mathbabe

Greetings! Thanks so much to Cathy for having me in to guest blog for her while she visits Haiti! While neither a math pro nor a babe, I do, on occasion confer with Cathy about her posts and contribute a few thoughts of my own about the world on Twitter at @advisoryA. And I also play bluegrass with her most Tuesday nights – so I guess that qualifies me as a substitute.

To start, I thought I’d share some observations about my new neighbor. West 22nd Street, where my family and I live, is a lovely, tree-lined area with a mix of modest townhouses, apartments and an occasional upscale single-family home mixed in.

In early October my street was lined with pink “No Parking Tuesday” signs. Through neighborhood scuttlebutt I learned the reason: President Obama was attending a fundraiser at a home across the street from me. The location of the fundraiser was at what had been, until recently, a modest townhouse owned by an old Chelsea family for decades. In 2012 the building was bought for $4.6 million. It received a lavish renovation and was put on the market a couple of weeks ago for …. $16.5 million (yes, nearly four times the price paid less than 18 months earlier). It’s being marketed by some real estate broker guy who is a regular on a TV show called Million Dollar Listing – i.e. a home flipping show. http://ny.curbed.com/tags/460-west-22nd-street For fun, check out the comments on Curbed.com (which note that a more “reasonable” flip might be $7 or $8 million, the layout of the narrow home is awkward because the dining room is on a different floor from the kitchen and the master bath that is down the hall from the master bedroom.  Plus, there’s a playground pretty much in the backyard and it’s in flood zone A – this area was hit during Hurricane Sandy).

As far as I can tell, the new owners have never lived there – I watched the renovation over the past several months and, since it was put on the market, the only people I’ve noticed inside have come from a stream of of black cars delivering their passengers to apartment viewings.

It didn’t take much effort to discover who was the mastermind behind this audacious exercise in house-flipping: the owners of this lovely home are Bill White and Bryan Eure. White manages to get his name in the paper with some regularity. He’s basically a professional fundraiser. His wiki is…interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_White_(administrator) His big claim to fame is raising funds for, and subsequently managing, the Intrepid Museum. In 2010 he also formed a consulting company called Constellation Group for advice on charitable contributions, etc., and, within no time, he somehow got tangled up in the pay-to-play scandals. He was subpoenaed by then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (hmmm?) and ended up paying $1 million to resolve the mess. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-16/ex-intrepid-president-said-to-settle-cuomo-pension-probe-for-1-million.html A million dollars sounds like a pretty big check and it came with some loss of status, including a “Disgraced” headline from the Daily News (“disgraced ex-head of the Intrepid” http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bill-white-disgraced-ex-head-intrepid-agrees-pay-1-million-settlement-pay-to-play-deal-article-1.443855 ). The New York pay-to-play scandal was pretty ugly and a few notables, including former New York City Comptroller Alan Hevisi, were convicted and sent to prison. White, however, was undeterred and instead, went about ramping up his political mover-and-shaker career. Within a year, his “disgrace” was fully rehabilitated.

Not one to let a romantic occasion go to waste, in 2011 White threw an elaborate, 700 guest wedding extravaganza at the Plaza to commemorate his wedding Bryan Eure. It wasn’t just any wedding – David Boies officiated! http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/nyregion/wedding-of-bill-white-and-bryan-eure-is-extravagant.html http://nypost.com/2011/07/19/my-big-fab-gay-wedding/ And it was filled with luminaries and politicians, including Bill Clinton, both George Bushes, David Patterson, Scott Stringer, Christine Quinn, and, remarkably, White’s former Javert, Andrew Cuomo. Nothing like a wedding to help bury old grudges.

For some reason, White appears to be a bit fickle when it comes to his political affiliation. Despite supposedly being considered for senior military positions in the Obama Administration during Obama’s first term, White presented himself as a Romney supporter in 2012. He was back in the news for withdrawing support, and requesting his contributions back, from Romney in 2012 over Romney’s gay marriage stance http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/14/romney-donor-pulls-support-backs-obama-over-same-sex-marriage/.

White also calls on his political friends to help out the neighborhood sometimes, too. Even though he doesn’t spend much time at his 22nd Street home, White still has strong opinions on the neighborhood. He angrily petitioned Mayor Bloomberg over the CitiBikes station that would be a few feet from his front door. http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140106/chelsea/mayor-bloombergs-friends-emailed-for-help-with-their-citi-bike-woes In an email to his old buddy, he argued that it was just plain unfair that the ugly bike rack would mess up the character of “his” block.

I’d estimate roughly 200 police officers and at least 50 Secret Service officers arrived on Tuesday, October 7th to prepare for the President’s arrival. Security gates were all over the place, the street was closed off to traffic and eventually the police and Secret Service required ID for anyone entering the block (the NY Times had a little commentary about the visit http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/nyregion/before-a-visit-from-obama-a-chelsea-block-goes-on-lockdown.html?_r=0. At one point, the Secret Service came to my door to ask about the open window in the upstairs apartment – apparently it made the snipers (!!) uncomfortable (since my upstairs neighbor was out at the time, I’m not sure how this was resolved). Many thousands of dollars were spent securing this visit. The President showed up, hung out for about an hour and headed out to Greenwich, Connecticut for fundraiser part II. But the good news is Bill White can now say that the President (who he may or may not support, depending on the current tides) broke bread in his house, which should certainly help boost resale value – I bet they don’t have that happen every day on Million Dollar Listing!

