The Mean Streets: Private Eye Stories.

     Bill Pronzini & Martin Greenberg. The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories (1988) The PI story is quintessentially American. Since about 1950, writers in other countries have tried their hand at it, but my reading suggests that they capture the bleak existentialism of the PI tale best with police officers, perhaps because the PI in most of the US has a larger scope of action than in Europe.
     The editors offer these tales in chronological order by author birth dates. A couple are duds, not because of the plots but because of the writing. Whether first or third person, it’s the PI’s off-hand observations about the weather, the characters’ faces, the smells and sounds of morning-after bars, that create the ambience which convinces us that these dark fantasies are true. That’s a style that’s easy to parody and difficult to do well.
     All the expected authors are here, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Sue Grafton, and so on, as well as some I know only from reviews. A wonderful potato-chip book, you read one story, and you want to read the next one just to taste that dark and near-despairing view of life again.
     Recommended, if you can find a copy. Numerous typos mar an otherwise near-perfect collection: the effect of early use of spell-checking, no doubt. ***

Oil Cartel, anyone?

Today's New York Times reports that OPEC and Russia will be meeting (probably) to discuss a freeze on pumping oil, and perhaps exercise "market discipline."

What is market discipline? An agreement among sellers to control prices. Which happens to be illegal everywhere. Well among the G20, anyway. So why is OPEC allowed to get away with it?

The Limits of Knowledge

 Theory, Model, Algorithm, and the Limits of Knowledge

Three terms that are often used interchangeably. They do have something in common, we’ll see what it is after an attempt to differentiate them, by describing how what they refer to differs.

Framework: The world we live in is “reality”. We interact with it in various ways. As we grow from infancy to adulthood, we develop various methods of predicting how reality works so that we can get what we need and want. Explicit ideas about how reality works are the theories on which we base our actions. We reason about the state of reality right now so that we can change it to suit ourselves. For example, we plant seeds when we figure the weather is favourable so that we get tomatoes a couple of months later. We add fertiliser and soil conditioners and water to ensure that the tomatoes will grow. Those actions are based on a bundle of ideas and observations that form a more or less coherent theory about how tomatoes grow from seeds.

Theory: An explanation of how something works the way it does. It’s what you get when you test a hypothesis, which is a more or less speculative explanation of some observation(s). A good hypothesis links the observation(s) to some existing explanation, and predicts additional observation(s). If those predictions are proved true, then the hypothesis is confirmed and becomes a theory. A good theory implies or suggests further hypotheses, which in turn imply new observations. When a theory is applied to some practical problem, we get a model. That, and the desire to just figure things out, are what drives science and engineering.

Model: An explanation that can be used to predict how some part of reality will work. We use this term because a conceptual model about growing tomatoes is analogous to a physical model of, say, a steam locomotive. A scale model is not a replica, it is something that looks like, and in a limited way works like its prototype. The model locomotive may operate on steam as the prototype does, but even so, there will be compromises. E.g., the thickness of the boiler shell will not be to scale for that would make it too weak to contain the necessary steam pressure. And so on.

We use both models and theories to plan what to do so as to get some desired result. The difference is subtle. We test a theory’s predictions in order to discover its limits, so that if necessary we can modify it or even replace it. We use a model within its limits to control some aspect of reality as much as possible. We may use a model to test a theory; an experiment is a model constructed from that part of a theory that we wish to test. It’s not easy to derive a model from a theory: models also have to be tested.

Both models and theories are true insofar as they work. When a model becomes a precise set of rules, it becomes an algorithm.

Algorithm: A set of procedures applied to some inputs that will produce outputs in a predictable way. Thus, “long division” is an algorithm because it describes how to manipulate the input numbers (divisor and dividend) to get the answer (quotient). A recipe for a toasted cheese sandwich is an algorithm because it describes how to manipulate the inputs (ingredients and  heating device) so as to get an output (tasty sandwich). And so on.

Algorithms are everywhere. They are especially handy for determining future values of present states. In this sense, an algorithm is a knowledge machine: input information about “this thing here and now”, turn the crank, and you get information about “this thing somewhere, somewhen, somehow else”.

