Ryan Wilkins

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The world is a confusing place. Causation looks like correlation; the signal sounds like the noise; randomness is everywhere. This raises the obvious question: How does the human brain cope with such an epistemic mess? How do we deal with the helter-skelter of reality? One approach would be to ground all of our beliefs in modesty and uncertainty, to recognize that we know so little and understand even less.

Needless to say, that's not what we do. Instead of grappling with the problem of induction, we believe in God. Instead of applying Bayesian logic, we slip into rigid ideologies, which lead us to neglect all sorts of salient facts.

A new paper by psychologists at the University of Waterloo explores the connection between the presence of randomness and our belief in the supernatural. (The existence of God is the ultimate refutation of randomness, unless God throws dice.) The scientists argue that we abhor randomness so much that when confronted with it - when we're reminded that nothing makes very much sense - we become more likely to subscribe to "spiritual control," or the belief that everything is caused by an invisible hand.

The study was simple: 37 undergraduates were told they were participating in an experiment concerning "effects of an herbal supplement on color perception." Upon arrival, participants read a brochure about the product. Half of the subjects were informed that, according to federal testing, the supplement has no side effects, and half were told that it has a single side effect, "mild arousal or anxiety." Participants then swallowed a pill that supposedly contained the supplement (but actually contained inert microcrystalline cellulose).

While "waiting for the compound to metabolize," participants completed a questionnaire that was supposedly unrelated to the experiment. Here is where the priming occurred: subjects were told to unscramble a variety of word sets. For half the participants, eight words in these sets were related to randomness, such as "chance," "random" and "chaotic". For the other half, these randomness primes were replaced with negatively valenced control words, such as "poorly," "slimy" and "injuries".

Finally, the subjects were quizzed about their religious beliefs. Did they think that that the universe is controlled by a God or a similar nonhuman entity? Is there a supernatural order, such as karma, that dictates the outcome of events? Does life unfold according to a master plan? Interestingly, "the randomness primes led to significantly stronger beliefs in the existence of supernatural sources of control than the negativity primes did." However, this effect disappeared in the group of subjects that were told about the side-effects of the herbal supplement, as they probably assumed that their mild anxiety wasn't about randomness - it was just a chemical hiccup.

The scientists summarize their results thusly:

These data suggest that belief in supernatural sources of control, such as God and karma, may function, in part, to defend against distress associated with randomness, even when the perception of randomness is not related to traumatic events.

Personally, I'm less convinced by the theological implications of the experiment than I am by the larger relationship between randomness primes and the search for patterns. (Religion is a vast, sprawling subject - it isn't going to be solved by a clever study involving 37 teenagers. People believe in God for an infinitude of reasons; as William James reminds us, one can only talk about religious experiences in the plural, for there are so many different kinds.)

What this study really reminds me of is the stock market. On the one hand, it's a mostly accepted fact that the stock market is a random walk. (Some smart behavioral economists disagree.) Nevertheless, it's pretty clear that, for the vast majority of investors, it's safe to assume that the market is so efficient that it's effectively random. So how do we react to this information? Do we stop trying to outsmart the S&P 500 and instead sink our savings into a low cost index fund? Do we seek the safety of bonds? Not at all. Instead, we become day traders.

This all reminds me of one of my favorite Bob Dylan quotes: "I accept the chaos. I hope it accepts me."

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If there's a theme to my blog posts, it's something along the lines of Complexity is Killing Us. The complexity of investment options is why you're afraid to put your money anywhere but inside an old sock. Complexity is why the healthcare system in the United States is apparently unfixable. Complexity is why scientists can't convince a large segment of the public to believe in evolution or global warming. Complexity is why your computer spends all morning begging you for updates instead of just doing what-the-frakk you want it to do. And lately, I've noticed that routine conversations have become too complicated.

In simpler times, I imagine conversations went like this:

Nobleman: "Hey, peasant, would you like a potato?"

Peasant: "Does it come with a beating?"

Nobleman: "A brief one. My arms are tired."

Peasant: "Then yes, I would like a potato."

These days, there's no such thing as a simple conversation. When you get a business call, it might start with a history of the industrial age, a complete explanation of some sort of technology, an exposition of budgetary limitations, a verbal sketch of the characters, a briefing on the politics of the situation, with a full accounting of the timing, the risks, the opportunity, so on. Sometimes you want to know all of that stuff, and you have the time to listen. Other times, you already have the information, or you don't have time to listen, or you're the wrong person. That's when you have to go for the interrupt. And interrupting is getting harder every year.

