivery will be spotty. Things will change. Cities will have serious trouble. New York and Chicago and Louisville do not exist at this size without transport and electricity. Lots of people would die.

As things fall apart, choices have to be made. Who can enter a community? Who gets fed? How much? It seems strange in a land where we consider taxing soda pop to fight obesity. Yet only 70 years ago, food was not secure. It wouldn’t take long. What about justice?

These are tough questions, and I appreciate how the book ponders these issues. In that way, it’s better than the classic Alas Babylon which has less struggle with government. Things just happened in the 50s; this text has much for political scientists. It’s not easy to read the Day 10 food discussion, or the riots, or the need for communication, or how things degrade. In a year, 80 percent of the town dies. And, as the last chapter points out, that’s not bad. To many people now, when drowned cats merit a big story, this is shocking. For me, it’s not, but if you do fall into the shocked category, you need this more.

It’s dealing with the sadness of life and death, starting one second after.

This was influenza, only influenza.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a potential pandemic flu floating around now, enough to make the US government have a website. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention publishes alerts like “Interim Guidance for People who have Close Contact with Pigs in Non-commercial Settings.” Really. They do. So far, even though as of last week there were 40,000 American cases of H1N1 flu, we seem to have dodged a bullet. So far.

Back in January and February, I decided to start researching the deadliest pandemic of the last century. Part of that was to teach it in Stochastic Processes. My students enjoyed the topic (even though they didn’t like the course that much; it does take a real interest in mathematical modeling to like this stuff.) I put an H1N1 question on their final exam in late April. Who knew? Well, maybe the hypothetical conspiracy plotters, but nobody else. My preparation included reading a well-regarded book on the 1918 pandemic, The Great Influenza – the story of the deadliest pandemic in history – by John M. Barry. What I was looking for was, well, a disease thriller – the story of what happened, when, and how much it hurt. How did the “Spanish flu” get around the world? Did anything work? What was the cost?

In this book, I got that. Unfortunately, I got another basically unrelated book, as well; a history of medical schools and medical research at the end of the 19th century. This is a shame. If you like biographies, full of reports about this scientist not liking that scientist, or this political fight, the other book is for you. There’s lots, and lots, of that. Mr. Berry claims in the Acknowledgments, “This book was initially supposed to be a straightforward story of the deadliest epidemic in human history, told from the perspectives of both scientists who tried to fight it and political leaders who tried to respond to it. … it didn’t seem possible to write about the scientists without exploring the nature of American medicine at this time.”

He’s wrong. Actually, he wrote that book inside this bigger one. That book, well, would be really, really good. It wouldn’t be spectacular, because there are still problems. One is that Mr. Berry has a catchphrase, the title of this post. He repeats it a lot. It’s not a good catchphrase either, unlike, say Where’s the Beef? Like the commercial, there’s a whole lot of gossip bun around the pandemic beef.

Nevertheless, there is a good bit of beef. (If you like the scientist stuff, you’ll find even more.) One is why the flu is called “Spanish”. As Mr. Berry explains, the flu did not start in Spain; the most valid theory is, of all places, Kansas. During World War I, Spain did not practice press censorship, and let disease reports flow freely. Thus the name. Other places, including the good ol’ USA, hid details as much as possible. Part of this was military as described in this PBS interview, but part was also to “prevent panic”. It was interesting. Additionally, the hypothesis about President Wilson at the 1919 Paris peace conference is Chapter 32 is extremely illuminating. And, as a side note, three Congressmen were taken by the flu. These details, and statistics, are invaluable. You can find some at the Stanford page and through Wikipedia, yet the good book provides more context and a better story.

Let me give you the chapters for this better book. Read the Prologue, Chapter 6, 11, 13 through 18, 26 through 35, and the Afterward. That book, by itself, would get a 4. However, combined with the extra scientist social club, reduces The Great Influenza to a 2 out of 5. And I very much hope there will be no book about the current H1N1 pandemic of 2009 to top this one.

Top Books

In the spirit of the “15 Books” meme on Facebook, I decided to look at my bookcase and figure out exactly what books would receive a 5 under the Book Rating System.

As a reminder, here’s what a rating of 5 out of 5 stands for:

Outstanding book. If nonfiction, the book made me learn understand something substantial. If fiction, the book is engrossing enough to bring up in casual conversation. When asked, I would make a general recommendation. There aren’t very many at this level, so I feature these on my bookcases. Sometimes I buy them as gifts.