The President’s visit was, for me, a rather sad window into the fundraising machine of rich guys and the politicians who need them. As a coda, investigative reporter Roddy Boyd provided an additional glimpse into my millionaire-next-door. As part of his many efforts to help Veterans, White worked as a fundraiser for New York City’s Veteran’s Day parade. Sadly, due to rising costs of throwing a parade, it almost didn’t happen this year.  But thanks to the fundraiser with Obama at White’s house, he managed to scrape enough money together to save the parade. As Roddy notes, there’s a little more to this story. http://observer.com/2014/11/stumbling-up-fifth-avenue/ Just ten years ago, the NY Veteran’s Day parade cost about $35,000 to run. Now, a much more elaborate, televised parade costs more than a million dollars to run each year, in part due to the $570,000 fund-raising contract for our old friend Bill White. Roddy has much more on the ugly sausage-making of charitable fund raising and I highly recommend you check out his article. I eagerly await the arrival of the Russian oligarch or Chinese official who’ll buy White’s house and help make the neighborhood a little more respectable.

Yesterday I read a book written by Carole Marshall which she called Stubborn Hope: Memoir of an Urban Teacher (thanks to Ernest Davis for sending it to me). Just to give you an idea of how quick this read is, I read it before class. I think it took about 1 hour and 10 minutes in all.

In a nutshell, it was the story of a really hard-working and dedicated urban school teacher who learned how to teach reading skills, and prose and poetry writing skills to her poverty-stricken students in the urban Providence, RI area. She develops curriculum, making it relevant to the kids, and gets them to read every night and to aspire to college. The school that she mostly taught at is profiled in this article from the Brown Daily Herald.

She’s a really good writer herself, and she profiles a bunch of her students with enough details to make you feel enormous empathy for their struggles. In other words, she makes this shit very very real. After reading this you stop wondering why we see a strong negative correlation between standardized tests scores and poverty levels, because it is so obvious.

You might want to check out this video to get a satirical idea of what this woman was like and what she was dealing with (hat tip Jenn Rubinovitz):

Here’s the thing. We need nice white ladies in our schools! And of course nice other people too.

But we are presently losing such dedicated people. Carole Marshall, the author of these memoirs, quit teaching after the school system she worked in was taken over by the mindless testing zombies. She describes her experience like this:

After spending years refining strategies for getting my students to become enthusiastic readers and writers on thoughtful, relevant curriculum, I was being forced to teach canned curriculum purchased for millions of dollars from textbook publishers who knew nothing about urban teaching.

School and district administrators roamed the halls and classrooms, taking notes on shiny new iPads, to make sure teachers were on the same page every day as every other teacher in our grade and subject in the district. All the activities we had used in the past to open our students to a world beyond the narrow constraints of their neighborhoods were no longer permitted; they were seen as time wasted. Every path to good teaching was effectively blocked off.

It had become impossible to do the things with students that I believe teachers need to be able to do. What was going on in the classrooms could no longer be called teaching. When I realized that, it was a sad day. At the end of that year, I left teaching.

That was in 2012, I believe. Since then she’s become more aware of the national disaster that is defined by the testing insanity. She even worked for a time with a test prep company based in Florida that was clearly scamming for the $5 million consultant fee and removing cherry-picked students from important classes so the school would look like it had improved based on the arbitrary measure of the month.

We are so used to pointing at examples of bad and defeated teachers and saying that they are the problem, and that a strict and regimented system of curriculum will improve the classrooms for the students of such teachers. And maybe in some cases that is true.

But when we do that we also push out really talented and inspirational teachers like Carole Marshall. It is painful to imagine how many great teachers have left the educational system because of No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top. Come to think of it, that would be a great data journalism project.

Last Friday Gillian Tett ran a profoundly disturbing article in the Financial Times entitled Mapping Crime – Or Stirring Hate? (hat tip Marcos Carreira), which makes me sad to say this given how much respect I normally have for her regarding her coverage of the financial crisis.

In the article, Tett describes the predictive policing model used by the Chicago police force, which told the police where to go to find criminals based on where people had been arrested in the past.

Her article reads like an advertisement for racist profiling. First she deftly and indirectly claims the model is super successful at lowering the murder rate without actually coming out and saying so (since she actually has only correlative evidence):

And when Weis launched the programme in early 2010, together with a clever policeman-cum-computer expert called Brett Goldstein, it delivered impressive results. In the first year the murder rate fell 5 per cent and then continued to tumble. Indeed by the summer of 2011 it looked as if Chicago’s annual death toll would soon drop below 400, the lowest since 1965. “The homicide rates for that summer were just crazy low compared to what we had been,” Weis observes.

 

But then, following his departure from the force, the programme was wound down in late 2011. And, tragically, the murder rate immediately rose again.

Here’s the thing, it’s really hard to actually know why murder rates go up and down. In New York City we’ve been using Stop & Frisk as the violent crime rates have been steadily lowering in this city (and many others), and for a long time Bloomberg took credit for that through the Stop & Frisk practice. But when Stop & Frisk rates went down, murder rates didn’t shoot up. Just saying. And that’s ignoring how reliable the police data is, which is another issue. Let’s take a look at her evidence for a longer time frame:

She’s talking about that small uptick at the end, which to the naked eye could well be statistical noise.

The reason I’m pointing out her bad statistics is that she needs them to set up the following, truly disturbing paragraphs (emphasis mine):

But while racism is rightly deemed unacceptable, computer programs pose more subtle questions. If a spreadsheet forecast has a racial imbalance, is this likely to reinforce existing human biases, or racial profiling? Or is a weather map of crime simply a neutral tool? To put it another way, does the benefit of using predictive policing outweigh any worries about political risk?

 

Personally, I think it does. After all, as the former CPD computer experts point out, the algorithms in themselves are neutral. “This program had absolutely nothing to do with race… but multi-variable equations,” argues Goldstein. Meanwhile, the potential benefits of predictive policing are profound.

No, Gillian Tett, there is no such thing as a neutral tool. No algorithm focused on human behavior is neutral. Anything which is trained on historical human behavior embeds and codifies historical and cultural practices. Specifically, this means that the fact that black Americans are nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession even though the two groups use the drug at similar rates would be seen by such a model (or rather, by the people who deploy the model) as a fact of nature that is neutral and true. But it is in fact a direct consequence of systemic racism.

Put it another way: if we allowed a model to be used for college admissions in 1870, we’d still have 0.7% of women going to college. Thank goodness we didn’t have big data back then!

This is very scary to me, when even Gillian Tett, who famously predicted the financial crisis in 2006, can be fooled. We clearly have a lot of work to do.

Holy crap it’s already been an eventful morning and it’s not even 10am. Aunt Pythia blew a bike tire on the George Washington Bridge and had to walk back across and find the 1 train near 181st street, which was hidden from view. Seriously, it was.

Now, if Aunt Pythia ever asked for advice herself, she would know to carry a spare tire and tools to change a flat. But does Aunt Pythia ever ask for or take advice? I think not. Shame on you, Aunt Pythia, shame on you.

In spite of that obvious flaw, Aunt Pythia is super excited to finally be warming up the advice bus engine. Vroom vroom! Put the pedal to the medal, Auntie P!

As it happens, all the questions are about sex today, and yes that was by design, things this awesomesauce don’t “just happen”. Aunt Pythia makes them happen, please keep this in mind.

After this most ridiculous and sexy ride, please don’t forget to:

please think of something to ask Aunt Pythia at the bottom of the page!

I am almost out of questions!!!

By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.

——

Dearest Aunt Pythia,

I’ve been dating this guy for a couple of months, and we always have a lot of fun when we go out on dates together. We see each other at least once or twice a week, but we’ve only been intimate 4 times. Those 4 times have been great, and I don’t mind moving slowly, but a few nights ago something happened that made me question some things:

After a nice dinner-and-a-movie date, I invited him up for a drink (knowing it was a weekend and he would probably be sleeping over). We watched some Hulu, had a drink or two, and then both declared that we were tired and should move to the bedroom. I slipped into the bathroom to put on something a little more “comfortable” (read: I took my pants off), and when I came back into the room, he was in bed wearing boxers and a t-shirt. I got in bed with him, expecting things to heat up, but instead he FELL ASLEEP! That’s right: he had a smart, funny, beautiful and PANTS-LESS girl lying next to him in bed, and he made no attempts to initiate contact. He slept on one side, I slept on the other, with absolutely zero touching. When we woke up the next morning, he acted like his sweet old self and just said he “passed out” because he was “so tired.”

What’s the deal!? Was he really THAT tired? Is he gay? Is he homeless and needed a bed to crash on!? Or maybe worst of all: is he already so comfortable in this “relationship” that he no longer feels the need to be intimate every time we have a sleep over?

I like this guy a lot, but I also like when guys touch me a lot. Have you ever been through this? Any advice?

Lonely on the bathroom side of the bed

Dear Lonely,

First of all, it’s important to know if this is a one-time, “special occasion” thing or a regular occurrence. If, say, he had competed in a triathlon that day, for example, then it would actually make sense for him to be too tired. On that night.

On the other hand, if he does this regularly – and judging by the numbers you gave me, whereby he has seen you about 20 times but you guys have only gotten down 4 times, there does seem to be some regularity to his reluctance – I’m gonna have to conclude that yes, he’s gay.

Haha, no, just kidding. What it really means is that he’s less sexual than you are. Or that he’s not that into you, although since you are smart, funny, beautiful, and pants-less, it’s hard to really imagine that. There are just so many ways I start imagining that and then the imagining just doesn’t move in that direction at all. Nope, it doesn’t.

Here’s a fun theory, that I’ll just throw out there because “not as sexual as you” is so depressing and final: he’s really into kinky sex but hasn’t gotten the nerve up to tell you. Although, to tell you the truth, I’m not seeing evidence for that. Usually people really into kinky sex are agitated and nervous, and hoping you notice their leather bracelets and suchnot, and they typically don’t accidentally fall asleep. Poop.

So, here’s an idea. When you’re next with him and you want to get sexy, take off your shirt and start rubbing your boobs on him. See if that works. After all, why are you waiting for him to initiate? That’s old fashioned and silly. And that also answers the other question you asked near the end of your letter! Why wait passively when you can make it happen? So yeah, go ahead and make the first move, and see if that works.

