Every
now and then the universe seems to be telling you something. Carl Jung believed
this enough to expound on synchronicity and the collective unconscious. I don’t
buy it. I suspect the universe is all random events and that any “seems” comes
from confirmation bias. Be that as it may, odd coincidences do catch our
attention. Several times in recent months, for example, I’ve seen references to
an obscure book by successful mutual fund manager Edgar Lawrence Smith, a
fellow of whom I’d never before heard – or at least I don’t remember hearing of him. (The recurrence
surely has to do with my choice of reading genres in those months.) The
references to the book for the most part were snickering, and that was enough
to prompt me to look up the original. The author of a well-received treatise on
stock investing in the 1920s, Smith in 1939 published Tides and the Affairs of Men. The title, of course, derives from Julius Caesar.
Brutus:
There
is a tide in the affairs of men
Which,
taken at the flood, leads on to fortune
Economic
theory has gotten very mathematically complex in the past couple of decades.
There is much insight inherent in the new analytical tools, and they allow for such
things (among many others) as valuing arcane derivatives in ways other than
guesswork. Yet, today’s economists are no better at forecasting the stock
market than were their predecessors a hundred years ago. 2008 caught nearly
everyone (the SEC most of all) by surprise. Accordingly, for a common investor writings
from the last century are every bit as useful – and as useless – as anything
new.
There
are two main points in Smith’s book. One is the Decennial Cycle. Analyzing
stock prices since 1880, he discerned a repeating ten year pattern in stock
movements. The scale of price movement might vary but the general pattern
persisted. He didn’t try to explain the pattern; he simply noted that it was
there. (This pattern, if still valid, suggests 2017 will be a bad year.) The
other point is weirder. He also claimed to see a correlation between stock
prices and the weather. In this case I think his data points are selective to
put it kindly. I would snicker if Smith hadn’t somehow managed to make money
despite these views.
The
fact that a fund manager could invest based on the weather and be successful at
it brings to mind a point made long before Smith’s time. In 1863 Jules Regnault,
who also was a successful broker/investor, wrote Calcul des Chances et Philosophie de la Bourse. In this treatise he
tells us that stock prices already embody the average opinion of a multitude of
investors with the result that your chances of winning or losing on any given
stock pick are exactly 50:50. Prices follow a “random walk.” Actually, your
odds are worse than a coin toss when you take account of transaction costs such
as brokers’ fees. The only ways to make money in stocks are 1) to get lucky, 2)
to have inside information, or 3) to be invested during a time of a general
market price rise. (The hackneyed but useful modern phrase describing #3 is “a
rising tide lifts all boats.”) Regnault preferred bonds with clearly defined
rates of return over stocks, though of course one must diversify enough to survive the
occasional default. That equity holdings should be diversified was centuries-old
advice by 1863.
Here
we have the key to Smith’s success – at least after the 1929 debacle. It didn’t
really matter what wacky method he used to pick stocks so long as the general market
trend was up and so long as he diversified his risks in the process.
The
Random Walk is still taught in business schools as is the dartboard method of
investing: throwing darts at The Wall
Street Journal is as successful an investment strategy as any other. That
doesn’t stop analysts from trying to beat the market. Some seem to do it, at
least for a few years, but they are balanced by others who are just as smart
yet lag the market. It is hard to see more than luck in either outcome.
Be
warned again, though, that, if Smith was right, in 2017 there will be a change
in the weather.
Barrett Strong - Money (That's What I Want) [1959]
My
parents moved from Whippany to Mendham NJ in the summer of 1959 when I was 6. For
my mom this was a move back to
Mendham where she had grown up. While the coincidence of the move with the
turning of the decade was not perfect it was close. So, when I recall the 1950s
I think of very young childhood and Whippany while the 1960s mean boyhood,
tween, teen, and Mendham. I was already a scifi fan at the time of the move. I
credit Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956). Now that I think about it, it is somewhat surprising my parents let me
watch something with that title at that age.