When I say “there aren’t very many”, I mean it. Looking over my bookshelf, there are only eleven books that would receive a 5. Also, I can’t remember any books I don’t own that would get that rating, since I would try to buy such a book, and now I have enough money to do that.

To make it even more fun, I’m going to list them in reverse order. That makes me just like Casey Kasem, I guess. I thought about adding comments, but instead decided to let the list stand on its own.

• 11. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
• 10. Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam.
• 9. Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh.
• 8. The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal.
• 7. The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis.
• 6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee.
• 5. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson.
• 4. The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis.
• 3. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien.
• 2. Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram.
• 1. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury.

When books get added to this list, I’ll make a note here.

Not Good to Great

I’ve mentioned the book Good to Great before, as it was where I read about The Stockdale Paradox. It’s worth quoting again, as great philosophy.

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

Given my first exposure to the book was this section, I had very high hopes for the remainder of the book. This is the 30th book to get a rating on my book rating system introduced in October 2007. There’s been one top score of 5 in this series, Gang Leader for a Day. Of course, there are other 5’s on my bookcase, like Fahrenheit 451 and The Four Loves. I just read them before this series started.

At the low end, several books have gotten a 1 out of 5, but there have been no zeroes. Good to Great came close, closer than any book beforehand. In the end, though, it squeaks by with a 1 out of 5, primarily because of James Stockdale. I was severely disappointed.

So, what went wrong? Let’s start with the obvious, the decline of mentioned companies. This book was published in 2001, which dates the research to 1999 and 2000. Mr. Collins and his team focused on eleven companies that appeared successful at that time: Abbott, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo. Let’s look at their performance over the last ten years. I’ll use the same metric, stock price. As a comparison, the S&P 500 index was at about 1328 ten years ago. Unlike the NASDAQ, Dow Jones, and house prices, the broader market had less of a boom. It got up about 1500 in 2000, declined into the 800s in 2003, and rebounded into the 1500s last year, before the crash. Right now the index is in the low 900s. In other words, a broader comparative market has lost about 30%, all in the last year.

1. Abbott: from 43 to 45. Above average, not great.
2. Circuit City: bankrupt.
3. Fannie Mae: from 70 to 0.51. Bailed out by the government.
4. Gillette: from mid-40s to about 50 in 2005, when bought by Proctor and Gamble. Average.
5. Kimberly-Clark: from 54 to 52. Above average, not great.
6. Kroger: from 31 to 21. Average. It made the 2000 decline than never really recovered.
7. Nucor: from 11 to 41. Great, taking off in 2004 along with world steel demand.
8. Philip Morris: from 9 to 16. Very good, EXCEPT that they had to rename their company to Altria because of negative press.
9. Pitney Bowes: from 63 to 20. 1999 was their high point, never reattained.
10. Walgreens: from 28 to 28. Another above average consumer products company like Abbott and Kimberly-Clark.
11. Wells Fargo: from 22 to 22. Above average performance. It took some bailout money, but relatively little. It’s considered strong.

Of the 11 companies, three (Nucor, Philip Morris, Wells Fargo) have excellent performance for their industry group. But one of those three had to rename itself and another took government money. Four have been above average but not great, two average, and two went bankrupt. I wouldn’t call this Great Performance. Thus, we’ve hit the first problem. What they found didn’t transfer. It’s more like Good to Great, temporarily, then basically Average.

Searching deeper, there were two huge problems with their approach. The first, more obvious, one is relying on a flawed metric. The research team used Stock Price, likely because it’s the only thing with sufficient history. Unfortunately, Stock Price makes the ultimate judge the Kapitalist Fundamentalists that I detest. Maximizing shareholder value is not what corporations should do. For a team that conducted dozens of interviews with each “winner”, failing to consider the definition of “win” is a shocking flaw.

The second one is subtler and statistical. Mr. Collins and his team defined success numerically, then tried to find explanations for success. A statistician like myself would call this proof by exploration. They used an exploratory technique, looking backward in an observational study, and then tried to prove things from observation. All my students in Math 200 and 205 should know better than that. Unfortunately, this happens so often in Business books that it gets a name: Survivor Bias. The Freakonomics fellows noticed the problem. Nassim Taleb wrote a book about it. There’s an entire website, survivorbias.com, on this problem.
Survivor Bias is a major failing.

Is most of the advice even complicated? Well, no. Let’s summarize: Make sure leaders delegate and focus on company succession, not personal success. Quality people matter more than product. Understand the Stockdale Paradox (the hardest one). Keep to your plan, slow and steady, with a culture of discipline. Outside high tech, technology accelerates but does not transform. Successes and failures turn a flywheel, not a jumpstart. Like most business books, this is not difficult stuff. Then again, it’s business.

Overall, this was a very disappointing use of my money, even with a coupon. I had started with the best three pages, true philosophy from a Hero. And I don’t mean Mr. Collins. My suggestion is to just listen to the Stockdale Paradox piece and ignore the rest. If you want to learn about people for business, read Gang Leader for a Day. Street boss J. T. will teach you more.

Patriots

On Memorial Day, I decided to delve into a different culture and read a book from a former military man. That book, by James Wesley Rawles, has an appropriate title, Patriots. The subtitle gives a strong hint of the content, “A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse.” It’s been very popular in these troubled times, so much so that the Amazon link above is for the Kindle book only. I grabbed my copy from Borders.

I believe in preparation. Based on a recommendation, I’ve been reading Mr. Rawles’s blog, SurvivalBlog, since the fall. Since I believe in fair value, I donated to the site. If you skip over some of the gun articles (training is far more important than caliber), there’s a lot of good information. Everyone should have supplies to stay in their home for about 10 days, and supplies to flee almost immediately if needed. Just in the past year in Louisville, I’ve faced a windstorm, where much of the area was without power for a week, and an ice storm, where much of the area was without power for a week. These sort of things happen. The official government provides ready.gov if you prefer a site without weaponry. I take suggestions from both places.

The primary point of this review, though, is not to talk about survival preparedness. It’s also not to judge the book as a survival manual, though I will take a short digression. There are very good parts, particularly about retreat preparation, weaponry, and military tactics. Given that Mr. Rawles has lots of experience in that subject, this is not surprising. On the other hand, the book provides little guidance on morale and psychology. Most plans have people living in very small groups, with little to no outside contact, for years. Additionally, much comfort, even down to flush toilets, will be gone. Anyone who doesn’t make serious plans for morale, and psychological issues, shows far too much confidence in their people. And you need people and a group to survive.

Anyway, let’s assume you want to read Patriots as a novel, not a survivor’s guide. It’s not very good. In several places, a character spends several pages lecturing. From a plot perspective, five pages on how radio communications are detected are not interesting, or information on stringing together gun magazines, or building claymores. Can these parts be skipped? Well, yes, but it exposes the slimness of the narrative. It will also make the product placements more obvious. It’s like Chuck and Subway, except with the Encyclopedia of Country Living instead of the $5 footlong. I know that the full titles and authors are there for the survival references, but they don’t help the story.

Furthermore, the characters are often indistinguishable. There’s Kevin, Lisa, Todd, Dan, and over a dozen more. While there are some attempts to keep people apart, and a few succeed (like Dan), it doesn’t generally work. Sometimes Mr. Rawles uses a last name for a character, and I found myself forgetting who it was. They certainly don’t have the distinction of Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn in a much better fantasy series. For that matter, they don’t have the distinction of the characters in the Left Behind series. That’s not a high standard.

Speaking of standards, the fact checking is surprisingly lacking, given the updates for the current financial crash of 2008 and the military details. I find it amazing that Mr. Rawles couldn’t get the number of amendments correct. As of 1992, there are 27, not 26, so the new “27th Amendment” mentioned would be impossible. Furthermore, on page 22, Todd and TK are walking back to their dorm in 2006 even though Todd was married by 2001 and TK was a Sears manager by 2002. And having been at the University of Chicago, a lot of their majors do not exist. Finally, the deaths from the “influenza pandemic” make no sense in Chapter 21; there is no model that would give that mortality rate, yet survive long enough to cause the stated number of deaths, but not be known to people in the west, even by rumor. Pandemics don’t work that way.

Finally, I turn to the plot. The first half was interesting, in a post-apocalyptic situation traversed before by Alas Babylon and other tales. While some might find the fundamentalist Christianity simplistic, I didn’t have a problem; complicated systems would be out of fashion. I did have a problem with the Federal invasion. It combines several far right notions such as United Nations control, National ID cards, Marks of the Beast, and martial law. Furthermore, the opponents seem to have a black ninja problem, where they are orders of magnitude less competent than the heroes. For example, the invading forces had air superiority. Why wasn’t there recon? Or aerial bombardment? The US has bombed civilians in many wars. If the opposition is “worse”, why wouldn’t they use these tactics?

