Pie, Chart
Back in the old days this is how all pie charts were made.
Via Kevin Denny, via @pauldotkelleher.
And Now for Something Completely Different
Except not completely different, because it is again Star Wars themed. Noodle Chewbacca:
Via FSM, h/t @rHumanist.
Barbecue Theory
The word barbecue means different things to different people in different parts of the country. My spouse grew up in California and thinks, or used to think, that anything cooked outdoors on a grill is barbecue. And that’s fine. But then most people are also aware of the kind of barbecue that is slow-roasted, predominantly pork, and usually attended by “bbq sauce,” and that this kind of barbecue is, culturally and gastronomically, altogether different from generic grilling. If you want, you can think of the more specialized genre as “southern barbecue”; to me it is simply “barbecue.”
Reflecting on why barbecue passions sometimes burn hot, Don Taylor posits what I would call the nostalgia theory of barbecue:
[W]hy do many people seem to care so much about barbecue? I believe the answer lies in the economics of pigs, especially in the agrarian South of years past.
[* * *]
I think feelings are so strong about barbecue because feasts around pigs were infused with meaning since they represented shared experiences with loved ones and friends in both good times and bad. So these meals of both celebration and lament, centered around cooking a pig, became culturally meaningful in a way that make me interested in disagreeing with others about the best type of sauce to put on your barbecue. Because these events are important, it makes the way barbecue is prepared and served, important. Even if you are many generations away from a farm, I suspect this is the basic reason that many people have such strong feelings about barbecue.
This is all sociologically interesting, and in the rest of the post Don gives us a nice glimpse into a piece of his heritage, the tradition of “pig pickin’,” and the economics of cull hogs—all of which I enjoyed.
Still, on such a serious matter as this, I feel I must question some aspects of Don’s account, which seems to imply that barbecue fervor has more to do with a cultural context than with the qualities of the food itself. I’ve never been to a pig pickin’, and I doubt that more than a fifth of my recent forebears ever did either. The closest thing to pig pickins in my own experience would have to be something like neighborhood fish fries or maybe Thanksgiving dinner. I like fried fish and roast turkey, but they do not come close to spurring the same level of carnivorous infatuation in me.
It bears mention that, done right, barbecue pork tastes and smells diabolically good. Consequently I’m more inclined toward a biological/chemical theory of barbecue. Indeed I admit to having had in the past a vague notion there must be some sort of dedicated barbecue/bacon receptors or reuptake inhibitors or something in the brain somewhere. Like bacon, barbecue pork punches a powerful combination of buttons: the rich aroma, the fatty, the salty, a touch of the sweet; ideally, the bbq sauce contributes a moderate element of spicy and perhaps tangy but without interfering with the native qualities of the pork proper. And everyone knows there’s something preternaturally addictive about bacon. 43% of respondents in a Canadian survey said that they would rather have bacon than sex. A sizable corner of the internet is devoted to various forms of baconalia. (Btw, here’s The Incidental Economist with a side of bacon.) Instinctively I’d have thought all this points to a biological explanation.
But then this NPR story reminds me that taste is mostly about odor, and that we shouldn’t think too reductively about the effects of odors. Interviewed in the story, cognitive scientist Johan Lundstrom specifically notes a social aspect of the phenomenology of bacon:
Because bacon is one- to two-thirds fat and also has lots of protein, it speaks to our evolutionary quest for calories, Lundstrom says. And since 90 percent of what we taste is really odor, bacon’s aggressive smell delivers a powerful hit to our sense of how good it will taste.
“There’s an intimate connection between odor and emotion, and odor and memory,” Lundstrom says. “When you pair that with the social atmosphere of weekend breakfast and hunger, bacon is in the perfect position to take advantage of how the brain is wired.”
