Emanuel Derman's Blog

Die Antwoord: Part Deux

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:17:00 --0100

Is it possible, that despite my normally impeccable standards I was in unseemly haste and unseemly taste to embrace Die Antwoord quite so urgently? It may be so. I was overcome by sentimentality/pride at hearing English spoken with a heavy South African accent without embarrassment. Plus provinciality, the excitement of seeing someone from your small town make good in the capital. Wikipedia tells me that Ninja of Die Antwoord is maybe 46 years old, and an accomplished guy before this. Die Antwoord is funny, and is closest to Ali G doing Eminem.

Die Antwoord (pronounced Dee Unt-Voord)

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:18:00 --0100

About six months ago my nephew in South Africa sent me a link to what he warned me was a rude video. I took a look briefly and it was kind of funny. Then the other day in The Times I saw a positive review of a South African band performing explicit songs on Governors' Island, and putting two and two together, I realized they were the band my nephew pointed out. I just checked them out on the internet and suddenly got quite patriotically sentimental. Most foreign bands try hard to sound American. I listened to a Stones song on the car radio the other day (Wild Horses and then You Can't Always Get What You Want) and was struck by how American they sounded. It's effective, but it's a kind of envy and inauthenticity nevertheless. Everyone in show business tries to sound like they come from the center. What I liked in my brief visit to Die Antwoord (it means The Answer in Afrikaans) is their unashamed localness. They're confident enough to not try to adjust their vocabulary and references to be understandable by strangers. Their website is really funny, at least to me -- a kind of South African rap performed by what seem to be (what were called) "poor whites" when I lived there. They're unashamedly (actually proudly) trashy. They swear in a very local patois. Actually, I may be being fooled: they are pretty professional and so this kind of white trash patina may be an act, I don't know. I once read The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey and was impressed, in addition to the plot, by his unselfconscious use of an Australian milieu. If you write a book set in London you don't have to explain to the reader what Bond St is. He treated Sydney the same way twenty years ago. And Die Antwoord seem to treat South Africa similarly. Of course, South Africa isn't any more the unknown cultural place it was when I lived there. When I came to New York you couldn't buy a travel book on South Africa. Now there are ones on Cape Town alone. Listening to their website, I was charmed by the South African familiar high-school dirty-talk flavor of Die Antwoord. I never particularly liked rap, but this was local stuff and ingrained in me , and I suddenly could glimpse the charm of rap to people for whom the references were familiar too.

The Misguided Center of the Universe

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:13:00 --0100

On the east side of Central Park West, on the side of the road heading north, is a narrow bike lane which I recently made use of. Since there is only one bike lane for both sides of Central Park West, I figured it was OK to use it going south. It's meant for bikes going in both directions, I said to myself. So I did. This morning I rode up to Columbia going north on the same lane. A few blocks up, I saw a man on a bicycle riding south on it towards me. An immediate warm flush of irritation coursed through my body as I saw him inconveniencing me by going the wrong way. So much for rationality and world peace.

Movie Connections

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:19:00 --0100

I watched Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass with Natalie Wood and a very young un-arrogant Warren Beatty this weekend, streaming Netflix. I remember it being around when I was a kid but never saw it then. It's very good, and very unAmerican in its not so happy (not unhappy) ending. It seemed to me an American version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg -- the same sad realism -- and then I discovered that it was made three years earlier, so I wonder if the latter is a French version of Splendor. Both good. Elia Kazan's novel The Arrangement is worth a read too, fades away towards the end after a very good start.

SECsy Beast

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:22:00 --0100

There is something odd about the strategy of the SEC's settlement of charges related to Abacus. They had four possible strategies: 1. Keep charges against the employee, keep charges against the firm. SEC might lose and look stupid. 2. Settle with the employee, settle with the firm, let them both go back to work. Sounds sensible to save face if you think they can't win. 3. Settle with the employee, keep charges against the firm. A common strategy: going easy on small fish to go after bigger ones. 4. Keep charges against the individual, settle with the firm and let them get back to work. What's their rationale here? Picking on someone your own size?