I
recall watching only a few scifi movies during the 50s. That’s not to say I
didn’t see more, but I don’t remember them. They were 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Invaders from Mars, Godzilla, Invasion of
the Body Snatchers, and The
Mysterians. The first and last of those were at drive-ins (20,000 Leagues under the Sea must have
been a re-release) and the middle three were on television. While I liked them
all – and still do for that matter, though nowadays just for laughs in the case
of The Mysterians – the least
assuming of the bunch with the lowest budget had the biggest impact on me. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was
filmed in only 23 days. The only special effects that weren’t off-the-shelf
were the big alien plant pods. I watched this for the first time at night with
my sister. It scared the hell out of me and I loved every minute of it. I’ve
enjoyed it on each subsequent view as well, including last night when it unexpectedly turned up on cable.
The
movie has been remade several times – on at least one occasion with flair and
merit – but I still like the original the best.
Naturally at age 5 or 6 (whichever it was) I didn’t have a very
sophisticated take on the movie. The whole “Run! They’re going to get you!”
element was enough. As I got older, recognizing the theme of the value of
individuality amid conformist groupthink only made the viewing more enjoyable. It
is sometimes said that this movie is Cold War propaganda. It is not. The movie
does not target followers of any particular ideology: it targets mindless
conformism of any kind. Groupthink occurs across the political spectrum and in
all sorts of ways far beyond politics. There is emotional comfort in swallowing
one prepackaged wisdom or another: to emphasize one set of facts and dismiss another
set according to an accepted pattern while sycophantically exalting the
appropriate heroes and vilifying the appropriate enemies. It is calming – at
least for oneself. Said director Don Siegel, “I think that the world is
populated by pods and I wanted to show them…There's regimentation, a lack of
having to make up your mind, face decisions.... People are becoming vegetables.
I don't know what the answer is except an awareness of it.” The message is
every bit as contemporary as it was 60 years ago.
In
the unlikely event the reader hasn’t seen this movie or one of the remakes, the
plot is that big seed pods, presumably from space, have fallen on Santa Mira, a
fictional California town though a dozen later scifi/horror films also were set
there. Inside the pods grow copies of the town’s residents. When the real
person falls asleep his or her consciousness transfers to the pod person who
wakes up and disposes of the original. The pod people lack individuality and
heart. They spread around more pods to expand their numbers and they actively
try to destroy anyone who gets in the way.
*Spoiler
alert.* The original script ended when Miles (Kevin McCarthy) discovers a truck
full of pods on the highway, realizes it is already too late, and shouts to
passing drivers, “You’re next!” This was a little too bleak for the studio
which insisted on a prologue and epilogue that offered some hope. For once,
studio interference probably helped. A happy ending would have been
unsatisfying, but one in which there is at least a fighting chance works better,
I think, than simple despair.
Perhaps
I would have become an avid reader, viewer, and sometimes writer of scifi
without this movie. But it surely influenced my sense of what constituted good
scifi. Seeing it again last night was not just a nostalgia trip. Showing once
again the primacy of script over fx, the movie is still scary.
I
was pleased to get a chance to shake Kevin McCarthy’s hand at a Chiller Theater
convention the year before he died. I didn’t tell him then how much his 1956
film had influenced me, but I suspect he knew. I doubt anyone at that
convention sought him out because of his appearance on Murder, She Wrote. On the other hand his off-Broadway role in Happy Birthday Wanda June was also memorable,
but that is perhaps a subject for another blog.
My 1960s weren’t as free-spirited as they
were for many from the Baby Boomers’ first cohort – those born 1946-50. They
experienced a goodly piece of the ‘60s as legal adults. The next cohort (1951-57)
caught at least a piece of the decade as teenagers, but unless they ran away
from home or rebelled big-time their moment didn’t come fully until the ‘70s.
Parental oversight and all that. I was in this second cohort. I didn’t turn 18
until near the end of 1970 and I wasn’t terribly rebellious. (The Crystals’ big
hit was not written for me.) But I did have one advantage as far as the decade’s music was concerned: an older sister who filled the house with the
sounds of Dylan, Clapton, Donovan, the Doors, et al. much sooner than I would
have found them on my own. So, the mental soundtrack to my memories of the
1960s is pretty good. In 1965 one of the vinyl albums Sharon brought home was Animal
Tracks by the
Animals. (The US album has a different track list from the UK album of the same
title, btw, but both are good.) She liked it, but not half so much as I did.
What on these shores was called the British
Invasion was a reflection wave from young British musicians who were inspired
by Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, and other blues artists. Forming
their own bands, they added their own flourishes. Eric Burdon (b. May 11, 1941, in Newcastle
upon Tyne) was in the right place at the right time with the right voice. He
and Alan Price formed the Animals in 1962. They had their first hit a couple
years later with House of the Rising Sun, which Eric said took only 15 minutes to
record. They might not have been as prolific and inventive as the Beatles or Rolling
Stones, but I liked their sound better back then. I still do. We Gotta Get
Out of This Place was popular with troops in Vietnam for self-explanatory reasons. The
Animals went through a few incarnations; in between two of them Eric joined up
with the funk band War and had the hit Spill the Wine. At age 75 Eric is still
performing and recording.
By the time Sharon went off to college I was
picking my own album purchases. They were a mix of styles but continued to
favor blues-based rock. Five years Eric’s junior, Edgar Winter (like his
brother Johnny [d.2014]) from Beaumont Texas is a multi-instrumentalist who
plays just that brand of music. Due largely to timing (I was in college by the
time Edgar hit with Frankenstein and Free Ride), he didn’t have the
formative effect on my tastes that Eric did, but I liked his sound. Hearing it today also
can make me nostalgic, though for a different phase of life.
A few months ago when I noticed Eric Burdon
and Edgar Winter were double-billed at a nearby venue for July 17 in
Morristown, it took me fewer than ten minutes to score tickets. I went with
someone I’ve known for decades, which seemed appropriate.
The concert was the best I’ve heard in
years. While the old songs did evoke some memories, the joy of live music is
that it is very much in the now. So overwhelmingly they (along with a few newer
numbers) evoked the sensation that this was a very good evening in 2016.
I stood outside in the dark and quiet until
a few minutes ago. It is a hot muggy night; though the haze is not thick enough to
be visible directly, the heaviness to the air blocks the light from all but the
brightest stars. It feels wonderful.
[I debated
with myself whether to attach vintage or recent videos. I flipped a coin and went
with vintage.]
As
the Dow and S&P reach new highs the contrarian in me urges caution. The slacker
in me needs little urging, so there is not much chance of my toe dipping any
deeper into the market at present. This could change if a correction offers a
special opportunity. (October is the most likely month for one of those –
nobody knows why.) A correction is coming sometime, of course: a full-blown
crash too, whether it happens this year, next, or a decade down the pike. They are
always coming. They are a feature of any financial system and cannot
be prevented, try as we might. Changing the mix of laws and rules means only
that it will be triggered in some new and completely unexpected way.
This
was the conclusion of Princeton economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth
Rogoff in their 2009 book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of
Financial Folly which examined financial crises over the past 800 years. Their book
was one of the earliest expert examinations of the 2006-2008 crisis and is
still one of the best. Though they do say that regulatory policies can affect
the speed and effectiveness with which we pick up the pieces afterwards, they
emphasize that it is misguided to think crashes can be somehow outlawed: "a
financial system can collapse under the pressure of greed, politics, and profits
no matter how well regulated it seems to be." Financial collapses happen in advanced
economies, in emerging ones, in free market economies, in command economies,
and in mixed ones. Every country has had them. They are "equal opportunity
crises."
We even have records of ancient Roman
crashes – on one occasion complete with a financial bailout. Like the 2008
crash that started in the US, the Roman crisis of 33 AD began with a decline in
real estate values. Landowners soon were underwater with their mortgages, which
were held mostly by members of the Senatorial class. Tacitus tells us “many
were utterly ruined. The destruction of private wealth precipitated the fall of
rank and reputation, till at last the emperor interposed his aid by
distributing throughout the banks a hundred million sesterces.” The emperor was
Tiberius who was a tyrannical old pervert, but also a budget hawk who had filled
up the Roman treasury, thereby putting him in a position to help. The recovery
was slow, but naturally Tiberius took credit for it. How much the bailout
helped is, like that of 2008, a matter of debate. Skeptics might point to a
similar earlier crisis also provoked by real estate price declines in 49 BC precipitated
by uncertainty regarding Julius Caesar’s march on Rome. Julius was in no
position to bail out anyone; the civil war had first call on cash. The Senate
enacted some regulatory interventions such as a cap of 12% on interest and a
law against hoarding of cash, but, since the crash already had happened, they
had little effect. Finances recovered anyway in about the same time frame as
under Tiberius.
It is not surprising that in all ages
financiers tend to be unpopular, whether working for themselves, banks,
brokerages, or quasi-governmental agencies such as the IMF. Even in good times
they seem to average folks to profit unseemly well, and in bad they don’t seem
to suffer enough. Yet, like them or not, the role they play is critical and
always has been. In his book Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made
Civilization Possible, William Goetzmann argues that we owe the birth of urban civilization
to their doings.
Urban civilization with written records
began some 5000 years ago in Sumeria. Early contracts among traders and their
financiers were clay balls with tokens inside representing sheep, cattle,
linen, and whatever other goods were to be traded. Later, symbols derived from
the shapes of these tokens were simply inscribed on clay tablets: commercial
contracts were the first writing. They required basic mathematical ability and
good accounting. The development of math and writing had profound consequences
beyond just business. Very quickly the financial instruments with which we are
still familiar developed: short term deposits, long term loans, compound interest,
mortgages, limited partnerships, insurance, equity investments, paper profits
(clay, actually), and more. By chance the records of a number of financiers
have survived. Dumuzi-gamil in the city of Ur for example was a banker who took
deposits and invested in a wide range of instruments including mortgages, shipping, and
bakeries. He collected on short term loans at interest rates of up to 20% per
month.
Real Estate Contract
There was political risk, of course, as
there still is today. In 1788 BC, Rim-Sin, the local king of Ur, in a
populist move declared all debts void. This wiped out Dumuzi-gamil and other
financiers. While no doubt this was popular it is also the last we hear of Ur
as a commercial and military center. Commerce (and the taxes for armies it
generated) moved to Lagash.
Goetzmann makes a good case that money made civilization.
Whether or not that was a bad move is debated by anthropologists. The answer may depend on whether one is a creditor
or debtor.
An
evening followed by a sleepless night led to a pleasing trio of sights
and sounds, all offered up by the gals.
**
** ** **
Whiskey
Tango Foxtrot (2016)
This
adaptation of the memoir The Taliban
Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by former Chicago Tribune correspondent Kim Barker
disappointed at the box office despite generally positive reviews. The reason
isn’t hard to guess. The longest war in US history – still grimly ongoing – has
wearied the public in this country and around the world to the point that any
movie about it faces reticent audiences. The promoters of the film were aware
of this, which is why the trailers misrepresented it as a comedy. It is really not.
There is a fair amount of humor, true enough, but it is of the graveyard and
ironic variety. Mostly the movie is a
story of a woman’s addiction: an addiction to the intensity and
otherworldliness of war correspondence. The film is not political except to the
extent any absurdist movie set in a war zone (M*A*S*H comes to mind) is bound to be.
