Statistics Lexicon... of a sort

 An old, but still handy, statistical primer I just ran across, courtesy of Gelman:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2009/05/24/handy_statistic/

Hey, Maybe Not Such a Bad Idea...

 Watch your mailbox:

https://www.theonion.com/cdc-announces-plan-to-send-every-u-s-household-pamphle-1848354068

Today's Lesson In Recursion...

 

Where Can I Buy One ;))

 But before you laugh too hard, realize THIS is almost how mathematicians sound to some people:

https://twitter.com/PaulLeeTeeks/status/1471330346096496643

Hey Bayesians, What Were the Chances? ;)

 https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1045990641/meteorite-canada-british-columbia-bed

Dilbert Espouses...

 An oldie-but-goodie:

Dilbert.com

Hahh!

 A little end-of-week humor... I don't see a lot of new math humor these days that really makes me chuckle any more, but this bumper sticker recently seen on Twitter (H/T Simon Pampena) did (...though perhaps it's quite old and I've just missed it or forgotten it):

For the More Advanced and Insightful Readers of This Blog....

 Apologies for being a few days late in posting this (H/T to Colm Mulcahy for pointing to it):

If you find this video too difficult to wrap your brain around you may want to wait and bone up a bit by first reading a basic topology text, or perhaps alternatively, Jordan Ellenberg's latest upcoming volume "Shape."

Math vs. Psychology....

 OK, today just a little humor... a joke I recently ran across in an old Reader's Digest:

“See that kid?” a barber says to his customer during a haircut, pointing to a 12-year-old standing outside the barbershop. “He is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch. I’ll prove it to you.” The barber takes out a one-dollar bill and a five-dollar bill, then calls the boy inside. He holds out both bills and asks, “Which one do you want?”

The kid takes the one-dollar bill and leaves the shop.

“See?” the barber says, laughing. “The dumbest kid in the world.”

The customer leaves the barbershop and spots the boy coming out of an ice cream store. He says, “If you don’t mind my asking, son, why didn’t you take the five-dollar bill?”

The boy takes a lick of his ice cream cone and says, “Because the day I choose the five, the game is over.”

Ahhh Yes, the Research Literature…. ;))

Cleaning out some old files I stumbled across this vintage piece from sometime in my 1970s academic career (I believe at the time I adapted this from some other original source?). Am sure most of you have seen such parodies before. I do find it noteworthy that several of the issues taken quite seriously in statistics and research methodology currently were already being hinted at and joked about by we grad students 40+ years ago….:

**************************************

A Guide to the Reading and Understanding of Research Literature

Phrase:                                                                    

"it has long been known that…."                                                    

Really means:

I haven’t bothered to look up the original references

Phrase:

"…of great theoretical and practical interest"

Means:

interesting to me

Phrase:

"the … reagent was chosen as especially suitable for the experimental procedure"

Means:

the fellow in the next lab over already had some made up

Phrase:

"subjects for the study were randomly chosen"

Means:

students in Psych. 101 were asked to participate as a prerequisite for passing the course

Phrase:

"three of the samples were selected for detailed study"

Means:

the results on the others didn’t make any sense

Phrase:

"accidentally strained during mounting"

Means:

dropped on the floor

Phrase:

"handled with extreme care throughout the experiment"

Means:

not dropped on floor

Phrase:

"typical results are shown…"

Means:

the best results are shown

Phrase:

"the data revealed a linear correlation"

Means:

we took a ruler and drew a line

"agreement with the predicted curve is:"

excellent  (means fair)

good  (means poor)

satisfactory  (means doubtful)

fair  (means imaginary)

Phrase:

"the values are correct at least within an order of magnitude"

Means:

the values are wrong

Phrase:

"statistically significant"

Means:

possibly plausible

Phrase:

"it is suggested that…”

Means:

I believe

Phrase:

"it may be that…”

Means:

I think

Phrase:

"It is generally believed that….”

