Vincent

“It’s only in front of the easel while painting that I feel a little of life.” Vincent Van Gogh

I titled this post ‘Vincent’ because that's how Van Gogh signed his paintings. After spending several hours in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I feel like I know him well enough to make small talk. “Good morning, Vincent. How’s the new painting?” “I’m satisfied with the sketches. It’s time to lay down some gesso.”

An episode of Dr. Who once made Van Gogh seem like the most popular painter of all time. It sounded crazy until I got to the museum. It’s one of several in a multi-museum complex that includes the Rijksmuseum with paintings by the Dutch masters and another dedicated to Dutch history. It’s also chilly, pouring rain, and the ticket queue is outside and uncovered. Yet there's a half-hour wait for the Van Gogh museum.

Is the interest in Van Gogh because of his paintings, or because of the seemingly tragic details of his life? Having seen photographs of his work, I was inclined to think the later. Now I’m standing in a room full of the artist’s self-portraits, most of them from 1887. Despite the non-representational style, his eyes seem to look back at me. I’m looking at a real human being. I’m waiting for him to say, “Hi. How’s it going?” And the famous paintings, which I'll get to in a minute, are just as affecting.

In the middle of the room, three portraits merit individual glass cases. Two of them you’ve seen. They’re the famous portraits of Vincent in his straw hat. In the third, he wears a suit. This is the one I think is the most compelling, the one I can't stop looking at and the one that doesn't play as well in photo on a computer screen—and the one I can't find in the gift shop.

One floor up are paintings from Van Gogh’s early period. The most striking painting here, one considered an early masterpiece is called The Potato Eaters. It depicts a peasant family eating diner. Absent are the bright colors we associate with Van Gogh, but even at this stage his style is seems completely his own.

The next floor shows what happens when Vincent arrives in Paris. He sees the impressionists for the first time. He sees Japanese block prints, then creating a stir in European art circles.  He get’s access to the latest technology in paints and the vibrant colors that were then newly available. By the time he moves to Arles, France in 1888 his mature style is emerging.

The top floor contains his most famous paintings, his mature style. I wonder at Vincent's ability to evoke such beauty from such humdrum subjects. His most famous paintings are subjects he had at hand. The Yellow House shows the same window we see in Bedroom in Arles. In the bedroom, hanging above Vincent's bed is the yellow straw hat worn in his self-portraits.

Non-representationalists (particularly the more abstract ones) are often accused of having no talent. Some might point to the uneven perspective of Van Gogh's paintings and dismiss him as an amateur. Yet the sketches he made while planning a painting show the same views with better perspective. An electronic display overlays three images he made of a view from his Paris window. The positions match closely. This suggests he knew exactly what he was doing and that he was deliberately distorting. More importantly, the distortions when seen in person just seem right.

I reach the last painting in the museum and realize I haven't seen Starry Night. It’s Van Gogh’s most famous painting, yet it’s not in his eponymous museum. For that I have to go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Without even realizing it my guess about Starry Night's size had grown in the ten weeks since Amsterdam. I shouldn't have been surprised that the painting was half the size I expected. Vincent couldn't sell small paintings. Why would he make them larger?

I noticed something again, something that first occurred to me in Amsterdam. The paintings I knew about, the ones I knew from photographs, weren't the ones that affected me. The paintings that impressed me in person seemed lesser in photographs.
In person, I loved the formal self-portrait. I loved the paintings of where he lived. And Starry Night looks much better on a screen or a page than it does in person.

Did Stop and Frisk Work?

I don't have time to fact check every statement that was made by both Trump and Clinton at last night's presidential debate. I really don't need to since there are plenty of people out there who are. I do have time to share data I already have. And what I already have pertains to this moment from Trump.

Now, whether or not in a place like Chicago you do stop and frisk, which worked very well, Mayor Giuliani is here, worked very well in New York. It brought the crime rate way down. But you take the gun away from criminals that shouldn't be having it.

About a year ago, I pulled crime rates for the top five largest cities in the United States, plus the national average for the years 1985 to 2012. The data comes from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics. The FBI apparently has data for 2013, 2014, and 2015. It's just not available in this database. For 2014 and 2015, I have some data collected by fivethirtyeight.com. I need to update my data set, but the years I need aren't relevant to the current question.