If the above comments make sense, we may see a model as a set of interrelated algorithms, and a theory then becomes a set of validated and interconnected models.

And that brings us to what they have in common: All three are modes of gaining new knowledge. All three operate on the same fundamental principle: “If you do this, you will find out that”. None of them “describe reality”. They describe only how we may observe certain aspects of reality. Which ones? Those that the theory or model or algorithm “is about.” What “is about” means is not easy to say. An example will explain (as far as the example applies, that is):

We may use Newton’s laws of motion to build a model that calculates the course of a rocket launched towards Jupiter. If we know its mass and its velocity, the varying gravitational forces of the Moon and Mars, the trajectory of the rocket, etc, we can calculate, and recalculate, its course to whatever precision we like. But the model will tell us nothing about the health of the crew, if any. If we want to know that, we need another (and more complicated and less certain) model. The model cannot tell us what the rocket “really is”, only how it interacts with gravitational fields and the reaction forces of its engines. If we want to know other things about it, we must use other models. What’s more, even to monitor the course of the rocket, we have to use other models.

Thus all theories, all models, all algorithms are knowledge engines. They are epistemological devices. But they are limited. They can’t tell us what some entity really is, only how we can interact with it, and what will happen when we do so. Even the notion of “entity” is fundamentally epistemological: An entity is a more or less consistent bundle of expected interactions. If any of them are missing or unexpected, we doubt that we are interacting with that entity. It may be an hallucination, or a dream, or a fake, or merely an image of the entity

Kant was right, I think: There is no way to know reality in itself. That doesn’t mean there is no reality “out there”. It just means that we can know only our interactions with it. That we can know even that much is, I think, an even greater puzzle than what it is that we can’t know.

(c) 2016-04-07 Edited 2025-10-20

Cathy: Life, the Universe, and Everything. In a comic strip.

     Cathy Guisewite. Cathy Twentieth Anniversary Collection (1996) Our local paper used to run Cathy. We liked it then and we still like it, so Marie snapped up this book when she saw it at the Soo Library used-books room. I started reading it right away, and finished it the next day. Cost $1, worth every penny.
     Guisewite has the eye and ear for not only fashionable foolishness but also the underlying constants of human life. Self-confidence. Peer pressure. Obligations to work, family, friends. Conflicting demands on our time, our energy, our emotions. Amazing that we not only survive but from time to time may relish moments of calm and joy.
     Sample: Eating lunch, Cathy thinks: French croissants... French Brie... English biscuits... Italian pasta... Italian ices... Danish ice cream... Grecian pastries... Swiss fudge... Austrian chocolates... I used to feel fat. Now I feel global.
     I like the reference to Austrian chocolates. Highly recommended. The book too. ***

Night Train to Lisbon

     Emily Grayson. Night Train to Lisbon (2004) It’s 1936. Carson Weatherell, daughter of a well-to-do Connecticut family, meets and falls in love with Alec Breve, a Cambridge physics student also travelling on the Paris-Lisbon train. They embark on an intense affair, while the war clouds gather. Carson’s Uncle Lawrence (married to her Aunt Jane) tells Carson that Alec is a member of pro-Fascist group, the Watchmen, suspected of passing secrets to the Germans. He asks her to tell him everything she knows.
     She returns home, and tries to forget Alec, who shows up when she finally sends him a Dear John letter. Pressed, she tells him what Lawrence told her, Alec denies it, they go to London, where his foster mother tries to pull some strings, but Alec is arrested anyway. Carson goes to Cambridge to see his friends and discovers that one of them has framed Alec. So Alec is set free, they marry and live happily ever after. Oh yes, turns out that Carson is Jane’s daughter, conceived during WW1 before Jane and Lawrence married, and raised by Phillippa (Jane's sister) because her marriage was sterile.
     The story focusses on Carson’s feelings. The plot is barely enough for a medium length short story, but it isn’t the point. It’s Carson’s self-discovery and increasing self-confidence that matters. Sometimes, Grayson’s narration of Carson’s dialogues with herself sounds more like a psych lecture than a story. The inter-war years setting helps plausibility, but as with any fantasy-love Romance, the facts of the setting don’t matter much, really, and there are few errors. In the Epilogue, “Carson and Alec are married at the Old Bailey”, a hilarious error. I suppose Grayson assumed that since the Old Bailey is a court house, one may be married there. In the USA, yes, but not in the UK. The Brits talk like Americans, too.
     We see everything from Carson’s point of view. That’s the most plausible part of the book, as she is a naive and under-educated All-American girl. Her dialogues with herself are plausible, and she comes across as an intelligent and strong-willed woman. No wonder Alec falls in love with her. I read the book over about a month, in smallish chunks. I bought it because the key opening scenes are set on a train, and that was quite well done. I wouldn’t have read it otherwise. It’s above average as a Romance. **

