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Underneath the ice in suspension
Dec. 4th, 2006 11:44 pm
Currently at UW: -7.1. High today: -3.6.
It always amazes me--well, each of the last few years, it has amazed me--how instantly the world looks normal covered in snow. And I always think: what do the birds, and the squirrels, think of this? This has got to be the worst thing that has ever happened. Life is terrible now. Maybe. (I sure get that feeling about the penned-up swans, anyway, of which the two adults have now been segregated from the half-dozen young ones. They were all just sitting there on the ground. The young ones were peeping. Everything is gone from the pond, which is maybe two-thirds frozen over, except the seagulls, which, I think, look bigger--fluffed out, maybe. (Last week, the warm-up roused the carp, which were mucking around near the shore for the first time I'd since since, probably, the beginning of October.) Among the larger zoo mammals, only the deer were out of the barn. One was trying to eat a stick, and the other seemed to be trying to gnaw moss off some logs. One emu was lying there in the snow. Every time I say hello to them now--"Hello, emu," I say--I wonder if they recognize me. The two turkeys, as usual, were perched on rails. Their naked heads must be cold.)
Real life is out there somewhere ... but I know my luck too well. Three anecdotes on "real life":
1. At Thanksgiving, I told my sister and brother-in-law about my little data-monkey spin and how I seemed to be getting ridiculously overpaid, on an hourly basis, for it, and my brother-in-law said to me something like, you'd better enjoy it, because it won't happen in the real world.
2. In Todd Jones's column for yahoo baseball (Todd Jones being a pitcher for the Tigers), a bit after the World Series, he wrote that this is the time of year when baseball players get back to real life.
3. After Bob Rae was knocked off the ballot the other day, he said to the media: "This is politics, not real life." (That was the Post's quote-of-the-convention.)
The first was just kind of perplexing--I mean, how far do I have to go to get to the real world? I had thought that having to do stuff I hate for no other reason than that it seems like I have to do it was far enough, but apparently not. The second was aggravating in the way it is when professional athletes say that death and destruction shows how much what they do really doesn't matter. (You know, it occurs to me now, I've been vaguely thinking, nobody says that kind of stuff about art--but there is all this crap about how people stopped reading fiction after September 11th, too. Not that what they stopped reading has a whole lot, necessarily, to do with art.) The third, though, is just dismaying. "For we are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live."
It's too bad I didn't say, back in the summer, when it looked to me like Dion was the one who was most likely going to win, that Dion would win. On the other hand, it's a good thing I didn't say, on Thursday, when I would've been surprised if Rae didn't win, that Rae would win. (And I have to say, it is pretty amazing that all that old Liberal firepower lined up behind Rae was, as it turned out, worth just more than a quarter of the vote on his last ballot. It's also pretty amazing that the Post, today, is characterizing Dion as the anti-Liberal-establishment choice. Andrew Coyne, particularly, who is practically gushing about the guy.)
So here we go with those prediction problems again. Last weekend, L.'s father was on about how the Jays were making a big mistake not re-signing Greg Zaun (who is, really, a very limited player anyway, but never mind), and I said they would re-sign Greg Zaun. Now, as it turns out, they did re-sign Greg Zaun, but only after Rod Barajas, who they thought they had signed, backed out of the deal. So here we are again, with another Gettier-analogous prediction: justified and true, but only true by accident. Was that a good prediction? Well--isn't a good prediction just a reasonably well-justified prediction? So, this is a good prediction that, additionally, came true ... but only accidentally. There's something wrong with this prediction that wouldn't have been wrong with it if the Rod Barajas pseudo-signing hadn't intervened.
(I get annoyed all the time when people mock weather forecasters, but here's the problem: contemporary meteorologists are incredibly good at predicting where all the weather systems are going to be in a week, but what's still very difficult to do with a large degree of confidence is to predict what this weather system, currently over the Pacific, is going to do next week, when it's roughly over Ohio, to the weather in Kitchener. And it can make a huge difference to the weather in Kitchener if the system ends up over Kentucky instead of Ohio, in which case the forecasters will have gotten the basics just about right, and the details way wrong.)
It occurred to me the other day that there is an obvious way to get around the problem of electing the candidate nobody really likes while still taking into account that most people might hate the candidate who's liked by the most people. It's obvious insofar as I have been aware for practically my whole conscious life of an election system that works this way, but for some reason I'd never thought of applying it to politics. And that system is the system they use for baseball awards: you have, say, three votes, and your first choice gets three points, your second two, and your third one. (That's how the Cy Young voting works. There's more choices for the MVPs.) For the Liberal leadership vote, you could've just ranked them, 1 through 8. And to keep people from "powering up" their ballots by just picking one--which, otherwise, is what they would do--you could either count as spoiled any ballot that didn't have all eight, or you could make the maximum number of points on any given ballot the number of candidates listed on the ballot. Using that kind of system--if you had to rank all eight, anyway--I'm pretty sure Rae would've won.
Of course, that kind of system is too complicated to expect ordinary people to understand it. Only geniuses like sports writers could figure it out. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to sort through the irony there, because I'm not too sure about it myself.)