Thanks to complexity, and the impact it has on people's schedules, if you get a person's attention, you want to take advantage of it before your listener gets into an automobile accident, or has to run for another meeting, or his kid starts vomiting, or he simply can't hold his bladder one more minute. Your best strategy is to prevent the other person from talking - not a single peep - until you have said every last thing that you called to say. I believe this is a modern phenomenon. My guess is that in olden days it was customary to pause in your fire-hose-monologue now and then to let the other person ask for clarification, make a point, or just sigh. Now any pause introduces an unacceptable risk of a failed phone call. The interrupter's job is harder than ever.

I have experimented with ways to interrupt the fire-hose-monologue without seeming rude, but social conventions haven't evolved fast enough to provide a polite solution. So far, the best I have come up with is some variant on "Can I interrupt you?" But it always feels as if I just called someone a time-wasting windbag. And I've tried "Whoa, whoa," but it feels as if I'm scolding a horse.

I propose a new custom for interrupting when it's absolutely necessary. Make a beeping sound like a garbage truck when it backs up. That way it won't seem so personal. Try it and let me know how that works out for you.

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I know it's passé to share Frontal Cortex links, but my lizard-brain enjoys articles about social hierarchies, the Hawthorne Effect, and the way certain measurements drive our desire to maximize that measurement.

Now that the social web is maturing - the platforms have been winnowed down to a select few (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) - some interesting commonalities are emerging. The one shared feature that I'm most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn't just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn't just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach. LinkedIn has too many damn hierarchies to count. Even the staid blog is all about the metrics, from page views to unique visitors.

What I'm most troubled by is the desire of individuals (especially myself) to constantly check up on these numbers, and to accept these measurements as a measure of something meaningful. We've taken the natural nebulousness of social interactions - I might know you're important, but I don't know how important - and made them explicit. The end result is that our online relationships are shadowed by power relations.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. I was recently talking to a twitterer with a very large number of followers. (My least favorite thing about Twitter is the use of "follow" within the platform, with its weird connotations of subservience. I don't want to "follow" a person, I just want to "listen" to them.) He complained that one of his frustrations with the platform was the sheer amount of feedback from all of his tweets. He said much of the feedback was genuine (and sometimes critical), but a lot of it also struck him as inherently "phony," in that it was written just to get a reply or retweet from him, which then might lead to some new "followers" for the lesser twitterer. In other words, his power within the social network warped the nature of his online social interactions.

The primatologist Robert Sapolsky has done some marvelous work on how our position within the hierarchy shapes our behavior. Here's a fascinating description of the effects of testosterone on monkey aggression:

Round up some male monkeys. Put them in a group together, and give them plenty of time to sort out where they stand with each other - affiliative friendships, grudges and dislikes. Give them enough time to form a dominance hierarchy, a linear ranking system of numbers 1 through 5. This is the hierarchical sort of system where number 3, for example, can pass his day throwing around his weight with numbers 4 and 5, ripping off their monkey chow, forcing them to relinquish the best spots to sit in, but, at the same time, remembering to deal with numbers 1 and 2 shit-eating obsequiousness.

Hierarchy in place, it's time to do your experiment. Take the third-ranking monkey and give him some testosterone. Inject a ton of it into him...give him enough testosterone to grow antlers and a beard on every neuron in the brain. And, no surprise, when you check the behavioral data, it turns out that he will probably be participating in more aggressive interactions than before.

So even though small fluctuations in the levels of the hormone don't seem to matter much, testosterone still causes aggression. But that would be wrong. Check out number 3 more closely. Is he now raining aggressive terror on any and all in the group, frothing in an androgenic glaze of indiscriminate violence. Not at all. He's still judiciously kowtowing to numbers 1 and 2, but has simply become a total bastard to numbers 4 and 5.

I don't meant to suggest that Twitter is just like a primate dominance hierarchy, or that an injection of testosterone would lead people to abuse those with fewer followers. Instead, the elegance of Sapolsky's experiment is its demonstration of the all encompassing influence of the social hierarchy itself. Even a massive injection of hormone can't alter the way we experience the pecking order, which is why we talk differently to our boss than to our assistant, or why we're more solicitous of a rich, powerful friend that we are to an unemployed friend. I hate myself for even writing that sentence, but it's all too often true: we're a craven species, obsessed with status for the sake of status. And that pursuit of status shapes so many of our interactions, both in person and online.