A “weekend breakfast” doesn’t reach the depths of social meaning that Don’s pig pickins carry, but it strikes me that human emotion, memory, and meaning generally are concepts without application outside the social context in which they take shape. Bacon and barbecue alike, acting through the sense of smell, register in these channels and therefore surely do operate, in a nonspecific way, on a level rooted in social consciousness and nostalgia. So I credit Don with adding an important dimension to my understanding of barbecue and why I want it so damn much.
Starry Night (in bacon)
Image via bioephemera.
Weekend Wordery: Hoisted from Brad DeLong’s Blog Titles: Why Oh Why Can’t We Have More Grammatico-Mathematical Proofs in the Comments
Did someone say "Ghoughpteighbteau"?
Any sequence of the word “buffalo” of length n>1 is a grammatical sentence of English.
First, let n be odd. We start with n=3: “Buffalo buffalo buffalo”; that is, some buffalo do buffalo buffalo, i.e., some buffalo are buffaloed by buffalo. But of course the buffalo who are buffaloing may themselves be buffaloed by buffalo, so just as some cats that watch mice are chased by dogs, or as we say, cats dogs chase watch mice, buffalo that buffalo buffalo themselves buffalo buffalo, and we can say that buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. Anytime we have the noun buffalo, we can add the relative clause “who are buffaloed by buffalo”, or better, instead of the noun phrase “buffalo who are buffaloed by buffalo”, we may say simply “buffalo that buffalo buffalo”, then add the rest of the sentence, yielding “Buffalo that buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo”, or even better, “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo”. To a sentence consisting of n (odd) occurrences of the word, we can produce a sentence of n+2 occurrences.
Thus for any odd n, a sequence of n occurrences is a sentence.
But just as a dog that chases cats is a dog that chases, buffalo that buffalo some buffalo are buffalo that buffalo, so from one of our sequences of an odd number of occurrences, we can lop off the final direct object, producing a sequence of an even number of occurrences that is a grammatical sentence. For any n>1, odd or even, a sequence of n occurrences of “buffalo” is a grammatical English sentence!
Woah. That is simply genius.
- By everyone, I mean everyone except Karl Smith, who prefers the more colloquial “Fish fish fish fish fish….” [↩]
Weekend Birdery: Hummingbird Tongues
Science Friday brings us the latest in tongue research in this video. Apparently what we previously thought we knew about how hummingbirds drink—and about how dogs drink, but this isn’t weekend doggery, so whatever—was wrong. It turns out a hummingbird’s tongue isn’t really like a straw or a siphon. It’s more like . . . well, I dunno . . . a zipper cone?
Kingdom Come
Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a woodcut. Germany, AD 1498.
Vaughan Bell has an interesting piece at Slate about research into how followers of apocalyptic cults cope when their end-of-the-world predictions don’t pan out. The answer is that they don’t. That is, they don’t ever really face up to it, because to them, the great clash of theory and fact never happens. That’s because they’ve rigged their theories so that contrary facts may not disturb the integrity of the theory. Bell concludes:
For those not waiting for the world to end in a storm of fire and light it is easy to write off the believers as deluded, but Festinger was not so wide of the mark when he suggested that we adapt to even the most unlikely of contradictions using nothing more than our methods of everyday rationalization. The faithful could just as easily be those who stubbornly stand by disgraced politicians, failed ideologies, dishonest friends, or cheating spouses, even when reality highlights the clearest of inconsistencies. Armageddon is unlikely to arrive this weekend, but most of us have lived through it many times before.
Via Mind Hacks. Also interesting to see, via Kevin Drum, that the crackpot behind this particular rapture theory spent upwards of $100 million publicizing it, with the result that we’ve all had a good time making fun of it.
That said, in time the sun and stars will all burn out, and human life will be extinguished forever.
And Now for Something Completely Different
In 1972, the President of the United States could ride BART:
Richard Nixon, in California for a day of campaigning, rides BART from San Leandro to Oakland. Photo taken Sept. 27, 1972. AP photo.
Via The Poop. And yes, I did just write “The Poop.” It’s a blog.
