Eloquence

Maureen Corrigan, a contributor to NPR's Fresh Air program, normally reviews full-length books that contain tens of thousands of words.  On Memorial Day, 2013, she turned her attention to words that weigh in at a mere 186, soaking wet (metaphorically speaking).  By comparison, Lincoln's Gettyburg Address, known for its brevity, was 271.

The story starts with her father getting honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy in the fall of 1945, expecting never to hear from that institution again.  The economy faced significant disruption as military activity wound down and millions of veterans searched for work amid the uncertainty. (After the war my own father, a chemical engineer, finally found work as an insurance actuary.)

Ms. Corrigan:

And how special he must have felt in late December of 1945, when a letter [http://www.npr.org/assets/img/2013/05/28/corrigan-letter_archive.jpg] from Washington, D.C., came for him at his sister's house in Llanerch Hills, Pa. My father was living with his sister and her family because, by then, both of his parents had died. The letter, signed in fountain pen, was from the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal. It began:

My dear Mr. Corrigan:

I have addressed this letter to reach you after all the formalities of your separation from active service are completed. I have done so because, without formality but as clearly as I know how to say it, I want the Navy's pride in you, which it is my privilege to express, to reach into your civil life and to remain with you always.

...

The beauty of the letter's opening paragraph literally took my breath away.

Those words took my breath away too, not because they are eloquent, although they are, but because someone - Forrestal, or perhaps the Second Assistant to the Undersecretary of Naval Whatever - thought to send such a letter.  If every veteran WWII U.S. sailor received one in that pre-computer, pre-xerox age, as apparently was the case, this was a massive endeavor; at its WWII peak the U.S. Navy had 3,405,525 active duty sailors.

Eloquence emanates from the idea behind the words, not the words themselves. In Gettysburg, the power of Lincoln's words derive from surprise. A whole bunch of people had assembled there to do something; Lincoln said that they couldn't do what they had set out to do, and that they should do something else instead.

Forrestal can't hold a candle to Lincoln, not least because the fate of the nation did not hang in the balance. Nevertheless his eloquence also comes from an idea: to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the timing is the message. The letter needed to be civilian-to-civilian, therefore the timing was critical, indeed so critical that timing becomes the very focus of the letter.

Best Charles Ramsey tweet

Here's the best tweet regarding Charles Ramsey, the man who kicked in the door in order to free Amanda Berry:

Patton Oswalt:  Dear Charles Ramsey: I am not a little pretty white girl, but I totally want to run into your black arms. #hero

Andy Borowitz: Courageous Senators stand up to American people

Courageous Senators stand up to American people

Also: Right not to get shot faces uphill battle in Senate

A gun violence prevention town hall meeting

Last Saturday, I, along with about 100 others, attended a "town hall" meeting on gun violence prevention led by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo and Congressman Mike Thompson.

I did not have high hopes; Congress' approval ratings are low, and my opinion of it is even lower. Other attendees likely had similar thoughts; like myself, they glanced occasionally out the windows to admire the beautiful weather we were missing. Yet these two Representatives impressed me.

Anna's no gun expert, but Mike is. In addition to being the chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, Mike is a Vietnam veteran and the father of a police officer. Mike's task force released it's recommendations a couple of months ago. He gave us a brief gun tutorial using police-provided samples, including an AR-15, similar to the gun he carried in Vietnam, and an AK-47, similar to the gun carried by his adversaries there. He borrowed a "magazine" from a police officer, explaining how it's incorrect to call them "clips" or "cartridges." The tutorial continued, covering the difference between semi-automatic and fully-automatic, and more.