Means:

a couple of other guys think so too

Phrase:

"it is clear that much additional work will be required before a complete understanding…”

Means:

I don’t understand it

Phrase:

"unfortunately, a quantitative theory to account for these results has not been formulated”

Means:

neither does anyone else understand it

Phrase:

"while it has not been possible to provide definite answers to these questions…”

Means:

the experiment didn’t work, but I figured I could at least get a publication out of it

Phrase:

"further work in this area is warranted…”

Means:

I intend to get a second publication out of this data

Phrase:

"special thanks are due to R. Stoodle for technical assistance and to J. Goober for valuable discussions”

Means:

R. Stoodle did the work and J. Goober explained what it all meant

**************************************

And What Have You've Been Doing During Lockdown?

Some folks, it would appear, may have a wee bit too much free time on their hands...:

Stayin' Alive, Oh Yeah....

Hey, we all just wanna keep ’Stayin’ Alive,’ right:
(sorry, couldn't get these to embed within blogpost, but just follow the links)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHycxiW6XOQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAO6-rkpYCY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyBVBNI-uSA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPh_Gi7PCqs

...admit it, you don't get content like this from Terry Tao!  ;)

Truth In Advertising...?

As Matt Parker notes in his latest book, "If this Thomson Reuters ad is a Venn diagram, it's surprisingly honest":

Tom Lehrer… not yet pushing up daisies, as of this Monday

New month, so a new math “profile” today (#15 in the series)… all you 65+ year-old mathematicians will already know this individual well, but all you baby-faced, Instagram-addicted 30-year-old-and-younger whippersnappers, dabbling in category theory and elliptic curves, listen up now… AND, respect your elders (despite the damn mess we've left you with)!

The first amazing fact is… Tom Lehrer is still alive!!! Glory be (rampant rumors of his demise the last couple decades have been consistently exaggerated). He’s in his nineties and therefore no longer making appearances on Ed Sullivan, but you can still find him on YouTube (thank you Sergey and Larry). "Thomas Andrew Lehrer" (named after those bulwarks of American comedy, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Johnson), fittingly now lives in Massachusetts, the wise, sensible state that voted for George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis (while mindless, Zombie-like Americans were casting ballots for, if you can believe this, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush/Cheney, LOL). Tom's own political hero was Adlai Stevenson, who famously, and timelessly, said of Republicans back in the 50's that "if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them."

Tom Lehrer may have been the funniest mathematician of all time (…yeah, I know, Matt Parker is trying to give him a run for his money, but if Tom had had the Internet at his disposal, he might have left Matt in his Cantor dust).

Anyway, let’s jump right into it; here, for any Lehrer virgins out there, one of his all-time favorites, that he wrote for me when I was two-years old:

Now, compose yourself, and we’ll continue on…

Tom was born on April 9, 1928 in Manhattan, NY.; the same year that Noam Chomsky was born and also (like Tom) realized by age 2 that the United States was an imperialist corporatocracy.  Lehrer was considered a prodigy early on and after graduating prep school, entered Harvard at age 15 (something I personally refused to do, waiting instead until Pomona College made room for me). There he studied mathematics while also writing comic songs for friends (sort of like we all did on college Saturday nights… except, HE was good at it!). He earned both a BA and MA in math from Harvard, magna cum laude, which I believe is Latin for ‘funny as Hell’.  And he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, which I believe is Greek for ‘magna cum laude’.

Following that classroom stint at Hahhhvahd he taught math classes at MIT, Wellesley, Harvard, and University of California, never getting a dream job at the Claremont Colleges, but oh well. Lehrer continued off-and-on with classes at Harvard pursuing a math PhD. at the same time that his musical parody proclivities drew national attention. He spent time as a researcher at Los Alamos Laboratory as well. He was drafted into the Army and served from 1955-7 working at NSA, no doubt cracking up the code-crackers every time he burst into cryptic song (meanwhile, I was exploring the intrinsic structure of vintage humor on TV under the tutelage of Captain Kangaroo and Dr. Soupy Sales).  Lehrer eventually gave up on the PhD. once it was clear there was more money to be made making nerdy Americans guffaw. (Of course all the laughing came to a screeching halt for America in November of 2016 when happy-go-lucky socialism was replaced with creeping, unfunny, and lunatic kleptocracy… but, I digress.)

Tom also wrote songs for PBS’s “The Electric Company” back in the day, so some of you are familiar with his work even without knowing it.

Here’s a couple more Lehrer classics, before we get too far along:

His take on “the New Math” from decades ago makes you wonder what he might have to say about Common Core today:

...and then branching out to chemistry, "The Element Song"... with lyrics even harder to memorize than Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire":

Tom was by no means just a writer of math/science hijinks, but a general satirist poking fun... sometimes very controversial/irreverent fun... at stodgy society.  Indeed, when he toured parts of the world in the 1960's some of his ‘radical,’ liberal offerings were censored or banned in various locales — because, hey, you know you can’t laugh at the Establishment without consequences, or the next thing you know, you'll be asking them to pay taxes for gosh sakes! (Or, as Tom says at one point, "You can't be satirical and not be offensive to someone.") Of course societal standards were quite different back then — unlike now, you couldn’t even have nude pics of the First Lady of the U.S. splattered across the internet back in those Puritanistic days! Also, long before Mel Brooks took full credit, Tom voiced the idea of doing a musical based on Hitler. Despite his leftward leanings Lehrer was uncomfortable with antics of the 60's so-called "New Left" movement, as well as with some of the 'political correctness' that would follow, recognizing that 'free speech' is threatened by both the far left and far right.

Tom’s last main public performance was in 1972 on behalf of the presidential campaign of George McGovern (who I proudly voted for, and you younguns don't remember). 25 years later he did do one London performance for a new generation of fans. Through the 1970s, bored with performing the same material (he wrote 37 songs) over and over again, he mostly returned to teaching, and was beloved by students. His multitude of fans have kept his name and material alive and available, though a restrained Lehrer repeatedly eschewed the fame, fortune, and limelight headed his way, maintaining a surprising degree of privacy (making him, according to one writer, "the J.D. Salinger" of musical comedy).

Tom was quite an original, who influenced many future satirists like Harry Shearer and Mark Russell, who is close to Lehrer’s age, but who’s career took off about the time that Lehrer was withdrawing. Russell in turn likely influenced the Capitol Steps who gained national attention starting in 1981, and who will probably use their upcoming annual year-end review to tell Donald Trump (if, incredibly, he's still in office) where to shove it (just my educated hunch). On-the-other-hand, Lehrer once noted that much of the satire that followed him had been "de-fanged" and lost its edge.

Despite his elusiveness over the years, the Web bears a great many pieces on/about him; here are just a few...

A great interview with Tom from 2000:

 https://www.avclub.com/tom-lehrer-1798208112

...and another interview from 1994:
http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html

This fabulous 2014 Buzzfeed piece on Lehrer has a lot more details than I've given here:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/tom-lehrer
(In this piece he’s quoted as once saying his entire repertoire was “part of a huge scientific project to which I have devoted my entire life. Namely, the attempt to prolong adolescence beyond all previous limits.”)

...and another, older piece:
http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/jmazner/lehrhtml.html

(...and there are many more)

It’s kinda a shame Tom isn’t active today given all the material the current “Administration” (and obviously, I use that word loosely) hands out on a platter to work with — but then who wants an 80-hour work week. Still, I'm in the mood for perhaps a timely "Impeachment Rag":



Now I don't want to be accused of starting conspiracy theories, but one pressing question that still remains is, did ANYone ever see Tom Lehrer and Buddy Holly in the same room at the same time... EVER!? huhhhh?:

B.H.

T.L.