And if it doesn’t, then you know with a clear conscience that you’ve given it a valiant effort, and he’s just Not Very Sexual. In which case I suggest you run straight for OK Cupid. Or Tinder. Or my slutty friends’ favorite, HowAboutWe.

Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’ve recently encountered a few men who refuse to wear condoms. One actually said to me: “I’d rather never have sex again than have sex with a condom.” (Spoiler alert: I didn’t have sex with him). I’ve even had guys try to bully me into going bareback by saying things like “Come on, are we in high school?”

What’s the deal? Unless we are in a monogamous situation in which both parties have been tested AND I am regularly taking birth control (or we are ready to have children), there is no way we’re having condomless sex. Aunt Pythia, do you have any go-to sassy remarks I can whip out when confronted with this aversion to safe sex?

Not Obliging Boys Acting Bullyish In Ejaculating Situations

Dear NOBABIES,

HOLY CRAP I LOVE YOUR SIGN-OFF!!!! It’s perfect. I am ordering a plaque with that on it from zazzle.com.

I am also very in love with you for not taking that bullying crap. YOU ARE AWESOME.

And yes, I do have advice. Sex is not defined as vaginal intercourse. Tell him you guys can have sex without vaginal intercourse, and that it’s fine with you because it might even increase the probability of your overall enjoyment (read: more attention to your clitoris). And if he is super interested in vaginal intercourse, he will have to wear a condom. Because that’s how grownups who do not want to monogamous or have children have vaginal intercourse. But again, since there are lots of other ways to enjoy each others’ bodies, it’s all good.

Key phrase: “only middle schoolers define sex so narrowly as vaginal intercourse! Hahaha, can you IMAGINE!?!” Conversation over.

UPDATE: use condoms during oral sex as well to avoid oral HPV or gonorrhea!

Aunt Pythia

——

Aunt Pythia,

Thanks for all the love. I owe you many hugs. Share with me your take on an approach for the mid-life male discussing the warm-and-fuzzy male experience of age-related sexual dysfunction with a new female partner.

To maximize my affectionate partner’s satisfaction level, I’m fine with my future use of vitamin V (or Cialis or whatever’s been approved), but maybe the relationship honesty/trust thing is also served with a moment of “this stuff happens too.” My last girlfriend, a very loving, lovely, talented woman (also a clinical pharmacist) did not seem able to process the facts of male life-cycle physiology, instead framing the issue as “you’ve lost interest in me,” which cranked up the performance pressure.

Maybe that didn’t help the sex=fun equation & it definitely didn’t help the relationship. I think a plan to focus on showing more interest in multiple ways in the future is called for. But maybe it’s a good moment for some Auntie insight.

Mid-Life Laughs Every Minute

Dear Mid-Life Laughs,

First of all, here’s some more love and hugs.

Next, let’s talk about sex. Here’s the thing about Vitamin V: I’m so glad it exists. It’s another tool in the sex toolbox, sitting there right next to KY Jelly and the feather duster.

Every post needs at least one picture.

Is there a female version of Vitamin V? Not sure, and maybe I could go on a rant about that, but not today. Instead, I want to spend today appreciating just how much fun we can all have if we are understanding and forgiving and loving and sexy.

I think the new lady will – or should – understand the difference between the will and the reality of such things, especially if your words are consistently positive regarding the former, and especially if you go ahead and prepare yourself with a complete toolbox, including the above pictured feather duster. In other words, make it about her pleasure. Who can resist that? Answer: nobody.

Good luck!

Auntie P

——

Hi lovely Auntie P,

This is really good, so I thought I’d share.

Someone recently shared with me their list of “books that changed my life”. The first one I’m reading is called “Passionate Marriage” and has indeed the potential to be life-changing. It is a synthesis of sex therapy and marital counseling supposed to help one enhance their sex life. That sounds theoretical but I suggest you pick it up if you haven’t already.

Since I’m actually supposed to ask a question and cannot merely plug my latest page-turner, here are two, totally unrelated.

1. Does Auntie P have a list of books that changed her life and can she, in her transfinite wisdom, share that list with her readers?
2. What would you say constitutes “great sex”?

By the way, I loved your bit about everyone having crushes on one another. The world is such a beautiful place. You’re doing your part. I love you for that.

Getting Reads On Wishlist

Dear GROW,

I love you too! And thanks for the book suggestion, I will definitely check that out. After all, who doesn’t want an enhanced sex life? Answer: nobody.

As for the questions, let me think about it after I look up the word “transfinite”…

OK I’m back, and still somewhat confused, but I’ll let it pass.

1. Here’s the thing, I can’t remember any book I’ve ever read. For some reason I have an excellent memory for ideas but not people, and remembering where I first heard an idea is nearly impossible for me. I know that’s crazy but it’s true. If I had to say which book affected me the most, I’d have to say The Brothers Karamazov, when I was 15, but I only remember how much I loved the book, not anything about the actual content. Well, I do remember the brothers names and their general characters, but not much more. In general, though, I like books that make me think differently and challenge my assumptions. And I don’t like books with scenes in which people are mean to children.
2. This one is easy. Great sex is when both people feel great about it. It is characterized by generosity, empathy, and fun. Not so different, really, from a great dinner or a great bike ride with someone.

Hey, readers, what are your answers to these questions?

Warmly,

Aunt Pythia

——

Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!