Mike (and Anna) emphasized that no single law or set of laws will ever eliminate gun violence, but we can pass laws that reduce it, and we can do so while respecting the Second Amendment. Mike explained how the 2008 Supreme Court decision known as Heller put to rest two extreme positions. At one extreme, it said that the government could not ban all guns. At the other, it said that the right to bear arms is not unlimited, just like the right to freedom of speech is not unlimited (e.g. you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater). What you find in the Bill of Rights are fundamental rights, not absolute ones, and they are subject to restriction where it makes sense to do so. In writing for the Heller 5-4 majority, Antonin Scalia - as conservative a Supreme Court justice as you can find - explicitly cited the government's authority to (1) ban certain weapons, (2) ban certain people from owning any guns, and (3) ban all guns from certain areas.

Responding to a man who felt it was too difficult to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, Mike pointed out that his concern pertained to state law, not federal. A chorus of boos erupted when another man, citing the NRA's current go-to line ("The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun"), advocated arming teachers. Anna, asking teachers in attendance to raise their hands, responded that they have neither the background nor the time to go through the extensive training needed. Moreover, as Blink author Malcolm Gladwell noted, even with extensive training, good guys with guns can make tragic mistakes.

At one point a man's voice broke as he described how he lost his son to a gun suicide. The most poignant for me, however, was someone who sat through the entire meeting without saying a single word, but who I knew had lost a brother in the 1993 massacre at 101 California Street in San Francisco.

When the conversation came around to last Wednesday's Senate vote on gun violence, neither Mike nor Anna minced words. Although 90% of the country is in favor of background checks, the Senate voted them down (54 voted for it compared to 46 against, but they needed 60 to overcome the filibuster). Mike said the task force had videos showing prospective gun show buyers asking if they could buy a gun even though they could not pass a background check; of course they could, some sellers said cheerfully. Legally speaking, those sellers who didn't have a federal license were right. An estimated 40% of all gun purchases do not currently require a background check.

The vote on background checks was shameful, but Mike pointed out it was by no means the most shameful vote. The Senate also voted down amendments to criminalize straw purchases - buying a gun for someone else who can't pass a background check - and gun trafficking. Who, Mike asked rhetorically, is in favor of gun trafficking?

Although I kept my mouth shut, I know who profits from gun trafficking: gun manufacturers. One way or another, manufacturers profit off every gun, including those sold to - or stolen by - criminals and others who can't legally obtain them. But every gun that lands in the hands of bad guys is extra profitable, because it scares law-abiding citizens, who are far more numerous, into buying more guns.

Background checks; criminalizing trafficking; criminalizing straw purchases. All I have to say is: duh. Unfortunately I didn't hear anything about another meritable idea: mandatory gun insurance. Guns are dangerous; it's projected that by 2015 more people in the U.S. will die by gunfire than by car crashes (this is already the case in ten states). If gun insurance were mandatory, free markets would encourage a whole host of practical ideas - trigger locks, gun safes, guns that won't work if stolen, etc. We now have cars that automatically call for help when an airbag deploys. What about a gun that can be configured to automatically call for help when cocked? What about a "LoJack" service for guns? People still die because someone doesn't realize a gun is loaded. Why can't we solve that design problem? If you think these are dumb ideas (I might agree with you, upon further reflection), suggest your own.

Or another idea: require gun thefts to be reported. Exercising the right to bear arms goes hand-in-hand with bearing arms responsibly.

While I'll have to wait before seeing mandatory gun insurance, Mike is optimistic that the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on background checks. I admire him for trying, and I'll give the House (including Speaker Boehner) one gold star if they do. They are staying in the dog house if they don't.

 Update: The New York Times has a very interesting article on how the percentage of gun owners has declined.

Drop a cannonball from the Tower of Pisa. Where will it land?

An apocryphal story has Galileo dropping two cannonballs, one large and one small, from the top of the Tower of Pisa in 1589, to show people that small objects fall as fast as large ones.  Whether Galileo in fact performed the experiment, it's been done by many others.  Where did the cannonballs land?  Ignoring the effects of wind, the answer seems obvious; they fell straight down, and landed directly below, just as surely as two plus two equals four.  Indeed that’s a very accurate approximation.  Believe it or not, it’s only an approximation.

