Pauline Kael is my favorite writer.

If I'm ever asked who my favorite writer is, which I never am, but if I ever were, I might give any number of random answers. Thomas Pynchon or Neal Stephenson would be possibilities. At one time, I might have picked Jack Kerouac. I fell so in love with Catcher in the Rye for a while that I might have picked J. D. Salinger on the strength of that one book. I've read more of John Updike than just about any other author, but I can't say have a great affection for his works.

But when I have the time to stare at my bookshelf and make a mental tally of the books I've read and loved, the books I've read and hated, the books I've read and forgotten about, I have to admit that Pauline Kael is the one writer whose writing I would keep coming back to because she has such a gift for words - for being intelligent and engaging and persuasive and maddingly disruptive to your sense of what you thought was true. She was a film critic who made her name in the late 60s into the 70s working for The New Yorker. I first found out about her through reading Roger Ebert's movie reviews, which often referenced Kael. I fell in love with her work when I read the piece Replying to Listeners, which originated as a radio broadcast on KPFA. It begins thusly:

I am resolved to start the New Year right; I don’t want to carry over any unnecessary rancor from 1962. So let me discharge a few debts. I want to say a few words about a communication from a woman listener. She begins with, “Miss Kael, I assume you aren’t married—one loses that nasty, sharp bite in one’s voice when one learns to care about others.” Isn’t it remarkable that women, who used to pride themselves on their chastity, are now just as complacently proud of their married status? They’ve read Freud and they’ve not only got the illusion that being married is healthier, more “mature,” they’ve also got the illusion that it improves their character. This lady is so concerned that I won’t appreciate her full acceptance of femininity that she signs herself with her husband’s name preceded by a Mrs. Why, if this Mrs. John Doe just signed herself Jane Doe, I might confuse her with one of those nasty virgins, I might not understand the warmth and depth of connubial experience out of which she writes.

The end of the piece is something that inspired me to take up, very briefly, a career as a movie critic. And by career, I mean, a 10-minute weekly radio spot on the Rice University student radio station, KTRU, that lasted for one semester. But let's call it a career. Here's what inspired me, the end of Kael's article:

I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

Let me return from my long blog absence to extol the virtues of melancholy. Or more specifically, let me recommend this link (via Andrew Sullivan) to someone else extolling the virtues of melancholy. I don't have much to add to it except that I think being dishonest and inauthentic does more damage to people than most anybody realizes. Pretending to be happy when you're sad, pretending to be ok when you're not, is a denial of who you are as a person. There are sometimes when self-restraint is called for - there's a quote I Iove from Catcher in the Rye, "I'm always saying 'Glad to've met you' to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though." - but when you start lying to yourself, when you start telling yourself that you're happy when you're not, that's when you are really hurting yourself. It's ok to be sad and down and depressed, but, in our society, it can really feel like it's not ok.

On a different note, the NFL season is about to start, which means another season of Loser Bowl. Loser Bowl is a league run by my sister-in-law, Leanne, in which you have to pick one losing football team every week of the football season. The catch is you can't pick the same team twice in a season. So the first few weeks are, theoretically, easy, but then you start having to pick better and better teams to be losers. I've never come close to winning the league. This year is going to be tough, I think.... the Chiefs seem pretty crummy, but they're not completely crummy, so as soon as I pick them, they'll surprise me with an out-of-the-blue win and ruin my Loser Bowl season. The Dolphins should stink, but they look like they're getting better. The Raiders are saying that they want to run the ball about 600 times this year, which is, um actually, a pretty good idea. But the thing is, for the run-heavy offense to work, you need to have a defense that, how should I put this diplomatically, lacks suckiness. Which the Raiders defense traditionally does not lack. So we'll see. Speaking of defenses that lack suckiness, it looks like Houston is willing to start anyone and everyone at cornerback, so be expecting a call. And the new quarterback in Arizona is Kurt Warner, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the old quarterback in Arizona, Kurt Warner, who also bears an uncanny resemblance to your grandfather. Because he's so old. It's a joke, laugh! Ok, well, I'm calling it a night. ]]> http://fredkontur.com/diary/archives/2008/08/sunday_august_31_2008.html http://fredkontur.com/diary/archives/2008/08/sunday_august_31_2008.html Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:29:16 -0700 Now that Barack Obama has more or less sewn up the Democratic nomination for President, you are going to start to hear a slew of stories about the next big dramatic event in the Presidential race - selection of the Vice Presidential candidates. Already, you might have caught news stories about John McCain inviting potential VP candidates to his house for a Memorial Day barbeque. As the last few Democratic primaries play out, you'll hear more and more stories speculating on whether Obama will offer the VP slot to Hillary Clinton as part of a deal to get her to leave the race. Regardless of what you hear, you should keep in mind that it doesn't matter. As this post at The Plank says: "[T]he evidence indicates that running-mate selections usually have zero impact on election outcomes, even in the running mate's home state." So feel free to ignore all the news stories that breathlessly speculate on all the possibilities, typically illustrating their points with bar graphs and poll data and quotes from inside each campaign.

