This is from many years ago, but I just saw it for the first time. It is Sam Seder doing the “Global Warming Weather Report.” It’s just over a minute long. Take a look:
“It’s gonna feel several degrees stupider than it already is!”
On this day in 1924, the chess Grandmaster David Bronstein was born. In 1951, he made it to the World Chess Championship to challenge Mikhail Botvinnik. And over the course of 24 games, they ended tied with 12 points each—five wins each, and 14 draws. So Botvinnik retained the championship. Garry Kasparov claims that based upon the quality of the play, Bornstein should have won. He was an extremely innovative player and one of the greatest chess writers. And shockingly, he won a major tournament at the age of 70.
John Frankenheimer was born in 1930. He was a great director whose films included a string of three in the early 1960s: Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, and Seven Days in May. He is best known for thrillers, such as Black Sunday. And then there is Ronin. I’m very fond of it: a very intelligent action film. It had some of the best car chases I had ever seen. This included a chase going the wrong way down a freeway. And then, I started seeing that in just about every movie. I’m pretty sure Ronin was the one that started it. Now, I hate to see it. But I still think this is pretty cool. Those other directors are amateurs.
The singer and songwriter Smokey Robinson is 74 today. I don’t have a lot to say other than he really is one of the greatest songwriters ever. Here he is doing “Tears of a Clown”:
Other birthdays: playwright David Garrick (1717); physical chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859); sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876); expressionist painter Gabriele Munter (1877); actor Merle Oberon (1911); actor Lee Marvin (1924); game designer Danielle Bunten Berry (1949); novelist Amy Tan (62); fine actor Jeff Daniels (59); novelist Helen Fielding (56); actor Justine Bateman (48); and another really good actor Benicio del Toro (47).
The day, however, belongs to Nicolaus Copernicus who was born on this day in 1473. He’s the guy who put together the first model of the solar system with the sun in the middle. That was a brilliant insight. I remember a story about student talking to his teacher, “Those primitive people were so stupid to think the sun goes around the earth.” And the teacher replied, “Yes, just imagine how it would have looked if that were true!” The point is that it would look the same. There is nothing obvious about thinking the earth goes around the sun. Indeed, did you see this article, Poll: 26 Percent in US Do Not Know Earth Goes Around Sun. And the funny thing? “[Americans] did better than EU residents on the question about whether Earth moves around the sun.” Go figure.
There’s an interesting thing about Copernicus’ model, though. It wasn’t very successful. He had a brilliant insight, but it still wasn’t right. He had planets moving around the sun in circles. Well, they don’t move in circles. The world had to wait almost a hundred years for Johannes Kepler’s insight that the planets moved in ellipses. (Yes, I know that circles are ellipses!) So all those old models with the earth at the center of the universe might have been complicated, but they were still better at predicting where things would be in the sky. So old Copernicus made a necessary (And difficult!) contribution to knowledge, but all alone, it wasn’t sufficient to improve the practical science.
Also: Copernicus was old. And wise. He waited until he was dying to publish his book. No torture for him! That’s my kind of guy.
Happy birthday Nicolaus Copernicus!
On this day in 1820, the civil rights leader Susan B Anthony was born. She was an amazing woman who did a great deal, including organizing for women’s suffrage, starting the first women’s temperance movement, and founding the journal, The Revolution. She lived to be 86 years old, but unfortunately never saw women get the right to vote. I was fascinated with her when the United States government came out with a dollar coin with her on the face. It was a great coin because of the smaller size, replacing the totally ridiculous Eisenhower dollars. But a lot of people had a problem with it. How dare we celebrate a feminist on our money! What people actually said was that they confused it with the quarter. I don’t accept that; it is far more difficult to tell a dime from a penny by feel. Regardless, the coin was only minted from 1979 to 1981 and then in 1999. In its place, we now have the Sacagawea dollar which I love, partly 
because of the color. (One can do silver-copper coin tricks using the two dollars.) But no one today complains about the size of the dollar, even though it is exactly the same as the Anthony dollar. Regardless, here in California (and Florida, New York, West Virginia and Wisconsin), it is Susan B Anthony Day. So happy Susan B Anthony Day!