I find this weirdly comforting, like when you discovered that you could create many more colors than the six provided at the kindergarten fingerpaint easel. It's an affirmation that the world is full of endless, fascinating details, in every direction and at every scale.  No matter which direction you point your mental lens, no matter what magnification you set it to, the more you look the more patterns, intricate and beautiful, you will see.  Okay, so I like physics.  Sue me.

For the sake of discussion, let's keep it to one cannonball.  Assume there’s no wind resistance, the earth is spherical and of uniform density, the cannonball is as well, and there are no other gravitational forces.  Even in this simplified, imaginary world, calculating the exact landing spot, as opposed to a very accurate approximation, is hard.  (The fact that the Tower of Pisa has a noticeable lean has no bearing on the problem.)

The first complication is that the earth is rotating on its axis, and the tower is rotating along with it.  That means the top of the tower (i.e. the place where you drop the cannonball) is moving laterally faster than the plaza below.  Atop a 100 meter tower standing on the equator, you will travel roughly 628 meters farther every 24 hours (23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0916 seconds, but who's counting).  This difference in lateral speed means the trajectory of a dropped cannonball will follow a slight curve.

The Tower of Pisa is north of the equator, which means its speed differential relative to the plaza below is smaller.  But it also leads to the second complication: the cannonball's trajectory will curve slightly south, due to Coriolis, an effect which is also responsible for the counter-clockwise rotation of hurricanes in the northern hemisphere.  So the cannonball will land slightly to the east and south of the spot below where it was dropped.

The cannonball's exact trajectory will depend on the forces it is subjected to.  The third complication is the centrifugal force produced by the earth's rotation, which counteracts to some degree the earth's gravity.  When weighing yourself, you will get a smaller number at the equator than at either of the poles (if the earth spun about 16 times faster, those at the equator would be weightless).  When you drop the cannonball, centrifugal force counteracts, somewhat, the downward acceleration due to gravity.

The fourth complication also lowers the downward acceleration at the moment the cannonball is dropped.  Over four centuries ago, in one of the most famous scientific advances, Isaac Newton showed that the force of gravity varies in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the earth's center.  The top of the tower is farther from the center of the earth, which means the gravitational force is lower.  As the cannonball gets closer to the earth, the gravitational force increases.

The fifth complication has to do with the gravitational force caused by the cannonball itself.  All mass, no matter how small or how distant, exerts a gravitational force. While the cannonball is falling toward the earth, the earth is falling toward the cannonball.

The earth moves!  Two masses - the earth and the cannonball, in this case - accelerate toward each other.  Since the cannonball has less mass, it moves more than the earth does.  But the earth still moves. This universal law of gravitation was discovered by Isaac Newton.

Drop a cannonball from a 100 meter tower, and it will land after traveling slightly less than 100 meters, because the earth has been pulled ever so slightly toward the cannonball.

Einstein's theory of relativity introduces yet more complications, which I'll skip because I don't know enough about them.  And there may be more complications I haven't thought of.

These five complications have small effects, even when aggregated.  In almost any physics class, you can safely ignore them all, and pretend a dropped cannonball will fall straight down.  But rest assured that no matter where you look, if you choose to look further, there is more to find.

The Antidote

"For what?", you ask.  It's an excellent question, and, to be honest, after reading "The Antidote," a Grisham-esquely titled book by Oliver Burkeman, I still can't answer it.  To the best of my knowledge, the word "antidote" appears nowhere else in the book.  Nitpicking aside, I found the book, based on columns the author published in the Guardian.Weekend magazine, well written and well researched.  Like a Michael Lewis story, but with weirder characters - as if Michael Lewis had written a non-fiction version of Harry Potter.  (That analogy occurred to me after the first couple of chapters.  Later, by coincidence, J.K. Rowling makes a brief appearance.)