Speaking about Vice Presidential candidate speculation, I read a story about Jim Webb, one of the leading Democratic VP possibilities, that made me not just enormously disappointed but also repulsed by someone whom I had admired until quite recently. One of the major knocks against Webb as a VP candidate is that he has made questionable comments about women in the past. I didn't quite realize the extent of his questionable comments until I read about the specifics of them in this post on Matthew Yglesias's blog, by guest poster Kathy G. In a 1979 article arguing that women don't belong in the military, Webb declared that no senior female in a leadership position at the Naval Academy won her rank by merit, thereby impugning the accomplishments of every female midshipman and throwing fuel on the smoldering resentments of a vocal minority of disgruntled midshipmen. This article had a very real effect on women at the Academy. Kathleen Murray, a 1984 Naval Academy graduate, said, "This article was brandished repeatedly. [Men] quoted and used it as an excuse to mistreat us." More recently, Webb has tried to minimize the sexual abuse of women by Navy and Marine officers in the Tailhook scandal, placing the blame on "social engineers" who were insistent on ever-increasing sexual mixing in the military and on feminists who seized upon the Tailhook scandal to attack military culture.

I hope that, for everyone reading this, I'm merely stating the obvious when I say that the time has long since passed when it was questionable whether women should be in the military or whether women should be officers in the military or whether women should have equal status to men in the military. It's amazing to me that people still argue, quite vociferously, that that's not the case. I have a feeling that 25 years from now, long after openly gay people will have been allowed in the military, there will be similar situations where hardline military folks, typically from traditional military families, will make ludicrous arguments about how much better the military was when the gays weren't messing everything up. Just like 35 years ago, I'm sure there were people arguing about how much better things were when blacks and whites were separated in the military. Like I said, it's discouraging that these things have to be fights. I don't claim to be more enlightened that anybody else, but when you're doing dangerous, difficult, stressful work, then it seems to be that anybody who can get the job done should be welcomed and accepted whether they are a person of color or whether they have boobs or whether they share their bed with a person of the same sex.

I realize I'm very late to be jumping on the happy holidays train of emails (or very early to be starting off the happy valentine's day train of emails) but it's been so nice hearing from everyone that I didn't want to be left out. And I also wanted everyone to know that I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth, which some of you may have thought based on how terrible I've been at replying to emails for the last few months.

I don't have any big news or revelations. I went home to Pittsburgh for the holidays and had a wonderful time with my family. I even took a detour to visit my brother in Rochester, NY and see his new house. As you all know, I started a new job teaching introductory physics at the U.S. Air Force Academy in August. This is what's made me a terrible email correspondent. Teaching is the most amazing, difficult, and time-consuming job I've had by a longshot. My student evaluations were average (compared to other physics teachers) and my students performed a little below-average in the class, so I can't say I was a rousing success right off the bat, but I absolutely love being in the classroom and towards the end of the semester, when I realized that classes were going to be over, I realized how much I was going to be missing those 19-year old kids who probably wanted to be anywhere except in physics class three days a week, but who were amazing people to get to know and work with. I don't want to tarnish my reputation as a rock-hard cold-as-ice manly man, but I choked up a little, or maybe a lot, on the last day of classes. I hate being such a crybaby anymore, but it seems like I'm always saying goodbye to people I adore.

Anyway, I'm teaching a new set of students this year, and I'm just as busy and just as much loving the job. We have a long weekend this weekend, which is how I'm finding the time to write this long email. I read some teaching handbooks over the break, so I'm hoping the students like the class a little better and do a little better on the tests. We'll see. I've already been told, unofficially, that I'm hired on for another year. I'm going to be course director for the intro. physics classes this summer. Course director, I'm told, is Latin for "work your ass off", so I'm hoping to squeeze a vacation in before the class starts in July, after which I'll have no time whatsoever.

Well, I wish you all the best and I hope you know that you're all in my thoughts often. That little two week trip really does seem to have been a life-changing experience for many of us in both large and small ways, and it makes me so excited to hear about where we've all gone from then.

"Total Eclipse of the Heart" falls into the group of songs, best epitomized by Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", of rock drama ballads that sound and feel momentous, but upon further analysis, are mostly just confused imagery with orchestral backing. Which doesn't make them bad songs, but doesn't make them good songs either. Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Maker" is a cousin of these songs. It's a love song that forgoes sappy love lyrics and uses mostly nonsense lyrics - "Oh oh oh oh oh, you don't have to go oh oh oh oh":

I was a little disappointed by the Espenson article because for whatever weird reason I'm endlessly fascinated by the economics of Hollywood. Edward Jay Epstein wrote a book called The Big Picture about how Hollywood really makes money off of movies. The Washington Post, in their review of the book, wrote:

Each week the box-office grosses rung up by the big new movies are published, and each week it is near universally assumed, reflexively and reverentially, that they represent not merely an accurate ranking of current films but also an accurate record of how much they are making for the studios that produced them. Tommyrot, says Epstein. These seemingly huge earnings are wildly misleading, as the cost of making, distributing and showing new movies almost always far exceeds what they earn in theaters. Hollywood's highly imaginative accounting practices disguise this reality, but more to the point, theaters aren't where movies make money any more.

And Epstein writes in the book:

The main task of today's studio is to collect fees for the use of the intellectual properties they control in one form or another and then to allocate those fees among the parties -- including themselves -- who create, develop, and finance the properties. It is now essentially a service organization, a dream clearinghouse rather than a dream factory. As clearinghouses, they are very different creatures from their predecessors, and this difference is as apparent from looking at their financial reporting as it is from looking at their products.

Epstein also wrote a regular column for Slate called the The Hollywood Economist where he examined different aspects of the Hollywood money-making system, talking about, among other things, why Tom Cruise might be a wacky Scientology nut, but he's a brilliant businessman, and describing what steps you have to go through if you want to make an indie film, and telling why, until recent changes to their tax codes, Germany is an awesome place to find investors for your film. Anyway, people like me who watch movies to see something good and artistic would be well-served to never lose sight of the idea that, in a very direct way, films released in theaters are a vehicle to sell action figures in America and DVDs in Europe and Asia. If artistry manages to seep through, it is more a side effect rather than an intention of the film business. ]]> http://fredkontur.com/diary/archives/2007/08/sunday_august_11_2007.html http://fredkontur.com/diary/archives/2007/08/sunday_august_11_2007.html Sat, 11 Aug 2007 20:20:54 -0700 Monty Hall problem, so here it is. We found on Friday that, even though the three doors from which we have to choose have equal probabilities of being a winner, after Monty reveals a door, we are twice as likely to win if we switch to the remaining door. So, basically, instead of the two remaining doors having a 50/50 probability of revealing a car, they have a 67/33 probability, with the door you chose having the 33% probability, the same probability it had when you originally chose it. So we found that, counterintuitively, the probability stays the same and does not go up even after Monty reveals a goat behind one of the other doors. But can we get even more counterintuitive? Can the probability of our door go down AFTER Monty reveals another door contains a goat. It certainly doesn't seem possible. If we have three or four or five doors to choose from, and Monty essentially reduces the number of doors that could be a winner by revealing that one contains a goat, how could the probability of our door being a winner go down? In fact, that is what Jason Rosenhouse found when he analyzed a five-door Monty Hall problem in the post I linked to on Friday. In his analysis, you start out with five doors, and you choose, for example, Door 1, and Monty reveals a goat behind Door 2. You then, unwisely as it turns out, switch to Door 3. At this point, Door 3 has a 27% (4/15) chance of being a winner. If Monty then opens Door 1, the door you originally chose, and reveals a goat, it turns out that the new probability for Door 3 to be a winner is 25%. That is, the probability has gone down even though Monty has eliminated one of the possible doors. Rosenhouse's analysis, based on a probability theorem called Bayes' theorem, is complicated and hard to follow, so let's go back to the three-door problem to see a more straightforward illustration of this weird effect. Let's now assume that the game is fixed. A trusted friend of ours who works on Monty's staff tells us that the car is most definitely not behind Door 1. So we go into the game knowing that Door 1 has zero probability of winning, and Doors 2 and 3 each have a 50% probability of winning. Our best strategy in this case is to choose Door 1, forcing Monty to reveal whether Door 2 or Door 3 contains the goat. If he opens up Door 2 and shows it has a goat, we now know that Door 3 has a 100% chance of winning, so we will switch to that door, absolutely certain that we will win the car. But let's suppose we flub things and choose Door 2 initially. Monty then opens Door 1, which we know already will not be the winner. So Monty has given us no new information, meaning that the probabilities of Doors 2 and 3 are unchanged, right? Wrong. Let's look at the scenarios, remembering that we have chosen Door 2:

1. If Door 2 is the winner (1/2 the time), then Monty will reveal the goat behind Door 1 1/2 the time and the goat behind Door 3 the other 1/2 of the time.
2. If Door 3 is the winner (1/2 the time), then Monty will always reveal the goat behind Door 1.

Calculating each of the probabilities, we can rewrite the list like this:

1. Door 2 is the winner, and Monty will reveal the goat behind Door 1 1/4 of the time.
2. Door 2 is the winner, and Monty will reveal the goat behind Door 3 1/4 of the time.
3. Door 3 is the winner, and Monty will reveal the goat behind Door 1 1/2 of the time.