John Barrymore was born in 1882. He was one of the great actors. We especially know him for his Shakespearean acting. Here is a bit of a screen test of him performing Hamlet. At the beginning is Orson Welles talking about how great he was. Take my advice: never listen to Welles discuss Shakespeare. He was very good, but when he talks about Shakespeare, it’s drivel. But I think he is quite right about Barrymore. It is the best up to that time. Shakespearean acting has only gotten better, but this is still really good:
Other birthdays: French painter Charles-Andre van Loo (1705); philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748); Romanian painter Ion Andreescu (1850); great mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861); songwriter Walter Donaldson (1893); probably the least interesting of Les Six, Georges Auric (1899); actor Allan Arbus (1918); actor Harvey Korman (1927); actor Claire Bloom (83); screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin (1932); singer-songwriter Melissa Manchester (63); actor Jane Seymour (63); Futurama creator Matt Groening (60); character actor Christopher McDonald (59); and journalist Josh Marshall (45).
The day, however, belongs to Galileo Galilei who was born on this day in 1564. I guess it is best to call him a scientist, although his most important work would now be called physics. I think mostly of his work on basic mechanics showing that gravitational acceleration is constant. This is because size of the gravitational force is proportional to an objects mass, but that is matched by its inertia. This is not a simple concept.
Galileo is probably better known for his enormous impact on astronomy. He was the first person to seriously apply the telescope to the field. And as a result, he saw things others did not, like the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and sun spots. He was also a big proponent of heliocentrism, which got him in a bit of trouble with the Church. And personally, I think if you live your whole life without angering the religious dogmatists, you really haven’t lived.
Happy birthday Galileo Galilei!
Sid Caesar is dead. Unlike a lot of old icons, I actually knew that he was still alive. He was 91. As I get older, I am more and more aware that I’ve died a thousand deaths. When you get into your 90s, are you still the same person? What I’m getting at is the old joke/observation about an ax that has its handle changed and then its head changed. There’s a continuity there, but at the end, it isn’t the same ax. Anyway, Caesar was a funny guy—a bit broad for my tastes, but still funny. It is sad for his family, but the rest of us have all his movies and bad video tape of his shows. He ought to be able to rest in peace; he lived a worthwhile life.
On this day in 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born. He was a very impressive man who did a lot of good. I think that it makes perfect sense that he is such a hero to Barack Obama. I tend to see them very similarly. Neither were especially ideological. Lincoln had greatness forced on him by totally unreasonable southerners. Obama had mediocrity forced on him by totally unreasonable southerners. There are a lot of similarities. The kicker is that Lincoln’s secretary was named Obama, and Obama’s secretary was named Kennedy Lincoln. You can’t make this stuff up! Oh, wait, I guess you can.
Other birthdays: German physicist Heinrich Lenz (1804); novelist George Meredith (1828); labor leader John L Lewis (1880); Russian painter Marie Vassilieff (1884); theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger (1918); great film director Franco Zeffirelli (91); quiz show guy Charles Van Doren (88); actor of sorts Joe Don Baker (78); musician Ray Manzarek (1939); musician Michael McDonald (62); Pretty Good Privacy creator Phil Zimmermann (60); comedian Arsenio Hall (58); and actor Christina Ricci (34).
The day, however, belongs to Charles Darwin who was born on this day in 1809. I could write a whole book just bouncing around things that I associate him with. One example: I was working a Church-run computer lab last night. And in the other room a tutorial session was going on. I noticed that one of the tutors was carrying around a book with a title something like, “Evolution is a Myth.” I thought, “Great. And that’s the tutor!” That isn’t to say that one can’t be a perfectly fine tutor of math while holding such a ridiculous belief. But still, it doesn’t bode well.
