The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

In The Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze" the resolution of the mystery of a stolen race horse and a murdered stable man hinges on this famous exchange:

Scotland Yard Detective: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Detective: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

Scotland Yard has a coherent theory of the crime, or it thinks it does. But Holmes isn't happy. He wants to know why the dog didn't bark at the horse thief. It's not explained by the Scotland Yard theory. It doesn't fit.

I'm driven to ask questions. Even when something seems cut and dry, I always ask questions just to be sure everything fits, just to be sure I haven't overlooked a dog that should've been barking but wasn't. This is where I need to be careful and not let my imagination fly off to the moon. Sometimes all I do is fill a few final gaps. Sometimes I find nothing at all. I ask anyway because sometimes what I find is gold.

A few days ago a video was release allegedly showing the act of shoplifting that prompted Michael Brown's pursuit by the Ferguson police. (If I ran a news operation of any kind, I'd find an alternative to the word 'aledged' and disallow its use. Aledged means the evidence is uncertain. When a news story says 'aledged crime', all anyone hears is 'crime'.)

Video is the epitome of the double-edged sword. It can provide an accurate depiction of events. It can also fool you into thinking you have a complete depiction of events. The first version of this video I saw was truncated. It showed only the portion of the video in which Brown tried to leave and was confronted by who we presume is a store employee. Brown is holding an object, and after pushing the store employee aside walks out with it. 

My encounter with this portion of the video was on social media. Everyone on the thread was already convinced they were watching a crime. Because we've been told that we're watching a crime, we assume he's carrying something he picked up in the store. The video doesn't show where the object came from. Did he bring it in with him? Maybe it's something from the store. This video doesn't show the checkout counter. Did he pay for it or not? How can I tell from this video?

This is the point. It turns out Brown was carrying something he picked up in the store. The full video seems to show that. I could not make that statement based on the part of the video that I saw. Being told Brown carried something he picked up in the store ins't the same as knowing he carried something he picked up in the store. 

Before I saw the full video, this was the thing that didn't fit. This was the dog in the night. Even after seeing the full video I still have questions. 

The employee steps in front of someone who is a head taller and a car-length wider than himself and who we are told is a criminal. I'm guessing that in a fair fight, Brown could pound the guy so hard his ancestors would beg for mercy. Yet the employee steps in front of him. This is another piece that doesn't fit. Why doesn't the store employee see Brown as a threat? It could be that said employee is a former marine. I can think of other explanations, some of which could indicate extenuating circumstances. I have no interest in any one possible explanation, but I want to be sure it's not something important.

The meme is already rising that Brown got what he deserved. Never mind that police don't decide guilt or innocence. Never mind that execution isn't a punishment for shoplifting. 

Antithekyra Revisited

In 1900 a shipwreck from around 100 BCE was found just off the Greek island of Antithekyra. In the wreck was a bronze-work mechanical device whose complexity wasn't matched until the European Rennaissance.  Its purpose was unknown for decades, but it was eventually found to be an astronomical calculator for predicting celestial events such as eclipses. 

Over the last century the Antithekyra wreck site has been sporatically explored because it's depth makes diving dangerous.  A few months back, several news outlets reported that a new deep-dive exo suit, originally designed for work in the New York sewage system, will be used to thoroughly explore the shipwreck.

This week I learned that the planned expedition will run for one month starting on September 15. I hope there's some way to follow this in real time, but we'll see.

Lies, Damn Lies, Etc.

There's an oft-quoted aphorism that I deeply hate. It's attributed to 19th century Brittish Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and goes, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." Statistics aren't automatically mendacious just becuase they're statistics.  They're first and foremost a means of cataloging observations about the real world.  You can also think of them as a means of communicating those observations. It's in this realm that I take issue with Disraeli. As with any other form of communication, it can be earnest or it can be deceitful.  It can also be misunderstood. 

It's in this last category that the next story comes. The results of a study were misunderstood because the distinction between proportions and overall numbers was forgotten.  I present this as a cautionary tale as I'll let the authors explain. One other thing to note here is that the authors of the original study themselves failed to notice or failed to communicate what was in their own data.

Head Injuries Didn't Rise in Bike Share Cities

Recent Links

Here's a few things that caught my attention this week.  I have two hopes: that I'm giving you something you missed and that I can make this a regular feature. 

Solar Roads Revisited

I'm old enough to remember the engergy crisis of the 1970's and discussions surrounding the nacent possibilities of solar energy.  I remember in particular the smug way people with "common sense" would dismiss solar energy.  "What do you do on cloudy days? He he!" Obviously, there isn't a complete absence of photons on cloudy days. But, to be honest, I don't know that there weren't real practical problems with solar collectors in those days. 

