Some people in political office are mind-bogglingly stupid

...and this post isn't about the States! Actually, one thing that really irritates me is all the American-politics-bashing that goes on outside of America. American politics has its share of stupid personalities, but it's not like others don't. It's just that the stage is so much bigger in the States, the whole world gets to learn about it and gets to feel smug.

But I have to think that there are not many American politicians who are stupider than Lilian Helder, member of the Dutch parliament for the xenophobes of the PVV. I mainly like this video because I felt really good knowing that I still remember enough Dutch to get the general gist of what was happening, but take a look:

Mevr. Helder (speaking throughout) is discussing what to do with some kinds of criminals. Two approaches (one prison, one something else) are being compared, and it has been found that this something else approach has led to lower rates of recidivism (repeat offense) than the prison approach. She counters that this is like comparing cows and strawberries, because person A is not person B (she also helpfully adds that neither is person B person A). But, someone counters, the other approach has demonstrated lower rates of reoffense! To which mevr. Helder glibly states that you can't say that someone who went to prison wouldn't reoffend if they instead went to (this other thing) or that someone who went to (this other thing) would reoffend if they went to prison, because these things didn't actually happen! My eternal sympathies go to Sharon Gesthuizen (she also has a really beautiful "r" and a fantastic accent overall!) who asks whether the PVV then disbelieves statistical research in general? And asks in further disbelief whether, if, say, one hospital had heart operations fail 50% of the time, and another 3%, mevr. Helder would claim there is no difference in the quality of the hospitals.  Mevr. Gesthuizen, you are the best. I salute you!

By the way, expect this blog to further quieten its already quiet existence, as I've started a co-blog with a friend of mine. (ratedzed.wordpress.com). We swear a lot more there than I do here, I hope that's okay.

Brilliant Corners III

N: What's this band?
B: Guess.
N: Give me a clue?
B: I have it.
N: Chlamydia?

by the way, the band in question: Yo La Tengo. They are playing this thursday in Seattle, and this saturday in Vancouver. Anyone wanna go?

Sympathy for the Darrell

Ever been predisposed to dislike someone, and then read an article basically all about how the person is a crook, and yet end up somehow finding the person more likeable because of the article? No? I guess it's just me and

This profile of Darrell Issa

...

Okay, so the only point of this post is that I think the title is funny. So what?

Politicians are Surprisingly Good People

I realised don't really understand how political parties work given their reputations and incentives when it comes to getting power. So one thing that is a problem that is often discussed is that it's in the interest of parties out of power to sabotage the country so that the parties in power look bad. This is a problem, but in general it's not so bad because in most forms of government the parties in power are more numerous, and they certainly have greater power to enact their agenda (otherwise being "in power" is pretty meaningless). So, you would think that, even if the out-of-power parties were trying sabotage while the in-power parties were trying to improve the situation, overall it would be improved. And so it's reasonable to judge the in-power parties by their performance.

The additional problem that I don't understand how to resolve is the problem of reputation. Say, in America, the Democrats are associated with taking care of the poor, and the Republicans are associated with tough anti-terrorism measures. So, when people are really scared of terrorism, they are more likely to vote Republican. And when they are really scared of being poor and not taken care of, they are more likely to vote Democrat. Given that, it would be really good for the Republicans if there were more terrorist attacks, and good for the Democrats if more people were poor. Now, obviously, with some lag, there is a resolution. Given a long enough period of time, if it becomes clear that every time the Democrats are in power, there's a depression, and every time the Republicans are in power, there is a terrorist attack, then the reputations of the parties would change. However, that would take a very long time. Economic cycles are slow and terrorist attacks don't come so often that correlations are easy to discern. This isn't limited to the US - it is the case anywhere there are parties that are not based on leaders' personalities, but instead on policies.

Thus it seems to me if a party wanted to be cynically manipulative to stay in power, it should actually try to develop a reputation of caring about something the members don't actually care about and then make sure that's a strong concern for everyone (say, by completely neglecting doing anything about the issue when in power). Happily, this becomes somewhat problematic in a system where the party structure itself is somewhat democratic since party leaders would have to have the opposite desires from other party members, and that is unsustainable. One thing is I've not seen examples of this (except maybe Republicans on the Deficit?), so maybe politicians are not as cynical as everyone makes them out to be - they're not even acting in rational self-interest! They're, all things considered, being pretty altruistic.

The other upshot of thinking about this is that it is actually a good idea to have a grassroots-style primary process. Which is some consolation for the fact that as a result half of all time in American politics is spent campaigning. At least I see the point.