A big issue with Darwin is that even most people who accept natural selection don’t really understand it. It is a shockingly simple but powerful idea. You know, I tend to be pretty hard on Richard Dawkins around here. But his books on evolution are really great. I highly recommend them. But by far the biggest honest misunderstanding is that somehow, all species are evolving into us. By this theory, alligators are not as evolved as monkeys. But that’s an honest mistake. The biggest deceitful misunderstanding is that we evolved from chimpanzees. By this logic, animals evolve and then some just stop. So animals were evolving into chimps and then some of them stayed that way but the better ones struggled on and became us. Now, I’m not saying that people don’t actually think this, but it is almost always the result of religious disinformation.
One thing that annoys me about Darwin is how many atheists use evolution to argue God doesn’t exist. That is such a pathetic argument. It does, of course, argue against Creationism. But we really need to be clear about what we are doing. I think it is sad that for both atheists and theists alike, evolution has become theological. It isn’t. It’s science. The only way that it is at all theological is in that many theists get their science from religious texts. Beyond that, we should let it rest.
Happy birthday Charles Darwin!
The great mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli was born in 1700. There are a lot of Bernoullis in the history of science. But Daniel is the guy you’ve actually heard of. He’s the guy who developed Bernoulli’s Principle. This is an application of conservation of energy for fluid flow. Basically: as a fluid flows faster, its pressure goes down. This is brilliantly explained in the image of Venturi Flow on Wikipedia. Bernoulli also made important contributions to statistics.
The great classical composer Joseph Leopold Eybler was born in 1765. He is probably best known today as a friend of Mozart. And it is perhaps fitting that the end of his career came when he had a stroke while conducting Mozart’s Requiem Mass. As a composer, he mostly wrote sacred music. But I’m not in the mood. So here is his Clarinet Concerto in B-Flat Major. It was written in 1798, when Eybler was still very much under the influence of Mozart:
The great novelist Jules Verne was born in 1828. I haven’t ever read him, even in translation. I think. Maybe I did when I was a kid. But I was shocked to read that in the he was probably the most translated author in the world in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, he’s been second after Agatha Christie. So I should pick up one of his books. Around the World in Eighty Days sounds like fun, and it’s free on the Kindle!
Other birthdays: last of the Classical philosophers Proclus (412); satirist and poet Samuel Butler (1612); film director King Vidor (1894); actor Jack Lemmon (1925); musical composer Joe Raposo (1937); actor Nick Nolte (73); singer-songwriter Tom Rush (73); comedian Robert Klein (72); actor Mary Steenburgen (61); and actor Seth Green (40).
The day, however, belongs to the English scholar Robert Burton who was born on this day in 1577. He is best know for being a witty depressive. It was said that when he wasn’t depressed, he was “very merry, facete, and juvenile.” That sounds pretty much like all my closest friends. It also sounds rather like me. And being a depressive, he wanted to know about it and maybe even cure it. So he wrote one of those wonderfully idiosyncratic books that one occasionally delights to find, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Wikipedia describes it as, “Burton’s book consists mostly of a collection of opinions of a multitude of writers, grouped under quaint and old-fashioned divisions; in a solemn tone Burton endeavored to prove indisputable facts by weighty quotations.” It uses all of the “sciences” of the time including “psychology and physiology, but also astronomy, meteorology, and theology, and even astrology and demonology.” And it discussed various topics including “digestion, goblins, the geography of America.” Its digressive style is said to verge on “stream of consciousness.” And it is long. The first edition was 900 pages long, but later editions got longer as he added to it. Burton seems to have been the Jacobean Walt Whitman. He sounds like a complete delight. Reading about him made me feel so much less lonely in the universe.
Happy birthday Robert Burton!