The current question is this: did stop and frisk have any affect on violent crime rates in New York City?

Let's start with Murder and non negligent manslaughter. The chart below summarizes the data. I've highlighted the years that stop and frisk policies were in effect.

In looking at this chart, two things jump out at me. First by the time stop and frisk was in use, the crime wave in New York City had largely receded. The second thing I notice is that crime rates were down for the other four top cities as nationally. (The average shown in the chart is for the top 60 U.S. cities, not just the top five. This means that crime went down everywhere regardless of policy.

What remains now is to see if these patterns hold true for other types of crime. That's a task for a different evening. It's getting late and I have a day job.

Mass Shootings

The Homomonument (yes, that's what it's called) in Amsterdam.

In June I went to Amsterdam for work. A few dozen yards from the house where Anne Frank hid from the Nazi's is a Dutch gay memorial. By the time I took this picture it had been barely two weeks since the Orlando night club shooting. Writing this article many weeks later, I still don't know what to say about either the Orlando shooting or about the outpouring of support for the victims shown at this monument.

But I can do what I usually do; I can try to understand. In no particular order, here's a few things I've learned.

What is a Mass Killing?

That may seem like a silly question to ask until you realize that different sources give it different definitions. Several web sites including http://massshooting.org/ and http://www.shootingtracker.com/ define a mass killing as a shooting incident with four or more victims. The Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012 defines a mass shooting as 3 or more killings in a single incident.

The definition matters because any comparison of stats from different sources has to use the same definitions for comparisons between data sets to be valid.

We’re Not the Only Country to Suffer Mass Shootings

In fact, we’re not even the worst country for mass shootings. This probably surprises you as much as it surprises me. America out-guns our European counterparts in sheer numbers, but that’s a function of size rather than chaos. If you look at the death rate per million people, the good old US of A comes in 11th. For once I’m glad we don’t excel. The Netherlands, where I took the photos in this post, ranks 13th.

This information comes, however, with a caveat. The several articles I’ve found making this claim attribute their data to the Rampage Shooting Index from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. I haven’t been able to locate the index on their website, meaning I’m not yet able to make judgement about its voracity.

Many Incidents are Ended by Unarmed Individuals

This is the most counter-intuitive thing I learned. A 2014 FBI study of active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013 found that in 21 of the 160 incidents studied, the active shooter was stopped by an unarmed citizens.

This one also has a caveat. Active shooter incidents is a slightly broader but overlapping category than a mass shooting. It seems likely that active shooter incidents could have become mass shootings had they not been halted.

Active and Mass Shootings are Increasing Worldwide

This jumps out at you from the graphs in the FBI data set. Security Magazine agrees. It reports using a rolling five year total. The total from 2009 to 2013 was 413, compared to 373 for 2008 to 2012.

From a gay memorial in Amsterdam

Conclusion

As with other things I've tried to research my efforts have once again been thwarted by an inability to see much real unbiased research into the subject. An outfit called Journalist Resources has helpfully put out a list of articles related to mass shootings. Helpful though this seems, I can’t actually read any of it for less than $35 per article. With sixteen articles listed, I would need well over $450 to be conversant in this issue. That’s assuming these are the studies I need to read. The articles in that list are typical of what I found wherever I looked. Even looking beyond abstracts to judge what research might be relevant would cost thousands of dollars.

Racial Bias by Police?

Do you think there's widespread bias and violence by police officers against blacks and other minorities? What you suspect and what you can prove are two different things.

In the midst of much lamented acts of police violence and equally lamentable reprisal comes a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research titled An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Among the media and related punditry are some claiming this study as ‘proof’ of the absence of racism in policing.

Yet the paper itself shows why that conclusion may be erroneous, starting with a frank notice on page one that it’s a working paper that hasn’t been peer reviewed. Other caveats start on page 7. (Page 7 of the PDF actually displays the number 5 on it’s bottom.) Caveats include problems with their source data and a concern that their methodology is inadequate. Snopes.com catalogs many other problems noted by critics and others.