Guide to Philosophical Referee Hand Signals
Created by Landon Schurtz, via Brian Leiter, via Alex Tabarrok, via Matt Yglesias.
And Now for Something Completely Different…
This is something I never would have imagined happening inside R2-D2:
Via Jon Chait. Many more at the link.
Court Intrigue
Eight members of the the nation’s highest court have permanently recused themselves from participating in all future cases, according to insiders at the DoneScotus blog, a group of anonymous current and former clerks at the Court. It seems that the eight Justices signed and submitted official documents making sweeping conflict-of-interest disclosures. The signatures trigger automatic recusals “in all cases pertaining to United States federal or maritime law or the law of nations, and in all cases [involving] any parties save ambassadors or other public ministers” who may invoke the Court’s original jurisdiction under Article III.
No. Talking.
Experts are still gaming out the consequences and trying to piece together the facts. As best we can tell, the eight recused Justices had each signed documents they may have believed to be a birthday card and related liability waivers (with further advance acknowledgements, retroactive stipulations, and binding nondisclosure disclosures) for recused Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. The documents were in a folder marked “Happy Birthday, Tony,” though it is unclear why Kennedy himself would received the folder or signed its contents. The eight Recused are technically still members of the Court and are not expected to resign or retire. The Constitution grants federal judges life tenure, with no strings attached, at least during “good behavior.”
Thomas’s office has also issued a “Non-Advisory Opinion Notice” that the Court intends to revisit the meaning of the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause for the purpose of considering whether the Court’s new “No. Talking.” policy may be imposed in the United States Congress “in times of national emergency incited by partisan opponents of the Thomas Court and its Constitutional control of the independent judiciary.”
William Playfair, Inventer of Charts
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you history’s first bar chart, as invented and published in 1786 by Mr. William Playfair of Scotland. Obviously it’s hard to make out the details here, but it shows Scottish imports and exports for the year 1781.
Playfair also invented the line graph and the pie chart. That’s a pretty impressive resumè of contributions to humanity for which Mr. Playfair, it seems to me, has been seriously under-appreciated by history. Nor indeed was he recognized with proper gratitude while living, if this (totally unverified) clip from his 1824 obituary is accurate:
In private life Mr. Playfair was inoffensive and amiable; not prepossessing in his appearance and address, but with a strong and decided physiognomy, like that of his late brother. With a thoughtlessness that is too frequently allied to genius, he neglected to secure that provision for his family, which, from his talents, they were justified to expect; and although he laboured ardently and abundantly for his country, yet he found it ungrateful, and was left in age and infirmity to regret that he had neglected his own interests to promote those of the public.
The obit further explains that “Unhappily, however, for his own interests, he had the ambition to become an author.” He wrote a lot, mostly about politics and political economy. Nowadays we have a word for people like William Playfair, people who like to write, especially about politics and policy, often without compensation, and who love charts: bloggers.
My First Stata Lesson
- The blue dots represent meaningless blue dots from my first Stata lesson.
- The red line represents the places on the graph where those meaningless blue dots should be and where they would be if they would only behave like proper meaningless blue dots should behave.
- Conclusion: this is going to be awesome when I understand what all those little letters and things mean.
Best Placard Ever
From Greg Mankiw, via Austin Frakt. This surpasses the brilliant but, let’s face it, self-absorbed “I Have a Sign” on my all-time favorite placards list.
Monty Python Hospital Reform
“In the worst cases, we can perform a Total Cashectomy”:
This Week in Numerology
- According to a recent poll, 42% of Americans purportedly believe the Bill of Rights contains the provision, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” That’s funny because, you know, it’s actually from somewhere else.
- The Federal Open Market Committee is about 42% unconstitutional.
- And, of course, 42.
- 17 years after Bowers v. Hardwick, we got Lawrence v. Texas. 17 years after DADT, we got…not-DADT. That is, in both cases, 17 years elapsed between the codification of a reactionary anti-gay policy and the repeal of that policy.
About Me
- I write this blog.
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