There are too many simplifications, errors, and digressions to make this a good novel. It’s a good reference, but as a work of literature, not a survival manual, Patriots gets a 1 out of 5.

Basketball in Dangerous Places

Two similar books get quick reviews tonight: Basketball on Paper by Dean Oliver, and The World’s Most Dangerous Places by Robert Young Pelton.

It seems a little strange to put these books together, so why do I? Because they’re both from a new perspective, and that’s what makes them strong. There are lots of books on basketball, like there are lots of travel guides. You can find shelves of each at Borders. Most, frankly, are boring. Why do I need 20 uplifting autobiographies “with” a secondary author? Why are there 10 guides for each American state? It’s pretty much more of the same.

Basketball on Paper does something different. It tries to quantify the game. There had been, and continues to be, other work on the subject. There’s nowhere near as much as baseball with the Sabermetrics community. Mostly, that’s because baseball is easy to analyze. Almost all actions involve one or two people at a time. It’s pitcher versus hitter, then a fielder and a runner. Everything is separate. That’s what makes some people like baseball, while I find it slow. Basketball, on the other hand, involves ten players moving together, where one failure or success routinely changes several other actions. Basketball is tougher. People still try, and a good starting page is at SonicsCentral.

I’m not going to go into much detail, because if you’re a quantitative basketball fan, you should read the book. If you’re not, you likely won’t. Mr. Oliver is given credit for popularizing the concept of possession, offensive rating, and defensive rating, so it’s good to read to get examples. On the downside, the writing is pedestrian, and there are lots of tables. There are so many tables that my eyes would glaze a bit, and I like this stuff. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to read it all at once? The writing brings this grade down to 2 out of 5.

And if you want just a little detail, here are the key things to remember.

1. The Four Factors are, in order of importance, shooting percentage, turnover percentage, offensive rebounding percentage, and free throws.
2. The best shot attempt is an open layup. The second best attempt is an open three-pointer by a good shooter. The third best outcome is to get fouled and get free throws.
3. Interestingly, jump shots have approximately the same success percentage at all distances from about 6 feet to the three point line. Thus, medium to long two pointers are silly shots.
4. The disadvantage of a contested shot is very large. In one record, open shots went in about 61% of the time while contested shots went in less than 40% of the time.

Better writing, yet on another limited subject, grants Mr. Pelton’s book a 3 out of 5. Dangerous Places does something different. It provides a travel guide on countries that don’t have many of those silly travel books. As such, I learned a lot about North Korea, Afghanistan, Liberia, Yemen, and the rest. There’s good history. One small problem is that the book was published in 2003, so some countries – like Zimbabwe and Iraq – are somewhat out of date. On the other hand, South Africa and the United States still have bad spots.

The best part of the book consists of true stories, “In a Dangerous Place”. Some of the tales are just amazing. Even if you’re not a history or geography person, like I am, these are well worth the time. The Russian TV show, the Mali airport, and Albanian smugglers are all memorable. These are not happy stories; it’s no Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. You need to have a dark sense of humor to like things here, like the convenient list of mercenary companies. If you do, like with basketball, there are great rewards from an unusual approach.

Thinking about dimensions

A romance of many dimensions, says the subtitle to Flatland. It was written in the 1880s, and is out of copyright, so I’m linking to the Project Gutenburg free version. It’s a short read, much talked about by mathematicians. I am not a mathematician, but I’ve heard enough about it, and there’s even a movie with voices offered by a fellow Democrat for Life named Martin Sheen and fellow nerd lover – though somewhat hotter in a bikini – Kristin Bell.

I did notice that the movie has Ms. Bell voicing a hexagon, which is not in keeping with the book. It would surprise me to waste her on the way women are portrayed by Edwin A. Abbott in the written work; the movie crew didn’t, instead choosing to ignore the gender differences in the text. Since I haven’t seen the movie, I will comment only upon the book. Furthermore, I am not evaluating this book as an introduction to dimension and proportionality, a teaching tool. It’s good for that. Instead, I want to comment on the satire and story.

