Eric the Blue

Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews

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Nerdy Minnesotan

  • Say goodnight, Gracie

    When the Secretary of Health and Human Services recently defended his boss’s innumeracy with more innumeracy, my opinion of their mental fitness for their respective jobs did not suffer–it was already too low for that. It is nevertheless an amusing episode, especially perhaps for math educators accustomed to the wayward solutions of school children. To recap:

    A couple days ago, RFK Jr. was testifying in front of a Senate committee, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, was giving him hell. She noted almost in passing that President Trump’s claim to have reduced drug prices by as much as 600 percent was laughable, since the drug companies would then be paying us for ingesting their products. Kennedy defended his boss by claiming that the president had his own way of calculating percentages. Honest! Sort of like the “alternative facts” of one of Trump’s former flunkies, only now alternative math. Next day, at a press availability in the Oval Office, he amplified the administration’s take on the math of percentages:

    One of the things I love about this is the reaction of the other administration officials as Kennedy explains what I’ll call “revisionist math.” Is that Dr Oz wearing a red tie and smiling and nodding while 6th-grade math is flunked in the Oval? If something costs $100, and it then goes up to $600, that is not a 600 percent increase: it’s only 500 percent. But Kennedy’s idea that if something first goes up by a certain percent, and then down by that same percentage figure, it lands right where it started is possibly even dumber. If an item costs $100, then goes up 50 percent, it’s at $150, and if it then goes down by 50 percent it lands at $75, which is not $100. One could understand middle schoolers being puzzled by this mystical phenomenon. Kennedy is the Harvard-educated Secretary of Health and Human Services for a country of 340 million that, in a phrase of journalism, is often described as “advanced.”

    The kicker is that Kennedy seems so eager to debase himself. He could have just stood and smiled like the other stooges arrayed behind their deranged boss, but he felt Warren hadn’t allowed him to explain revisionist math, and a day later he was determined to do it. If only he’d gotten a percent smarter overnight. After her 14th daft speech act, George Burns used to dismiss his wife and comedy sidekick by advising, “Say goodnight, Gracie.”

  • “Sometimes it Snows in April”

    It’s been ten years and two days since Prince died, which means it was ten years ago today that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played a scheduled concert at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn. When the musicians took the stage, which was bathed in purple light, they opened with:

    I’m going to establish my standing as a music aficionado by stating that Nils Lofgren is highly skilled at the techniques of guitar playing. His hat, I think, is part of the tribute.

    Here are a couple more of my favorite covers of Prince compositions that I’ve come across over the years. First, “When You Were Mine,” covered by Lake Street Dive:

    And Patti Smith–possibly her favorite Prince song is mine too:

    Should include one of him, himself:

  • In the news, barely

    Are there countries besides ours in which eight kids, age 3 through 12, can die in a mass shooting and the story lives in the national news for around six-and-a-half seconds? I suppose if the slaughter of kindergartners at that school in Connecticut didn’t elicit much more than a ho-hum, there isn’t any reason to think the latest “incident” would push us past some “critical mass” of “outrage and sorrow.” I doubt there is any such critical mass of outrage and sorrow. The opposite is probably closer to the mark. Mass shootings are like videos of horrific crimes that elicit in us a numbing response when played over and over again at trial or online.

    Not sure whether it was a day, or a week, before the Louisiana shooting that the former lieutenant governor of Virginia shot and killed his wife before turning on himself the gun that he no doubt purchased and carried for “self-defense.” This was around 3 o’clock one morning. The couple’s teenaged kids were asleep in their rooms when the sound of gun shots woke them. One of them made the 911 call. Too late. Once again, there was no “good guy with a gun” on the scene to stop the good guy with a gun and marital problems. Margaret Atwood’s maxim borne out again: “Men worry that women will laugh at them. Women worry that men will kill them.”

    I just googled “chance of gun used for self defense versus for suicide or against family member or intimate partner.” According to the AI “overview”:

    Guns are significantly more likely to be used for suicide or against family/partners than for self-defense. Research indicates having a gun in the home triples suicide risk and doubles homicide risk, while defensive gun use (DGU) occurs in less than 1% of personal/property crimes. Studies show 83 women are murdered by an intimate partner with a handgun for every woman who uses a handgun to kill an intimate partner in self-defense.

    I know what some of you are thinking. In that case, more women need to arm themselves! My own complaint is the undersense that, while rare, it’s a good thing when a gun is used in “self defense” against the perpetrator of a property crime. Whatever, the overview hurdles ahead:

    Access to a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide more than three-fold. In the year after someone buys a handgun, the leading cause of death is suicide. . . .

    An abusive partner’s access to a firearm makes it 5 times more likely that a woman will be killed. . . .

    People living with a gun in the home are twice as likely to die by homicide and three times as likely to die by suicide. . . .