So, Jeff Larson from ProPublica came yesterday to talk to us at the Lede Program, and damn that guy is awesome.

Jeff Larson, my data journalism hero!

First, he showed us his work with the ProPublica Message Machine, where they first crowdsourced, then reverse engineered Obama’s political targeting algorithm. Turns out they used decision trees for that, so we got to talk about decision trees. But since it was an awesome project important to democracy, we also got to talk about democracy.

After that lengthy discussion, Jeff told us about using clustering algorithms to find interesting emails in foreign languages (and in particular, to sort out the spam). He mentioned both cosine similarity and k-means, which was cool because the Lede students already knew about those, and for a moment the class was like, “hey we can do this!” and it was true.

But just then, he showed us how to bypass captcha pages, at least 90% of the time, using neural networks. He seemed to somehow remain humble whilst explaining that he did this over a lunch break. Then the class was like, “holy shit this guy is a crazy genius!” and that was true too. 

Then Jeff led the entire program downtown to the ProPublica offices and gave us a tour of the office, and some of the other data journalists came in and told us what they were up to, which was super awesome but also top secret so I can’t tell you anything else about it. Suffice it to say they were all very awesome and that only one of them had formal CS training (Jeff was a lit major!), so the day was overall very inspiring and thought provoking.

Next time I’m tried for a criminal act, I think I’d like to be tried as a big bank.

Then I can pay a smallish fine for my misdeeds – pocket change for me, a cost of doing business really – and be assured that none of my business partners will stop hanging out with me or stop doing business with me, and in fact all punishments will likely be waived.

In any case, I’d prefer not to be tried as a poor person, where I’d likely be charged money I don’t have for my free lawyer, for any time I spend in jail, and possibly extra for a full jury. And if I didn’t have the money I’d have to spend extra time in jail, until I came up with the money I don’t have.

And since all people are equal under the law, even corporations, it shouldn’t matter who I choose to be, so I choose to be a big bank.

Periodically you have people conducting surveys to prove how dumb people are. Questions are of the form: Is Germany in Africa? Is the earth less than 1000 years old?

I hate these surveys, and I’m usually able to ignore these obnoxious and unscientific nature of them, except when they also ask the following question: Does the sun go around the earth?

Here’s my reproduction of the imaginary conversation if I encounter such a pollster:

Pollster: Does the sun go around the earth?

Me: It depends on your frame of reference, but yes, if I’m standing on the earth, and I look up in the sky, I will observe the sun going around the earth in a wobbly path, although before I let you go I need to make the point that it would be quite a bit simpler to understand the model of the solar system whereby the earth and other planets revolve around the sun and spin while they do so.

Pollster: Yes or no question, ma’am, what’s it gonna be?

Me: Yes, I guess.

Pollster: You are so ignorant!

Kind of awesome to be in Boston today.

Now that summer is here, it’s time to unschool ourselves.

At the beginning of every school year, I ask my students to consider the question, “What is the purpose of education?”  Most students understand from experience that schooling is at least in part an exercise in obedience to authority, in conformity to expectations, in bureaucracy, in knowing your place in the social and academic hierarchy. As one astute 14-year-old put it bluntly, “We’re here to be ranked and sorted.”

I shudder at the thought that my role as a teacher is to sort the winners from the losers. Like most educators, I’m aiming for a loftier mission: to unleash the curiosity and capacity for wonder that are inborn in each of us. Ironically, that mission might be best accomplished in the summer time, in the context of leisure, when the mind is at rest and at play, free from the strictures and dictates of institutional schooling.

At the end of every school year, I ask my students, “What will you think about when you are not being told what to think about? Are you prepared to trade the comforts of intellectual obedience for the risks of intellectual independence? How will you pursue your curiosities? What sets you on fire intellectually, and how will you fan those flames? What will you write feverishly in your Book of Questions?”  These are the same questions we must ask ourselves as educators, as people modeling intellectual engagement, as propagandists for the Life of the Mind.

What ignites my curiosity, reliably, is insects. I just got my hands on a compound stereoscope and some live stick insects and I have the whole summer ahead of me.

What ignites your curiosity? 

A girl considers insects under a microscope at the new Gallery of Natural Sciences at the Oakland Museum of California.  Photo by Becky Jaffe

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”  – Dorothy Parker

Dear Readers,

I hope you know I miss you as much as you miss me.

For the past few days I’ve been in sunny friendly Stockholm. In my defense, I’m suffering badly from jetlag. Since I left New York last Thursday I’ve had one good night’s sleep and about 3 naps. My youngest son has an ear infection which is making him miserable, and so I’m kind of stuck at home with the kids while Johan temporarily works at the nearby KTH math department.

But honestly, traveling, even with kids, and even with jetlag, is no excuse to take off so much time from blogging. I didn’t even announce beforehand I’d be going away because I’d planned to blog every day anyway.

Here’s my confession: the real reason I haven’t blogged is because I’ve fallen into a Northern European funk.

Let me explain. Being here in gorgeous sunny Stockholm is kind of like lying back in a cloud. It’s so soft, so bereft of the natural tension and energy of New York, that you just feel like knitting all day and drinking coffee. And then, when you can’t sleep and it’s still light out at midnight, you feel like knitting some more. I’m almost done with a sweater I didn’t even have the yarn for until Saturday.

