This really is just the weirdest damn thing. It’s not the least bit clear to me why this would be true.

This morning I was reading Terry Tao’s overview of the work of Yves Meyer and ran across this line:

The powers φ, φ², φ³, … of the golden ratio lie unexpectedly close to integers: for instance, φ¹¹ = 199.005… is unusually close to 199.

I’d never heard that before, so I wrote a little code to see just how close golden powers are to integers.

Here’s a plot of the difference between φⁿ and the nearest integer:

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2017/03/22/golden-powers-are-nearly-integers/

Pickpocketing in America was once a proud criminal tradition, rich with drama, celebrated in the culture, singular enough that its practitioners developed a whole lexicon to describe its intricacies. Those days appear to be over. “Pickpocketing is more or less dead in this country,” says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, whose new book Triumph of the City, deals at length with urban crime trends. “I think these skills have been tragically lost. You’ve got to respect the skill of some pickpocket relative to some thug coming up to you with a knife. A knife takes no skill whatsoever. But to lift someone’s wallet without them knowing …”

Marcus Felson, a criminologist at Texas State University who has spent decades studying low-level crime, calls pickpocketing a “lost art.” Last year, a New York City subway detective told the Daily News that the only pickpockets left working the trains anymore were middle-aged or older, and even those are few and far between. “You don’t find young picks anymore,” the cop told the paper. “It’s going to die out.” A transit detective in the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, which operates the Boston area’s bus, commuter rail, and subway system, concurred via e-mail. “Pickpockets are a dying breed,” he wrote. “The only known pickpockets we encounter are older, middle-aged men; however, they are rarely seen on the system anymore.”

The decline of dipping on the rails is extraordinary. Subways were always the happiest hunting grounds for pickpockets, who would work alone or in teams. There were classic skilled canons—organized pickpocket gangs—at the top, targeting wealthier riders, then “bag workers” who went for purses, and “lush workers” who disreputably targeted unconscious drunks. Richard Sinnott, who worked as a New York City transit cop in the 1970s and ‘80s, also admiringly recalls “fob workers,” a subspecies of pickpocket who worked their way through train cars using just their index and middle fingers to extract coins and pieces of paper money—a quarter here, a buck there—from riders’ pockets. “They weren’t greedy, and they never got caught,” says Sinnott. Bit by bit, fob workers could make up to $400 on a single subway trip; then they’d go to Florida in the winter to work the racetracks. Many of the city’s pickpockets trained elsewhere, “and if they were any good, they came to New York,” Sinnot says, with a touch of pride. “In the subways, we had the best there were.” Pickpocketing remained fairly rampant for years. Glenn Cunningham, who was part of an elite NYPD anti-pickpocketing task force in the 1980s and ‘90s (he currently handles security for Robert De Niro’s hotel and film festival), says that pickpocketing in spots like Times Square was “out of control” at that time. “I made tons of arrests with those guys. We were like cowboys.”

That was then. In a 2001 story, the New York Times reported that there were 23,068 reported pickpocketing incidents in the city in 1990, amounting to nearly $10 million in losses. Five years later, the number of reported incidents had fallen by half, and by the turn of the millennium, there were less than 5,000. Today, the NYPD doesn’t even maintain individual numbers on pickpocketing…

https://slate.com/culture/2011/02/the-lost-art-of-pickpocketing-why-has-the-crime-become-so-rare-in-the-united-states.html

Replication and standardization are so hard-wired into our world that we forget how the unstandardized world functioned. A Massachusetts inventor named Thomas Blanchard in 1817 created a lathe that made wooden lasts for shoes. Cobblers still made the shoes, but now the sizes could be systematized. “Prior to that,” says Winchester, “shoes were offered up in barrels, at random. A customer shuffled through the barrel until finding a shoe that fit, more or less comfortably.” Before long, Blanchard’s lathe was making standardized gun stocks at the Springfield Armory and then at its successor, the Harpers Ferry Armory, which began turning out muskets and rifles by the thousands on machines powered by water turbines at the convergence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. “These were the first truly mechanically produced production-line objects made anywhere,” Winchester writes. “They were machine-made in their entirety, ‘lock, stock, and barrel.’” It is perhaps no surprise that the military played from the first, and continues to play, a leading and deadly part in the development of precision-based technologies and methods.

The same methods that enabled mass production of guns led to sewing machines, combine harvesters, and bicycles. By the time of the American Civil War, precision engineers in England had learned to machine metal to a tolerance of a millionth of an inch. High-velocity rifles followed, and precision timepieces. A new century, a few more orders of magnitude, and then automobiles. On one side of the Atlantic, Winchester admires the Silver Ghost of Henry Royce and Charles Rolls, “the nonpareil, the exemplar of all that is right about engineering accomplished to the very highest of standards, and with the highest level of precision.” On the other side, though, Henry Ford was advertising his Model A—“made of few parts, and every part does something”—followed by the Models B, C, F, K, N, and, finally, T, the Tin Lizzie. During the same period that the Rolls-Royce factory turned out almost eight thousand Silver Ghosts, Ford made more than 16 million of his motorcars.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/precision-accuracy-perfectionism/

On William James and the relationship between religion, drugs, and the law:

From a Jamesian perspective, religious toleration represents not just a commitment to individual freedom, not simply a hands-off policy on the part of the government toward questions of ultimate truth, but rather an affirmative decision to shelter certain useful though potentially false beliefs. Drug use, from this perspective, represents a similar sort of decision, but on the level of the individual rather than of the society. Just as a society might choose to nurture or tolerate certain sorts of illusions, pluralistically embracing both atheistic and religious subcultures, so, too, might an individual decide–as did James–to divide his or her life into periods of sober rationality and ecstatic religious intoxication. Drugs can allow even the most skeptical people, those who by constitution or upbringing are not susceptible to religious insights, to experience temporary periods of pleasing falsehood. Indeed, this is the real religious significance of drug use, from the Jamesian point of view–that it lets us choose, if only vaguely and temporarily, what to believe.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/05/the-nitrous-oxide-philosopher/376581/

‘From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.”

‘Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—?’

http://buttersafe.com/2018/10/11/ah-zombies/

There were a few surprises for me in this summary of a March working paper by Larry Bartels:

…we look at the underlying ideological and partisan sentiments of Republican and Democratic voters. Prof. Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University did just that in a revealing working paper titled “Partisanship in the Trump Era,” released last month. In it, Bartels closely examined a November 2017 YouGov survey of 2,000 people, all of whom were originally interviewed in 2015 and 2016 as part of YouGov’s 2016 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project. After putting all three of those survey findings through rigorous regression analyses, a great deal of conventional wisdom about what’s going on in the Republican Party was blown to bits.

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/political-landscape-not-even-close-think/

A sheep, a drum and a snake fall down a cliff…..……….. Ba-dum-tss!

(courtesy of a random respondent to an sms voter-registration notification from TurboVote)

A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”

The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.” The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change.

The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.

Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid 2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.

For instance, the report says that heavy taxes or prices on carbon dioxide emissions — perhaps as high as $27,000 per ton by 2100 — would be required. But such a move would be almost politically impossible in the United States, the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China. Lawmakers around the world, including in China, the European Union and California, have enacted carbon pricing programs.

Source: Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040

In the previous incarnation of [“culture wars”], the prevailing mood was mockery and more boundary expansion. All kinds of artists seemed eager to tick conservatives off, while testing how free freedom of expression really was. A queer independent cinema came out of this era. There seemed to be one erotic thriller a month. Tony Kushner wrote “Angels in America.” Madonna happened, over and over. Andres Serrano put a crucifix in a tank of his own urine, photographed it and called it “Piss Christ.”

The animating crisis of that era was sex — from the paranoia, shame and judgment during the AIDS epidemic to the national cataclysm of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The animating crisis of this era is power: the abuse, sharing and stripping of it. Empowerment. Art might not have the privilege of being art for art’s sake anymore. It has to be art for justice’s sake. Suddenly, but for very different reasons, the kinds of people who used to be subject to censorship are now the purveyors of a not-dissimilar silencing. Something generational has shifted, even among the cool kids and artsy-fartsies. Members of the old anti-censorship brigades now feel they have to censor themselves.

So we wind up with safer art and discourse that provokes and disturbs and shocks less. It gives us culture whose artistic value has been replaced by moral judgment and leaves us with monocriticism. This might indeed be a kind of social justice. But it also robs us of what is messy and tense and chaotic and extrajudicial about art. It validates life while making work and conversations about that work kind of dull.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/03/magazine/morality-social-justice-art-entertainment.html

Incidentally, I hadn’t read the Zadie Smith piece he references, and it’s worth reading:

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/07/getting-in-and-out/