Hey what're the odds

The full title of Joseph Mazur's book Fluke is Fluke: The Math & Myth of Coincidence. The cover of the 2016 Basic Books edition shows a man in silhouette, walking his dog. A lightning bolt descends from the word "Fluke", aimed at the man's head. Wouldn't it be crazy if he had been hit by lightning before and was about to be so struck again?

An excerpt: 

By definition, coincidences are events that happen without apparent cause. Apparent to whom? It does not mean there is no cause. The world generally moves by cause and effect. I say generally, because there are acausal phenomena in physics, psychology, and religion. But the word apparent tells us that the moment we learn the cause of a coincidental phenomenon, its status diminishes to a simple time-space event. That must mean that coincidences are relative to the people affected by them. It also means that the unapparent cause is there, waiting to be discovered. If there is no cause at all, then it happens by chance. 

This is graspable in theory. It doesn't necessarily make this "unapparent cause" easy to pin down. There are probably some coincidences where the actual odds for and against remain a topic of hot debate.

One interesting thing I learned about in this book is the birthday problem, meaning that the probability of two people having the same birthday reaches 50% when there are 23 people in the group. This threw me at first. I would have guessed that this point came at 183, which is about half the number of days in the year. But the numbers check out when you look at it.

Might have beens

There used to be an easy listening station here in the Providence area. It eventually converted to a talk format, but held on through most of the 90s I think. 

Anyway, among the old records they played was "Amapola", sung by Bob Eberly and Helen O'Connell with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. It struck me as a very good performance.

Eberly's story is an interesting one, and for him must have been frustrating. When the Dorsey brothers split up, he stayed with Jimmy's band. Tommy would soon enlist a young Frank Sinatra. So could Eberly have been as big a star as Sinatra, with movie roles and his own record label? Maybe. He had a great voice, as heard here with unavoidable pops and hisses. And he was good looking in a slightly androgynous way. 

It wasn't quite to be, though. Mostly it seems to have come down to timing. When he died in 1981 he'd mostly be remembered by Big Band Era diehards. That's quite a sentence, but there are probably worse fates.

World without rocks

 

There's a famous anecdote about Samuel Johnson. It's said that he was so irritated by a mention of George Berkeley's assertion that there is no reality except for what is perceived that he kicked a rock and said, "Thus I refute Berkeley." 

What's the problem with arguing on the internet? Some people think it's that no one respects experts anymore and that leads them to spread misinformation. But in truth, most experts are fatuous idiots and liars, and it's actively a good thing that people ignore them.

A more serious problem is that there's no way to appeal to objective reality. You're not face to face with anyone. You're not sharing space with them. Cyberspace isn't space. So you do see people assert some things and deny other things in a way that would entirely collapse if they weren't alone with their reflections.

Men in white

I'm reading a Ray Bradbury collection called A Medicine for Melancholy. Not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time. And one thing about Bradbury is that he can launch into a bunch of different kind of stories.

When it was published, "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" probably wasn't what people were expecting from Bradbury, known to be a science fiction guy. It's about a half-dozen men who all go in on buying a gleaming white suit that none of them could afford on their own. Ultimately it's a very affecting story about friendship.

Could he have published it now? If he weren't already established as a big name, I mean. I don't know. The main characters are all Chicano. While wokeness isn't really rampant among American Latinos, editors might hesitate, saying that they'd "prefer a story like this from someone in the community." To which this hypothetical Ray Bradbury might respond, "Okay, but I'm the one who did write it, so how about evaluating it on its own terms?"  So again, I don't know what would happen.

Remember what I said about Bradbury's versatility? The next story in the collection is "Fever Dream", a scary story about a boy at the start of adolescence who gets sick. But that's not all, as the ad say.

Plant corner

Monkey puzzle trees are quite interesting both because of their unusual crisscross branches and because they're conifers native to the Southern hemisphere. They're not the only conifers from the Southern Hemisphere, but conditions in the southern temperate zones have almost certainly shaped them into what they are now. In any case, as they're endangered, may they soon be unendangered.

It's theorized that they're spiky branches evolved as a defense against dinosaurs. Crazy to think about how aspects of such a long-ago world are still with us today.

We got a jumper

 

I love this song. It's got an aggressively angular sound you wouldn't necessarily associate with Simon & Garfunkel, but they wear it well. It's also a really good example of storytelling in song. A real "you are there" feel, and an ending that raises some question. 

This blog post about it is very good too. (Remember blogs?) "Another Paul" has always been able to draw a lot out of the Simon songs he writes about. Marilyn Manson is an interesting addition to the mix.

Cat's entertainment

Well, the known animal kingdom just got a little bigger, and it's always cool when you can find out about that. The tilcayo tiger cat was just discovered in Bolivia. Its Latin binomial is leopardus tilcayo, which sounds not unlike a Chicano rapper with an Ancient Roman theme.

One of the researchers who discovered the tilcayo notes that it's "smaller than a housecat." But how can that be when it's of the genus "leopardus"? Well, actual leopards, which mostly live in Africa, have the genus "panthera." The "leopardus" genus describes South American native cats, most of the species being quite small. 

Anyway, here's hoping the tilcayo tiger cat's habitat remains sufficiently intact for them to thrive.