Tina
Fey stars as the barely fictionalized “Kim Baker,” a correspondent for an
unnamed TV network. She arrives in Kabul clueless about either the local
culture or the “Kabubble” subculture of rowdy bawdy foreign correspondents. She
volunteered for the assignment in Afghanistan because she was dissatisfied with
her desk job and her unexciting relationship with her boyfriend, an explanation
that prompted a Kabubble denizen’s observation, “That is officially the most
American-white-lady story I’ve ever heard.” Danger is real and pervasive
whether she is with the troops, interviewing the locals, or walking on the
street. She often is unaware of just how precarious are the situations in which
she places herself and her translator/guide Fahim, sometimes just by
unconsciously violating local customs. At other times firefights come to her, and the bombs, gunfire, and casualties make the situation all too clear. The
adrenaline from being amid all this causes her to stretch her three month
assignment to three years.
Thumbs
Up, but not at all what one would expect from the trailers.
**
** ** **
Angela
Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales
Angela
Carter wrote fiction and nonfiction in several genres but is probably best
known for her surreal and sensual science fiction. She is often called a
feminist writer, and she is, albeit with a non-doctrinaire perspective: see her
book The Sadeian Woman and the
Ideology of Pornography (1978), which is sympathetic both to Sade and porn.
Carter was intrigued by fairy
tales: particularly the dark variety of the sort found in unexpurgated editions
of Grimm. She published collections in her lifetime and was wrapping up this
compilation from her earlier books at the time of her death in 1992 at age 51. A
few of the tales are versions of familiar ones (e.g. “Little Red Riding Hood”)
but most will be entirely new to the reader, not least because they include
tales from around the world. There is, for example, a curious Inuit parallel of
Pygmalion in which a young woman carves a boyfriend for herself out of blubber,
a Japanese tale of a young girl who thinks she sees her dead mother’s face in a
mirror thereby tearing the eyes of her father, and a North American tale
(verging on urban legend) about a dangerous pet in a pet shop. Most fairy tales,
deriving as they do from oral tradition, exist in multiple versions, but though
Carter may select uncommon ones she denies rewriting them: “I have tried, as
far as possible, to avoid stories that have been conspicuously ‘improved’ by
collectors, or rendered ‘literary’, and I haven’t rewritten any myself no
matter how great the temptation…” There is a theme of sorts: “All of these
stories have only one thing in common – they all centre around a female
protagonist; be she clever, brave, or good, or silly, or cruel, or sinister, or
awesomely unfortunate, she is centre stage, as large as life – sometimes, like
Sermerssuaq, larger.”
We often forget how recent
widespread literacy is. For most of human history oral traditions were the way
values, fears, hopes, and culture were communicated. Perrault, Grimm, and
Andersen recognized this. So, too, does Angela Carter. They all recorded folk
stories before they were lost forever. The tales inform us about ourselves
about as well as any other literature.
Thumbs way Up.
**
** ** **
Dorothy – Rock Is Dead (2016)
Popular
music from one's youth is notoriously dear to the heart. It is the soundtrack to so
many formative “firsts” in our lives. Some people never move beyond it. I’m not
immune to the impulse. While I like to sample new music, I’m still most easily drawn
to the style that I liked back when – which is to say basic blues-based
rock-and-roll and its variants. With the Boomer bands on Medicare and even the grunge
bands turning grey-headed, it is fortunate some young bands still like and play
those sounds. Among them is the Los Angeles band “Dorothy” whose debut album Rock Is Deadreached shelves in June.
Fronted
by Dorothy Martin the band plays refreshingly raw rock in an era overwhelmed
by overproduced electronic pop. Nor is it all one note. There is the bluesy “Dark
Nights,” the hard rock “Whiskey Fever,” and the taste of Nashville in “Shelter.”
Even some psychedelic licks creep in here and there. I’m pleased to see from
live videos on YouTube that the audience is Millennials. But if Dorothy plays
nearby, I don’t mind being outside the demographic.