For the last several months a company called Solar Roadways has been raising start-up money for a technology for paving roads with solar cells.  Like any new technology, they're getting the range of typical criticism from perfectly valid to downright silly. Solar Roadways has responded. The response is not without problems either. Instead of another pundit run-down, I thought I'd give you their side directly.

Half-Baked Science

Is marijuana a harmless pastime or a societal menace? It turns out that facts don't really care about your beliefs, as an article in the latest edition of science news shows.

Egyptian Pixels

Did you ever want to visit an Egyptian building as it was when it was new? Have you ever thought to ask that question? I hadn't either, until I stumbled on a collaboration between a company creating immersive learning software and an Egyptologist.

A company called Corinth and one Jaromír Krejčí, Ph.D (no, I don't know how to pronounce that) both out of the Czech Republic have created an application that lets you move through a three dimensional reconstruction of the hall of a fifth dynasty pharaoh named Raneferef. Is ancient history not your thing? Corinth has a few other apps that might interest you. Please remember you're there for the 3D, not the translated text.

Synthetic Biology

Here's a new term for you: synthetic biology.  It's one  you'll likely hear more often in the future, especially given a recent accomplishment from the Scripps Research Institute out of California.  More on that in a moment.

I don't want this to be a blog that just reposts links, but with one exception. If you're trying to understand the weirdness of the material world, it's good to keep an eye on the vanguard. The first rule of dealing with change is to try not to be blindsided by it, at least whenever possible. 

You've likely heard yesterday's news that scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California have created the first sythetic DNA. This will, I'm sure, give some nightmares of microscopic Frankensteins maiming the life familliar.  Certainly any new technology brings with it ethical and safety concerns.  Somewhere in our anthropocene past was a faction who likely objected to using fire because of it's ability to harm life and rage out of control.  Did that stop it's adoption?

The most obvious use for this technology is creating pharmacueticals.  What are the unbvious uses? I wish I knew.  When microprocessors were invited, likely no one predicted personal computers, cell phones, ipads, ecommerce, google, facebook, twitter.

For a repost, this has already rambled on longer than I intended.  My goal was to find an article that I thought did a good job of covering the essentials. Providing that would save you the trouble of finding a good one.  My favorite so far is the one at Popular Mechanics.  Also, here's the list returned by Google.

History On Line

I recently watched the documentary "Titanic's Final Mystery" in which historian Tim Maltin uses historical sources to tease out new information about the tragedy of said ship's sinking nearly a century ago. To get a sense of weather conditions in the North Atlantic, in particular on the night of the sinking, Maltin reviews the logs of ships that crossed the ocean in April of 1912. NOAA's ships logs were, at least, transferred to computer punch cards in the 1970s. Records of German ships are still kept in their original log books at an archive in Germany. This is important because in historical research the only thing that counts is original records.

What jumped out at me was how he viewed them. In neither case were these records available on line. Maltin had to physically travel to their storage facilities to examine them.

Someday, I need to do a post about how 'proving' a point in the internet age still requires going beyond Google, sometimes way beyond Google. At least, that will be the case until all the paper in all the obscure archives is digitized.

Paper is one thing. Our intuition expects that paper will transferred to computer. But artifacts? This week I learned that museums are starting to put three dimensional scans of artifacts on line. Until now the public's access to archaeological relics has been restricted to views behind ropes and through panes of glass. Only top scholars get the privilege of turning these objects over and looking at them closely.

That isn't likely to ever change. But with online scans and now burgeoning virtual reality technology, exemplified by the recently released Oculus Rift, you and I will eventually get the chance to examine ancient artifacts.

The latest museum to enter the 3D club is the University College London's Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. Never heard of it? Among Etymologists, UCL ranks right behind the Cairo Museum and the British museum in the number and quality of ancient Egyptian artifacts.

You can view UCL's collection here. Meanwhile, I'll be looking for links to other collections. I hope someone has built a specialized search engine. I doubt this is on Google's radar yet.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Economic debates remind me of theological ones.  Where do the souls of babies go? Limbo or the bosom of Abraham?  Free will or predestination?

Keyensianism or neo-classicism? 

Let's leave economics aside for a bit. Have you ever heard of proponents of Einstein arguing with Newtonians? Neither have I.  What we recognize is that Newton had part of the story and Einstein added to it. He did this with observation and data. Physicists and astronomers have an advantage over economists when it comes to observation and data.  Every time there's a refinement in instrumentation, they can look at the same phenomenon again and find new data. Economists need to wait in real time for new data to accumulate.  Since they've been observing--about 200 years--there haven't been a statistically significant number of economic cycles.  Therein is the reason they sometimes sound more like astrologers than astronomers.