Elephants are amazing animals. I was just reading about them on Wikipedia. They are, for example, one of the few animals to recognize themselves in the mirror. They also fashion objects into tools. For example, “An Asian elephant has been observed modifying branches and using them as flyswatters.” And they seem to feel emotion. Of course, whenever such a claim is made, some scientists start ranting about how we are anthropomorphizing them. This strikes me as very small minded and completely at odds with Darwin. After all, we didn’t get our emotions in a vacuum.
Given all of this, I do wonder about how much we interact with elephants. I’m definitely not keen on circuses and other performing elephants. And at this point, I really don’t know what I think about zoos. On the one hand, elephants don’t seem to live quite as long in captivity as they do in the wild. What’s more, living in a zoo has got to be pretty boring. I’m really not sure that is a life worth living. On the other hand, I’m still scarred from watching an elephant killed by a pride of lions in Planet Earth.
Regardless, it is hard not to be totally enchanted by the news from Texas, Houston Zoo Welcomes 400-Pound Baby Boy Elephant. He is named Duncan and is the son of Shanti, who was in labor only three minutes.[1] This is Shanti’s fourth child in captivity. According to zoo director Rick Barongi, “She’s just a great, perfect mom. Very attentive.”
The wonderful picture above is of Duncan as he learns how to make his 385-pound body walk. It is very hard to be cynical about this birth. Happy birthday Duncan!
[1] Note to God: you must really hate female humans to put them through the terrible birthing process you do. This is why I don’t believe that (If you exist at all!) you are a loving God. You are a total jerk.
H/T: Digby
Last night I watched the creationism debate between Bill Nye (the science guy) and Ken Ham (the Christian nutjob). I had heard that Nye destroyed Ham, but I don’t think that’s true. Nye did a good job, of course. But it was impressive to watch just how slippery Ham was. He, along with the whole young earth creationist movement, has done a great job of developing talking points that sound like real science.
In the past, this was just cherry picked and deceptive claims that things like carbon-14 dating were not accurate. And indeed, that kind of stuff was well on display. But Ham introduced me to something new. Ham pushed an arbitrary distinction between “experimental” science and “historical” science. He claimed that of course creationists believe in experimental science. But they don’t accept historical science.
The basic idea here is that we can’t say how things got to where they are now because no one was around to measure how they were. It actually sounds plausible and I’m sure the creationists have focus grouped the hell out of this talking point. But it makes no sense. They are saying that maybe the laws of the universe were different before the fall. But the same argument could be made of experimental science. Maybe sea level gravity is only 9.8 m/s/s when we’re watching. Maybe when I’m asleep it is half that. How can we know?! It is just an assumption that gravitation is constant.
A critical part of science is inference. When I woke up this morning, everything was wet. The truck was glazed with water, the road was wet, the trees were dripping. But it wasn’t raining. I inferred that it rained last night. But according to Ham, this is improper—it’s historical, not experimental science! Maybe it didn’t rain last night. It could be that a fairy came to my town last night and sprinkled water everywhere.
So when Ham attacks “historical science,” he is attacking science in general. In fact, he is attacking the idea that we can know anything. And that would be fine if he would just admit that. But he won’t. He wants to have it both ways. He is honest enough to admit that he takes it as given that the Bible is inerrant. It is the only fact that cannot be questioned. But on top of that, he will use the idea of science to justify it.
An example of Ham’s thinking is how he dismisses hundreds of years of geological research. Instead of all the evidence pointing to slow changes over vast amounts of time, he thinks that these things just happened as a result of the flood. This is magic thinking. It’s the same as disregarding light scattering and ozone absorption and saying that we have red sunsets because God made it that way to appeal to our sense of beauty. That might be a nice story, but it is nothing that can be built on. It doesn’t tell us about anything other than that one thing.
That isn’t science. It is apologetics. It really isn’t any different than Biblical apologists who harmonize the Bible. For example, there are two stories of the creation of Eve. In one, they were both created at the same time. In the other, Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Any reasonable person would say, “That’s just two creation myths that were documented in the Bible. No mystery there.” But no! For Christian fundamentalists, they must both be literally true. So the apologists came up with Lilith. She was the one created at the same time as Adam. But she was such a feminist harpy that Adam was sad. So God got rid of her and made Stepford wife Eve. Of course, you would think if that happened, it would be included in the Bible. But what’s a fundamentalist to do?