Blood tests and illness: do the arithmetic.

(Thanks to John Paulos for inspiration)

Suppose a nasty but relatively rare disease that shows up every spring. Suppose that in any given year, 5% of the population will get it, and many of them will die. Suppose that researchers have discovered that if you catch the virus early enough, a short but expensive treatment will cure you. Would be nice to have a simple and cheap blood test, wouldn’t it?

Suppose now you read a news story that a lab has developed a blood test that will find evidence of the disease before you have any serious symptoms. It’s cheap enough to use as a screening test every spring. Suppose it is 95% accurate. That means, it will catch 95% of the people who have it.

Sounds pretty good, right? 

Think again.

Test 1,000 people for the disease. 5%, that is 50 people, will have it. You will find 45 of them.

What about the 950 that don’t have it? At a 95% accuracy rate, 95% of those will test negative and 5% will test positive. 5% of 950 is 47.5. So 47 or 48 people will test positive that don’t have it. Let’s go with 47.

So after 1,000 people are tested, we have:

5 false negatives
903 true negatives
Ratio of false to true negatives: 5 to 903, or 1 to 180.6, or 0.006%, or very low.
If you test negative, the odds are close to 200 to one that you don’t have it. Pretty good.

45 true positives
47 false positives
Ratio of true to false positives: 45 to 47, or 0.95 to 1, or 96%, or almost even.
If you test positive, the odds are almost even that you do not have it. Leaves you pretty much where you were before the test.

So if you take the test, and it comes up positive, you have a roughly 50% chance that you don’t have it. If it comes up negative, you have a roughly 99% chance that you don’t have it.

You realise that a vaccine would be better.

Read the news with a numerically critical eye.

Elizabeth I: A Machiavellian Prince

     B. W. Beckingsale. Elizabeth I (1963) A well done survey of Elizabeth’s life, emphasising the political life. Early on she learned that it was dangerous to let her personal life intersect with her role as Queen, and she very nearly destroyed herself as Queen when early in her reign Dudley’s ambitions outran her affection. But for most of her reign, she was a skilled administrator and exploiter of the existing political structures. On the record, she achieved pretty well everything she wanted. She listened to her advisors, but she was not ruled by them. She was the first monarch to understand the power of public opinion, and she cultivated it, so that what she appeared to be often cloaked what she did. She died leaving behind an England more prosperous, secure and peaceful than she found it.
     I think Elizabeth was a Machiavellian Prince.  She saw her duty to maintain peace and good order and to defend against foreign incursions. She governed her realm well, relying on the love of her subjects as well as the skill and wisdom of her advisors to maintain absolute power. But that power was beginning to shift to Parliament, and none of her successors were able to act as she did. Charles I lost his head trying to do so. She was willing to do what was needed, although there were times when it was not easy: she dithered about signing Mary, Queen of Scots execution warrant, and never gave the actual order to carry it out; that was done by the bureaucrats, acting on the authority implicit in the warrant.
     We will never know how much her sense of duty to the realm cost her. Power is seductive, but I think there’s enough evidence in Elizabeth’s actions and recorded words to show that she saw power as a means to an end, not an end in itself. She was capable of great personal sympathy and friendship towards people outside the power-structures of the court. But she also maintained a strict rule over her Maids of Honour.
      Beckingsale is very good at keeping to a clear narrative, introducing asides but never letting them obscure the central plot.  In the end, we understand both the legend, which persists to this day, Elizabeth’s role in developing it, and the reality which underlay it and which it often hid. The book is one in a series that were popular post-WW2, when people aspired to an education that still aimed at the cultivated individual. It was clearly intended as supplementary reading in secondary and post-secondary schools, as well as for the “interested layman”, that semi-mythical creature that provided a ready and profitable market for the publishers. Well-done of its kind. The book is out of print. I found a copy 30-odd years ago, and it languished on Jon’s bookshelves until I read it. ***