    In 8 out of 10 defensive gun uses, the perpetrator is not armed with a gun.

    I guess the approved “conservative” response to that last data point would be that the perpetrators need to arm themselves, so that they can return fire during their burglaries and barroom disputes. The AI overview does not take up the matter of accidental homicides that occur when the genius who owns the weapon is petting it, or his kids get their hands on it.

  • Dumbest timeline ever?

    Lots of people say we’re living in “the dumbest timeline ever” but this isn’t true for those of us who, like me, have a hard time distinguishing Donald Trump from Jesus Christ (or either one from a medical doctor). The pope seems pretty sure of his judgment so maybe you have to be trained in theology and classical languages to discern the subtle divergences in character and message. But then you have to consider too that, on the other side of the question, our vice president also appears to be pretty sure of himself, to the point that he has warned the pope against speaking up thoughtlessly on doctrinal matters. On the side of the vice president we have the Secretary of Defense–or War, as he prefers–whose numerous invocations of Scripture include film maker Quentin Tarrantino’s made-up riff on an obscure verse in everyone’s favorite, the Book of Ezekiel. Pulp Fiction: even better than the real thing?

    It’s a minority view, but I’d like to put in a word for the opinion of a character in a Woody Allen movie who, after spending some time watching religious programming on tv (this is back in the day before Pentagon press briefings qualified), tells his live-in girlfriend that if Jesus Christ were to come back to Earth, land in America, and take in everything being done in his name, or in his defense, he (Jesus) would not be able to stop throwing up. When you think it over, this view seems more in line with the pope’s, and I think that’s the way I’m leaning, which is weird because I’ve had a vasectomy, but maybe this is after all “the dumbest timeline ever,” and in any event it’s even possible that I wouldn’t care in the least about any of this if Trump administration officials, including the top one, would just stfu.

    [Lol, I just asked the “AI Assistant” to “provide feedback” on the above and she quickly obliged: “This content presents a unique perspective that blends humor with serious commentary, but it can benefit from a more structured approach.” No, sorry, I’m done, the lack of structure is going to live on the Internet forever, and anyway I can console myself with the thought that the first reviews of “Song of Myself” were less favorable.]

  • Math with Mr J, edited by Mr J

    There’s a YouTube channel, “Math with Mr. J,” in which Mr. J presents lessons on common school topics in math. Here’s one I watched the other day, on dividing fractions, a topic that I’ve been working on with my fifth grade friends:

    These videos are sometimes used in classroom instruction, and I guess they’re ok: at least, a kid who remembers “keep, switch, flip” will likely answer correctly a fraction division problem on a standardized test, which seems to be the holy grail. (“X percent of students performing at or above grade level!”) But kids will be excused if they get the idea that math is memorizing tricks so that they can then jump through hoops held up by the authors of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment. In ethics, you can do the right thing for the wrong reason, in which case you don’t deserve the praise you might receive. In a similar way, you can in math get the right answer without understanding a thing. What’s going on when you divide fractions? Why does the trick work? Some kids might want to know. In what follows I’m warming up for Monday.

    What’s going on when you divide fractions isn’t really different from what’s going on in the “easy” problems, like, say, 35 divided by 5. If you write it like this

    35/5

    you can then simplify the fraction to get the answer, 7/1, or 7. If you pay $35 for 5 widgets, then each widget costs $7. So you get the answer by making the denominator (also known as the divisor) 1. You make the denominator 1 by multiplying it by its reciprocal, and of course you have to do the same thing to the numerator to hold the value steady. The problem then simplifies to multiplying the numerator by the reciprocal of the denominator, since division by 1 changes nothing. A specific case with fractions might be:

    Three-fourths divided by two-thirds can be written

    3/4 / 2/3,

    which equals

    3/4 x 3/2 / 2/3 x 3/2.

    The denominator now equals 1. Since division by 1 doesn’t change anything, the answer is in the numerator, and the numerator is the product of the amount being divided (3/4) and the divisor (2/3) “flipped” (3/2). This is why “keep, switch, flip” works. It’s math, not magic.

    To be fair, Mr. J does in a different video show what’s happening when one fraction is divided by another:

    Fine, but I think kids might be less confused if you carve up distance instead of area and ask them, “How many times does this fit into that?” For example, if you’re going on a trip of 35 units, and you divide it up into segments that are 5 units long, how many segments are there? (Seven, because “five fits into 35 seven times.”) Of course, things don’t always work out so neatly. If the trip is 37 units, and you divide it into segments that are five units long, how many segments are there? (“How many times does five fit into 37?”) The question doesn’t change when we’re dealing with fractions. If you’re going on a trip of three-fourths of a unit, and you divide it up into half-unit segments, how many segments are there? (“How many times does a half fit into three-fourths?”) We can visualize the answers to all these questions with number lines:

    Five fits into 35 seven times, so 35 divided by 5 is 7. Five fits into 37 seven times plus two-fifths of what would be an eighth time, so 37 divided by 5 is 7.4 (“seven and two-fifths”). A half fits into three-fourths one time plus half of what would be a second time, so 3/4 divided by 1/2 equals 1.5 (“one and a half”).