I don’t particularly care that Christian apologists do this. But Ham is soiling science and it makes me angry. As with most modern conservatives, Ham is fundamentally postmodern. He only believes that truth is to be found in his interpretation of the Bible. So everything else—all the tools that humans have developed to find truth—are used in a massive and deceptive effort to prove that the Bible is literally true. And that makes him nothing more than a charlatan.
But the issue is much bigger than religion. I have no doubt that eventually society will get past its belief in Christianity and move on to see it as no more true than myths of Zeus and Odin. So the long term effects of Ham’s work is to devalue honest intellectual discourse. And in the debate, you can see the frustration that Bill Nye is experiencing. He’s engaged in an entirely different process than Ham. For his part, Ham totally undermines his case to any but the true believers. As the debate goes on, he gives up all pretense at debate and simply proselytizes. In the end, it’s rather sad. His overall argument seems to be, “I want to believe silly things and have people still respect me.”
But that doesn’t make Ham and the young earth creationists any less dangerous. He is arguing for the destruction of science, history, and pretty much every other way we have of finding truth. I was personally offended by it all. He repeatedly mentioned the work of three scientists who agreed with him as though that meant something. He claims that you can have biochemistry and gene splicing and still know (not think, know) that humans were created as they now are 6,000 years ago. No you can’t. Humans believed this stuff for a long time and then the evidence from various fields showed that it was wrong. You simply can’t have science if you start with the unquestionable assumption that the Bible is literally true. It poisons science and it poisons society.
Here is the video. I started it 13 minutes in, so you miss the countdown and the Creation Museum advertisement.
I don’t care what they say. Swimming with a 26-foot long whale shark with a mouth that is five feet wide is dangerous. It is also, I’m sure, thrilling. The photo above is from a collection take by marine biologist Simon Pierce and published in GrindTV, Whale Shark About to Eat Diver, Or So It Appears.
The whale shark is the largest fish in existence. In fact, actual whales are the only animals on earth that are bigger than they are. The whale shark in the picture is actually small. The average length is 32 feet, but they can grow to be over 41 feet. And non-confirmed individuals have been estimated to be well over 50 feet. It doesn’t matter. Twenty-six feet is more than long enough impress and terrify me.
It is one of only three sharks that filter feed—the others being the rarely seen megamouth shark and the equally bizarre basking shark. As such, it feeds on plankton and similar foods. To feed in this way, they have roughly 300 tiny teeth and ten filter pads. They are said to be docile, even allowing divers to grab onto them for a free ride. But I can’t get past the notion that these gentle giants could swallow me whole, even though it would doubtless be on accident.
If you’ve seen Planet Earth (And if not, why not?!) you will remember seeing something like this when whale sharks feed:
So I’m going to stay out of the water. But I’m glad there are brave souls out in the world who can provide me with wonderful pictures of these magnificent creatures. They really are beautiful.
I find it profoundly frustrating to talk about global warming. I don’t mind ignorant questions. Ignorant questions lead to informed clarity. What I hate are disingenuous questions. A common question that fits into both categories is, “If There’s Global Warming… Why Is It So Cold?” But I think most people now understand the difference between weather and climate. And they understand the difference between local and global. And they understand that global warming can cause unusual weather that we can’t predict. So when I hear that question, I now assume it is either just a global warming denier or it is someone whose thinking has been polluted by a global warming denier. Regardless, it is a question we must continue to answer.
The follow video answers the question, “If There’s Global Warming… Why Is It So Cold?” In addition to answering the question, the video shows the difference between global warming deniers and the scientific community that overwhelmingly accepts global warming as a fact. The scientist interviewed is not willing to say that the polar vortex is the result of global warming. She says that it is consistent with it, but that’s as far as she will go. Because evidence matters to her.