It always amazes me--well, each of the last few years, it has amazed me--how instantly the world looks normal covered in snow. And I always think: what do the birds, and the squirrels, think of this? This has got to be the worst thing that has ever happened. Life is terrible now. Maybe. (I sure get that feeling about the penned-up swans, anyway, of which the two adults have now been segregated from the half-dozen young ones. They were all just sitting there on the ground. The young ones were peeping. Everything is gone from the pond, which is maybe two-thirds frozen over, except the seagulls, which, I think, look bigger--fluffed out, maybe. (Last week, the warm-up roused the carp, which were mucking around near the shore for the first time I'd since since, probably, the beginning of October.) Among the larger zoo mammals, only the deer were out of the barn. One was trying to eat a stick, and the other seemed to be trying to gnaw moss off some logs. One emu was lying there in the snow. Every time I say hello to them now--"Hello, emu," I say--I wonder if they recognize me. The two turkeys, as usual, were perched on rails. Their naked heads must be cold.)
Real life is out there somewhere ... but I know my luck too well. Three anecdotes on "real life":
1. At Thanksgiving, I told my sister and brother-in-law about my little data-monkey spin and how I seemed to be getting ridiculously overpaid, on an hourly basis, for it, and my brother-in-law said to me something like, you'd better enjoy it, because it won't happen in the real world.
2. In Todd Jones's column for yahoo baseball (Todd Jones being a pitcher for the Tigers), a bit after the World Series, he wrote that this is the time of year when baseball players get back to real life.
3. After Bob Rae was knocked off the ballot the other day, he said to the media: "This is politics, not real life." (That was the Post's quote-of-the-convention.)
The first was just kind of perplexing--I mean, how far do I have to go to get to the real world? I had thought that having to do stuff I hate for no other reason than that it seems like I have to do it was far enough, but apparently not. The second was aggravating in the way it is when professional athletes say that death and destruction shows how much what they do really doesn't matter. (You know, it occurs to me now, I've been vaguely thinking, nobody says that kind of stuff about art--but there is all this crap about how people stopped reading fiction after September 11th, too. Not that what they stopped reading has a whole lot, necessarily, to do with art.) The third, though, is just dismaying. "For we are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live."
It's too bad I didn't say, back in the summer, when it looked to me like Dion was the one who was most likely going to win, that Dion would win. On the other hand, it's a good thing I didn't say, on Thursday, when I would've been surprised if Rae didn't win, that Rae would win. (And I have to say, it is pretty amazing that all that old Liberal firepower lined up behind Rae was, as it turned out, worth just more than a quarter of the vote on his last ballot. It's also pretty amazing that the Post, today, is characterizing Dion as the anti-Liberal-establishment choice. Andrew Coyne, particularly, who is practically gushing about the guy.)
So here we go with those prediction problems again. Last weekend, L.'s father was on about how the Jays were making a big mistake not re-signing Greg Zaun (who is, really, a very limited player anyway, but never mind), and I said they would re-sign Greg Zaun. Now, as it turns out, they did re-sign Greg Zaun, but only after Rod Barajas, who they thought they had signed, backed out of the deal. So here we are again, with another Gettier-analogous prediction: justified and true, but only true by accident. Was that a good prediction? Well--isn't a good prediction just a reasonably well-justified prediction? So, this is a good prediction that, additionally, came true ... but only accidentally. There's something wrong with this prediction that wouldn't have been wrong with it if the Rod Barajas pseudo-signing hadn't intervened.
(I get annoyed all the time when people mock weather forecasters, but here's the problem: contemporary meteorologists are incredibly good at predicting where all the weather systems are going to be in a week, but what's still very difficult to do with a large degree of confidence is to predict what this weather system, currently over the Pacific, is going to do next week, when it's roughly over Ohio, to the weather in Kitchener. And it can make a huge difference to the weather in Kitchener if the system ends up over Kentucky instead of Ohio, in which case the forecasters will have gotten the basics just about right, and the details way wrong.)
It occurred to me the other day that there is an obvious way to get around the problem of electing the candidate nobody really likes while still taking into account that most people might hate the candidate who's liked by the most people. It's obvious insofar as I have been aware for practically my whole conscious life of an election system that works this way, but for some reason I'd never thought of applying it to politics. And that system is the system they use for baseball awards: you have, say, three votes, and your first choice gets three points, your second two, and your third one. (That's how the Cy Young voting works. There's more choices for the MVPs.) For the Liberal leadership vote, you could've just ranked them, 1 through 8. And to keep people from "powering up" their ballots by just picking one--which, otherwise, is what they would do--you could either count as spoiled any ballot that didn't have all eight, or you could make the maximum number of points on any given ballot the number of candidates listed on the ballot. Using that kind of system--if you had to rank all eight, anyway--I'm pretty sure Rae would've won.
Of course, that kind of system is too complicated to expect ordinary people to understand it. Only geniuses like sports writers could figure it out. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to sort through the irony there, because I'm not too sure about it myself.)