Introducing Thomas Piketty.  He's already somewhat known for coining the term "the 1%", referring to the world's richest. His recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century attempts to explain the growing numeric divide between the 1% and the rest of us. Based on 200 years of data, Piketty posits that historically, wealth has grown about three times faster than productivity.

Predictably the left and right have taken opposing positions.  They've proceeded to attack or defend him based on those positions.  My interest in this is not to take sides.  My interest is in his approach.  He didn't try to find the data that supported his initial premis.  In fact, he criticizes Carl Marx for doing exactly that.  Instead, he collected all the data he could find and looked for what was in it.  

This is a key point for anyone who wishes to criticize Piketty.  It's a key point for understanding why his approach is more science than theology.  His own brief account of his life illustrates the point.  After getting his doctorate in France, Piketty accepted a university position outside Boston. After only a few years, he left.  As he tells it:

I realized that that there had been no significant effort to collect historical data on the dynamics of inequality since [Simon] Kuznets, yet the profession continued to churn out purely theoretical results without even knowing what facts needed to be explained. And it expected me to do the same

My jaw hit the floor when I read this.  My impression of economic debates could easily be dismissed.  I'm not an economist.  I could never be sure that my impression wasn't an artifact of the way economic issues are reported.  Here's a similar idea stated by a top member of the profession.  It's hard to imagine a clearer confirmation of a hypothesis.

It throws down the gauntlet to anyone who wants to challenge Piketty's conclusion.  Any criticism of Piketty has to do it with the same or larger data set. 

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Update: I should have pointed out when I originally published that Piketty has put his data set on line.  What's more, every chart in the book is accompanied by the web address of the data set. This is in the spirit of what real science calls peer review.  Reviews of this data have already generated some criticism, which I hope to write about in the coming week.  If you have the expertise, you can get Piketty's data here. (5/30/14)

Cheaper by the Dozen

This post isn't about curiosity.  It's free hypothesizing.

Here's a bit of freakonomics I can't find discussed anywhere.  Why are laws and contracts thicker now than they were in past decades or centuries?  The meme is that the people writing them are power hungry control freaks, or they need to justify their jobs or something.  I'm not sure I buy it.

Before I explain, let's make sure we're on the same page.  The law of supply and demand: if the cost of production goes down, the supply goes up; if the supply goes up, the cost of use goes down.  Now has anyone noticed that the cost of adding text to laws and contracts has been going down for centuries?

When documents began to replace customs in the 13th century all laws and contracts had to be handwritten.  The cost of hand copying documents, need I say, is prohibitive.  Because of low literacy they had to be read out loud to many.  The printing press changed that. After 1440 a ruler could print as many as were needed.  Drafts of laws were still a little pricy, but we'll solve that shortly.

It was 500 years before other improvements were made.  When they came, change was, in human history terms, rapid. Next came the typewriter in the mid-19th century, the mimeograph in 1890, the Xerox machine in 1949, the word processor, web pages, mobile devices.  As newspapers have discovered, the bottom has fallen out of the cost of producing and distributing text.  Why, then, are we surprised that laws and contracts have gotten more complicated?  

Attributing this phenomenon to some "essential" quality of legislators and lawyers is to mischaracterize the problem. In so doing, do we look to the wrong solutions? Do jokes about lawyers at the bottom of the ocean really help us? I can't say I have a solution either, but I'll confidently say I think we've been looking in the wrong place.

Introduction

"Science is about trying to eliminate pockets of ignorance." Adam Savage

I get curious about things.  Then I look them up and I'm Cliff Clavin for the next few days. I'm always paranoid that what I repeat might be wrong.  Did I remember it correctly? Did I understand it to begin with? Was it up to date?

I conceived this blog as a way to check myself and to exorcise the Cliff demon. The first steps languished in my online accounts for over a year. Then one Christmas one of my Cliff moments went awry.  I was bloviating about something I had read from what I thought was a reputable news source, but my audience knew more about the subject than I did. Even while being conscientious I was caught. How much more likely is it to get something wrong by even intelligent people who don't think to monitor themselves?

I realized what this blog really needs to be about.

This blog is about two things.

• An outlet for sharing my curiosity.
• An exploration of how to be sure of facts in an information sea when that sea is equal parts truth and equal parts nonsense.

The title of this blog is meant to be ironic.  Curiosity killed the cat, the old saying goes. Curiosity doesn't tend to kill anyone.  This blog is a post mortem, as it were, of the results of my curiosity.