The fine lines and times of satire

As a youngest child with nothing of substance to add to most family dinner discussions, I had no choice but to accept my niche as the annoying little commentator. If at least one out of every twenty comments or so drew a reaction, I considered that to be a reasonable success rate. Bonus points if I could elicit a laugh. Extra bonus points if I prompted an especially reluctant and helpless laugh, like if I said something that was so immature that it lowered the self-worth of anyone who laughed at it.

Even now, walking around in an adult body, I still live in a childish mind. It still takes me by surprise when I say or do something weird and people look at me like I'm weird. I'm like, please just laugh or ignore it. That's how I used to get treated, and that's what I'm used to. Unfortunately, not everyone gets it, so learning to maintain a humorous edge while remaining sensitive to the moral sensibilities of stupid people appears to be a life-long journey for me.

Sometimes it is impossible for me to predict what will draw a laugh and what will draw a frown. Here are two examples of songs that I consider high-quality irreverence. One almost uniformly draws happily amused reactions, while the other typically elicits disappointed frowns or sad giggles.

Here is one verse of the first example, which appears not to exist on youtube, and came to me via one of those old record devices that came even before record players. Emphasis applies to the almost-rhyme between "fit" and "shave":

An old lady died in her bathtub
She died from a terrible fit
In order to fulfill her wishes
She was buried in six feet of
Shaving cream be nice and clean
Shave every day and you'll always look keen

This song deals both with foul language and the death of a lady, and an old lady at that. The second song (on youtube) might seem far more benign, and yet it is generally deemed more repugnant. Here is an excerpt:

All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon,
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park.
Ev'ry Sunday you'll see
My sweetheart and me,
As we poison the pigeons in the park.

When they see us coming, the birdies all try an' hide,
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide.
The sun's shining bright,
Ev'rything seems all right,
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park.

Lalaalaalalaladoodiedieedoodoodoo

Am I missing something?

Racism and Obama

One of the reasons that Obama was able to gain the presidency despite the color of his skin was his refusal to define his political identity along racial lines. He acknowledged his heritage, but he took the extraordinary step of not using the pronoun "we" when talking about fellow African Americans. For that matter, he often avoided using the term "we" when talking about Democrats. "We" to Obama meant all Americans, if not the whole world.

In sharpton contrast, the lack of success among many other black politicians has to do with how they use the word "we." Take, for example, the words of Al Sharpton, as he joined the protest against a "racist" cartoon that compared Obama to a chimpanzee:

"I guess they thought we were chimpanzees," Sharpton said. "They will find out we are lions."

It sounds to me like Sharpton is trying to speak for all blacks. What could be more racist? What if some blacks would prefer to be compared to a chimpanzee instead of a lion? Moreover, let us not forget that cartoonists faced no opposition to portraying George Bush as a stupid little monkey. At least a chimpanzee is a smart monkey.

Google v.s. Grandma: Carrot Cake and Heritage

My colleague (the mostest elitest term for coworker) said that her Grandma's carrot cake is surely better than the first carrot cake recipe that comes up on Google, which I use. So we had a bake-off, and let folks cast votes without knowing who made which cake. I tasted first, and I began to feel deeply sorry for my competitor, because my cake was so vastly better than hers, and I knew this contest would be a terrible blow to her ego and identity. But when all 28 votes had been cast, it was a perfect tie, with my cake trailing until near the end of the day.

Three Dreams

I am back in my hometown as a composite of my child-self and my current-self. I walk into some kind of tiny restaurant. I sit in the corner. The room is hot. A man comes and asks me if he can get me something. I say Yes, preferably something cold, like a frozen fruit salad. Presently he produces a frozen fruit salad, along with some kind of special for the day. The only other people in the room are two men at a nearby table. They are discussing the recent news, and trying to decide the shape and content of a news story for some paper that they presumably work for. They say that the days of the Federal Reserve are over, that the financial sector needs such huge restructuring that the central bank will need to be replaced.

Later I am out on the streets in my WV hometown, several miles from my parents place. I am trying to get home, looking for buses, walking around, etc. Not much success. But from over the hills, or in my mind, I can hear my mother playing the piano and singing beautifully. She is young and energetic. I also hear her berating me for doing something wrong, but not without some love in her voice.

I am at my lofty place of employment, exploring the building. The main foyer/lobby area is several stories high, with staircases leading all the way to the top. I find myself near the top. Why have I never come up this far before? I look over the railing, the floor is far far below. I get dizzy with the height. I turn to walk up the last flight of stairs, proceeding carefully, pulling myself along the railing with all my strength and terrified that I will fall. As I approach the top, the trail ends and I am looking at an old balcony, built, perhaps, in 1913, overlooking the city. The balcony's blue-painted wooden flooring is clearly rotting out. The railings are partly missing. Birds fly by, the sky is blue.

One known side effect of taking drugs is an increase in vivid dreaming.

Intelligent Book Reviews

Amazon ranks the popularity of books with a one-star to five-star rating based on customer reviews. These customer reviews vary widely in quality. There is no easy way to accurately measure reviewer quality and incorporate that into a good summary statistic on the quality of a book.

