I just followed a link to this anti-global warming “argument” by some guy named James Lewis:

So in the best case, the smartest climatologist in the world will know 100 variables, each one to an accuracy of 99 percent. Want to know what the probability of our spiffiest math model would be, if that perfect world existed? Have you ever multiplied (99/100) by itself 100 times? According to the Google calculator, it equals a little more than 36.6 percent.

That sounds convincing…except, well, it’s not:

Actually, James, I have multiplied (99/100) by itself 100 times and, oddly enough, it’s 36.6% on any calculator, not just Google’s. Well, OK, but what if the accuracy was known to, say, 99.3% instead of 99%? Then you get 49.5%. Bump that up to 99.7% and you get 74%! Wow! Numbers are like magic! See how easy it is to just plug in arbitrary numbers into an arbitrary equation and come out with an answer that satisfies your argument?

It’s always interesting to see someone use a short column to throw around a bunch of numbers, usually in the form of “Multiply this times that, and then multiply that times this, and watch the numbers shrink! Ergo, [scientific theory here] is false!” You see this kind of thing a lot in Creationist/Intelligent Design literature.

So anyway, who is “James Lewis”? According to the blurb at the end of the article, he’s an “academic scientist”, and apparently “James Lewis” is a pseudonym. But there’s a link to a personal blog of his, Dangerous Times, a sparsely-posted blog whose links all lead right back to American Thinker. What kind of “academic scientist” is “James Lewis”, then? That’s slightly important, since as PZ Myers pointed out the other day, the kind of scientist you are has some bearing on this stuff. You wouldn’t go to a computer science Ph.D. for a precis of the most recent developments in particle physics, after all. This is why places like the Discovery Institute are always listing their rosters of “scientist” supporters but rarely actually indicating their areas of expertise.

And besides, I’m not terribly sure I’d overly rely on a guy willing to go on record as saying of George W. Bush:

By the measure of moral clarity and courage, George W. Bush is right up there with the best in American history.

Yup, there‘s a voice worth taking seriously on history and global warming.

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Here’s an interesting item that came into my inbox this morning, via the GMR staff mailing list: it seems that a filmed version of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is in the offing. But not for the cinema. They’ll be doing it on HBO, a la things like Deadwood, with one season per book.

Here’s the test of the press release:

HBO turns ‘Fire’ into fantasy series
Cabler acquires rights to Martin’s ‘Ice’
By MICHAEL FLEMING

HBO has acquired the rights to turn George R.R. Martin’s bestselling fantasy series “A Song of Fire & Ice” into a dramatic series to be written and exec produced by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.

“Fire” is the first TV project for Benioff (“Troy”) and Weiss (“Halo”) and will shoot in Europe or New Zealand. Benioff and Weiss will write every episode of each season together save one, which the author (a former TV writer) will script.

The series will begin with the 1996 first book, “A Game of Thrones,” and the intention is for each novel (they average 1,000 pages each) to fuel a season’s worth of episodes. Martin has nearly finished the fifth installment, but won’t complete the seven-book cycle until 2011.

The author will co-exec produce the series along with Management 360’s Guymon Casady and Created By’s Vince Gerardis.

Martin’s series has drawn comparisons to J.R.R. Tolkien, because both are period epics set in imagined lands. But Martin has eschewed Tolkien’s good-vs.-evil theme in favor of flawed characters from seven noble families.

The book has a decidedly adult bent, with sex and violence comparable to series like “Rome” and “Deadwood.”

“They tried for 50 years to make ‘Lord of the Rings’ as one movie before Peter Jackson found success making three,” Martin said. “My books are bigger and more complicated, and would require 18 movies. Otherwise, you’d have to choose one or two characters.”

Aside from writing the most recent draft of “Halo,” Weiss recently adapted the William Gibson novel “Pattern Recognition” for WB and director Peter Weir.

Benioff and Weiss were repped by CAA and Management 360.

Aside from Martin’s claim that he’ll be done with the series by 2011 (surely one of the larger “Yeah, right”-types of claims in recent years!), this is a pretty ambitious project. I’m not sure how many episodes constitutes a “season”, but even distilling A Storm of Swords down to twenty-two or so hour-long episodes is going to involve quite a bit of condensing.

