Archive for March, 2015

It’s not that vile people like Jeremy Clarkson exist that makes me sad. It is that after he has been allegedly suspended for punching a producer, over half a million of you sign a petition to have him reinstated.

His antics over the years include:

• Making fun of Gordon Brown for being disabled
• Using the word “nigger” in a nursery rhyme
• A series of Nazi jokes at the Tokyo Motor Show
• A seemingly endless series of racist jokes with targets including India, Mexico, South Korea, Burma, Wales, Romania, Scotland and Japan
• Using derogatory terms for people with mental health issues
• Using derogatory terms for gay people

These are just a few of the most prominent. Wikipedia has many, many more. They even have a second page of it. This isn’t even the first time he has physically assaulted someone. Clarkson’s racist, homophobic, sexist, bigoted and violent personality has no place in civilised society, let alone the national media platform that he enjoys.

Stuart Lee does an excellent deconstruction:

NOTE: Since original publication, I have removed Clarkson’s joke about murdering public service workers in front of their families as such comments could be viewed as justifiable in context.

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is a book about randomness and probability by Leonard Mlodinow.

It is well researched and written. He talks about a lot of the other research cited by similar books, and basically anything that references Daniel Kahneman is probably on the right track. Why Kahneman? Possibly because his research is the best. Or possibly because Kahneman’s work reached the critical mass to make it more popular than anyone else. I would seemed to have missed the point of the book if I didn’t accept that as a possibility.

Mlodinow talks a lot about luck, and how much that is a part of the most successful people. It is a massive part. I often describe it as “the one thing Malcolm Gladwell got right”. See my review of Outliers.

I was already familiar with most of the content of the book, but it was good to have a reminder. Take these points for example:

• We judge more specific scenarios more likely than general ones. The classic example is a character description of a feminist. We judge “she is a feminist and a bank teller” to be more likely than “she is a bank teller” even though B is contained in A so must be at least as likely.
• The two daughters problem. If a family has two children and one of them is a daughter, what is the probability that they will have two daughters. It might seem like a half, but the answer is actually a third. This is because there are four possibilities (boy boy, boy girl, girl boy, girl girl) and we only eliminate one (boy boy) by saying they have one daughter.
• The two daughters with a name problem. What are the probabilities of a family of two children having two girls if they have a girl named Florida? The answer is a half, not a third. This is because families with two daughters have two chances to have one named Florida.

The answers to these questions are often not obvious at first. It took me a bit of time to get my head round them. But that is the point. Humans do not have an innate understanding of probability, we’re actually pretty bad at it a lot of the time.

Then some of it is downright confusing. Take for example the gambler’s fallacy and regression towards the mean.

In the gambler’s fallacy, people think that if black has come up ten times in a row on a roulette wheel, red must be due. Of course it isn’t. The odds are still 50/50. At the same time, if you have just had a really good of ten bets, the odds are that your next run of ten bets will be less good because of regression towards the mean. Holding these two concepts in your head simultaneous and knowing which to apply in each situation becomes incredibly confusing.

There are some other great examples in the book too.

DNA testing is often described as almost perfect. The changes of DNA being confused are incredibly small. Whereas the chances of a witness being wrong are quite high. For more details read The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.

They correctly point out that faced with witness testimony vs DNA evidence, the DNA evidence is far more likely to be accurate. However, the odds are not millions to one that it will be wrong. Sure, the test itself is that good. But the chance of human error in the lab might be 1%. Thus it will still only be accurate 99% of the time.

Alcohol was another interesting topic. I’ve written several times before about how humans cannot tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine. Mlodinow quotes even more studies. In one, they labelled two bottles as $90 and $10 and subjects judged the expensive wine to be better. They were the same wine in two bottles. In a second cited experiment, food colouring was added to white wine and subjects were then served the same wine in “white” and “red” forms, claiming they could identify the differences.

Something also struck close to home was similar tests on vodka. Mlodinow points out that vodka is naturally without character, so most of it is marketing. Indeed, in a blind taste test, critics could not tell the difference between expensive brands such as Grey Goose and Ketel One and cheap brands – ultimately rating Smirnoff as the best.

I have done a taste test between Smirnoff, Absolut and Grey Goose and there was a clear difference. However, it was not blind and this study suggests that if I did it blind, I could not tell the difference (which I suspect is the case). It’s a good reminder of the power of expectation.

Mlodinow concludes the book by talking more about luck and how successful people are mainly just lucky. That is not to say that they do not tip the balance in their favour by being talented as well, but if you look at someone like Bill Gates, he himself admits he has been lucky to get where he is.

There is an important message to take away from this though. Because it is not innate, and there is a luck element, that gives us control. If we can control how many coin flips we take – in the form of how many times we try, be it in business, learning a new skill, whatever it is – the more chance we have for it to come up heads.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s third TV series, his most famous, is River Cottage. There are actually lots of them but so far I have watched the original ones, Escape to River Cottage, Return to River Cottage and River Cottage Forever.