  • Art of the Deal, Updated

    On Sunday (Easter), our president announced:

    Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.

    Until I transcribed the message, I hadn’t considered the key stroking effort needed to produce “Fuckin’,” as opposed to “Fucking.” Doin’ his best to sound like Joe Pesci. Yesterday, elaborating, he stretched to hit some world-historical notes:

    A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran.

    Then last night, about 90 minutes before the threatened Doomsday in Iran, he made another announcement:

    Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.

    This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all MILITARY objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning the Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate . . . .

    Several media outlets reported that Iran’s 10-point plan, which according to Trump “is a workable basis on which to negotiate,” includes:

    2. Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz

    3. Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear program

    7. End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program

    8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage

    There are six others. If the game was checkers, Iran would be making kings of all its pawns, which is how the cultists know that Trump is playing a more subtle game.

  • The doctor is in

    If the earth is taken to be 4.5 billion years old (it’s probably a little older than that), and if you plot out a 1-mile long timeline of its history, then the dinosaurs went extinct about 25 yards back from the current time, and the history of human civilization fits in the last one-tenth of an inch. The Old Testament patriarchs are said to have lived about 4,000 years ago, which puts them back about a sixteenth of an inch. The Homeric epics belong to a period that’s about one-twentieth of an inch behind tomorrow. Remember, the earth formed a mile back.

    If you’re still feeling haughty, consider too that you’re one of several billion inhabitants, all descended from what we call “lower” life forms, of one insignificant planet in an obscure star system in a corner of one of perhaps a trillion galaxies.

    When things aren’t going my way, I like to meditate on my insignificance, and I’d recommend the coping technique to others–maybe the Duke guy who threw the pass that got deflected with about 5 seconds left in a basketball game played on Sunday. You should have just held the ball, but, bruh, forget it, doesn’t matter.

  • A little o’ this, a little o’ that

    It occurred to me yesterday, while watching the NCAA women’s tournament game between the Gophers and UCLA, that in basketball it’s helpful to be tall.

    Don’t look now but, for the first time since before last year’s all-star game, the Twins do not have a losing record. I saw that if you want to bet on the over-under for Twins wins this season, the number is 70.5. Seems about right since, if my life depended upon placing a winning bet, I’m not sure what I’d do. Seventy wins mean 92 losses, a bad season, so I’m not expecting much. Whatever, it’s still baseball.

    I went to the rally/protest at the Capitol today. Took the below picture of almost the first person I saw upon disembarking from the train at the Capitol station. It seems there is a perception among the MAGA populace that we’re all a bunch of commies, but, honestly, I’ve rarely seen a larger collection of normies. Two out of three males without a sign featuring one of the most well known Anglo-Saxon expressions look like retired Lutheran pastors. They’re out-numbered, however, by women who could be their wives. Perhaps actuarial science accounts for this. Just judging by crowd demographics, however, you’d say that older white ladies are at least as pissed as Bruce Springsteen.

    I’ve been reading Romeo and Juliet in order to talk about it with my 9th-grader, who, to her dismay, has to read it for school English class. My take is that everyone in the play except Juliet is ridiculous, and maybe she is too, considering that she falls for Romeo. “You woo by the book,” she tells him in, I believe, a forgotten line from the play’s most famous scene. This is after he says all the cliched things that lovers need to say, in rhyming iambic pentameter, which makes it even worse than in real life. Why doesn’t she tell him to shove off? It might be because Shakespeare, as usual, had a source, and, for purposes of plot development, she didn’t tell him to shove off in the source. The older generation–what a shit-show. Old man Capulet really likes to plan a party. The clergy: self-important bumblers. Who else? The nurse is a fool. So is Juliet’s mother, who resists only briefly her husband’s mindless, reflexive cruelty before adopting it herself. The best that can be said for Paris is what Juliet’s parents say in recommending him to their daughter, and that’s not much: nice looking, conventional young man. In other words, an incipient stuffed shirt. He is saved by the general slaughter from taking his place among the next generation’s mediocrities.

    The best scene in the play is the one in which Romeo buys poison from the keeper of the seedy apothecary shop, and he (Romeo) here has to step out of character in order to win my sympathy. At the end of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, you feel bad about everyone being dead.

  • Ski-u-mah!

    Wasn’t expecting to become so invested in the Gopher women’s basketball team this March, but hey, they have advanced into the Sweet Sixteen and are easy to like for a lot of other reasons, too:

    –Local kids. Of the five starters, four are from Twin Cities suburbs–Hopkins, Minnetonka, Wayzata, and Farmington (I think Farmington now counts as a suburb?)–and the fifth is from a small town in Wisconsin.