Perhaps we should end with one of Tom's prescient and uplifting ditties:

Happy dreams everyone; I hope you've enjoyed this trip down memory lane… and remember sometimes the only alternative to laughing at life… is to incessantly wail.

************************

Check out all the prior math profiles here: 

Matt, Evelyn, David, Sean, Cathy, Al, Tadashi, Holly, Erik, Danica, Marcus, Ben, Tyler, Fawn

Fawn Nguyen… ever heard of her???

pho

Math-Frolic 'profile' #14:

I think I can safely say that one of the few and best things to come out of America’s ill-fated war in Viet Nam was.… Fawn Nguyen (who came here from there in 1976, when I was just a toddler — well, a toddler with a beard and mustache and two college degrees).

There’s an awful lot of wonderful, helpful cross-talk among primary/secondary teachers on internet social media, especially on Twitter. Often when you see a first name (Bob, Carol, Ted, Alice...) you have to check further to see exactly who it is…. BUT when you see the name “Fawn” EVERYone KNOWS who it is!! (ya know kinda like when you see the name Beyonce, Cher, Bono, Euclid, or Quasimodo). Because if you don’t know Fawn Nguyen, you’re probably not a real teacher to begin with, but just some planted Russian spy… who, in your best-case scenario, is hoping to marry a filthy-rich, power-hungry American real estate doofus, and eventually become First Lady (or Escort) of these here not-so-United States… but, I digress (again).

Fawn’s early life story, making her way to the U.S. as a youngster from Viet Nam, is inspiring (especially when compared with Ivanka Trump's childhood stories of Saturday Gucci shopping sprees), as she told it when I interviewed her back in 2014:  

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2014/05/fawn-nguyen-passion-personified.html
It's quite the saga of persistence and fortitude, even while leaving out the more graphic parts about not being eaten by sharks while at sea.

She eventually made her way from the Midwest (where she first arrived) to the West Coast of the U.S., where she has taught math since the French Revolution, first in Oregon and then in California. She’s still a huge fan of the Oregon Ducks (though frankly, I suspect that’s ONLY because “duck” rhymes with her favorite word). After teaching in the classroom for 30+ years (but who’s counting) they’ve now made her a ‘Teacher On Special Assignment’ (perhaps because too many of her students were deliberately flunking just so they could spend another year with her). Anyway, it all has a sort of clandestine ring to it -- psssst… Netflix, I think it would make a great TV mini-series: “Teacher On Special Assignment, starring Fawn Nguyen” (or, Angelina Jolie playing Fawn)… but then, my best ideas are always ignored. :(

I’d recommend Fawn for a teaching position at Pomona College, but with California either burning to the ground or falling into the Pacific Ocean in the next decade, I hesitate to do that. Better perhaps that she move back to Minnesota (where she first arrived in the U.S. lo those many years ago), hang out with Ben Orlin, and discuss the never-ending intricacies of the Pythagorean theorem. Maybe they could even write a book together — she could do the drawings and it would be entitled “Math With F*cking Good Drawings, At Long Last Dammit” (...or whatever Simon & Schuster preferred).

I also think Fawn would make a great Secretary of Education; I mean after 3 years of Betsy DeVos it would be nice (even earth-shattering) to have someone in charge who understands teaching, and education, and learning, and middle school boys.

I can’t do justice to Fawn here... Like Sean Carroll who I profiled earlier and who can’t possibly be summarized in a blogpost either, there is just too much stuff to tell — but at least I can comprehend Fawn when she talks; whereas Sean is caught up in that crazy cosmology cacophony that leaves me confounded... especially the part where I'm both dead and alive at the same time until someone observes me.