Not that I’m complaining, exactly – the Swedish people I’ve met are incredibly nice. So nice in fact that it’s almost become a personal challenge I’ve given myself to see what makes them tick.

For example, they don’t seem to value their time like we do in New York. There are lines for everything here, and although I can appreciate an organized line myself now and again, this is a different matter – it’s kind of a national pasttime.

For example, to gain entrance to an amusement park yesterday, my sons and I stood in line for 30 minutes. Then we tried to get onto some rides, but it turns out you have to stand in a second, separate line inside the park for another 30 minutes to buy tickets for the rides. Woohoo! Another line! I seemed to be the only person in line who was crazed by the system.

When I finally got to the ticket window and confronted the ticket seller in my polite-but-impatient New York way, he explained that it was the same system that the park had opened with back in 1830 or something. Naturally I felt incredibly honored to be taking part in such a hallowed ritual, as I explained to him.

Let’s talk Star Trek comparisons for a moment. There’s a spectrum of represented civilizations, from oppressed penal colonies on the one hand, where everyone’s dirty and wearing rags, but even so there’s always a shockingly articulate and thoughtful representatives, to ideal utopias on the other, where everyone’s incredibly fit and beautiful, bounding about without a care in the world (although often also hiding a dark secret – perhaps they sap the life energy from a slave race hidden underground?).

I’d have to put Stockholm and its ridiculously gorgeous citizenry firmly on the utopia end of the Star Trek spectrum, with a few inconsistent details, namely that, unlike in Star Trek, they still exchange money (although not for their high quality medical care) and that, despite their utopian existence, they don’t seem to have the requisite dirty secret. Of course I say that while temporarily residing in the Upper West Side equivalent of Stockholm, and not as an unemployed immigrant youth in the suburbs.

In any case, I’m coming back in a few days, and I’m looking forward to the friction, the hot grimy subway cars, and of course the beloved controversy over citibikes. Aunt Pythia, who missed her column this past Saturday, is also chomping at the bit (with some help from guest advice columnist Cousin Lily!), so stay tuned for that too.

XOXOX,

Cathy

Today I want to share a story with permission from my 10-year-old son.

There’s a bully in his school, a girl who is known to get other kids, boys and girls, together for the express purpose of choosing random victims and insulting them (his phrase is “dis”).

He claims to counteract this behavior by getting together his own posse of “nerd boys” and forming what he calls a compliment gang, where they essentially follow around the above dis gang and say things like, “Hey! I like your shoes!”.

He also enjoys challenging the ringleader to a dance-off, where he demonstrates absurd moves a la Chris Farley:

Yesterday morning when I got to my office, where I’ve been doing a temporary consulting gig, I was surprised to learn that I’d been working in the same room with Aaron Swartz for the past 3 weeks.

The company is called ThoughtWorks, and I’d learned about it through my last company, where some of the best developers had come from the “ThoughtWorks family,” and one of them was still going back to the office every week to work on a volunteer coding project which uses technology to help find missing children. And that’s not all.

The first time I formally met the ThoughtWorkers was on a retreat in lower Manhattan, when I came as an Occupier to pitch a web app to help people find a credit union. I got immediate response, and they quickly formed a team of developers and product people to help our Occupy group build the app (for unrelated reasons this project has stalled, namely we couldn’t find a long-term home for the app inside the credit union community).

So it wasn’t that surprising to learn that they’d hired Aaron 9 months ago, knowing full well what legal problems he was having, understanding and valuing his activist activities, and hiring him on with a new project aimed to promote justice.

It just made me wish I’d introduced myself to everyone last week rather than yesterday, when we were talking in sadness and anger at losing him. As I said yesterday, it speaks well of ThoughtWorks that they’d made a home for Aaron, and I am proud to be working there now, even if it’s only for a short time.

They expressed a desire to carry on in Aaron’s name, which of course different people will go about in different ways. But if you ask me, that means promoting justice and fair access to resources through scrappy technology, broadly understood. Because as I’ve learned, he was a generalist of the best kind when it came to working towards a fairer society.

It’s time for another possibly final installment of Aunt Pythia’s advice; if you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.

And most importantly, please submit your question at the bottom of this column, I need questions! In fact I’m pretty much going to answer all my remaining questions today, just to show you how much I need questions. So this will be the last installment of Aunt Pythia unless I get new questions.

From last time, I asked about the etiquette of ignoring Elsevier referee requests from the perspective of an editor:

Aunt Pythia,

If an editor of an Elsevier journal asks you to referee a paper, wouldn’t it be the norm to decline the request instead of leaving it unanswered, or does Gowers’s revolution includes that anyone who has not joined for one reason or another should be shunned and considered a pariah?

Trapped Editor

The answers were pretty clear: etiquette demands we say why we’re not doing it. If you haven’t got an actual refusal, you’re dealing with a lazy-ass, not a political activist.

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

Every time I say I admire how Lionel Messi plays for Barcelona and Argentina, my husband says it is a crush. According to my husband, women cannot admire men without them mixing up some lust or crush or impure love. What do you say?

novembertwentyeleven

Dear 11/11,

I agree with your husband, but at the same time I don’t see any problem whatsoever with having a crush on Lionel Messi, he’s hot:

In general I project onto others what I have experienced internally, so I would always assume a crush when it comes to a strapping young male athlete, yes. I may be wrong, but even if you insist I am, I will suspect I’m right. But what does it matter really?