On the other side, there is nothing but propaganda. I’ve been shocked at what global warming denier scientists (some of whom, like Fred Singer once did good work) are willing to say. The cherry-picking on that side of the debate is an embarrassment. But most of the scientists are not like Singer; most are “scientists”—people with a science background who have spent their whole career working in conservative politics. So when you hear about that small percentage of climate scientists who don’t except global warming, that’s pretty much who they are.
This is why I don’t even like talking about the issue. But I’ve very glad to have this video to send around:
See my article It’s Raining, But Not for Long, for a discussion of how different conservatives think about global warming. It is a progression. Every time their argument becomes untenable, they simply come up with another one.
Last night, I watched a great NOVA episode, Iceman Murder Mystery. It tells the story of the natural mummy Otzi, a man who died 5,300 years ago in the Austrian Central Alps. He appears to have died fairly directly from an arrow that was shot into his back. After that, he either died from the resulting fall, or someone helped by beating on his head. It is amazing how much we know about the man. For example, we know that he had brown eyes and suffered from Lyme disease.
One part of the episode bugged me. Everyone involved just assumed he was murdered. I don’t see it that way at all. Now the great thing about these kinds of investigations is that you can come up with an endless number of theories to suit the facts. Indeed, I think it would make a great writing exercise to take the facts and create a narrative to explain it. I have a number of stories, some of which are epic in scope. He was, after all, 45 years old—he could have traveled a long time to get to that mountain that he died on. But I also have a very simple narrative.
Two words: hunting accident. We know that the diet of the man included cultivated crops as well as Alpine ibex, a large species of goat. So I figure Otzi was a member of a hunting party. It had to be fairly large. The ibex can weigh 200 pounds or more. His body was found at 11,000 feet—two miles above sea level. So the party would have to slaughter the goat and then carry the meat back down the mountain, along with all of their gear. Regardless, you don’t hunt ibex alone. I figure, they were on a hunt and an arrow was carelessly released with tragic consequences.
The reason I like this explanation is that it explains why Otzi was left with all of his stuff, including a very valuable copper ax. When the rest of the party found that Otzi was dead, they were forced to leave the body there. I like the idea that they buried him under rocks (the ground would be frozen) at the scene, and out of respect, they left him with his stuff. Or it could be that they panicked and ran back down to the village. Or, as my father suggested, maybe there were only two of them and the guy who killed Otzi went down to get help so they could bring the body back to the village for burial, only to be unable to find him on return.
The main thing is that all the talk of murder makes it sound too much like a Chalcolithic Columbo episode. The scene of the crime was many miles from the villiage. Otzi had had a very large meal within an hour of his death. All his stuff was left with him so that no one would discover the murder. It sounds far fetched. And as we know from modern life, accidents are far more common than crimes. These were not recreational hunters with high powered rifles. They would have to chase down these ibex and get close. It would involve a lot of logistics, with people getting in each other’s way. Getting hurt and even killed would not be all that unusual.
I will admit, however, that I want it to be an accident. I never want to think that one human intentionally kills another. I know that it does happen. But I want to think that Otzi was killed in a work related accident. I don’t want to think that fate preserved his body for 5,300 years just to remind us of the worse things about us. But I encourage you to watch the episode. It is only 53 minutes long and it is really really good. Regardless of why Otzi died, we see the best of what we humans are in the work done to figure out his life and death by the hundreds of people involved with him over the years.
The standard style on this website is just to replace non-standard English character with the standard English character. So “Otzi” ought to have an umlaut over the “O.” Normally, this would mean the name would be Oetzi in standard English. I don’t know what I should do about this. I am using “Otzi” rather than “Oetzi,” even though I think the latter is probably better.
Michael Meier of The Q Filmcast tweeted out, “What are the chances of attending a meeting with 3 guys named Michael and 1 guy named Miguel?… Seriously, WHAT are chances??” This is like the ultimate invitation to me. It combines the things I most love: movies, math, and showing off. So I tweeted back, “Sadly, I can do that calculation for you…” What I actually meant is that I am a superior human being who of course can do that calculation, but I still have memories of grammar school beatings over such matters.
This is actually a trivial statistics problem, but it isn’t all math so stick with me. What’s more, I am fairly drunk, so who knows what’s coming. (I always maintain the right to edit drunk articles after the fact, but they are always posted along with something like, “Edited to conform to non-drunk standards.” Anyway, here we go.
Start with the assumption that one of the people in the meeting is Michael Meier. There is a 100% chance that any meeting he attends will include someone named “Michael.” So we’re really just dealing with 2 guys named Michael and 1 guy named Miguel. Let’s start slow. What are the odds that Michael is going to have a meeting with just one other guy and he is also going to be named Michael? The odds are whatever the odds are that any random person is going to be named Michael. It turns out that Michael is a really popular name. It has gotten less so over the last 100 years, but it is still really popular. I’ll come back to this. But just understand, the odds of two people named Winnifred meeting up are a hell of a lot less than two Michaels meeting.
So let’s make that percentage—the fraction of people in the United States with the name Michael—the variable M. So if the odds of two Michaels meeting up is M, the odds of three Michaels meeting up would just be M×M. Now let’s make the percentage of people named Miguel be m. In that case, the probability would be M×M×m. Pretty simple, right?
I asked Michael if there were more than four people in the meeting and he said there were not. That was great news! The statistics for 4 Michaels out of a group of 5 people, while higher, requires more math than any of my readers would have put up with. And at this point, I suspect your eyes are glazed over anyway.
When I first made my claim to being able to do the calculation, my only concern was whether I could find statistics on names in the United States. Not only did I find statistics, I found an absolutely fabulous website that uses the last census data to tell you how many people have various names: How Many of Me. It is really cool and you can spend a lot of time on it. Did you know there are ten people in the nation named Bill Clinton? But there are 227 named William Clinton. There are four people named Paul Krugman. There are 387 people named Michael Meier. There are only two people named Frank Moraes and the other is my dad, so suck it!
So I plugged Michael into the database and it turns out there are 4,191,129 people with that name in the US. But Michael is one of those names. I am absolutely sure that at least one of those “Michaels” was really a “Mike.” So I added that: 301,520. But as we all know, any of them could be Mickey (Perhaps a mouse?) or Mitchell (Perhaps Joe Don Baker in disguise?) or something else. But let’s leave it at Michael and Mike. That’s 4,492,649. The current population of the United States is roughly 313.9 million. That means that 1.43% of all Americans are named Michael or Mike.
The great thing about statistics is that it is never that simple, regardless of what you are talking about. You could include the phases of the moon and it is still not that simple. For example, this was a meeting of all guys. There are not a lot of women named Michael. (Note: I named my female chicken Fred, but that’s why people often think I’m “difficult.”) What’s more, people are not evenly distributed. If there were a meeting at a Catholic church, it is likely that there would have been more Michaels and Miguels around. On the other hand, if you were at a Klan meeting, the odds of a Miguel being there are pretty small.
Speaking of Miguel, there are 193,608 of them in the United States. I would have thought there would have been more. There are more Jesuses in America than Miguels. This may explain all the differences of opinions between the different Christian sects. (This is the part of the article where you think, “Yep. He wasn’t lying about being drunk!) Anyway, that means that the chances of you just to run into some person and their name being Miguel is 0.062%. So actually, it’s the Miguel who really makes this an unusual event.
So let’s put it all together:
That is about a 1 in 8 million chance. So it is not common. But exactly how many meetings does Michael have during a year? And how many Michaels are there who might have such a meeting? (A lot as I’ve already discussed. People like me really take the fun out of coincidences!) And notice, this is not four Michaels, it is four sort of Michaels. Actually, it’s three sort of Michaels, because we’ve already established that Michael is absolutely positively going to be in attendance at all the meetings he is in attendance at.