Fawn’s blog “Finding Ways” is one of the more distinctive math blogs out there; a mix of teaching points, personal observation, uncommon wisdom, and Fawn’s helpful household hints (like the hysterically absurdist, "Make your bed every morning;" she's such a kidder!). You never know just what she might write about next, or when a four-letter word will pop up without warning (while you're reading pleasantly to your 7-year-old). I can’t even employ Fawn’s favorite words  here on a nice family blog like this (…well, except that is, when I’m talking about Donald T. or any member of his dysfunctional family… and I use the word “family” advisedly in the same loose, sketchy sense that people speak of the ‘Manson family’). 
By the way, "Visual Patterns" and "MathTalks" are a couple of other sites for math teachers, that Fawn started.

Fawn learned English as a second language, but writes better than most of us who learned it first (or, right after pig-Latin); and certainly better than anyone in Mitch McConnell's Senate Office. In fact, her writing has the ability to make grown men cry (but don’t ask me how I know that), and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve linked to this 2012 blogpost of hers.

But seriously if some prescient publisher doesn’t snap her up one day soon it will be a miscarriage of book publishing (…I may be lookin’ at you Princeton University Press).

Fawn admits to having once been too judgmental, something that having 3 kids and more than 3 doughnuts remedied (still, I'd be a tad cautious about crossing Fawn whenever she's holding a fork):

http://fawnnguyen.com/send-doughnuts/

Fawn loves food, and if you tell her she makes the best Pho on the planet you’ll likely be moved to the #1 slot on her speed-dial, AND be invited over in a few weeks for Thanksgiving dinner. She’s also been known to down a beer on days of the week beginning with a consonant... and, perhaps also a Bloody Mary on occasion:
https://twitter.com/fawnpnguyen/status/1184089101655396353

Fawn is on Twitter HERE in case you’re not already one of her 20,000 ardent followers (more than triple what Donald Trump has, after you eliminate Russian bots).

I get the feeling that “Nguyen” in Viet Nam must be like “Smith” in America — I mean there’s a LOT of them. So if you look Fawn up on the internet DON’T get confused by any similarly-named felons, strippers, embezzlers, ne’er-do-wells, real estate agents, etc. that you may run across there (at least I think they’re different people). You want only the reeeeal Fawn (the one who answers to “Fawnzie” because of her affection for the Fonzie character of old “Happy Days” episodes that she credits with helping her learn English). All the others are lame imitations.

Needless to say Fawn has a lot of fans. Here is one member of her cult extolling her virtues in a blogpost from a year ago:

https://countjoy12.wordpress.com/2018/08/17/fawn-nguyen/

I don’t know how much Fawn normally pays to have such posts planted around the blogosphere, but I want to assure readers that I’m NOT receiving a single penny for today’s blog entry! (…though I may check my mailbox a little more often over the next few days).

Fawn has talked to teacher groups and conferences more times than I've flossed my back molars (not that that’s saying much). Here is a brief inimitable example of her in action:

With the money she’s amassed from teaching, Fawn will no doubt be able to retire in just a few more decades, and all her past students (who have become Wall Street bankers or professional poker players), can then fondly visit her at one of Los Angeles’ finest homeless shelters.

Until then, Fawn, keep up the great work!!

p.s…. you make the BEST Pho!

——————————————————

Check out all the prior math profiles here: 

Matt, Evelyn, David, Sean, Cathy, Al, Tadashi, Holly, Erik, Danica, Marcus, Ben, Tyler

Tyler Vigen…. Correlate THIS!

Readers have been clamoring non-stop for another scintillating mathematician “profile” (well, not really, that's more like a KellyAnne Conway alternative factoid), so without further ado….

The hottest thing going in mathematics these days is statistics/probability (I mean other than the 613 books out this year on calculus), so figured a profile of a statistician was in order (just a short while back I mentioned several that I follow on Twitter)… BUT, I rarely do what I ought… so instead, will briefly profile a former law student...