The Mills of God

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:39:00 --0100

In the summer after a long day's work a not-so-young man's mind turns to cigarettes. I like to buy a pack, smoke one or two, and then throw it away to avoid future temptation. I set out to do this last Tuesday. A very occasional smoker, I went into the nearest corner grocery store and bought a pack of Marlboro Lites that set me back ? $14. I still think of $7 as being a shockingly high price for a pack in NYC. The last time I bought a pack I paid somewhere around $10. What is going on here? If you smoke a pack a day, that's $5,000 per annum. This is surely going to not result in increased tax revenues for long. When I grew up in South Africa I loved the smell of cigarettes and knew I was going to smoke as soon as I could. Somewhere around the age of 16 I started on menthols whose brand name I can't remember. I never smoked a lot. At some point I splurged on Mills that came from England in beautiful last-your-whole-life tin cases of yellow metal. Players were pretty cool too, and Sobranie. Imported, they cost twice what Peter Stuyvesant or Ransom or local Viceroy (red box for the filter, green for the plain) cost, but they seemed worth it, I convinced myself. There were and are lots of poor people in South Africa, and so cigarettes came in a luscious variety of containers to match your lifetstyle. Cylindrical tins of fifties; flat big double-decker boxes of 30s; flat boxes or packs of twenties; smaller boxes of 10s; and cute little boxes of 5s that sometimes were placed as freebies on dining tables at weddings and barmitzvahs. And finally, blessedly, you could go into grocery stores and buy ONE cigarette in a variety of brands kept loose in a tin near the counter. (Those days may be coming again too, given the $14 price. It's now cheaper to buy a cigar than to buy one cigarette and throw the pack away.) When I was back in Cape Town last Xmas they still sold single cigarettes, but they cost more like a Rand or so now. Cigarettes came in a luscious variety of styles too. Filter was filter. But then there was plain, no filter at all. And most cool, cork, which was cork-tipped, literally, a bit of cork on the lip-end of the cigarette to prevent it from sticking to your lips, but no filter at all. And the accoutrements of the smoking life were great too. My sister's boyfriend smoked Viceroy Green 30s, and used the back of the flat box as a Filofax, writing his reminders on the large white surface and then copying them over from pack to pack. How cool was that? We live in a poorer world when it costs so much to indulge our addictions. __________ On a related note, I have carried around in my electronic filofax for years a quote that apparently comes from Hegel that says "The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom." I used to believe in free will and liked this quote, though it refers to the progressive extension of political freedom to unpropertied men, women, and eventually animals. But lately I have been reading bits of Spinoza and been impressed by his argument that people are not really free to act, only "free" to follow their unasked for desires. It took thousands of years to figure out the laws behind simple things like inanimate planets. We haven't lived long enough yet to discover the laws describing all matter, of which we are a part. His amendment to Hegel would be The history of our knowledge of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of our lack of freedom.

Quantity vs Quality

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 18:34:00 --0100

Richard Bookstaber has an interesting but I think short-sighted analysis of scoring in the Saturday WSJ at The Scoring Problem. He argues that the number of points scored in a game should be such that the error due to random fluctuations in skill is small enough to not change the result most of the time, but not so small that people get bored waiting for the game to end. He concludes that baseball and American football are somewhere near the sweet spot, and that tennis has too many point, soccer too few. His numerical analysis ignores many of the elements of human drama that make sport worth watching. I dislike the episodic nature of baseball and American football, so filled with commercial breaks that they are indeed the ultimate capitalist games. American football with its specialized massed armies switching from offense to defense and its weird bulked-up uniforms is closest to ritualized war conducted by bureaucrats from the sidelines. I like fluidity. I also like the triumphs, disappointments and catharsis of life encapsulated in a shorter time frame. Tennis is just about perfect; if one player is much better than another, it ends quickly; if two people are more or less equally matched there are phenomenal reversals of fortune in which character and tenacity play the major role, as they do in life. Also what's nice about tennis is that you can't break the rules tactically to score an advantage. That's what I dislike about basketball. Even cricket, with the possibility of test match draws that should in principle be dull, is exciting as one person tries to save an entire team from failure by simply staying at his post. And again, breaking the rules doesn't help you. Bookstaber dislikes soccer's penalty shootouts. He thinks it makes the outcome of a low-scoring sport in which a random fluctuation in scores can give you victory even more random, and the triumph of randomness offends him. But it's not simply the triumph of randomness; a penalty shootout is a test of fortitude and concentration under stress with some element of randomness. There are times in life when that matters most.