And I’m sure the inevitable “They’d better get _____ to play Jon Stark!” debates will get heated, as well as the response to whatever actual casting decisions are eventually made. And they’d better get a good composer, too.

Hmmmm…who should they get to play Hodor?

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At the end of yesterday’s grab-bag post about Buffalo, I noted that I had no idea what kind of story I was going to do for the current Buffalo News short story contest.

Well, I figured it out about an hour ago.

I’m back, bitches.

(UPDATE: Well, apparently the link to the News‘s contest is now broken, since the original dated story has fallen into the archive for which you have to pay for access. This, despite the fact that the contest entry deadline isn’t until next Tuesday.

If there’s a more embarrassing website for a major newspaper in this country, I’d like to know about it. The Buffalo News website is total, complete crap. It’s totally useless as a resource. It’s 20067, and these guys are still working the Web as if it’s still 1998.)

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Last night, whilst watching one of the very bad singers on the first episode of American Idol 6.0, The Daughter uncorked this bit of metaphoric wisdom:

“She sounds like a violin being played by a rock.”

Suddenly I fear that she will end up being the famous writer in the family.

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I don’t usually post YouTube videos on this blog, but my admiration for Hugh Laurie demands that I make an exception. The guy is just golden. Here he is the other night, accepting his Golden Globe award for his work on House:

“I know everyone says they have a wonderful crew, and logically that can’t be the case; we can’t all be wonderful. Somebody somewhere is working with a crew of drunken thieves, but it’s not me.”

And for good measure, here’s his equally hilarious and witty opening monologue from when he hosted Saturday Night Live some months ago:

“My bottom was much in demand at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 80s, although I didn’t actually do Midsummer Night’s Dream until 1994…So what can you expect from an Englishman, hosting an American comedy show? Well, firstly, humour…and when I say ‘humour’, I mean overly elaborate puns that may take you days to understand with very little payoff….”

Wow, I’d love to hear him in one of Shakespeare’s comedies!

UPDATE: Apparently the first version of Laurie’s acceptance speech was removed, so I’ve substituted another. You have to sit through all the “Here are nominees” stuff, it seems.

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I’ve just been looking at my referrers, and noticing some of the odd search strings that bring people here.

This one stood out, for obvious reasons. Problem is, it’s getting late and I have an early start at The Store tomorrow and I can’t be thinking about stuff like that when I need to be sleeping. I need to get this thought out of my head, stat.

So I’ll look at the very next search string on the list.

Well, that did the trick.

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Three guys are going to have some explaining to do when the Rapture comes.

I have the strangest feeling I’m going to get struck by lightning as soon as I click the “Publish Post” button.

(This may offend Christian readers. I both laughed and recoiled from it. What can I say, I contain multitudes.)

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Thinking about Buffalo a bit….

:: Last week, there was a post by Donald, one of the more than two blowhards who hold forth at 2Blowhards, about Buffalo. Here’s a bit of what he wrote, from the perspective of a person who has not, by his admission, set foot in Buffalo in twenty-five years, so this is basically how we look to the rest of the country:

Let me think… Yes, it was just about 50 years ago when…

Splat!!! [City hits wall]

When I was young, Buffalo, New York was Important. Not “major league” in the narrow sense of having a major baseball franchise, mind you, but Important nevertheless. It was the country’s most populous state’s second largest city — a major manufacturing and transportation center.

I first visited the Buffalo area in June, 1956. We bounced off the suburbs on our way from Detroit (via Canada) to Syracuse and points east, but I had no doubt that the place was large. And prosperous.

[table of Niagara Frontier population data]

As you can see, population peaked at a point near 1970 and has fallen (on a decade basis) ever since.

Nowadays — and for the last several decades — Buffalo has become a branch-plant town.

And that’s its fundamental problem.

Companies headquartered in an area will tend to take good care of that area. Contrast the Niagara Frontier with the nearby Rochester area. By the early 70s Buffalo had lost every major corporation aside from some banks (since merged out of existence) whereas Rochester had Kodak, Bausch & Lomb and the (then) booming Xerox (which later decamped). And Rochester prospered throughout the 60s and early 70s, though it hasn’t done as well since.