Now here's where the internet social platforms make a bad situation even worse. Because they exquisitely measure our place within the network, we know exactly who the powerful people are; it's like high-school, except on a massive scale. (Reading the comments on many popular blogs reminds me the sycophants who surrounded the popular kids in 9th grade. It's all applause and affirmation, with every criticism shouted down.) Furthermore, the quantification of our social world inevitably inspires a certain kind of social anxiety. We want to be moving upwards, to have more friends and more followers and more connections. (Such are the burdens of being a social primate.) It's a ridiculous endeavor, of course, and I chastise myself every time I check my twitter count, but it's also a deeply seated instinct. I'm just a male monkey with broadband.

One last point: Because these online tools collapse the space between people - we can experience a weird intimacy with perfect strangers, learning about their breakfast routines and airport delays and glancing at their photo albums - we bring ourselves into "competition" with a far larger group. We're suddenly comparing ourselves with people we've never met, and never will. While this pseudo-closeness can be fun, I think it also comes with some anxiety inducing side-effects. David Hume, in A Treatise on Human Nature, makes a really important point:

It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him. A great disproportion cuts off the relation, and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us or diminishes the effects of the comparison.

My worry is that our online social platforms both magnify our hierarchies (by measuring our friends, followers, links, etc.) and erase the "disproportions," so that we suddenly find ourselves in the same monkey cage with a far larger number of monkeys. And that's why I wish there was a popular social platform that didn't measure anything. I doubt such a platform will ever exist - we clearly want the explicit hierarchies, even when they drive us crazy - but it sure would be a relief.

Read the comments on this post... I know it's passé to share Frontal Cortex links, but my lizard-brain enjoys articles about social hierarchies, the Hawthorne Effect, and the way certain measurements drive our desire to maximize that measurement.

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1) 10sion
2) A-One & Bo
3) B Dub
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5) Lloyd Banks
6) Big Oso Loc
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17) ChapWill a.k.a. T.R.U.T.H.
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20) Da Professor
21) Da Rapper (Lil Dean)
22) Danny!
23) Dirty Boyz
24) Wox Dizi
25) Dogg
26) Drake
27) Dub
28) The Duke's Click
29) Dumate
30) The Durio Family
31) Element
32) Eminem
33) Epic
34) Epix
35) Force One Networkz
36) G-Unit
37) Gar
38) HP the Vet
39) Hatchet
40) Hurricane Chris
41) Jr. Pimp
42) Juvenile
43) Knobody
44) Kurupt
45) Lil Scrappy
46) Lil Uno
47) Lil' Flip
48) Low Key
49) MC Tony
50) The Madd Assassinz
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52) Mars Black
53) Martie Biccardii 151
54) Mastermind
55) Matty
56) Mayor
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63) NCP's Metro Allstars
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80) Stat Quo
81) Daniel Swain
82) T-Ray
83) 3rd Degree
84) Track Wiz
85) Tremendous
86) Obie Trice
87) V-Boy
88) World
89) Young Jeezy
90) Young Buck
91) Young Stunna
92) Youngsta L.B.

Yesterday at 12:55 p.m., Conan O’Brien posted the following to his Twitter account: “I've decided to follow someone at random. She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.” And it did change, very quickly. Killen, who goes by the Twitter name LovelyButton, is a 19-year-old student in Michigan who started out yesterday with 3 Twitter followers and now is up to 13,279. We chatted with Killen (and her fiancée, John) this afternoon about becoming a sudden Internet celebrity.

So how did you become the one person that Conan O’Brien follows on Twitter?
I don’t know! Someone, but not Conan, contacted me on MySpace and told me he wanted to follow one random person. He said if Conan picked me, I’d get a lot of followers, and was that okay. And I said yes and then he did it, and I started getting followers immediately.

Did you actually think he was going to pick you?
No, because the person who contacted me was vague, and I didn’t take it seriously at all until I went on Twitter later and saw he’d put my name in there. All of a sudden, people were talking about me, and my name was everywhere, and I had all these followers. And it took a while to sort it out. I had like 4,000 messages in my in-box, so the first few hours were just going through everything.

What were you tweeting about before?
I tweet about random stuff: I love peanut butter, I love gummy dinosaurs, whatever I was doing at the time. I started doing it because I wanted to vent stuff, and because no one was following me, I knew no one would see it. And now I guess a lot of people will.