I know what my gut's telling me about the veracity of the NERB paper. If this were an opinion piece I'd share that opinion. A New York Time story on the paper opens with the unequivocal “a new study confirms”. If the Times actually believes that then they need to either read more carefully or acquire a better understanding of how scientific research works. If they understand how science works, they're editorializing. in which case their whole article should on the opinion section, not posted as news.

Biergartens

For years I've heard the German term biergarten and assumed that garten must have a broader meaning than the English term garden. Coming from a place with open container laws and an almost neurotic anxiety about where open drinking can and cannot occur, I thought surely Germans wouldn't allow alcohol consumption in a setting that sounds synonymous with park. Yet that's exactly what they do.

 My friend and coworker Paul is from Munich. He tells me the biergartens can be cliquish. The goal is what the Germans call Gemütlichkeit, a place or feeling of warmth and friendliness. This is the original place where everybody knows your name. It looks downright civilized. There’s no ear splitting music, no drunk twenty year olds crashing into each other and tossing back Jell-O shots. No bouncer keeping out The Ugly People™.

In fact, there’s no bouncer at all. Nor is there a barrier separating the drinkers from the non-drinkers. I can’t tell you if that’s true of all the dozens of biergartens in Munich. The biergarten in the photo is literally in the center of a public park called the Englischer Garten. The other biergarten I visited is the Viktualienmarkt, an open public square a block off the town center, the Marienplatz.

Every biergarten has copious trees, even more tables, places to buy beer, and places to buy food. Some people bring their own food because that’s allowed. I suppose it’s also possible to bring your own beer as well, but nobody seems to be doing that.

Most of the beer steins are glass instead of the traditional ornate covered steins that everyone associates with Bavaria. According to a tour guide, clear glass is required by law. About a century or so back, beer sellers were using the fact of dark covered steins to cheat customers by underfilling and charging the same price. Glass lets customers see exactly how much they’re getting for their money. Bier steins are a full lite. The glass in the photo is typical of the typical biergarten stein around here, it's actually one from the Hofbrauhaus. It’s 2.11 pints, in case you were wondering. Beer sellers keep them from wandering off by charging a stein deposit with the beer purchase, for which the buyer is given a metal token or ticket.

I wish I had better pictures of all of this. No matter how many pictures I take on a trip, inevitably, when I start processing them, I find there’s something I missed, something I didn’t get enough of. For Munich, biergarten’s are what I missed.

Lead in Water

I share the disdain of many people for our media, but not because they're too liberal or too conservative, or too whatever. I accuse them of other things. I accuse them of being lazy and incompetent. Today I'm adding to that list irresponsible.

The National Resources Defense Council a few days ago released a report indicating that more than 5300 communities nationwide, like Flint, Michigan, suffer from some for of lead contamination in their drinking water. The first question I want answered is, do I live in one of those communities?

If you read about this story on CNN or NBC, you wouldn't immediately know. To their credit, CNN, provided a link to instructions for investigating your own water for lead. But instead of linking to the NRDC report with interactive maps that let you zoom in on your part of the country, they created their own static maps that make that difficult.

I don't foolishly think that news organizations exist for the public good. They exist to make money for their owners. The marginal cost of adding a link to a news article in negligible, which is another way of saying it costs them nothing. To leave out links to answers when 18 million people are being poisoned, that's irresponsible.

Everybody’d be Surfing, Surfing Isar Fluss

When you hear the name Munich what comes to mind? The world’s best Lagers? Bier gartens the size of fusball fields? Maybe you’re a history buff and you think of darker things. One thing you won't think of is surfing.

It’s after lunch and the group I’m with leaves the bier garten in Munich’s Englischer Garten. We’ve got some time before our next stop at the Deutsches Museum so some of us decide to walk. One of my companions mentions something she specifically wants to see: a standing wave on the Eisbach, an artificial branch of the Isar fluss (river). It’s here that some locals in this land-locked state practice their surfing skills.

I don’t know much about this and didn’t think to ask any of the surfers at the time. If you’re curious, you can read the wikipedia article. Meanwhile, here are some pictures I took.