Let me just end by stressing that we are making grand assumptions here. Michael is located in Nashville, TN. Here in California, I personally know two people named Miguel. So I assume that the percentage of people with the name Miguel in Tennessee is much lower than it is here and thus much lower than it is nationally. But regardless, it isn’t a miracle or anything. It isn’t like he had a meeting with three people named Jesus who seemed to have an unlimited supply of booze.
According to the database, there are less than 1,587 people with the first name of Dweezil. I don’t know what that “less than” means; it doesn’t show up when searching for Michael. And most concerning of all, there are (according to the database) exactly 1,587 people with the first name Moon. Is there perhaps a Zappa family bug in the database? No! It is just that when the database can’t seem to find anyone, it says “less than 1,587.” I’m still not clear about the number for Moon. I would think there would be people named that. There are 11,109 people named Sun and 4,761 people named Sunshine. There appear to be no people named Korrok, which raises an interesting question, “Why has the Q Filmcast not done probably the best film I’ve seen in the last year, John Dies at the End?”
It seems the worse my mood gets, the worse the birthdays I have to choose from get. I’ve heard it said that depression is anger targeted inward. I don’t think that’s true. But I do find I have a curious combination of depression and anger. I think you can see that anger in everything I’ve written today. I don’t expect this article to be especially angry. Just short.
On this day in 1832, Horatio Alger was born. He was a very popular writer in the 19th century. He wrote what is charitably called “crap.” Typical kind of story: poor boy goes to rich man’s house in search of employment; rich man has a dog that immediately takes to the poor boy; rich man hires him because of the dog, and it is up, up, and away for the poor boy’s prospects, who probably ends up marrying the rich man’s daughter. It’s exactly the kind of stories that the people wanted to believe during the Gilded Age and exactly the kind of stories the rich wanted the poor to be reading. Today, “Horatio Alger” is a synonym for any kind of unbelievable rags to riches story. In general, we don’t see such stories in their pure form because we are a much more cynical people. (For good reason!) There have been times when there were jobs for the asking. There were times when what most of the Republican Party now believes was true: if you aren’t working, you aren’t trying hard enough. Sorry folks, that’s now no more true than the statement, “Horatio Alger was a great writer!”
Comedian Bill Bailey is 50 today. I know him from Black Books. But he’s a very good stand-up comedian. This bit is pretty funny:
Other birthdays: Dutch landscape painter Jan van Goyen (1598); Italian poet Metastasio (1698); composer Vasily Kalinnikov (1866); biologist Ross Granville Harrison (1870); inventor of my least favorite game Risk, Albert Lamorisse (1922); actor and dancer Gwen Verdon (1925); comedian Charles Nelson Reilly (1931); writer Edmund White (74); actor Julia Louis-Dreyfus (53); actor Penelope Ann Miller (50); and I’m sure a fine actor but he annoys me, Orlando Bloom (37).
The day, however, belongs to the great physicist Wilhelm Wien who was born on this day in 1864. He is a very important figure in our understanding of blackbody radiation. The idea of this is that you can tell what temperature the surface of an object is by the color that it radiates. The sun is yellow and so that means it is roughly 6,000 K. But don’t get confused here: a yellow piece of paper is not 6,000 K; it is yellow because that is the light it reflects not the light it radiates. The piece of paper is at room temperature, which means it radiates light in the IR spectrum which we humans can’t see. Wien deduced “Wien’s displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbody at any temperature from the emission at any one reference temperature.” This, of course, is why it is always difficult to write about scientists. You see, the sun doesn’t just radiate yellow light. After all, where would the blues and the reds come from? What I was talking about was the maximum. The sun radiates its maximum energy at yellow, but there is still a whole lot of blues and reds to have those wonderful sunsets. So Wien was dealing with these distributions. Anyway, blackbody radiation theory is fascinating stuff.
Happy birthday Wilhelm Wien!