Propeller Hats

Imagine this: every time you wanted to drive or ride in a car, you had to wear a propeller hat. It would of course look silly and what's more, wouldn't be particularly comfortable. Due to a bizarre property of this hat, you couldn't in fact leave it in the car for when you needed it, because it can be stolen by telepathy by anyone walking by. Additionally, it has this feature that if it is raining outside, your head under the hat gets wet, and if it's cold your ears freeze. However, not to worry, you can keep your head dry by wearing a shower cap in addition to the propeller hat. And the ears freezing can be solved by wearing a toque underneath the propeller hat, but, of course, apart from looking incredibly ridiculous, this might make your propeller hat not fit on your head anymore, so you might have to get another one. These propeller hats would cost about a tenth of the price of your car, and if somehow you ended up bumping it, you would need to buy a new one. Not wearing one would seem to be a good solution, except that that will result in being stopped by police, usually followed by a fine.

Outlandish, you say, why would such things exist. But, as you may have guessed, my point is that they already do - except they are called "helmets" and they go with bicycles. I just saw this video (thanks A.A.!) of a talk by Mikael Colville-Andersen on how wearing helmets discourages biking:



Colville-Andersen is very engaging and charismatic. It's true that the talk is a little overwrought and conspiratorial - I think the speaker recognises this as well. But the upshot is, helmet laws make biking sound dangerous, which makes people not bike. To me, it seems rather commonsensical that bike helmets would increase bike safety, so, since I don't have data to the contrary, I'm not going to argue that it's not so (Colville-Andersen, however, does, and does). But just like the Times' "DANGER ZONES" story, it seems to me the increased safety of wearing bike helmets is more than offset by the increased safety hazard of less people biking. Helmets, both in their hazardmongering aspect and just in their inconvenience, means less people biking, means more people driving who are going to hit bicycles with their cars, means less motorists aware of cyclists, means less cycle-friendly infrastructure, which in turns means it's more annoying to bike and even less people do it.  I wouldn't say don't wear a bike helmet - wear one if you want. All I would say is that I seriously doubt mandatory helmet laws improve a city's overall bike safety.

TR: Vesper Peak

So, at 6:45 am Anna Z. and I left Seattle in drizzle, and post stop at the Danish Bakery, were at the Vesper Peak trailhead without incident at about 8:45. Why Vesper? So, let me admit one thing. I would say that I am good at finding my way around cities, even entirely unfamiliar ones. I am reasonably proud of my skills in this regard. However, put me on a mountain and I have all the routefinding skills of a developmentally disabled walrus that was liquored, drugged, and then spun around five times. I didn't mention this in the scramble participation solicitation postification because I was hoping for a response from someone wanting to come. Sadly, no one did, although after giving my number, I did get a voicemail of someone breathing heavily for about a minute (climbing club or not? I'll never know). So, I figured, go to something that was almost all on trail, which the Seattle Times called a hike, which had a TR from this month on the climbing club forum, and which actually has a topo available online. Not even I'd screw this up. Reasonable?

Anyway, we started on the trail shortly before 9 in completely blue sky, crossed the creeks at the beginning without incident (stepping stones were no problem), threaded our way up the meadowy switchbacks to the basin of scree below and ascender's right of Headlee pass. Here one of us (AK) suddenly decided to turn right and head up scree, whereas another one of us (AZ) may have even seen the cairns pointing the correct way (straight), but was unaware that this was their function, since this technology is apparently not used in Quebec. So, anyway, we started climbing the reddish scree pile (which we later realised to be) ascender's right of Headlee Pass. Our progress was slow because the scree was steep, and also because we frequently stopped to weigh the relative merits of two truisms: that time already spent on a mistake should be considered sunk cost, but on the other hand that people are much more likely to secondguess themselves incorrectly than correctly (this dilemma is probably familiar to any of you who have ever made mistakes in your life!) Then we climbed some more scree. Then we crossed a small snow-slope. Then we had some scrambly moves, which were nothing too bad, but a little sketchy considering that at this point we were pretty sure this route wasn't leading to the pass. So, finally, the sunk costs truism won, and we turned around. I had my first ever very short unplanned glissade into rocks (not very fun), we slowly redescended the scree and found the obviously marked trail we somehow initially departed. By this point it was 12:30, we were pretty damn tired, and Anna needed to get back into Seattle by 7 to purchase a textbook. We lunched in a shady spot right under the switchbacks up to Headlee Pass, two gullies ascender's left of where we had wasted all that time. We then decided to continue on at least to the pass.

The pass reached, we still figured we had time, followed a well-cairned trail up to and along a very clear, cold and refreshing stream all the way to where two tents were perched above a very, very icy lake. We began to climb the grippy and friendly talus to our left that led up to Vesper. The snow was slow going, so we stayed on rock. It was very enjoyable scrambling, however, we veered far too much to ascender's right and ended up looking at the edge of Vesper's north slope, which is very steep and featureless and thus scary, and so our scramble was much more exposed than it needed to be (clarification: we didn't actually scramble up the north slope or anything... that'd be crazy! We just were too close to it for comfort). We reached the summit at about 2:40 (after several false hopes). South/Seattle direction had some low clouds but everywhere else was clear and blue and beautiful. We marveled, drank water, played super-rookie name-that-peak (Baker, Pugh, Shuksan, Glacier, hey, I wonder if that's Vancouver Island?), and realised there was actually a much less scrambly path to the top on ascender's extreme left of where we went up.