I propose that Amazon should introduce a simple chart to give customers more information about the quality of reviews. Under my plan, book reviewers submit their SAT scores (or some other standardized measure of academic excellence) along with their review. Then the ratings are charted on a scatter plot. The vertical axis would represent the SAT score, and the horizontal axis would represent the customer's summary rating of the book quality. Charts with lots of dots in the upper right of the chart would reflect that smart customers gave the the book a high rating. Charts with lots of dots in the lower right would reflect that dumb customers gave the book a high rating. Then a prospective buyer could predict whether they would like the book by looking at the reviews provided by customers with a similar SAT score.

Obamassiah or Obamessy?

Not yet one month into his presidency, our savior has already exercised a great deal of power. How is he doing? Exactly what did we vote for? Should we still believe?

1. Just days into office, Obama approves an attack into Pakistan, killing children. Find analysis of that action here.

2. Obama allows his treasury secretary nominee Timothy Geithner to say that the president believes that China is manipulating its currency. I argue that although China may be creating dangerous imbalances in the financial world, China also stands to suffer the most when these imbalances unravel. We should unobtrusively offer techinical assistance rather than confrontational rhetoric, which could lead to even more serious problems.

3. Obama improves human rights protections in the war on terror through a variety of popular measures. No complaints here.

4. Obama hedges on his campaign promise to get American troops out of Iraq in 16 months. Granted, he inherited this messy situation, and it is not entirely clear whether a quick pullout is best for the long-term security of all involved parties, especially considering recent security improvements in Iraq.

5. Obama appears to be screwing up the economy with an increase in government programs. Even the Congressional Budget Office, a highly-respected non-partisan federal agency which evaluates the financial costs and implications of government spending, says that Obama's proposed stimulus will make us worse off ten years down the road.

6. Obama has done little to push along the process of bailing out the troubled financial sector, which most experts claim is necessary to get at the root of our problems and begin a lasting recovery (with additional regulations for the future, of course).

I suppose Obama still beats McCain, but by how much?

Explaining the Freakwenter's Failure

Thanks to Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post Magazine, Feb 1:

The problem is that online readers don't send in lots of comments in response to cogent, contrapuntal exegeses on complicated subjects or witty observations about the ironies of life. Online readers generally send in lots of comments in response to ill-thought-out but provocative diatribes.

Buy American?

Congress is debating the scope of a buy-American clause in the proposed stimulus package, which would require recipients of stimulus funds to give preferential treatment to U.S.-produced goods. The exact language of such a clause could be tricky: cars, for example are composite products produced by a variety of nations.

A reader asks:

Would a "buy-American" clause benefit middle class Americans?

Under normal circumstances, conventional wisdom says that international trade (and avoiding a "buy domestic" mentality) increases the size of the economic pie for all participating nations. The effect of trade on income distribution is not well understood, however. Recent research by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman suggests that trade hurts the American "lower class," which is often euphemistically assumed to be part of the "middle class." Krugman's research won a lot of press, but even he admits that the research is inconclusive. I argue that the distributional effects of trade should be ignored, since income inequality can be largely corrected by adjusting the progressivity of the tax code.

Of course, the current economy is not operating "under normal circumstances." Would a temporary buy-America" clause act as a stimulus? I don't have a good answer. A first impression is that it seems obvious that buying American will stimulate American business. But not all American businesses agree. In particular, any business that exports much of it's product is worried that a buy-American clause would anger other nations who export to the U.S., and these other nations may retaliate with tariffs on U.S. exports, which would hurt U.S. exporters.

I support the stimulus proposal of Harvard economist Greg Mankiw.

Speed limits, congestion, and following distances

The highways in a metropolitan area are congested. At times of extreme congestion, cars move at a crawl. At low congestion, speed is constrained only by the speed limit. Suppose city planners want to maximize traffic flow -- the number of cars that drive over a particular section of highway in a given amount of time, say in a minute. What is the ideal speed limit for maximizing this measure of traffic flow? On first glance, it seems like completely removing the speed limit would do the trick. But is that really obvious? At higher speeds, cars must keep larger following distances. The faster the traffic, the thinner the traffic, so it is not clear if the number of cars passing a given point is higher or lower at high speeds.

Some standard assumptions:
Kinetic energy = a constant times the square of velocity.
Work = force times distance.
The maximum force applied by brakes does not vary with speed.

How drivers choose following distances completely determines the solution to the problem. The calculation details are messy and difficult to post to a blog, but here are the conclusions.

Case 1: Suppose that drivers tailgate to the extreme, staying a constant distance behind the car in front regardless of speed. Then you get the greatest traffic flow by posting no speed limit, and letting cars go as fast as possible.

Case 2: Suppose drivers follow a two-second rule (or any set number of seconds), staying two seconds behind the car in front. Then the speed of the cars has no effect on the level of traffic flow!

Case 3: Drivers stay back the same distance that it would require to come to a complete stop. (Most drivers don't follow this rule, because even if there is a wreck ahead, the wrecking cars do not normally come to a stop instantaneously, so the tailing cars have more time to slow down.) Then you can maximize traffic flow by making the speed limit as "low as possible." The vagueness of this answer is necessary because my model does not take into account the length of a car. This particularly matters at the extremes: If a car were zero feet long, then you can get arbitrarily high traffic flow by putting the speed limit sufficiently close to zero. I suspect that the length-of-car factor begins to outweigh the slow-is-efficient factor at around 40 mph, when the stopping distance is at least 5 car-lengths.