    –Very little “portal travel.” Those five starters are, by class year, a sophomore, two juniors, and two seniors, and I think four of them have only been Gophers as collegians. The fifth, one of the seniors, started out at North Carolina State and has now played three seasons at Minnesota.

    –They’re over-achievers. The phrase is sometimes deployed as a kind of backhanded compliment, but there’s nothing wrong with being determined and hard-working.

    –No star. Here are the points per game averaged by the five starters: 

    Tori McKinney (soph from Minnetonka) 12.9
    Grace Grocholski (jr from North Prairie, WI) 12.1
    Mara Braun (jr from Wayzata) 11.8
    Amaya Battle (sr from Hopkins) 11.3
    Sophie Hart (sr from Farmington) 11.1

    They exhibited their balanced strength in the game they won against Mississippi to advance to the regional semifinals.  After getting beat up to the tune of 25-14 in the third quarter, Minnesota still trailed by 8 points with around 4 minutes to play. Mississippi's best player then fouled out of the game on a charging call. (Taking a charge is something the Gophers are more apt to do than their opponents.) Without their star, Mississippi appeared lost on offense, and the Gophers just kept plugging away. Right before the above clip starts, Braun had made a 3-pointer to tie the score. After Hart scores the go-ahead bucket in traffic with her off hand, we allow a rare easy basket to re-tie the game with 3.5 seconds to play. Then Battle, playing her last game at Williams Arena, buries the winning shot a second before the buzzer. Check out the lift on her little base line jumper off the set inbound play. 

    The game clock was set to 0.8 second after Battle's basket, and Mississippi got a good look from 3-point land--which would have won the game--mainly because Battle, who is number 3, runs into two picks. She watches helplessly as the shot is launched just before the clock goes to 0:00, and it's fun to see her hands go to the top of her head in, I think, exhausted relief as the ball bounces off the front rim. In the game she had 14 points, 11 rebounds, and 5 assists. 

    Better enjoy it now. Unless there is a huge upset this evening, the regional semifinal will be against #1 seed UCLA. When the teams played earlier this year, in Minneapolis, the Bruins won by 18 points. But maybe that's good. If we're going to upset them once this season, better this coming Friday than back in January.



  • Theater of the grotesque

    I suppose that, for Kool-aid drinkers, the Trump administration suspending for 30 days sanctions on Iranian oil sales is another example of Our Dear Leader “playing chess, not checkers.” To me, it looks like desperation as the midterms loom and the price of crude rises. We might be a week away from offering Iran some anti-aircraft missiles in exchange for reopening the Strait.

    I saw recently that some MAGA nut in a high office said, in response to the charge that the U.S. was “going it alone” against Iran, that actually we have in Israel the best possible ally. Stories such as this one make me think that we may indeed have the ally we deserve. I think most of the article is behind a paywall, but, briefly, Alon Harel, an Israeli law professor, was sued for defamation by a Jewish settler in the Occupied Territories. The settler had published a screed in which he referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and called for their collective punishment, with no distinction made between terrorists and civilians. His article was titled “The Law of Jit is the Law of Rafah”–significant, because it was published a day after some settlers entered the Palestinian village of Jit, on the West Bank, where they killed a Palestinian man and set fire to some homes and cars. In a social media post Harel, in the course of harshly criticizing the article, called the author a member of “the Jewish Hamas.”

    The Israeli court held in favor of the plaintiff and ordered Harel to pay the equivalent of $6,500 to the settler in compensation. Harel describes his reaction to the judgment in a subsequent social media post:

    In my view, the doctrinal details of the case, and even the judgment itself, pale in comparison to one fact that powerfully exposes the moral decline of Israeli society and of its legal system. Most astonishingly, the judgment manages to proceed from beginning to end without referring –even once and not even in a single word–to the content of the article that prompted my response. Not a single word is devoted to describing, acknowledging, or engaging with its content. To the credit of the judge, she is not in favor of murder, of course–but also not in favor of condemning it either. It is as if the commitment to legal neutrality had been carried to an absurd extreme. This is precisely what makes this judgment so exceptionally morally depraved and deeply grotesque.

    How can this be? How can a judge fail to express some resentment to an article which is calling for the mass murder of Palestinians? After all, such murder is not only morally depraved; it is also a crime under Israeli and international law. As a matter of fact, the article [by the settler] is defined as a crime under Israeli law (section 144 D2 of the criminal code–incitement to violence).

    In Israel, a criminal wins a judgment against a law professor guilty of criticizing his criminal acts. The U.S. lifts sanctions against Iran while simultaneously trying to bomb Iran into submission. The only thing about any of this that makes much sense is that Israel and the U.S. should be allies.