It is odd how society decides that some things are offensive. For example, raising your index finger is fine. Athletes often point to the heavens after a good play to thank their god for taking time out from his busy schedule to help them out. But the third finger pointing to the heavens is considered such a dire insult that it can result in murderous fury.

We know that certain words are not allowed on broadcast television. But when I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, they bleep out these words too, even though those shows are on cable and I watch them online.

But what surprised me is that when the people on these shows raise the third finger, it is pixelated. Despite the fact that many of the comedic segments on the show involve gestures that have obvious similarities to sexual acts and are not pixelated, ‘giving the finger’ is seen as so toxic that it gets special treatment.

I love it when regular people do this kind of unexpected stuff, bringing some fun into the daily routine.

I never unquestioningly accept the results produced by machines and as much as possible try to find independent ways to check if they make sense. The following story may explain why.

When I was in graduate school, my doctoral thesis involved a lot of detailed calculations that required using a computer. This was in the days prior to the personal computer and we used massive mainframes, entering the programs and data using punch cards and later advancing to remote terminals. Because the computer programs I had written were so complicated and there were so many opportunities for making errors, as much as possible I would check its output in special, simplified cases where I could also do the calculations using just a pocket calculator.

There was one occasion where I simply could not get the two results to agree. After days and days of work trying to find the source of disagreement, going to the extent of doing elaborate calculations without even the calculator, I found the source of the problem. It turned out that my hand calculator had this bug that if you had a number in the display that had the digit 8 in the fourth decimal place, and stored this number in the memory, when you recalled this number, the 8 would have been replaced with a zero. It was a very specialized error, occurring only with the digit 8 and only in the fourth decimal place. Everything else was fine. When I told my thesis advisor what had caused the problem he was shocked and said, “If you can’t trust your own calculator, what can you trust?”

It was the kind of bug that could escape detection for a long time because the chances of it making a noticeable difference in a calculation was extremely small but it shook me up so much that after more than three decades I still remember the details of that story.

I was reminded of this when I came across this item about a ‘Wrongulator‘, a gag calculator that always gives you the wrong answer.

I am not sure how it works. I would think that a calculator that is invariably wrong would be easy to detect unless you are totally innumerate. It also depends on how wrong it is. To fool someone, the error would have to be subtle, like my own experience. If the wrongulator said that 4×6=543, that would be easily detectable, whereas one that returned the answer of 26 may fool some.

I actually don’t like gag gifts like this. They could have very serious negative consequences in the hands of innumerate people who accept unquestioningly whatever machines tell them.

In October 2006, more than one hundred horses got trapped in a small patch of dry land as a result of a sudden flood in the Netherlands in which 18 horses drowned. All rescue attempts failed and the horses seemed to be getting desperate until four women decided to try a different approach.

The episode has been set to music. Watch.

None of us are in a position to figure out everything for ourselves. We are all dependent on experts in specific fields for knowledge. While an expert’s reputation and record of reliability and honesty can and should be factored in, we don’t want to unquestioningly accept the assertions of authorities since it is possible that they may be mistaken or not as expert or knowledgeable as they claim to be or may even be lying

So to what extent is it reasonable to depend on experts? Bertrand Russell in his 1941 book Let the People Think suggested that rather than depend on this or that expert, one should look at the views of the aggregate of experts and draw the following reasonable inferences:

1. “that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain;
2. that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and
3. that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.”

That seems like a good rule of thumb.

But of course, you will rarely get unanimity among experts. There will almost always be dissenters. But at least when it comes to scientific matters, there often tends to be an overwhelming consensus and what I do is see what the dominant views are. So for example, in the case of global warming, since an overwhelming majority of climate scientists say that it is occurring and is man-made, Russell would say (according to rule (1)) that it would be foolish to insist that they are wrong. Similarly, since an overwhelming majority of biologists accept the theory of evolution as the means by which speciation occurred, Russell would say that it would be silly to confidently deny it. At most one should voice tentative dissent.

When it comes to economic or political questions where there is often not only no unanimity but not even a dominant consensus, rule (2) comes into play and it is wise to not place one’s faith too strongly on one particular view.

I saw a news item that said that the plane that managed an emergency landing in the Hudson river without any casualties is being shipped to a museum in Charlotte, NC for display.

My question is: Why? I am as pleased as the next person that no lives were lost in that accident but why would anyone care to see that particular plane, which is just like any other plane? Do they think it has some special significance?