We began to descend this path, tried our hands (asses?) at glissading, but there weren't enough contiguous snow patches for this to be a reasonable method of descent and so continued on rock. At some point Anna and I ended up on opposite ends of a stream that lost itself under a narrow snowslope. I was actually on the ridge-like thing that goes to where the tents were, and Anna was to descender's left of that. Unfortunately the only obvious way to get to where I was from where Anna was was to climb up a bunch and then climb down a bunch. Fearing that we'd get lost if separated, I instead went towards where she was, very uncomfortably, because the stream made all the rock wet and disgusting.

At this point the mosquitoes redoubled their already impressive attacks. I actually saw five sitting simultaneously on one of my forearms, and thanking my lucky stars that I was not a Jain, attempted to slap them with my face (hands being occupied at holding rock). We continued to descend slowly, now on loose, wet, earth+scree combo on the wrong side of a steep snow slope. By wrong, I mean the one that led into the icy lake rather than to the tents and our descent. Seeing that this could not continue indefinitely we traversed the narrow snow slope, were forced to make several climbing moves that I would put into "not difficult but way too freakin' scary" class, and were back to the good. This, as all scary things do, played out in slow motion, naturally, so by the time we were back at the tents, it was past 5. A short dip in the stream and an hour and a half of descent later, we were back at the trailhead, and the only thing that materially suffered was Anna's ability to buy her textbook. Since I don't need the textbook, I judged this to be a totally worthwhile sacrifice for beautiful views and a fun (mixed type 1 and 2) day.

How to Have a Russian accent - Rule 10

Part of series. Fake Russian accents. Long. You know the drill.

Rule 10. Ё (yo) is your friend. Russians love their letter "Ë" - or "yo". A relatively recent invention, and one that is uniquely Russian. Possibly apocryphally, it was invented when a Russian noblewoman asked a gathering of the Academy of Sciences to spell "ёлка" (which was, of course, not spelled like that at that point) and then asked whether it was right that more than one letter was being used for one sound. Its exclusive Russianness, the eminent sensibility of the shallow orthography argument that led to its creation, and its perceived "underdog" status make the letter well loved (see picture of lower-case ë statue). Of course, Ë is not for everyone. I've heard people argue whether it is a letter at all, and many people are too "cool" or "lazy" to use it in written Russian (or just too traditional: many typewriters didn't contain the letter, and people got used to reading without it). This in turn led to the tradition of transcribing it into the latin alphabet as "e", which is why there are people named "Fedorov", "Semin" etc. in the NHL. But then, its "nonobviousness" to the uninitiated just increases its appeal. Additionally, very few words begin with Ë, but among them is a universally favourite swearword, and the hedgehog, who is somewhat of an underdog Russian hero himself.

All this is by way of preamble to saying Russians enjoy using the letter Ë, but unfortunately English doesn't contain many opporunities to do so. "Yo, is Bjork yearning for your fjord?" pretty much exhausts the words where you could think of using it, and even in most of these cases it wouldn't be completely right. So what's a russophone to do? Why, use it where it doesn't make any sense, obviously. That is, to substitute for /ɝ/ in words like "bird", "burn" or "heard". Whether they follow this with an /r/ largely depends on whether they were first exposed to American English or RP. It'd actually be interesting to hear how russophones who are exposed to Scottish English (which distinguishes the vowel sounds in the three examples I gave) pronounce these words, but I've never met anyone with that kind of accent, so I don't know. So, examples:

mirth /mɝθ/ becomes [mʲo(r)s]

search /sɝt͡ʃ/ becomes [sʲo(r)t͡ɕ]

hurt /hɝt/ becomes [xʲo(r)t]

There are two caveats. One is that this shift doesn't usually happen when there isn't a palatalizable consonant preceding. Thus "earth", "worth" or "urn" are not pronounced with a [Cʲo]. The second is to remember that unstressed vowels are reduced (Rule 4!) and so you don't see things like "Robert" being pronounced ['robʲo(r)t]. As mentioned before, Ë doesn't exist in almost any other Slavic language, so following this rule will help distinguish your fake Russian accent from a generic Eastern-European one. To impress all those fake accent connoisseurs. (I like to imagine such people exist.) Conversely, if you want "general east-europeanness", don't do this (or, actually, a bunch of the other stuff we already talked about).

Bottom line:

In case you haven't clicked the above link about hedgehogs, it links to "Hedgehog in the Fog", which is amazing animation. You should check it out.

Also,

"normal" am. E.: burn /bɝn/

russ. acc. E.: bjo(r)n [bʲo(r)n]