Here's how the book starts:

The man who claims that he is about to tell me the secret of human happiness is eighty-three years old, with an alarming orange tan that does nothing to enhance his credibility.  It is just after eight o'clock on a December morning, in a darkened basketball stadium on the outskirts of San Antonio in Texas, and - according to the orange man - I am about to learn 'the one thing that will change your life forever.'  I'm skeptical, but not as much as I might normally be, because I am only one of more than fifteen thousand people at Get Motivated!, America's 'most popular business motivational seminar,'  and the enthusiasm of my fellow members is starting to become infectious. ...  'Here's the thing that will change your life forever.'  [Dr Schuller, author of more than 35 books on positive thinking] then barks a single syllable - 'Cut!' - and leaves a dramatic pause before completing the sentence '... the word 'impossible' out of your life!  Cut it out!  Cut it out forever!'  The audience combusts. ...

The book's subtitle is much more specific: "Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking."   Although I can't remember how the book caught my eye, I imagine this is it. People rarely accuse me of being excessively positive, a characteristic that, according to Burkeman, I share with journalists like himself.

This early passage contains hints of what comes later:

The logic of Schuller's philosophy, which is the doctrine of positive thinking at its most distilled, isn't exactly complex: decide to think happy and successful thoughts - banish the spectres of sadness and failure - and happiness and success will follow.  It could be argued that not every speaker listed in the glossy brochure for today's seminar provides uncontroversial evidence in support of this outlook: the keynote speech is to be delivered, in a few hours' time, by George W. Bush, a president far from universally viewed as successful.  But if you voiced this objection to Dr. Schuller, he would probably dismiss it as 'negativity thinking.'  To criticize the power of positivity is to demonstrate that you haven't really grasped it at all.  If you had, you would stop grumbling about such things, and indeed about anything else.

A brilliant business model: the less effective the philosophy is, the more profitable it becomes, since it can't be falsified, and all 15,000 attendees become prospective customers for Schuller's next visit to San Antonio.  But Burkeman's takedown of Schuller's philosophy turns out to be more perspicacious than merely suggesting that not all positive thinkers are successful and happy (although, I hasten to add, Bush 43 is nearly universally viewed as happy, inexplicably so); he points out that the power of positivity may not even lead to positive thoughts.  This is the realm of ironic process theory, which evolved out of research conducted by Daniel Wegner, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard.  At its core, it suggests that certain things are harder - nee impossible - to do when you try to do them, such as "not thinking about a white bear."  Being happy is one such thing, Burkeman argues.  Paraphrasing Burkeman, we can glimpse it out of the corner of our eye, but can't see it when we look directly at it; "For a civilization so fixated on happiness, we seem remarkably incompetent at the task. ... 'Ask yourself whether you are happy,' observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, 'and you cease to be so.'"  During a chapter on Buddhism, the astute reader will contemplate that the secret to happiness might be, paradoxically, to not care whether or not we are happy.

Breathtakingly negative topics - Stoicism; a guy who sat on a park bench for two years; failure; insecurity; Mexico's fascination with death; the world's largest pubic louse - succumb to Burkeman's cheerful, engaging prose.  At times I think the book is repetitive, but it doesn't feel repetitive; when he finds several interesting ways to say the same thing, I'll happily read them all.  Analogous to Clinton's "third way" in politics, Burkeman's opus is a third angle on happiness, between "the futile effort to pursue solutions that never seem to work, on the one hand, and just giving up, on the other."  Sounds plausible to me, paradoxes and all.

Time Magazine: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

Here is a terrific long read: Time Magazine's fascinating, detailed look at why medical bills are killing us, by Steven Brill.

Update:

Some more links for those interested:

Matt Yglesias comments on the Time Magazine series.

David Goldhill: How American Health Care Killed My Father.

Jonathan Cohn: The Robot Will See You Now.

Atul Gawande: The Cost Conundrum and The Cost Conundrum (*).