Were you a big Conan fan before?
He’s hilarious, I would stay up to watch him. I was one of his followers on Twitter, so that’s how he found me. I just started my Twitter account a few days before he did, so there were rumors that I was in cahoots with him about this, but I definitely wasn’t.

So has your life actually changed yet?
Yes! I have a lot of people offering me free stuff, though I’ve only accepted a computer from Hornblasters. But people are offering us stuff for our wedding, photographers and invitations, but I haven't accepted anything other than the computer. Oh, and I’ve raised a lot of money for 3-day for the Cure, the charity I support. I think we’re over $2,000 in one day, which is the amount I wanted to raise by August.

So you’re getting married on September 25.
Everybody keeps joking that Conan will come to our wedding, so that would be fantastic. It’s rumored that he’s going to start his new show that day.

Maybe you’ll get married on the show!
I would do it, that’d be awesome.

Read more posts by Emma Rosenblum

Filed Under: chat room, conan o'brien, late shifting, sarah killen, tv, twitter

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The Rube Goldberg contraption in this OK Go video for "This Too Shall Pass" is one of the best visual metaphors I've seen for the way a well-put-together movie works. If something misfires or doesn't go right, the cumulative payoff is diminished. Anywhere along the line, the whole thing could come crashing to a halt or just veer off course and peter out. It has nothing to do with narrative; it's about construction, creating momentum (and anticipation and suspense) and the interactions between many details that ultimately make the thing whiz and whir and tick. I'm not yet crazy about the song itself, but I have a feeling it's going to grow on me...

(tip: MattRosenDP, @GregMitch)

There's also a four-part film showing how they did it, starting here:

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Hey, students -- pay attention. Not to us, mind you, but to the syllabus provided by your professor. Kieran Mullen, a physics professor at the University of Oklahoma, has a fairly strict rule about gadgets in class: there won't be any, ever, under any circumstances. Balk all you want (understandable given his own clipped-on cellie), but if you sign up for this guy's class, you'll be flipping your phone to "off" and leaving your laptop in the dormitory. And if you try to blaze your own path and slip that netbook into the back row, you might leave bitterly disappointed. As you'll see clearly in the video past the break, Mr. Mullen sought to make a visual point that laptops weren't allowed in class (he calls them "a distraction"), and while it seems that the whole stunt was premeditated, most students acknowledged that his point was driven home. In short, he took a defunct machine, submerged it in liquid nitrogen, and proceeded to make the following statement:

"This is just liquid nitrogen, so it alone won't hurt the computer. But this will."

Find out exactly what "this" was by hitting that 'Read More' button there on the lower left.

We sit in front of our computers most of the day, connected to our friends and co-workers by the series of pipes, strings, and nimbostratus zackets called the Internet. Many times per day, things flash before our eyes—videos, photos, songs, sites—that are funny or strange enough to warrant sharing with other people. 

Data nerds and pop-culture nerds, unite! This is perhaps revealing a little too much, but to me, there are few things more beautiful than a really well-done infographic.

This is a gallery of winners of the World Press Photo Contest. You owe it to yourself to view it in "Full Screen" mode before you read the post.

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Schaller's conclusion: "So where's the rest of the "waste" that, in Americans' minds, adds up to half of what the government spends? You tell me, because I have no idea. But I do know this much: Given the perception that so much money goes to the so-called "undeserving poor" here at home as well as to foreigners through foreign aid, it's not surprising that people think government spending is wasteful. If half the budget--instead about one-seventh--actually went to such things, I could understand the sentiment."

So I wrote a post yesterday about government waste in which I dared to suggest that some Americans may be confused about just what exactly our federal government spends its money on and in what amounts. I still cannot find any survey results in which Americans are asked to apply actual percentages to actual spending categories. But I have dug up some other, related findings.


Before proceeding, let's establish some general baselines of actual federal government spending against which to compare what we do know about American perceptions. The above pie chart, taken from Wikipedia, breaks down spending into more than two dozen programs or cabinet agencies. But we can simplify this a bit by collapsing the eight largest chunks/wedges into three main categories:

1. Welfare for seniors, 34 percent: Social Security and Medicare wedges.
   
   
2. Defense, 22 percent (Defense and Homeland Security).
   
   
3. Welfare for everyone else, 20 percent ( Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance and Health & Human Services.)
   