I hope that helps,

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

Dear Aunt Pythia, How much do you tip on to go orders?

Outrageous in Oakland

Dear Outrageous,

What?! I don’t tip on to-go orders at all. If I’m standing there an picking up my own food from a restaurant I kind of don’t think they need extra money for all the service they’re providing me.

If you mean on delivery, then I tip at a rounded-up 10% rate to the nearest dollar, with a $5 minimum. One time I tipped less than this and a belligerent deliverer refused to leave. It was a learning experience.

AP

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

Dear Aunt Pythia, as an alpha female are you able to fall in love?

Happy Brownian

Dear Happy,

What a bizarre question. But I’m going to answer it anyway.

Yes, I definitely fall in love, but since you asked I’m going to throw in that I don’t expect love to be magical, to find a soul mate, or to have my partner complete me in some weird way. I find that kind of romantic notion utterly weird and unattractive and it’s never made sense to me why people would even desire that loss of self. I’m tempted to think this is related to my being alpha, but I’m not sure.

For me true love means finding someone you still want to hang out with and are still surprised by 17 years after you met them, even though they never learned to play bridge.

AP

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

Do you know you give a new meaning to the acronym MILF?

DrunkGuy

Dear DrunkGuy,

Now that you’ve sobered up, can you be more specific as to the “new meaning” part? For now I’ll assume you mean “Momma I’d like to Fund (for her open model initiative)”.

Aunt Pythia

Again, please ask questions, I’m out.

Note: it is okay to recycle old Dan Savage questions: I have no ethics here.

Yesterday there was a reporter from CBS Morning News looking around for a quirky fun statistician or mathematician to talk about the Powerball lottery, which is worth more than $500 million right now. I thought about doing it and accumulated some cute facts I might want to say on air:

• It costs $2 to play.
• If you took away the grand prize, a ticket is worth 36 cents in expectation (there are 9 ways to win with prizes ranging from $4 to $1 million).
• The chance of winning grand prize is one in about 175,000,000.
• So when the prize goes over $175 million, that’s worth $1 in expectation.
• So if the prize is twice that, at $350 million, that’s worth $2 in expectation.
• Right now the prize is $500 million, so the tickets are worth more than $2 in expectation.
• Even so, the chances of being hit by lightening in a given year is something like 1,000,000, so 175 times more likely than winning the lottery

In general, the expected payoff for playing the lottery is well below the price. And keep in mind that if you win, almost half goes to taxes. I am super busy trying to write, so I ended up helping find someone else for the interview: Jared Lander. I hope he has fun.

If you look a bit further into the lottery system, you’ll find some questionable information. For example, lotteries are super regressive: poor people spend more money than rich people on lotteries, and way more if you think of it as a percentage of their income.

One thing that didn’t occur to me yesterday but would have been nice to try, and came to me via my friend Aaron, is to suggest that instead of “investing” their $2 in a lottery, people might consider investing it in the Rolling Jubilee. Here are some reasons:

• The payoff is larger than the investment by construction. You never pay more than $1 for $1 of debt.
• It’s similar to the lottery in that people are anonymously chosen and their debts are removed.
• The taxes on the benefits are nonexistent, at least as we understand the taxcode, because it’s a gift.

It would be interesting to see how the mindset would change if people were spending money to anonymously remove debt from each other rather than to win a jackpot. Not as flashy, perhaps, but maybe more stimulative to the economy. Note: an estimated $50 billion was spent on lotteries in 2010. That’s a lot of debt.

Today I’m posting my friend Becky’s poem about wasting time on a hobby you love. I spent the day at a yarn festival admiring hand-spun, dyed, and knit sweaters that cost about 5 times as much money and infinitely more time than the machine-made ones you can buy in any clothing store. I believe there’s no economic theory that could possibly explain why thousands of other people were just as excited as I was to be there.

——

What pastime could be less economically productive?

Owl swivels her tufted attention,
fixing her severity
on a silent stirring
in the fraying field
a mute meditation
just beyond
my upturned incomprehension.

What activity could be of less social value?

Hawk tears into hare
with his Swiss Army face,
unblinkingly slices
the limp sinew of snow,
a leap of fur
a moment before.

What hobby could be of less measurable benefit?

Egret unfolds her fistful of light,
lifts her improbable wings,
no metaphor for an angel
but the real deal –
You can see for yourself
how Spirit fancies feathers.

What avocation could be a more fervent waste of time?

Only Prayer –
Hummingbird’s eggs are a pair of pearl earrings
nestled in a pocket of lichen and silk –
and Love,
Loon’s lone lament.

It’s high time I tell you guys about my favorite blog, Effing Dykes.

Why now? Well, I’ve wanted to write a post about body image like Effing Dykes’ The Body Electric ever since I started this blog (ever since I turned 10, actually). But I couldn’t get it right. Not in a million years could I have written something so beautiful or so right. So I’m really grateful she has written it. Please read and enjoy.

That url again: http://effingdykes.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-body-electric.html

Note: I’ve stolen the catchy phrase “live and let live, motherfuckers” (can you say “phrase of the week”?) from that post, as well as this picture, which reminds me of my wordpress profile pic as well as all of my friends from high school:

p.s. I had a wardrobe crisis last week when I realized I only owned one ugly plaid flannel shirt, but luckily Old Navy has an ugly plaid flannel shirt sale going on.