Recurring characters are bread and butter for popular
authors: Sherlock Holmes (the archetype), Miss Marple, Mike Hammer, Jack
Reacher, Dexter Morgan (more about him later), et al. One of the most enjoyable
by a contemporary author is Repairman Jack, a creation of F. Paul Wilson. The
16 main Repairman Jack books read much like Dashiell Hammett blended with HP
Lovecraft. Jack is an urban mercenary who repeatedly runs afoul of the
nefarious schemes of a secret society that is actively seeking to bring about
the end of the world as we know it. The novels are best read in order from The Tomb (1998) to Nightworld (2012). (The Tomb
originally was published in 1984 [preceding TheEqualizer TV series about an urban
mercenary], but was extensively rewritten in 1998.) The books are readable,
adventurous, and funny. They appeal to those who believe that maybe there
really is a dark conspiracy afoot in the world and to those who wish this were
true, because it at least would explain the otherwise inexplicable.
When a character reaches the end of his or her story arc, as
Jack does in Nightworld, an author is
faced with a decision to retire the character permanently or start a new
storyline. Wilson chose a third path: prequels. There are three Young Adult Jack novels set in Jack’s tweens and
three adult novels about a youthful (and sometimes fumbling) Jack learning his
way. Fear City is the last of these,
and perhaps the last of any kind. F. Paul Wilson: “After sixteen novels
(counting Nightworld) in the main
sequence plus three juveniles and three prequels, Jack needs a rest.” Fear City is great fun for existing fans
of the series, but it is not for newcomers: too many inside jokes and references.
So, Thumbs Up, but only for existing fans of Repairman Jack.
All others should start with The Tomb (1998).
** ** ** **
It’s All in Your Head by Suzanne O’Sullivan
Psychosomatic illnesses get a bad rap, which is why today
they more commonly are called conversion disorders or dissociative disorders.
There is a widespread assumption among members of the general public that
sufferers can and should just “snap out of it.” Even physicians, who ought to
know better, are sometimes inclined to this judgment. Says neurologist Dr.
Suzanne O’Sullivan in her book It’s All
in Your Head, “One of the greatest challenges for most doctors is the
struggle to believe in the truly subconscious nature of their patients’
psychosomatic symptoms.” The situation is not helped by the fact that there is
a small percentage of patients who deliberately fake symptoms for attention or
monetary gain (e.g. disability payments or lawsuits). The large majority,
however, do nothing of the kind. That symptoms can be entirely real despite the
absence of an organic cause has been understood for 150 years.
In truth, we all experience psychogenic symptoms, as when
your hands shake from nervousness, when your pulse rate jumps when you feel
uneasy, or when you get sick to your stomach when emotionally distressed. What
of teens who faint before rock idols? Most of them are neither overheated, dehydrated,
nor faking – they are just worked up. We don’t think much about these involuntary
events, because they are “normal.” So why is it so hard to believe that people
can suffer chronic pain, convulsions, loss of vision, chronic fatigue, or
paralysis for the same reasons – that the symptoms can be 100% real and yet psychogenic?
The difference is merely one of degree.
Those most fiercely resistant to the diagnosis are the
patients themselves. Dr. O’Sullivan’s practice includes treatment of epileptics
and others with organic diseases, and she stresses the importance of thorough testing
for organic causes. But because many patients are referred to her who already
have been tested exhaustively with negative results, she encounters an outsized
proportion of patients whom she ultimately diagnoses with dissociative
disorders. She is accustomed to facing their wrath, for (oddly) people typically
are less upset by a diagnosis of an incurable physical disease than of a
curable psychogenic illness. Nowadays most patients come into her office armed
with a file full of pages they have printed off the internet about diseases
with symptoms like their own. (A common malady of medical students is a
conviction they have diseases about which they are reading; in the 21st
century the internet has spread this malady to others.) They usually reject
what she says outright and counter her diagnosis with challenges such as “What percentage
sure are you?” She answers this simply by repeating that she is sure, for if
she falls into the trap of saying something like 99.5%, they will insist, “I’m
one of the 0.5%.” Yet, she knows they are not being deliberately stubborn;
their symptoms are very real and they just have a hard time accepting a
nonorganic cause.