Will the Niagara Frontier turn around? I saw some items in the press a few years back claiming that the worst was over, but the recent population estimate suggests population share decline is still steady.

I need to confess that I haven’t been in Buffalo since the early 1980s. So if any readers can provide recent information, that would be greatly appreciated.

Of course, this is all old news to those of us who live here, even those of us who live here and feel some sense of optimism that, yes, things may be on the cusp of an upswing. Or maybe not. In any event, population seems likely to me to be a lagging indicator of a Buffalo resurgence; before we can get people to stop leaving, we have to have the reasons in place for them to not leave in the first place. And that means economic development and jobs.

Donald’s statement that Buffalo’s biggest problem is its status as a “branch-plant town” is pretty much spot on. It frustrates that so much state effort here to help the area’s economy focuses on getting companies from elsewhere to set up shop here. Sometimes this is successful (Geico), other times less so (Bass Pro). This approach has provided some small bang once in a while, but what we’re looking for is a boom. We’re not looking for big companies to set up an outpost here; what we need is for the next huge company to get its start here. We’re looking for New York to make entrepreneurship here easier. The companies that used to rule the roost here are gone; the ones that are opening call centers and whatnot are welcome to do business here, but they’re not the key. The key is the companies that, twenty years from now, will still be here after launching themselves here.

What companies will those be? Who knows? But there’s something to the old canard about knowing what the problem is before you can solve it. We know what our problem is, and we have good ideas on how to fix it. The big stumbling block now isn’t Buffalo, but Albany.

And only after those problems are fixed, and only after we start seeing homegrown businesses having to advertise out-of-area for jobs, will we start to see the population numbers go back up.

As for other Buffalo stuff:

:: Area police finally made an arrest in this area’s most notorious string of unsolved rapes and murders. Check out the article on how it happened. Some true-crime writer is going to get a hell of a book out of this one. It’s got it all: horrifying crimes; an arrest made after a combination of cutting-edge forensic science and old-fashioned detective work; a suspect who has come under suspicion for these very crimes before; and that same suspect turning out to be a suburban dweller well-liked by his neighbors.

:: Sportswriter Jerry Sullivan says that the Bills should trade Willis McGahee. I’m not sure if they should publicly plunk him on the market, but surely Marv Levy can make it known that he’ll entertain offers. The problem with that, obviously, is that there are unlikely to be any big trade offers coming the Bills’ way for a guy who is entering his last year on his contract, is already making noises about getting a new and huge deal, and who has a growing reputation for underachieving. But if they can get a second or third round pick for him, I’m fine with that. McGahee hasn’t shown much upside, except for those inexplicably great games he always has against the Jets. But the Bills don’t play the Jets sixteen times a year, so we can forget that idea.

Sure, you’d rather have a great running back than an average one, but McGahee isn’t a great back, and anyway, how did the four starting running backs in this year’s upcoming conference championships rank this season? Eleventh (the Bears’ Thomas Jones), eighteenth (the Colts’ Joseph Addai), twentieth (the Saints’ Deuce McAllister), and twenty-eighth (the StuPats’ Corey Dillon). Of course, all of those teams have very good offensive lines. Hmmmmm.

:: When I was working at Pizza Hut, one of my fellow shift managers was a huge fan of the New York Yankees. One season the Yankees got off to an 0-3 start, and this guy got really panicked about their fortunes for the rest of the year. Well, that was 1998, and the Yankees that year went on to set records for winning en route to sweeping their way all the way through the playoffs and then the World Series.

My point is this: I’m not worried about a three-game slump by the Sabres.

:: Buffalo’s been courting Bass Pro for two years now (or maybe Bass Pro’s been courting Buffalo). The original Bass Pro project that was proposed here was a giant superstore to be housed in the shell of Buffalo’s old Memorial Auditorium, with the idea that this giant store would be a tourist attraction in itself, with people flocking from miles around to shop in downtown Buffalo. Nobody much thinks that anymore, especially with the Aud apparently out of the discussions as a location and the Bass Pro people reportedly looking at other locations on the waterfront for a smaller store. If that’s the case, I’m basically of the opinion that Buffalo shouldn’t be “talking” to them at all. It didn’t take a cadre of Buffalo development officials to get Cheesecake Factory to open a restaurant at the Galleria Mall. Seems to me that Buffalo should basically say to Bass Pro, “Here are some locations you can look at; here are the zoning requirements for those locations so you don’t build something ghastly or out of place with what we’re trying to do; here’s the price. You do the rest. You have our number if you’re interested.”