Sometimes, Mr. Abbott is funny or sweet. There’s humor in the visit to Point, a zero-dimensional structure who considers It the entire universe. All outside comments must come from Its thoughts. I thought of people who sometimes act almost as self absorbed as Point. I also thought of sweetness in the description of how the people of Lineland mate. “No, no, neighbourhood is needless for the union of hearts.” For them, it’s about hearing, and distance, and matching male voice with females; courtship can take many weeks, too, until the pure harmony of the marriage chorus is achieved.

On the other hand, in Flatland Women are mere lines – well, very thin parallelograms. They receive almost no schooling, must constantly make noise to prevent a figure from hitting them, and are stuck with just emotion. Each house has a special door for women, to avoid potential entry problems. This is not good. On the other hand, they can use their pointy ends to puncture almost any male figure, including their husbands, a strong inducement to fidelity.

That’s the major part of the satire here, the difference between social classes and genders. British society in the 19th century had strict social structure, where advancement could be made slowly, if at all. In Flatland, triangles can only improve their angles at 0.5 degrees per birth. Regular polygons get to advance faster, one side per generation, but still would take hundreds of years to reach the high dimension of “circles”. Even by British standards, that’s slow. The class system is strong; higher class people do not engage in touch recognition, and in most cases should not even be contacted. (It even holds today at the head of state level, as Michelle Obama caused a great deal of discussion about protocol.) To try to reach a higher class, promising children are often sent to special facilities to be broken and reset. The “Circular Neo-Therapeutic Gymnasium” kills nine out of ten, but apparently it’s worth it to the Flatland classes. To Democrats for Life like Mr. Sheen and myself, though, this would be anathema.

Another modern anathema would be the treatment of women, and I’m not surprised that this was removed from the movie. In Mr. Abbott’s book, women are considered to have lower intelligence to match their lower dimension. They are taught about emotions, with different language. This seems in line with the thoughts of the Victorian era, and its outward restraint against emotion. One might even see a little eugenic critique inside Flatland society, though I’m not sure about that.

The problem with the book, from a 2009 perspective, is that the satire doesn’t make sense. It’s no longer our satire. Of course I don’t like lower classes for women; I strongly prefer multidimensional females with curves. Of course I find such a strong caste system unlikeable. It’s easy to say that, now. Unlike other social critiques such as
Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, this satire has lost its salt, mostly. Thus, as a social critique, Flatland earns a 1 out of 5. The grade as a mathematical teaching tool would be much higher, if you’re looking for that.

Killing the White Swan

Finally, after almost two years, I’ve gotten around to reading the much talked about book The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The term Black Swan has entered financial vocabulary, so it’s good to evaluate the source. Overall, it’s a good term; a Black Swan event is a rare event, hard to predict, that has a large impact. For instance, until the 17th century Europeans thought all swans were white. They are, in Europe. In Australia, they’re not.

Overall, it’s a pretty good book. I’ll award it a 3 out of 5. However, it can be tough to read at times. Dr. Taleb is pompous. Very pompous. He seems to be basically alone in this world. Describing someone, he wants to “put a rat down his shirt.” While I don’t appreciate false humility, either, or too much self depreciation (as in the saddest hoopster), this book would have more power if it was more targeted. A statistician’s review says it well, so I’ll quote Robert Lund in the American Statistician: “reckless at times and subject to grandiose overstatements; the professional statistician will find the book ubiquitously naive.” As a professional statistician, I agree wholeheartedly.

Before I come back to why I agree, let me list what Dr. Taleb gets correct. He is right that many things in this world are not Gaussian or normal, and not subject to the bell shaped 95% cutpoints like the linked applet. There are many things in his Extremistan, particularly those that follow Mandlebrot power laws, and putting them into his Mediocristan is dangerous. Note that by choosing the word Mediocre for the other group, against the currently positive word Extreme, he induces stylistic bias. Who would ever want to be in Mediocristan? Well, except nature with height and growth processes and stuff. So he’s got a correct point, but overreaches.

Another clear point is about the Ludic Fallacy, which notes that real life does not have the same structured randomness of games. Though he had to invent a term for it, the author is correct. Too many introductory examples involve games of chance, cards and dice and roulette wheels. Equal probabilities and independent events are much rarer in reality than Moore and McCabe’s introductory text. In my classes, I make a point about independence, with several reminders of its importance, including the most important one, the test question.