I know I’m not alone when I say, thank god school starts next week. These kids need to be back in school.

Not that I don’t adore the little lovemuffins, or that I don’t enjoy spending time with them, or that I enjoy hearing them whine about homework. It’s been great, and we’ve watched quite a few good movies in the past few days (for some reason they didn’t enjoy “12 Angry Men” or “Contact” as much as they should have, though).

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy for them to have summer vacation. I just wish we could all take a pill about a week before school actually starts that puts us in a coma for exactly one week. Is that too much to ask?

It wouldn’t help to make summer one week shorter, either. That would just move up the insanity one week sooner. No good. We need that pill.

I’m not employed right now, and I’m trying to find time to write and to plan my future. But it’s kind of hard to do that when my three sons are actively coming up with ways to simultaneously talk louder than anyone knew was humanly possible and to fight ferociously about such things like who gets to play with the cardboard boxes from the last Fresh Direct delivery.

I’m not gonna lie, I’ll be glad when they’re gone. I’m counting the hours. T minus 166.

After a long night of vodkas and karaoke, there’s one sure method for feeling brand new once again, namely listening to Empire State of Mind, really loud, over and over.

At least I hope so.

p.s. The first year anniversary of mathbabe.org is coming up next Monday, please come up with suggestions for how to celebrate!

I’m reading a book called “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” which explains how people first make moral decisions, then use their brains to argue those decisions.

It also promises to explain how you can actually change people’s minds, so I’m looking forward to that.

My goal of reading this is to understand how good, moral people can really believe some things that seem just so outrageous and illogical to me. I want to know when it makes sense to have a difficult conversation and how to approach it. I’ll tell you how that goes.

But every now and then I lose faith in the idea that those outrageous ideas come from an earnestly moral place. And one example came from my son, who is 12.

If you have a 12-year-old, or if you’ve ever been a 12-year-old, you may remember that they speak somewhat hyperbolically. So when mine told me there’s someone in Wisconsin making it illegal to be a single parent, I thought he was making it up.

But then he found this article for me. I was dumbfounded, and he said I’d have to blog about it since he was right and I was wrong. So here I am.

This just seems so so ass backwards on so so many levels, especially when you think about how it would go down if it became law. Do we get the fathers in trouble too? What if we don’t know who the father is? Do we make it illegal to have unprotected sex in the first place with someone you aren’t married to?

Beyond the crazy idea of where this would stop, I always get upset when I see vulnerable people further abused. If this guy can make a case that kids of single moms are more at risk for various things, why not take that as a cue to give them more support (rather than punishing them)?

This is a guest post by Michael Thaddeus.

When President Obama spoke at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio, on Wednesday, he said, “Somebody gave me an education. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Michelle wasn’t. But somebody gave us a chance.” [Minute 9:24 on video.] He has made similar remarks numerous times, including as early as 2009.

But when smirking reporter Steve Doocy quoted the President to Mitt Romney on Fox News, he added three words: “Unlike some people, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.” [Minute 3:39 on video.]

Those three words, “unlike some people,” were a complete fabrication. President Obama never said them or anything like them. The extra words make the President sound snide, as if he were mocking Romney.

Where did these extra words come from? Steve Doocy seemingly made them up out of whole cloth. Are reporters really supposed to do that?

What happened next? Philip Rucker at the Washington Post “reported” the story on Thursday, but he made no effort to check the fabricated quote against the primary sources, easily available online. Instead, he put Fox’s words directly into the mouth of President Obama. Are reporters really supposed to do that? I e-mailed him and the Post editors to request a correction, but he hasn’t answered, and guess what, the false quote is still there.

Update: the Washington Post has made a correction.

Then what happened? The New York Post devoted one of its two Friday editorials to slamming Obama for taunting Romney. They called him “cynical,” “misguided,” and “snotty.” Well, of course he sounded snotty! That’s because the Post used the snotty quote concocted by their colleagues at Fox News! Are newspapers really supposed to do that?

When I pointed this out to the editorial staff at the Post on Friday, they replied, “we’d be happy to consider running a letter to the editor on this subject, if you’d care to write one.” Great! But what’s the catch? “I couldn’t guarantee that we could run it.” What odds do you give me? Meanwhile, even though a prominent editorial in the Post is devoted to denouncing the President for saying something that he didn’t really say, there seem to be no plans for a correction or retraction.

So there you have it. One branch of the Murdoch empire concocts a snotty quote, supposedly from Barack Hussein Obama. Another branch vilifies him for supposedly saying the snotty thing that they themselves concocted. Meanwhile, the fabricated quote continues to reverberate in the echo chamber of the right-wing blogosphere. And thanks to the Washington Post, it will soon be as good as true.

Let’s grant that these three little words are a petty mendacity by the Iraq War standards to which we’ve become accustomed. And let’s grant that Obama’s speechwriters are shrewd and were hardly unaware of the contrast with Romney when they wrote the “silver spoon” line. Still, what makes Murdoch newspapers and TV stations think they can fabricate quotes, enclose them in quotation marks, attribute them to the President of the United States, and get away with it? It’s pretty shocking when you think about it.