Such cases are far more common than generally acknowledged: “in
2011 a German study showed that twenty-two percent of people attending a
primary care centre had a somatising disorder.” In the US and the UK “the
prevalence of dissociative seizures in epilepsy clinics is thirty percent.” In
most cases these are transient events brought on by stress with no lasting
effects – patients commonly attribute them to “a bug” and get on with their
lives. (People do get bugs, of
course, so one shouldn’t be hasty in one’s conclusions one way or the other.)
In a few cases, though, the symptoms can be debilitating for months, years, or
a lifetime – especially if patients refuse the best chance at treatment, which
is seeing a psychiatrist. At bottom psychogenic illnesses are biological too,
of course. Even Freud acknowledged this. But they can be treated without
recourse to medication or surgery.
O’Sullivan’s book is well-written, well-argued, and based on
(suitably disguised) real experiences with her patients. Thumbs Up, but it will
infuriate those who have received a “dissociative disorder” diagnosis and
reject it. (A small percentage may be correct to do so.) This is evidenced in
the reader ratings on Amazon, which are mostly 4 and 5-stars with a sprinkling
of 1-stars from readers angry at having received just such a diagnosis.
** ** ** **
Dexter
is Dead by Jeff Lindsay
Those who are familiar with Dexter Morgan – by day a
blood-spatter expert with the Miami PD and by night a serial killer – only from
the Showtime TV series know a very different character from the one in Jeff
Lindsay’s novels. Showtime Dexter is a likable fellow who politely kills his
victims before slicing and dicing them; his vigilante justice, however
horrific, is recognizable as a form of justice. Not so the Dexter of the books.
He is an out-and-out monster with a dark and wicked sense of humor, and he keeps
his victims alive as he dismembers them, because their pain is fun. Novel
Dexter does have a code (kill only vicious criminals), but it is not one he
follows out of a sense of justice. It is merely a technique to reduce the odds
he will get caught. He has no qualms per
se about targeting an innocent person; he avoids doing so purely for practical
reasons. For all that, Jeff Lindsay is funny in the same way that Edgar Allen
Poe is funny.
Book seven in the series, Dexter’s Final Cut, ended with Dexter in jail on charges of murder
(of his wife Rita among others) and pedophilia. Ironically he is innocent of
these particular crimes, but he seems sure to be convicted of them. In book
eight, Dexter is Dead (2015),
Dexter’s brother Brian – also a serial killer but without a code – hires a
celebrity attorney who springs Dexter. Dexter obtains evidence that provides good reasons to be optimistic about his case. Brian, however, has ulterior
motives and soon Dexter is wondering if he would have been safer in jail. The
bodies pile up and Dex isn’t even having fun. If you liked the previous Dexter
books, you’ll like this one too. What of the title? Is Dexter really dead?
Maybe.
Thumbs Up.
** ** ** **
How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff
An example is a blurb on the cover: “Over half a million
copies sold – an Honest-to-Goodness Bestseller.” Well, yes. But since the book
has been in print since 1954 one also could say that it sells about 8,000
copies per year, which is considerably less impressive.
Don’t let the publication date deter you. Precisely the same
issues are discussed and elaborated in this book as are discussed in more
recent titles on the subject – including scientific fraud, which became a
fashionable topic only recently. Better yet, Huff, a statistician by trade,
deals with them concisely and readably. There is nothing new in this book, but
unfortunately nothing old either: all the methods of collecting and
manipulating data to produce a misleading or desired result are still in use.
It doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves of them.
The methods include sample bias, shifting bases when listing
percentages, selective use of “average” (average incomes, for example, with
complete accuracy might be called either rising or falling depending on whether
the average is the median or the mean), semiattached figures (“If you can’t
prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend it is the
same thing”), showing correlations while letting the reader infer cause and
effect, manipulating graphs by selecting scales and the type of graph, and so
on. None of this is rocket science, but Huff demonstrates how easily we can
mislead others, and, far more often and troublingly, ourselves.
Thumbs Up.
** ** ** **
Perhaps O’Sullivan would get a better
response by referring patients to Melanie: Psychotherapy