   
4. Interest, 9 percent (Interest).

First of all, Americans tend to think we spend too much on what they call "welfare," but which in fact limited mostly to category 3 above--welfare for non-seniors. A Kaiser survey conducted a while back (1995) clearly indicates a high level of suspicion toward "welfare" spending, but when asked to clarify respondents clearly meant programs like food stamps, TANF programs (formerly AFDC), Medicaid and public housing. Indeed, although about 90 percent of Americans viewed housing, AFDC and food stamps as welfare, only 30 percent defined Medicare and just 15 percent deemed Social Security "welfare."

Of course, citizens pay into SSI and Medicare with their payroll taxes, but there is still a redistributive effect of spending by the government on these programs. Unemployment insurance apparently didn't even make the list, even though today it's about one dollar in every nine the feds spend. In any event, these definitions have meaning when it comes to budget-cutting. According to a Bloomberg poll two months ago, fewer than one in four Americans thinks we should cut Social Security or Medicare, despite the fact that more than a third of the US budget is spent on these two programs alone.

The Kaiser results further confirm the apparently longstanding belief among Americans that we spend more than we actually do not only on foreign aid, but interest and defense. Though we can't get to actual percentages the way the Kaiser poll asked it, it's clear which parts of the budget Americans think constitute the largest or second-largest spending commitments. About 40 percent of Americans cited two of the following four items as being one of the government's top two expenditures: foreign aid (41%), welfare (40%), interest (40%) and defense (37%). Only if Americans defined welfare as inclusive of Social Security and Medicare would these views be accurate--with welfare thusly combined and defined easily ranking #1, and in which case defense would rank #2.

But again, that's clearly not how Americans define "welfare," and even if they did it's difficult to explain how foreign aid ranks first. And it's clear that "foreign aid" isn't viewed as the effective function of our defense expenditures, or else defense would rank a lot lower.

In any case, given the anxiety we hear about constantly in terms of government spending and deficits, how could all that "waste" be eliminated. Remember, with almost no public support for tinkering with Social Security or Medicare--heck, even Republicans are scare-mongering about cuts to Medicare, the fastest-growing federal program--we start with just two-thirds of the budget in play politically. Of that, clearly there is ample political will to cut welfare that's viewed as going to the so-called "undeserving" poor people. (If you want to understand why Americans hate such kinds of welfare, I suggest reading Martin Gilens book that addresses this question squarely: Why Americans Hate Welfare.) But since unemployment insurance (to which workers also contribute) did not make the list of referents respondents cited when asked by Kaiser to identify welfare in terms of specific programs, 12 percent of that 20 percent should also be taken out of play, leaving just 8 percent of the budget as the "dastardly" kind of welfare.

OK, so for the sake of argument, let's say the government immediately ceased payment of all that remaining 8 percent in "welfare" spending. According to the Bloomberg poll, there also seems to be growing frustration with Iraq and Afghanistan war spending, but that only accounts for about $130 billion right now--and that money is "off-budget" anyway. And while we might wish not to pay interest on our outstanding debts, that's simply not an option--and interest payments couldn't be categorized as "waste" anyway because they're simply debt-service. (I suppose there are some administrative costs to paying those debts--what I classified in the previous post as Type 2 waste--but there's basically zero efficiency savings to be found there.)

So where's the rest of the "waste" that, in Americans' minds, adds up to half of what the government spends? You tell me, because I have no idea. But I do know this much: Given the perception that so much money goes to the so-called "undeserving poor" here at home as well as to foreigners through foreign aid, it's not surprising that people think government spending is wasteful. If half the budget--instead about one-seventh--actually went to such things, I could understand the sentiment.
Schaller's conclusion: "So where's the rest of the "waste" that, in Americans' minds, adds up to half of what the government spends? You tell me, because I have no idea. But I do know this much: Given the perception that so much money goes to the so-called "undeserving poor" here at home as well as to foreigners through foreign aid, it's not surprising that people think government spending is wasteful. If half the budget--instead about one-seventh--actually went to such things, I could understand the sentiment."

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See also: Jacob Weisberg's recent article at Slate, "Down With the People: Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis." (Much like Daniel Plainview, I'm probably a little too sympathetic to opinions that conclude that, when it comes to people, I see nothing worth liking.)