I feel the same way about the things in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum is Cleveland that I have not as yet visited. Why would I want to see (say) the clothes worn by Elvis or a guitar played by Jimi Hendrix? It would be different if there were something unique about the item itself that was distinguishable from the person it is associated with that made it interesting. If, for example, Jimi Hendrix had a special guitar made that enabled him to play in ways that other guitars would not allow, then I can see its value in a museum.

I can also understand wanting to preserve and see (say) the marked up copies of drafts of music or book manuscripts to see how the creator’s ideas evolved. But the mere fact that something was owned by someone famous or is a relic of a famous event does not (for me at least) count for much.

On this independence day holiday, I am repeating a post on what to me is one of the most intriguing phrases in the US Declaration of Independence. It is contained in the famous sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I have always found the insertion of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right to be appealing. One does not expect to see such a quaint sentiment in a revolutionary political document, and its inclusion sheds an interesting and positive light on the minds and aspirations of the people who drafted it.

While happiness is a laudable goal, the suggestion that we should actively seek it may be misguided. Happiness is not something to be pursued. People who pursue happiness as a goal are unlikely to find it. Happiness is what happens when you are pursuing other worthwhile goals. The philosopher Robert Ingersoll also valued happiness but had a better sense about what it would take to achieve it, saying “Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.” [My italics]

Kurt Vonnegut in his last book A Man Without a Country suggests that the real problem is not that we are rarely happy but that we don’t realize when we are happy, and that we should get in the habit of noticing those moments and stop and savor them. He wrote:

I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me, I just got here.”

There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity — the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.”

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a man can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Good advice.

Apparently 60% of the population have left and right feet that are of different sizes, and of those 80% have larger left feet, which apparently has something to do with right hand dominance. (I got this information after a quick search from this website but cannot vouch for its reliability.) So that means that 40% of the general population have feet of equal size, 48% have larger left feet, and 12% have larger right feet.

I belong to the larger left foot group. When I buy a new pair of shoes, if I forget to try it in the store with my left foot, I end up with a pair in which the left foot starts to feel pinched and uncomfortable later in the day when people’s feet start to swell. For some, the inequality is so great that they buy two pairs of shoes in two different sizes and use only one of each, which seems like a colossal waste. As a partial and somewhat clumsy solution, this website offers people a way of exchanging unused mismatched shoes.

But why must shoes be sold in equal size pairs at all when this does not suit the needs of more than half the population? Why not allow people to pick the correct size for each foot? Doing so should lead to little or no waste, even if 100% of the population had the same side foot being larger. For example, if I needed a size 11 left shoe and a size 10 for the right, someone else with a larger left foot would need a size 10 left and a size 9 right, and so on. So all the mid-range sizes would be paired off and sold, except to different customers.

There may be a few left over of the largest right shoe sizes and the smallest left sizes but assuming the above distribution is right, a quarter of those would be bought by people with larger right feet, leaving only a few unsold. And over time, manufacturers would be able to estimate production more accurately and eliminate even this waste.

So shoe manufacturers and retailers, what about it?

This interactive map shows surprisingly large variations across the US. The darker the region, the higher the life expectancy. The article states that the US is 37th amongst all countries in overall life expectancy at birth in 2007 (although the CIA Factbook estimates it at 50th for 2011) and is now stagnant or even declining, hardly something to be proud of for the world’s largest economy.

The range within the US is huge, varying from highs of 86 years for women in some counties in Florida to a low of 65.9 years for men in Holmes county in Mississippi.

I had never heard of Tracy Morgan until he appeared on The Daily Show a few weeks ago and I took an instinctive dislike to him. He seemed kind of obnoxious. I did not know if he was really like that or was playing a part and I did not really care.

The next thing I heard was that he had let loose a nasty homophobic rant during his stand up comedy routine.

Tina Fey, who plays his boss on a TV show, criticized his comments and in the process said something important that I hope all people will take to heart: “I hope for his sake that Tracy’s apology will be accepted as sincere by his gay and lesbian coworkers at 30 Rock, without whom Tracy would not have lines to say, clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or a printed-out paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket.”

Even if you don’t like gay people, you would be wise to keep your anti-gay bile to yourself, not because they will threaten you, but because they are all around us and we depend on them whether we are aware of it or not.