The Style of the Century? Not really. (Hillier: The Style of the Century 1900-1980)

     Bevis Hillier. The Style of the Century (2nd edition, 1998) I can’t tell the intended audience of this book. The title suggests a systematic overview, but Hillier’s narrative is personal and unbalanced. He did a study of Art Deco (he claims he coined the term), and provides a good deal of interesting information about its development and revival in the 1970s. But on the other styles, Hillier gives us what amounts to gossip. He’s not only a name-dropper, he’s incurious about anything done outside his circle. The result is finally unsatisfying. For example, he knows little about cars, so the interchange between car styling and consumer design generally isn’t discussed. Most of Hillier’s examples, especially the ones he chooses to illustrate, are on the fringes of fashion and had little influence on the styles of the century.
     As a source-book of some of the more outre attempts by designers and stylists, the book has value, especially since Hillier was an active player. He curated a number of exhibitions and shows, and knew many of the artists. But as an overview of how styles developed, he’s unreliable. He ignores how and why fashion develops into style. He’s oblivious to the interesting question of why some fashions remain mere passing fads and others define a style. He seems to be unaware of the interplay between the styling of different technologies. And so on. The final chapter, written by Kate McIntyre is a more systematic survey of the last two decades of the 20th century. But its chief interest is the predictions that turned out to be wrong. **½

Imperial Russia 1801-1917: too slow to reform

     Michael Karpovich. Imperial Russia 1801-1917 (1932) A college text, designed for beginners. It’s bland, uses a lot of impersonal language, and avoids details such as statistics. It assumes the student has a historical atlas handy. I suppose including portraits and maps would have upped the cost.
     I learned a few things about the reforms enacted during the time period, and got some hints as to why they failed, and why they didn’t proceed more rapidly. Aside from the economic and technical obstacles to more rapid reform, the main reason was the Tsars’ inability or unwillingness to push the reforms through. Even autocrats have limited powers; they depend on public opinion and the support of the nobility.
     The author clearly sympathises with pre-Communist Russia, and softpedals the awful conditions of serfdom, or the nastiness of corruption authorised by legal entitlements. The landowning nobility paid no taxes, for example. No modern state can survive that kind of thing.
     The reformers began as little more than debating societies. Later, more widespread education and the establishment of local councils designed to administer some local matters brought more lower class people into the Reform movements. These newcomers were more interested in practical politics, and the more extreme ones advocated overthrow of the existing autocratic order. They got their wish in 1917. But autocracy didn’t die, it simply put on new clothes.
     I have two takeaways: a) autocracy is difficult to change because the privileges are too great for the autocrat and his supporters to give up easily; and b) Russians like autocrats.
     An interesting read, it filled a few gaps in my knowledge. **½

Freight Cars of the 40s and 50s

     Jeff Wilson. Freight Cars of the 40s and 50s (2015) Kalmbach has a long history of publishing railway history and reference books. This is the latest iteration of its histories of North American freight cars. It doesn’t pretend to be complete, but it is comprehensive. It deals with freight car technology, then with the different types. The illustrations are all high quality. Wilson has compiled statistics by type and year, a useful guide for the modeller/operator who wants a representative collection on his layout. An good read for anyone interested in railways or technology generally, as well as modellers. ***

Econ 101: Cost, price, and value

We often use the terms cost, price, and value interchangeably. Economists try to differentiate them. The comments below are a distillation and summary of other people’s ideas as I have come to understand them. I want to give them a precise content. I believe that most of us have very poor notions of these concepts, and these poor notions are a major factor in creating the economic messes that we suffer from. We base our choices on our ideas. Ideas have consequences.

Framework: “The economy” consists of the systems we use to provide ourselves with the goods and services we need and desire. One can define the concept so that it applies to all animals, in the sense that the effort expended by the individual or the group or the hive must yield sufficient food to enable successful reproduction.

Observation: All human economies are trading systems. Regardless of how they are organised in detail, they all feature rules for exchanging goods and labour. All cultures strive for fair distribution of what we need and want. “Fair” varies somewhat between cultures, but all on the one hand promote fair exchange, and on the other hand punish cheating. All strive for equitable distribution of goods, and what inequality exists is justified by appeals to ideas about worth and social roles. Too much inequality creates social stresses that sooner or later cause political strife. In all cultures, economic and political power are intertwined.

Cost: The quantity of resources needed to make something or to provide some service. At the level of the economy, that is of trade, “cost” is some combination of energy (including human labour) and materials. Cost includes waste disposal, which ranges from waste as a new resource (eg, compost for gardening), to a variable fraction of the input cost, to waste as the largest component of cost (eg, nuclear power plants). Technology affects cost, because technological improvement is driven by a desire to reduce costs.

Price: The measure of cost. In a monetised economy it is stated in a currency, such as dollars. Through most of human history, economies were not monetised, trading was done without the convenience of pricing goods and services. Non-monetised pricing survived for a long time. When I was a boy, the cost of travel was measured in time, even when it was paid-for transport.

Archaeological evidence suggests that currency began as a system of IOUs sometime around 4,000 BCE. Clay seals were used to identify goods owed in an incomplete transaction, and clay tags were used to record taxes owing. It’s easy to speculate that the next step was for such seals to become objects of trade themselves. The final step would be inventing some abstract measure of price, such a gold. But the early history of money is not well understood.

Value: The measure of the buyer’s need or desire. In a monetised economy, value, like price, is stated in a currency. If a buyer assesses a price as equal to or less than the value, there will be an incentive to buy. The “law of supply and demand” is about value, not cost.

Trade is asymmetrical. For the seller the goods have a lower value than for the buyer. Needs and desires are mediated and modified by cultural variables such as social obligations and status. Cost is also a factor; the desire to reduce the work of making something for oneself will raise the value of ready-made goods.

Implications

Measurement of Costs: Ultimately, since the production of raw materials requires energy, all cost reduces to energy. This observation implies that cost reduces to physics. In principle, it would be possible to state the cost entirely in terms of energy. “Carbon footprint”, usually stated as tonnes of CO2, is an attempt to state cost in fundamental terms. Since some quantity of CO2 represents a fixed quantity of energy, it’s a proxy for energy. It’s a complicated calculation, and inevitably incomplete and more or less uncertain. But it has the virtue of getting us thinking about cost in material terms.

The Role of Government, among many others, is to price externalities. There are three methods of doing this: regulate the storage and disposal of waste; collect fees for raw materials; and vary taxes on goods. Both producers and consumers resist these methods, but without them goods will be underpriced, which will distort the market.

Prices, Markets, Profits, and Sustainability: In an ideal market, price would be an accurate representation of cost. In practice, that doesn’t happen. The main reason is the cost of externalities, which are defined as unpriced costs. Hence the producer does not pay them, and they are not included in the price of the product. Another reason is the misconception about the role of profit. When inputs are priced, the seller must sell at a higher price than he paid. The difference, raw profit, pays for his input, often termed “added value”. Profit pays for the continued operation of the business, that is, his and his employees’ livelihoods, operation and maintenance of the plant, research and development, and future capital costs. In a share-holder owned company, profit also pays the shareholders a return on their investment.

The Temptation is to demand a greater profit than is needed to pay for continued operation of the business or a reasonable interest to the share holders. So on the one hand, omitting the cost of externalities underprices some goods, which leads to choices that distort the consumer market. On the other hand, excess profit overprices some goods and so sequesters capital, which distorts the capital market. Either way, the economy as a whole fails to operate correctly, and in the long run it will fail to provide a sustainable basis for human life.

2016-03-12

Improbable Research (link)

    The Ig-Nobel prizes are awarded by the Improbable Research people, whose web presence is here. If you like the truth that is stranger than fiction, that's a great place to visit.