It's been the political equivalent of an intervention: in recent weeks, Democrats have been bombarded with advice about how they should reinvent their economic agenda. The electorate, we hear, wants Barack Obama to be more of an economic populist but less of an ambitious reformer. He has to aggressively create jobs but also be less spendthrift. This advice may be contradictory, but then so are the economic opinions of the many angry voters who are animating what’s being called the new populism. Whereas the economic populism of the eighteen-nineties and the right-wing cultural populism of recent years represented reasonably coherent ideologies, this new populism has stitched together incompatible concerns and goals into one “I’m mad as hell” quilt. The people may have spoken. It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense See also: Jacob Weisberg's recent article at Slate, "Down With the People: Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis." (Much like Daniel Plainview, I'm probably a little too sympathetic to opinions that conclude that, when it comes to people, I see nothing worth liking.)

Charles Simic

I have a collection of Buster Keaton’s films I bought in the late 1980s when they first became available on video. It’s made up of nineteen half-hour shorts and his nine full-length films, all made between 1920 and 1928. Every few years I take a look at some of them, and recently, being thoroughly depressed by our wars and our politics, I watched a dozen of his shorts to cheer myself up. Almost ninety years old, these shorts are still very funny and visually beautiful. They make the Dada and Surrealist pranks everybody was scandalized by in that era seem dated and tame in comparison.

Charlie Chaplin’s bum is at the mercy of a cruel world. Keaton, with his impassive face and a hat flat as a pancake, is a stoic. He confronts one setback after another with serenity worthy of a Buddhist monk. In one short film, “The Goat” (1921) he’s standing on the sidewalk behind two tailor’s dummies, under the impression that they are at the end of a bread line. When he discovers his mistake, he moves on quietly.

Keaton’s movies were a big success in Europe since his type of comedy doesn’t need a translation. I first saw one of his shorts in occupied Belgrade during the Second World War. I liked him instantly. His films are full of remarkable acrobatic stunts. Keaton started out in vaudeville when he was four years old working with his parents, whose comedy act included a lot of roughhousing; he was thrown by his father across the stage and sometimes even at the hecklers in the audience.

A plot of a good comedy can be written on a postcard, Keaton said. For instance, in “Cops” (1922) a girl tells the hero, either you become a successful businessman, or I won’t marry you. Everything that happens in this delightful short follows from his effort to fulfill her request.

Keaton claimed that it was much harder to make a short comic film than a full-length one in which the story is uppermost, since a short film is nothing but a series of gags that follow from the original premise. For the gags to work, they have to be timed just right. Even after a film was completed, he reshot some gags if he felt they were executed either too quickly or too slowly—and many of them, of course, were extremely difficult to do. In “Neighbors” (1921), when a young woman cries for help from a third-floor apartment across the street, Keaton and two other men each step out of their three respective windows to form a human totem pole and rush to her rescue.

At the same time, he warned against the dangers of rehearsing a comic scene too much. To be successful, a scene had to keep its feel of improvisation. In “One Week” (1920), an uncle gives to a pair of newlyweds a build-it-yourself house and a plot of land. A disappointed rival alters the numbers in the boxes containing the house, so that when Keaton begins to assemble it, the result is freakish. A door on the second floor opens to nowhere; the kitchen sink is on the outside wall; the rain pours through an opening in the roof and the house spins in the high wind. An obstinate and ingenious man, he tries to cope with whatever new difficulties present themselves.

In another short, “The Scarecrow,” a couple are eloping on a motorcycle with a side car, pursued by the girl’s father, when in their speed they sweep up a priest who happens to be crossing the street. “Where is the ring?” the priest asks. Using a nut Keaton has just unscrewed, the priest pronounces them man and wife.

In the world in which everything can go wrong, and usually does, Keaton remains unperturbed. In “The Boat” (1921), after the boat he built in his garage sinks, he and his wife and two kids are set adrift on the sea in a bathtub he brought along to serve as a lifeboat. One of the little ones cries for a drink of water, and Keaton, without any sign of anxiety, pours him a glass from the tap, which the kid drinks as they sink. As the old stoic philosophers said, the sage is immune to misfortune. Since most of us are not sages, we can at least laugh.

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Waxy's annual analysis of AMPAS-nominated movies leaking on the internet.

Avast, ye scurvy dogs! The Oscar nominees were announced yesterday, which means it's time again to revisit the eternal war between the MPAA and Internet movie pirates.