In other words, I do my job as a professional statistician. That’s the big deal here. I know Dr. Taleb has had dealings with the professional statisticians since the publication of this book, since I quoted Dr. Lund from the American Statistician special August 2007 issue on the book. I suspect that he had very few dealings with my kind before. Unfortunately, what passes for “statistics” nowadays mostly comes from economists. Economists, well, are pretty nasty. A friend of mine once said that “Economists are just sociologists with Asperger’s Syndrome.” I replied that I’ve always thought of them as megalomaniac statisticians, or just plain bad ones. Even the so called revolution, this Freakonomics thing, is really just regression analysis, at the second course level. In some places, it’s not even a good second course level, as this blog post acknowledges a mistake and then tries to defend an abortion model with serious interaction problems. Do they not understand saturation or degrees of freedom? I recommend this critique; even though I might not like all the articles from Steve Sailer, he’s demolished Dr. Levitt on this one. It’s too bad he’s not cool enough to get a fancy book. And who knows – maybe I’ll venture into that perilous topic myself, soon.

On page 239 of my hardback edition, Dr. Taleb thinks that in comparison to what he calls dull statistics classes, “Clearly it would have been more beneficial, and certainly more entertaining, to have taken classes in the neurobiology of aesthetics or postcolonial African dance, and this is easy to see empirically.” I should be careful here. Particularly before computers became readily available, statistics courses focused heavily on computation. I’ve seen those books from before roughly 1990; they weren’t as good as the courses of today. Given his age, he likely had one of those older courses. Postcolonial African dance might well be better. I also wish that standard deviation had a name that didn’t imply standards, like how I prefer credible interval to confidence interval. That doesn’t affect the main point, that the true professionals know the problems, and that at least now we’re trying to get those across.

Precision, research, and greater balance could have taken this book from decent to great, so I look in a little frustration at Dr. Taleb’s work. I do have his other book, Fooled by Randomness, which might not show the problems of this one. It won’t be random, or a Black Swan, if I get around to reading that.

Comic Books

Most of the books on this site, and most of the books I read, are rather sad. So is much of what I talk about in this blog. It’s part of my vocation, for one thing. Right now there are books on pandemics, flu and AIDS, waiting to be read. There are also at least two books on the misuse of statistics. Another portion of what I read is about pain in the world. Right now there are books about child soldiers and torture. These make my list because I think that a citizen needs to understand suffering. Though plenty in my life is painful, other parts of the world need explanation.

Not everything I read is sad, though. Science fiction appears from time to time. So do children’s books. In a similar vein, this post summarizes some comic books. The blogroll contains the online comics PhD Comics and xkcd, obviously. In the printed paper, my favorite current works are Get Fuzzy and Frazz. I have all four treasuries of Get Fuzzy, of which The Potpourrific Great Big Bag of Get Fuzzy is the latest. I give this book a 3 out of 5. It’s funny. Bucky Katt is nasty, while Satchel Pooch is sweet, and Rob Wilco as the human tries to keep order. I appreciate the casualness at which dogs and cats can speak; it’s one of the funny parts. Everyone that visits just accepts the anthropomorphism. (And I can use anthropomorphism in my blog, yes! Amazing, it’s even in my spell checker.) I’m not sure if this is true. Dogs in my life are nasty, while some cats at least are nice. Then again, it is a comic book, and they can talk. Things can be different.

I also am a fan of Frazz. I own all three books, of which Frazz 3.1416 is the third. Frazz is set in a Michigan elementary school. Part of its appeal is the pro-education bias. Involved teachers are treated well, while inactivity, major sports, and stupidity get little quarter. Additionally, there’s a really sweet love story with Frazz and Miss Plainwell. I appreciate it a lot, so much so that I’ve previously reviewed the first two books. As before, I suggest this book. It also gets a 3 out of 5.

The third comic book continues one of my favorite TV shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The idea was to continue the stories, but without the budget. The first five issues were collected in The Long Way Home, which I picked up to take a look. My thoughts are mixed. The stories make sense, the characters still have their character, and I was entertained. I particularly liked the last story, a standalone entitled “The Chain”. But something is missing. It’s the medium, I think. Comic books are more reflective, and lose the immediacy and personality of TV. It’s different wit. When I think of the wit of Buffy the TV series, the comic can’t match that. I’m not a serious comic book guy, and it shows here. Buffy gets a 2 out of 5.