The thing with Bass Pro is that when the mega-store in the Aud was proposed in 2004, there weren’t that many Bass Pro’s around, so this store at that point might well have been a destination kind of place. But they’ve opened a lot more stores since then, some of them reasonably close to Buffalo, which means that the Bass Pro here is a lot less likely to be a destination. And I can’t help but think that Bass Pro knew this all along.

Large retail stores don’t spring into existence quickly. Just looking at the way my own company does business, from the moment the announcement is made that a location has been selected and a store will be built to the moment the store’s doors are thrown open to the public, a year or more can elapse. It takes a long time to build a big store, and the more picky the company is about the appearance standards of its stores, the longer they take. I find it hard to believe that even as the Bass Pro people were selling our former Mayor and our former Governor on the idea of this tourist-attraction store, they didn’t know that they were proceeding full-steam ahead on all the other stores nearby. My intuition (and it’s just that, intuition) about all this is that Bass Pro figured Buffalo for a bunch of chumps. Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren’t. But they didn’t get their store, did they?

Worst thing is, I loved this idea when I first heard it. I loved the idea of something different on the waterfront, something that would help sell the idea of Buffalo as something other than snow, football, beer, and old steelmills. This region of ours is a place of great outdoor beauty and activity, and you’d never know it to hear anybody outside of Buffalo talk about Buffalo. A big Bass Pro might have been a start to changing that perception a little. But that’s about it.

We’re the ones with the land. If they want to build here, let them spend the money to do it.

:: What do I think we should do with the old Aud? Personally, I’m thinking, tear it down, zone the land in accordance with urban design principles, and let the buyers and developers fight over it. (Although maybe moving the Museum of Science down there would be cool, if they could really do it up right and make a top-flight science museum, with an OmniMax theater and planetariums and whatnot, maybe with a section devoted to Great Lakes history and biology. Of course, I have no idea where the money comes from for something like that, so demolish-and-zone is probably the best way to go.)

:: One week to go in this year’s Buffalo News short-fiction contest, and I have absolutely no idea how to write this story. I’m so out of practice, fiction-wise, that I’m appalled to call myself a writer. What the hell.

And that’s all I have to say about Buffalo right now.

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My reading tastes, as I’ve indicated before, have shifted in the last eighteen months or so to narratives of how people respond to being thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Notice that I don’t say “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances”, because it’s always extraordinary circumstances that make people extraordinary, right? You never hear about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances. Well, not much, anyway. I’ve just completed two such books, back-to-back, which provide a fairly stark contrast between the types of circumstances endured by their authors: one seems fairly banal and only elevated to the level of “extraordinary” by virtue of the author’s performance, while the other is clearly extraordinary right from the very beginning.

The first of the books I read follows the latter course. I was looking through the history stacks at the library for some kind of personal war narrative, not really caring about what war or what person’s narrative it was. I found a number of such books, too, and finally settled on Tomorrow to be Brave by Susan Travers. The subtitle gives the game away fairly quickly: “A Memoir of the only woman ever to serve in the French Foreign Legion”. Automatically I found myself wondering, What kind of woman joins the Foreign Legion? The answer becomes clear at the outset of the book’s second chapter, when Travers bluntly tells us, “It is my greatest regret that I wasn’t born a boy.”

Judging by the way she depicts her childhood, this seems to also be her parents’ greatest regret. Born in England before World War One, Travers was raised by fairly distant parents and a downright cold brother into her young adult years, when the family moved to France (making her feel doubly the outsider). She is sent to boarding school, becomes a semi-professional tennis player, and eventually volunteers with the French Red Cross, because she wishes to play a part in the war.