Ad Ventures

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:16:00 --0100

I recently entered a competition to create "a pithy ad" for the New York Review of Books Classifieds, and won a half-bottle of distinguished wine (not yet delivered) for my honorable-mention tongue-in-cheek entry: "FANNIE MAE with troubled assets, bored with Freddie Mac, seeks well-regulated stimulus package from counterparty too big to fail. No cash for clunkers." Though the NYRB listed the winning ads as competition winners in their print edition, in their online edition at http://www.nybooks.com/classified, for reasons known only to them, they simply listed the ads with all the others, as though all were genuine. To my initial surprise, I have therefore received quite a bunch of propositions, some risque, some not, mostly from self-admitted upper west siders, who are definitely a good-looking and pretty fearless bunch as far as I can tell from the unrequested photos they sent. Things are looking up for America.

UnPC Scientists

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:52:00 --0100

Thanks to Dave Edwards for a link to this comment by Michio Kaku: "As you know, I work in something called String Theory which makes the statement that we are reading the mind of God. It?s based on music or little vibrating strings thus giving us particles that we see in nature. The laws of chemistry that we struggled with in high school would be the melodies that you can play on these vibrating strings. The Universe would be a symphony of these vibrating strings and the mind of God that Einstein wrote about at length would be cosmic music resonating through this nirvana? through this 11 dimensional hyperspace?that would be the mind of God. We physicists are the only scientists who can say the word ?God? and not blush. The fact of the matter is that we are dealing with the cosmic questions of existence and meaning." This reminds me of Keynes's speech about Newton, from which I quote: Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty - just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.

Uruguay a Ghanaf^*

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 22:59:00 --0100

In cricket, if a batsman illegally interposes his legs between the ball and wickets, the umpire, if he judges that the ball would have hit the wickets, rules the batsman out "LBW" -- Leg Before Wicket. If cricket were soccer, the batsmen wouldn't be out; instead, the umpire would have given the bowler a free throw at the wicket. If soccer were cricket, Ghana would have beaten Uruguay. _____ * http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ganef

Moles

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:20:00 --0100

Could the Russian penetration of the US have gone deeper than we thought? Kagan Geithner Bernanke Summers Vilsack Romer

Financial Metaphors

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 16:28:00 --0100

Years ago I used to admire the literate double-entendre ads for people seeking people in the New York Review of Books, and wrote a blog entry about them: Masculin-Feminin A few weeks ago the NYRB announced a competition asking you to compose a "pithy personal ad". I received an Honorable Mention and the promise of a half bottle of wine "of distinguished vintage" for this one, which appears in the latest issue: "FANNIE MAE with troubled assets, bored with Freddie Mac, seeks well-regulated stimulus package from counterparty too big to fail. No cash for clunkers."

The Droid, Gurgling

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 03:32:00 --0100

My Droid, I reported a few days ago, jitterbugged ceaselessly for 5 days while I was in the Caribbean, where, from the moment of my arrival, it responded only to phantom input. I received a bunch of kind emails from people with similar problems who exchanged theirs for Blackberries. Prepared for the worst, I boarded a plane to New York, ready to confront Verizon and start all over again with a mint Droid or a totally different phone. But within minutes the jitter slowly began to fade away. I conclude that it was the humidity. It was indeed unbelievably damp where I was, inside and out; nothing would dry. Presumably, the touchscreen's electrical conductivity got screwed up. Nevertheless, I don't want to be too forgiving. The fact it that while my Droid malfunctioned, I was surrounded by people merrily iPhoning away with no problem. My iPad too was jitterfree. Go figure.