This follows him packing up his life in London and moving to Dorset to live as a smallholder – that is someone who has a small farm, primarily used for self subsistence. Each series follows a year.

He seems to be well versed in rural life already. While he clearly isn’t a livestock expert, he does manage to keep them alive and seems familiar with a lot of activities I would not be, such as diving, butchery, smoking meat and wielding a gun. He also manages the first two years in a soft-top classic sports car, before finally giving in and buying a Land Rover (also a soft-top).

I did wonder how real it was. For example he talks about going to do a farmers market to raise some cash for a little project he has on. But was does the £100 actually cover? Presumably not his rent, his vet’s bills, or the large amount of food he buys in to supplement his own stocks. Fun to watch, but I got the distinct impression that undertaking such a project was not actually in the reach of us plebs, despite Hugh’s assertion that we could all do it.

It’s not really a cooking show. He cooks things obviously, but I did not come away with any recipe ideas. It’s just fun to watch (and it is very entertaining), and possible dream.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s first TV show was called Cook on the Wild Side. In his first series he converted a truck into a “gastro van”, which the back folded out into a complete kitchen for him to cook from anywhere. He then drove round the country foraging for food and cooking it up.

There was a surprisingly amount of illegal activity in it, which was amusing. He tried poaching, trespassing and raiding supermarket bins. He went everywhere from inner city London to the highlands of Scotland. In seemed quite realistic in that a lot of his attempts, especially fishing, just did not work.

In the second series he used a boat that he sailed up the canals and even included a bike with a pedal-powered stove so that he could leave the water whenever he needed.

While the series was highly entertaining, I also took away two practical tips. The first is that you can eat common garden snails. Literally you can just pick them up and fry them. Though you may also want to cleanse them for a few days before doing this. Gorden Ramsey has a great video on this as well:

Secondly Hugh recommends a book called “why not eat insects?” and then goes on to gather up woodlice from a wood and then fry them too. Apparently they taste like shrimp. I like shrimp…

Written by Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre makes up and important part of the Bronte sisters work. With Emily Bronte having written Wuthering Heights, these two novels represent the best work of the two sisters. It is only a shame there wasn’t a third Bronte sister to write another great novel. But there wasn’t.

I decided to go for the abridged version. I just couldn’t face the 500-or-so pages of the unabridged version. Of course you lose a lot of the detail that way, but I found it made for a more pleasurable experience for a book that I was not sure how much I would enjoy.

It started off very promising. An attractive young lady being restrained in “the red room”. Though it is luckily it did not end up going this way given how young the character was at the time.

Charlotte’s style conforms more to that of a Jane Austin novel than it does to that of her sisters and I think I am grateful for that. Wuthering Heights was an unpleasant story. It had depth, realism and emotion, and I’m not looking for that in a novel. I’m looking for a Jane Eyre style happy-ish ending.

After reading a book about Holocaust deniers I needed something a little more upbeat. A fairy tale about animals on a farm seemed to be the exact remedy I needed.

It’s very Nineteen Eighty-Four. Of course, it is no surprise it is similar given there are both Orwellian novels, but many of the ideas and concepts are taken almost word for word from each other. The constant threat of the enemy, the re-writing of history, the propaganda.

How can you pretend that someone as massive as the Holocaust never happened? That is the topic of Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman’s book. They look at many of the most widely recognised Holocaust deniers and what exactly it is that they believe.

The book spends a good deal of the book refuting the claims of Holocaust deniers. This was a little disappointing for two reasons. Firstly, it was just horrible to read. Transcripts of former German soldiers explaining how it was done made for extremely unpleasant reading. Secondly, I wanted to read this book because I wanted to know more about the psychology of Holocaust deniers, and I felt there could have been more on this.

The conclusion of the book looks at how we can learn from such obviously nonsense claims as Holocaust denial in terms of determining whether other people, looking at other issues, are promoting genuine revision or simple denial.

I’ve been reading George R. R. Martin’s second book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series ever since I finished the first over a year ago. Clearly with not much focus. Actually, I have been putting it off because I was a bit worried about not remembering what was going on.

Having restarted, however, I found it fairly easy to piece together. This involved fitting some of it in with the TV series though, and there are differences.

It is what you would expect from Martin. The good guys having a really hard time, the bad guys having a slightly less hard time, and all your favourite characters constantly being killed. The ending is also rather abrupt. It is almost like he just writes the entire thing and picks arbitrary points to slice into books (maybe he does).

American Gods is a novel by Neil Gaiman. I’ve read Good Omens which was a collaboration between Gaiman and Pratchett, but this was the first entirely Gaiman novel I have read. It follows the tail of a man named Shadow as he travels around America meeting gods, old and new.

From Gaiman’s introduction, I was expecting a story about some kind of road trip exploring American culture. To an extent, it probably was that, but America is such a diverse place that you can only really do small parts of it justice.

Its clever story arc makes for a very satisfying ending.