What follows is pretty harrowing stuff, as Travers ends up in North Africa with the Foreign Legion, driving the car for a general with whom she falls in love (and later becoming his mistress). Their affair plays out amidst the desperation of the Foreign Legion’s stand against Erwin Rommel’s advance across Africa. There’s no getting around the sadness inherent in this book, as Travers makes clear she has resisted telling this story until all of the persons in it, save her, have died. Tomorrow to be Brave is part elegy, part testimony, and one of the more passionate books I’ve read.

Having written her book in 2001, Travers died in 2003 at the age of 94.

And from the last page of this heart-rending book about love and loss in the sands of North Africa in World War II, I plunged straight into Brainiac by Ken Jennings.

Yep, the tell-all book by the guy who spent six months as reigning champion on Jeopardy!. But this is more than a tell-all book about a game show; Jennings instead delves into the “Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs”.

Why would I read Ken Jennings’s book about trivia right after a passionate tale of forbidden love in World War II? Well, there’s something to reading books with wildly contrasting tones and subject matter for me — “cleansing the mental palate”, you might say — but I do tend to avoid reading books of similar genres back-to-back, or at least more than a couple such books back-to-back. There’s always the danger of overdosing on a genre, as well as the danger that a book that’s pretty good will look downright bad in comparison to the book before, if that one was a great one. (An extreme example here would be when I tried, years ago, reading the first book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series immediately after finishing Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana. I never did take any kind of shine to Jordan, but coming right after Kay, he really didn’t come off well.) So, anyway, Jennings it was. Not to imply that I expected his book to be crap after the remarkable Tomorrow to be Brave, but rather that I expected it to be totally different. And it was.

But here’s the thing: Brainiac is a delight.

Jennings could have given us a boring biography of himself coupled with a fairly dull, blow-by-blow account of his Jeopardy! run, but he doesn’t. He’s more concerned with the larger subject of trivia: what constitutes trivia, what drives people who make trivia their hobby, what kind of organized events trivia buffs partake in to advance their hobbies, and so on. It turns out that trivia buffs have their own little subculture to themselves, much as role-playing gamers, or anime fans, or football fans, and so on. For this book, Jennings spends a lot of time profiling the world of competitive college Quiz Bowls, the people who actually write the “questions” on Jeopardy!, the history of various trivia TV game shows and home board games, and even ruminates on how Google has changed the hobby of trivia.

But of course, there’s a lot of Jeopardy! stuff, too, detailing Jennings’s try-out for the show, his method of practice before his appearance (he used his living-room recliner as his podium and his kid’s ring-stacking toy as his buzzer), his discoveries of proper buzzing technique, what it’s like to tape a week’s worth of episodes in a single day, and so on. We learn what it’s really like during the “gab session” between Alex Trebek and the contestants during each show’s end credits:

This is each show’s most awkward moment. All four of you are pretending to be at a jovial cocktail party when, in actuality, two of you are kicking yourselves for muffing your chance at Jeopardy! stardom and lamenting what might have been, one of you is gradually realizing you’re going to have to go through the whole stressful ordeal again in about ten minutes, and one of you is wondering how much of the Lakers game you’re going to miss.

Jennings also relates some of the logistical nightmares inherent in his far-longer-than-anticipated stay on the show, from the excuses he has to cook up to get out of work constantly (since he’s forbidden by contract to tell anyone he’s been on the show until it airs), how he works his way into a “home field advantage” of sorts (watch the show long enough, and you note that they re-use questions), and how Trebek himself at one point late in Jennings’s run castigates the other contestants after they’ve played poorly in Single Jeopardy!: “You are not here as Ken Jennings’s fan club!” One envisions that episode of The Simpsons, when Homer shows up at the “All You Can Eat” seafood restaurant and proceeds to eat it into bankruptcy.

Jennings writes with a breezy, self-deprecating wit, and when I was done with his book, I knew something that I hadn’t known before. And I’m not just talking about all the trivia.

You don’t get books that contrast more than these two. And that’s good, because I like contrast.

Sprinkled through all of this are ruminations on what makes trivia so compelling, the “anatomy” of a good trivia question, and, yes, actual trivia questions with answers provided at the end of each chapter.

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