A Short Moral Tale

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:34:00 --0100

Once upon a time a lady who loved animals took a vacation at an upscale island hotel, part of a chain offering cheap promotional rates to entice customers to a new location where the local staff still needed training. On the hotel grounds lived a grey cat that belonged to no one. The cat was skinny but healthy-looking. When people congregated at the outdoor bar the cat approached quietly and miaowed, asking for food. But the cat was well-behaved and wary, and seemed to understood that making a nuisance of itself would be counterproductive. So no one paid much attention to the cat and it lived in tentative coexistence with the hotel, fending for itself. One day the lady who loved animals fed the cat a bit of her tuna baguette; on another day she gave it scraps of turkey and bacon from a club sandwich. The cat was so hungry that it even ate french fries, though it rejected bread. Being kind, the lady then bought some tins of cat food in a local supermercado. The next time she went to the outdoor bar, she took along the cat food, opened a tin, and gave it to the cat, who devoured it. The lady cleaned up carefully and deposited the empty can in the garbage. No one was bothered. But a man wearing long trousers and a tie and carrying a clipboard, part of the mainland management of the chain, was visiting the island that day, checking to see on how well the newly trained local employees were performing their tasks. He saw the stray cat being fed. He spoke quietly to the staff at the bar. A little later the grey cat was observed being deposited into a plastic soft-drink crate which was then covered with a towel, and then placed on a shelf in the bar supply hut. The cat miaowed plaintively and then soon fell silent. The lady asked what was happening. The bar tender said that the local humane society had been called and would come to pick up the cat. She gave the bar tender her last can of cat food to send with the cat to the humane society, and they placed it on top of the towel on top of the crate. A few hours later the crate was gone. Sometimes a little help can do a lot of harm.

The Invisible Hand

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:01:00 --0100

I hesitate to report on this for fear of being pitied and mocked, but honestly compels. If, like me, you are the proud owner of a Verizon-Motorola-Google Droid, you will be interested to know that its synchronization problems that cause the entire machine to seize up, its dumb search function that cannot even find appointments in its own calendar, and other sundry design problems are dwarfed by a new one I've discovered: The Invisible Hand! Lest you think I am the only poor soul so afflicted, I recommend you google or bing "motorola android touch screen jitter". This is the situation. Sometimes, the Droid screen starts to jitter, as though stroked by invisible touches from some phantom Dybbuk trying to arouse it. It looks as though it is suffering endless and continual touch screen input. The screen scrolls up and down, left and right, opens up the picture gallery, displays menus, asks you to enter data, ceaselessly. Needless to say, this makes looking at your calendar or dialing a phone number an impossibility. Often, it makes unlocking the screen and using the smartphone in any way at all a non-event. I've experienced this occasionally over the past few months, and it seemed to happen after I put the phone in my pocket. I thought that maybe it was accumulating touches from my pocket lining and then trying to parse them. Trying to kick it out of its Parkinsonian tremors, I eventually removed the battery, but when I re-inserted it the behavior continued. I thought perhaps that, being a smartphone, it buffered all its touchscreen inputs, and that even after I put in the battery again, it was still trying to parse the meaningless strokes it experienced in my pocket. Usually, after a few hours, it seemed, the buffer emptied. But this may have been my fantasy. For the past day or two my phone has been in extremis, trembling at invisible touches that seem to resume even after a quiet night spent batteryless. I googled the string above and discovered with some relief that I am not the only one with this problem. People similarly afflicted seem to be divided as to whether this is a software problem or a hardware problem (something to do with high humidity and the electrocapacitive touch screen). Ours not to reason why, but the iPad and the iPhone don't seem to have similar problems. To paraphrase a slogan about dogs and cats I saw in a store recently, iPhones have owners, Droids have staff.