I've updated my spreadsheet with all the current available data, eight years of data tracking the online distribution of every Oscar-nominated film since 2003. I've added this year's 34 nominated films to the list, a total of 245 films. (Read about my methodology at the end of the entry.)

View or download all the data below, including a second sheet with some interesting aggregate statistics. As always, I'll keep it updated until the Oscar broadcast. (And let me know if you find any mistakes.)

View full-size on Google Spreadsheets.

Download: Excel (with formulas) or CSV

Findings

Since 2003, I've tracked the online distribution of Oscar screeners, and every year, the piracy scene manages to release nearly every film by nomination day. Last year, all but three films were leaked in DVD quality by nomination day.

Incredibly, the tide may be turning. Fewer Oscar screeners leaked online this year — only 14 out of 34 nominated films, the lowest percentage ever. And they're taking twice as long to leak — a median 21 days after theatrical release, up from 11 days the previous year.

It's not limited to screeners, either. Camcorder and telesync releases dropped this year. Even the percentage of retail DVD rips has dropped, though this will likely shift before the broadcast. In the chart below, you can see the percentage of films that were released in each format. (For example, 21% of this year's films had a cam release and 44% had a retail DVD leak.)

And the R5 DVD releases that dominated previous year's Oscars is now mostly dead. I'm guessing the studios are moving away from the early distribution of R5 DVDs entirely.

But why the shift this year? Are studios doing a better job protecting screeners and intimidating Academy members? Or was this year's crop of films too boring for pirates to bother with? I can't tell if this is a scene-wide trend or localized to the Oscars only. If you have access to historical data tracking scene releases, get in touch.

And if you have any theories or inside information, leave a comment.

Other fun facts:

• Academy members received screeners for 30 of the 34 nominated films.
• The Avatar screener was the last to be received by Academy members (Ken Rudolph received his on January 15). Amazingly, it hasn't leaked online yet.
• The Hurt Locker and The Young Victoria were both leaked online in DVD format over six months before their theatrical release.
• As far as I can tell, The Secret of Kells is the first film since I started tracking to be nominated without a U.S. theatrical release. It's currently slated to come out in March.

Methodology

As usual, I included the feature films in every category except documentary and foreign films (even makeup and costume design). I used Yahoo! Movies for US release dates, always using the first available date, even if it was a limited release. Cam, telesync, R5, and screener leak dates were taken from VCD Quality. I used the first leak date, with the exception of unviewable or incomplete nuked releases. Finally, the official screener dates came from Academy member Ken Rudolph, who lists the date he receives every screener on his personal homepage. Thanks again, Ken!

For previous years, see 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 (part 1 and part 2), and 2009.

Waxy's annual analysis of AMPAS-nominated movies leaking on the internet.

While it can be argued that correlation does not imply causation, the trends revealed by these statistics, in relation to IQ, impoverishment, divorce, crime and political beliefs seem too consistent to refute. Data sources listed at bottom.

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A great column idea from Steven Strogatz. An insta-RSS for me.

A debut column on math features an introduction to numbers, from upsides (they're efficient) to down (they're ethereal). A great column idea from Steven Strogatz. An insta-RSS for me.

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I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you're more familiar with, because I don't understand it in terms of anything else you're more familiar with.

This is why science is so maddening for some and so great for others.

Tags: physics   Richard Feynman   science   video

Everyone Eats ... But that doesn't make you a restaurant critic | CJR:

Robert Sietsema, in the Columbia Journalism Review, on the history of restaurant criticism. (Related: John Colapinto in The New Yorker on undercover Michelin Guide inspectors.)

155 people carried him 9.4 miles in below freezing temperatures [via]

The stark and gorgeous Japanese poster for Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited Shutter Island eschews the one thing that has dominated the posters for the last four Scorsese features, and that’s the looming noggin of Leonardo DiCaprio. In anticipation of that film I thought I'd gather together some other foreign Scorsese posters, with the help of our friends at Posteritati.

Last year I wrote about Peter Strausfield’s superb woodcut designs for the Academy Cinema in London, but the holy grail for Strausfield collectors is his Mean Streets poster, one of which sold at Christie’s in 2006 for $11,400.

Mean Streets seems to have inspired more different designs than any of Scorsese’s films. Below we have two Italian and two Spanish-language posters (one Argentinian, not sure of the provenance of the one on the far right). Then one Czech and two Japanese Raging Bull posters, and three Polish posters: for Taxi Driver, New York, New York and an especially striking, and typically surreal, design for After Hours.