In case you think that makes no sense, well not so fast Stephen Hawking wannabes! In recent years this particular law student had one of the most popular stat-related websites of anyone on the entire Web (in fact, he turned it into a little book). If you’ve followed math much at all on the internet over that time you likely already know of Tyler Vigen and his “Spurious Correlations” site. IF you’re NOT familiar with Tyler’s work, he regularly posts graphs of variables that seem to correlate VERY strongly, even though they have no logical reason for doing so (he's generated ~85,000 graphs!). So for example, here’s one of his graphs:

Or, for something less pleasant to think about:

Perhaps that even makes sense to you!? Anyway, you get the idea…. (statistics that are ludicrous... with or without fat tails). 

But of course who says these correlations aren’t real!?  “Correlation is not causation” is not so simple, my friend.  As every third-grader knows by now, a butterfly flying over the Indian Ocean in April may cause a hurricane in Miami in October (or, the election of neo-fascists in two of the world’s oldest democracies later on… but I digress). Perhaps A does not directly cause B, but perhaps A does cause Q which causes R which causes X which causes Y which causes Z, which, causes... B! Well then!… (Hey, it could happen... and does!).

In any event, here's Tyler explaining his site in his own words:

So back to our main focus….  the profile of Tyler Vigen, known anagrammatically as “Ever Tingly”:

Ever, I mean Tyler, was born in Burnsville, Minnesota on Feb. 13, 1991 (the same year that "Silence of the Lambs" came out and fava beans with a fine chianti became a thing). That makes him an Aquarium, just like myself, and accounting for the constant ’sink or swim’ feeling I've had throughout life. No, no, truth-be-told, the 'Age of Aquarius' ended long ago, and ever since Reagan we’ve been floundering deplorably in the Age of Rush Limbaugh (not completely unlike what 1930s Germany experienced... in fact the correlation gets closer and closer over time; some sort of regression to the mean... and reprehensible).

Tyler earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Metropolitan State University in Minnesota and worked in the National Guard in areas of geospatial analysis and satellite imagery and other data. From there he went on to Harvard Law School, thus missing out on a real education at Pomona College, but his technical interests and computer programming continued. He created his “Spurious Correlations” website while at Harvard, writing a program to search out misbegotten statistical flukes (each one of which Republicans ponder super-seriously). He also wrote other programs to assist students along their way.

He graduated Harvard in 2016 but was not interested in pursuing a career in law (which is a shame because I may need a good lawyer before the current Administration, known colloquially as the 4th Reich, comes ignominiously to a grinding halt, just maybe around Christmas!). But I can't really blame Tyler; I mean if there are two things the world is awash in, it's lawyers and people who write calculus books.

Tyler, by the way, pronounces his last name “VEE-Gun,” just like that cult of San Francisco hippies who, unlike the rest of incorrigible human riff-raff, actually takes ethics seriously. Tyler got married earlier this year and now lives and works in Chicago as a management consultant for Boston Consulting Group, where, if you can believe this, John Legend, Mitt Romney, and Bibi Netanyahu all previously worked (probably Carl Yastrzemski too, but I haven't verified that). There, Tyler makes use of his programming skills, and, I assume if Government contracts are involved, is eligible to become a whistleblower.

Tyler seems to have been inactive on Twitter for about a year, but he does have a Facebook page where Mark Zuckerberg violates his rights each-and-every day while stealing his identity to put up for sale on the Dark Web, right alongside Jared Kushner's (no, I’m kidding of course, Mark would never do that... but Jack Dorsey, not so sure).

I hope that while he was at Harvard, Tyler taught those lawyers-to-be some statistics — we need more lawyers who understand statistics… heck, we need more mathematicians... and, more 12th graders for that matter... who understand statistics, if America is to be saved!

That's about all my crack investigative team could dig up on Tyler, but we wish him well in all future endeavors, and caution him to moderate his margarine consumption. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm in the middle of exploring any budding correlation between presidents committing treason and impeachment... and I don't mean spurious.

—————————————

Check out all the prior math profiles here: 

Matt 

Evelyn 

David 

Sean

Cathy

Al

Tadashi

Holly

Erik

Danica

Marcus

Ben