So, numbers 1 and 3 in the above list correspond to the situation where you choose Door 2 and Monty opens Door 1. We see that for those list items, it is twice as likely that Door 3 is the winner than that Door 2 is the winner. In other words, Door 3 has a 2/3 chance of being a winner and Door 2 has a 1/3 chance of being a winner. But remember that Door 2 initially had a 1/2 chance of being a winner. So, amazingly, the probability of Door 2 being a winner went down when Monty revealed the goat behind Door 1. The reason for this is that Monty gave us a lot of information by not choosing to reveal a goat behind Door 3. If Doors 1 and 3 both contain goats and Door 2 is the winner, then Monty will be equally likely to open either door. The fact that he chose Door 1 tells you that there is a good possibility that he avoided Door 3 because it is the winner. In effect, Monty raised the probability of Door 3 by opening Door 1. Since only Doors 2 and 3 had any probability of winning, if the probability of Door 3 goes up, the probability of Door 2 must go down. Even though we analyzed the simple 3-door problem, it will always be the case that, when the doors have unequal probabilities, Monty will lower the probability of your chosen door by opening a low probability door. ]]> http://fredkontur.com/diary/archives/2007/08/tuesday_august_7_2007.html http://fredkontur.com/diary/archives/2007/08/tuesday_august_7_2007.html Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:00:39 -0700 This post on EvolutionBlog brought back to mind one of the classic non-intuitive mathematics problems, the Monty Hall problem. The problem goes like this-- you are on a Let's Make a Deal-style game show, where you have three doors to choose from. One of the doors has a car behind it, and the other two have goats. There is an equal 1/3 probability for the car to be behind each of the doors, and the game show host, Monty Hall, knows which door contains the car. You choose Door 1. Monty Hall, wanting to maximize suspense, reveals that Door 2 contains a goat, and asks if you would like to switch to Door 3. Intuition tells you that there is nothing gained by switching doors, since each door is equally likely to contain the car. But in fact, your probability of winning by sticking with Door 1 is 1/3, while your probability of winning by switching to Door 3 is 2/3. How can that be? If each of the doors started off with equal probability of being a winner, how can the doors suddenly change their probabilities mid-game? There are a couple ways to view the situation. Probably the most straightforward is that your door has a probability of winning of 1/3, while the other two doors have a combined probability of winning of 2/3. When Monty reveals that a goat is behind Door 2, that door suddenly has a probability of winning of 0, meaning that now Door 3 has a probability of winning of 2/3. Another way to look at it is in terms of information. Monty knows which door contains the car, and he can share that information with you in various ways. When you choose a door, you restrict Monty from opening the door, so you restrict him from revealing any information (directly, at least) about the door you have chosen. So the information he can give you is about the other two doors. To better illustrate the situation, imagine that there are four doors, each with a 1/4 probability of containing the car. But before you choose a door, Monty tells you that Doors 1 and 2 both contain goats. We are assuming that Monty is always honest with us, so what he has done is told us that Doors 3 and 4 now have a 1/2 probability of containing the car. But let's say that we know Monty will never tell us anything about Door 4. All we know is that at the beginning of the game each of the doors has an equal probability of being a winner. So, if he tells us before we choose that he knows that, among Doors 1, 2, and 3, Doors 1 and 2 contain goats, we know that Door 3 now has a 3/4 probability of containing the car. This is because he will never reveal anything about Door 4 to us, but the fact that he DIDN'T tell us that Door 3 contains a goat tells us volumes. Since we assume that Monty is randomly choosing which goat doors to reveal to us, there is very low probability that Monty would randomly not tell us that Door 3 contains a goat if it did, but much better probability that Monty would avoid telling us about Door 3 because it contains a car. Once again, he will never say anthing about the door we chose, Door 4 in this case. If you're thoroughly confused by my analysis, you can fairly easily go through the possibilities in the 3-door problem and convince yourself that you're better off switching. Assume you choose Door 1, which is a winner 1/3 of the time, then the possibilities are:

1. If Door 1 is a winner (1/3 of the time), then Monty will reveal the goat behind Door 2 1/2 the time and the goat behind Door 3 the other 1/2 of the time.
2. If Door 2 is a winner (1/3 of the time), then Monty will always reveal the goat behind Door 3.
3. If Door 3 is a winner (1/3 of the time), then Monty will always reveal the goat behind Door 2.

We can calculate the various probabilities, and rewrite the list like this:

1. Door 1 will be a winner and Monty will reveal Door 2 1/6 of the time.
2. Door 1 will be a winner and Monty will reveal Door 3 1/6 of the time.
3. Door 2 will be a winner and Monty will reveal Door 3 1/3 of the time.
4. Door 3 will be a winner and Monty will reveal Door 2 1/3 of the time.

So, if you've chosen Door 1 and Monty chooses Door 2 (possibilities 1 and 4 in the above list), then we can see that there is twice the probability that Door 3 will be the winner than that Door 1 will be the winner. Similarly, if you choose Door 1 and Monty chooses Door 3 (possibilities 2 and 3 in the list), you will have twice the chance of winning by switching to Door 2. More on this tomorrow.]]> http://fredkontur.com/diary/archives/2007/08/friday_august_3_2007.html http://fredkontur.com/diary/archives/2007/08/friday_august_3_2007.html Fri, 03 Aug 2007 08:27:54 -0700