… via Calculated Risk: Colbert: Honor Bound.

When I was doing my reading on standards, identity, and highly skewed distributions one of the many places they all come together is around names.  Names powerlaw distributed, and there are some amusing stories of about extreme cases.  For example at one point in England so many males came to be named after the King that they had to introduce last names just to be able to differentiate.

Brad DeLong caught a good story of this kind today.  The remains of Super Typhoon Melor, brought unseasonable rains to Berkeley.  Classic blog posting material.  But then he gets this single comment.

kaleidescope said…

Typhoon Melor. During the Thirties, scores of Soviet citizens named their children Melsor, which stood for Marx, Engels, Stalin, October Revolution. After Khruschev’s 1956 speech to the 20th Party Conference, the Melsors changed their names to Melor.

I love the Internet, Surely some revelation is at hand.

We are talking here about jokes, not humor.  Obviously Pride and Prejudice and much of Shakespeare is hilarious, but the jokes are nonexistent.  Let’s give a joke by example to help clarify, lifted from the that article on the Roman joke book:

a barber, a bald man and an absent-minded professor taking a journey together. They have to camp overnight, so decide to take turns watching the luggage. When it’s the barber’s turn, he gets bored, so amuses himself by shaving the head of the professor. When the professor is woken up for his shift, he feels his head, and says “How stupid is that barber? He’s woken up the bald man instead of me.”

A joke is very brief, even one line; and it’s not really the same as a quip, like say the amusing rye observations that Jane’s father makes in Pride and Prejudice.   A joke is a little stand along machine designed to trap it’s audience into laughing.

But obviously Mankoff’s version must have some grain of truth in it, since watching the video it’s clear that he has deep familiarity with the history and theory of humor.  I can accept that the discovery of an ancient joke book is in fact an extremely exceptional event.  Which I find entirely bizzare.   If asked to guess I’d have presumed that joke books would be close on the heels of pornography as one of the first things an entrepreneurial book printer would print up for his customers.  And, I gather, that many great Universities have significant collections of dusty books of porn; so why no similar collections of jokes?

That says something,  I’m just not sure what.  Joking seems to fundamentally human that I can’t help but presume that some serious social controls censored the behavior so it was extremely exceptional for the behavior to get up enough steam that joke books survived.  Maybe something about the state of the art in joking, which is largely consistent with Mankoff’s model.  Maybe something about the nature of self censorship, e.g. maybe joking was treated as more sinful than pornography and or the demand for porn displaces the limited time for making possibly sinful books for resale.  Maybe it says something about archivists.  Maybe all these and others?

All this reminds me of another example of human activity unknown until modern times, i.e. political demonstrations.  For which similar questions could presumably be asked.  I joke that it’s my right as an American to complain, and apparently it is in fact a very modern right.  Maybe the right to joke is similarly modern.   There are days when I think modern human culture really is entirely different from what passed prior to say 1750.

Are all these modern activities fundamentally out of scope, i.e. sufficiently suspect as to be worth vigorous suppression, for a true conservative?

Meanwhile I gather that boffins think that a 10% rise in fuels prices drops the highway deaths by 1%; or in other terms that 4$ gas will reduce highway deaths by a thousand a month.

Oh boy.  Arithmetic:  12 months a year; 1,000 deaths a month; $6.9 Million/person … or $82.8 Billion a year.  That’s just the deaths of course, no doubt the injuries, loss of capital equipment and other costs mean we can multiply that by a another 3.  With around a 100 million households in the US, and 365 days in the year that’s $6.81 per household per day.  Feel free to spend the savings on gas.

On the other hand some people think these numbers are just numerology.

The woman spoke of global warming to her companions: a friend and a husband. She mentioned that she thought such storms were becoming more common. She mentioned hurricanes. His counter point was that we don’t know much about hurricanes, maybe a few decades. No doubt this was only idle conversation; but I quietly leaned across my table and whispered to my wife. “This is important. Somebody is wrong on the Internet!”

I’ve been haunted by this conversation. He’s wrong. She’s right.

Finally the ghost of the stairwell was sufficiently frustrated to manifest himself, at least in virtual form. Fresh off the presses “Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate” – From the Brochure: “More frequent and intense heavy downpours and higher proportion of total rainfall in heavy precipitation events.” – “Very Likely.” From volume 3, chapter 2 of the final report: “Paleotempestology is an emerging field of science that attempts to reconstruct past tropical cyclone activity using geological proxy evidence and historical documents.”

Ah, if only. I could have leaned over and said “Paleotempestology!” Well, as we like to say around my house “Oh, tell it to the blog!”

Via …chartserver.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr…utube.com/watch?v=oH…0

The term “controversy” amuses me. It seems like it’s a holdout from the pre-internet era when there might actually have been something that no one felt strongly about.  – Floppy, Hoppy Bunnies

• Safe – As in “What could possibly go wrong?”
• Scalable – As in, “How do you plan to make that approach scale?”
• Social – “Shouldn’t the account management include a social network?”
• Socialize – As in “But first, let’s socialize this idea in the organization.”
• Semantic
• Sustainable – “I don’t understand your business model.”
• Simple
• Standard

I needed to post this so I stop seeking more S words to add to the list.