(no subject)
First, a summary of a comical statistical analysis out of the office:
Ray: Yankees fans are so mean! I can't believe they had to bring out the riot police!
Jack: Actually, I figure they aren't necessarily any worse. You just have to figure there are 55,000 fans at the game instead of 35,000, so you're naturally going to bring in a greater absolute number of the maximally obnoxious fans who lie on the tail end of the demeanor distribution. Even though they're not a greater percentage of the population, they are the only ones who stand out, so it just seems like yankee fans are worse.
Gordon: Ahh, but you're drawing your sample from a larger aggregate population, so the relative sample size is smaller and exactly the opposite could be quite true. And the larger population should be more normalized, anyway.
Jack: Good point. Additional testing is probably necessary.
--
Neal Stephenson's Slashdot interview is up, in case you didn't see it. He talks, among other things, about literary criticism and about the three occasions on which he dueled William Gibson, as excerpted below. God that man is a genius.
In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?
Neal:
You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.
The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle...
Ray: Yankees fans are so mean! I can't believe they had to bring out the riot police!
Jack: Actually, I figure they aren't necessarily any worse. You just have to figure there are 55,000 fans at the game instead of 35,000, so you're naturally going to bring in a greater absolute number of the maximally obnoxious fans who lie on the tail end of the demeanor distribution. Even though they're not a greater percentage of the population, they are the only ones who stand out, so it just seems like yankee fans are worse.
Gordon: Ahh, but you're drawing your sample from a larger aggregate population, so the relative sample size is smaller and exactly the opposite could be quite true. And the larger population should be more normalized, anyway.
Jack: Good point. Additional testing is probably necessary.
--
Neal Stephenson's Slashdot interview is up, in case you didn't see it. He talks, among other things, about literary criticism and about the three occasions on which he dueled William Gibson, as excerpted below. God that man is a genius.
In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?
Neal:
You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.
The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle...