Steve Kass

I’m in New York this weekend to sing Beethoven’s Ninth on Sunday with the Budapest Festival Orchestra under the baton of Iván Fischer. Further details of this breaking story are embargoed until late Sunday afternoon.

In January, 1985, Bob Moody and I visited Dick Slansky at Los Alamos National Laboratory to begin collaborating on what would eventually become a book. Driving back to the Albuquerque airport, we stopped to fill up at a NewMexigas service station. This is what I saw at the cashier’s window.

I lost it. Doubled over laughing, I stumbled back to the car, managed to grunt and point Bob towards the sign (he immediately lost it, too), and, thanks be to god, controlled the convulsions well enough to grab my camera and take a photo. [Click on the thumbnail for a larger uncropped version.]

This being the funniest thing ever, I jumped on the chance to share it later when I started posting stuff on the internet Bitnet. You can see the quote in my signature in this 1989 post to comp.dcom.telecom. (Also available in the TELECOM Digest & Archives.)

I used the quote in my signature off and on for some years, and in 1995, I contributed it to a web collection of funny signs. You can find that contribution here.

Unfortunately, an apparent misquoting of this sign (“We will sell gasoline to anyone in a glass container.”) now appears in many places on the web. The misquoting makes no sense to me as a funny thing, and I’ve seen no photo to back it up.

Here’s for setting the record straight.

Today’s word is manier.
man·i·er / ˈmɛn i ɛr/

adjective 
Comparative form of many. More numerous; more; of greater number: The town’s recent immigrants voted overwhelmingly against the lottery, yet the will of the manier natives prevailed.

Origin:
2010: intentional coinage by Steve Kass (http://www.stevekass.com).

Related form:
maniest: superlative form of many. Most numerous; most; of greatest number.

A recent numerical expedition led me to these summary statistics from a 2009 Pew survey on Religion and Public Life.

Looks like a typo to me. At a glance, the breakdown by age seems inconsistent with the aggregate result.

Most (about 85%) of the survey participants fell into one of the three oldest age groups, all of which favored gay marriage at a lower rate than the general population. The 65+ crowd, numbering 507, favored gay marriage at a rate a full 17 points lower than the rate for all ages combined. Although young’ens favor allowing Adam¹ and me (or Autumn and Eve) to get married legally, and they smile with approval at a rate almost 20 points higher than the rate for all ages combined, there are too few of them (only 283) to balance out the manier² old grumps and middle-aged semigrumps.

I have no reason to suspect the Pew folks of vulpigeration, so I tried to find an honest basis for these apparently contradictory figures.

Pew’s full report on survey question Q146a revealed one potential source of slop: the number under “Favor” seems be the sum of two individually rounded percentages: one for “Favor” and one for “Strongly Favor.” The actual survey instrument included both possible answers. Therefore, 39% could mean anything between 38% and 40%. Survey percentages are routinely rounded, but one expects 39% to mean somewhere between 38.5% and 39.5%.

Even allowing for extra slop, the numbers don’t agree. Here’s a tabulation (using the increased slop allowance) that gives the minimum and maximum numbers of favorers in each age group and (by summing) the minimum and maximum number of favorers among those in any age category.

According to these numbers, between 34.8% and 36.8% of 1,980 respondents would be cool with my marrying Adam legally.

According to Pew’s summary chart (at the top), though, between 38% and 40% of 2,010 responses, or between 764 and 804 people, answered “Favor.” That’s quite a bit higher than the breakdown figures show, and even if the 30 people in no age category (who presumably withheld their age or were under 18) all favored gay marriage, the maximum (and an unlikely maximum, because it would require all the rounding and missing information to be skewed favorably) number of favorers is 759.

As another plausible scenario, I calculated a Total percentage based on the age breakdown but weighted according to the actual histogram of age in the U.S. Still no dice. If anyone has an idea, let me know.

¹ For the record, I’m currently Adamless and available

² manier, adjective. Comparative of many; more numerous. To be coined presently. Many and numerous are synonyms; if things can be more numerous, I see no reason they can’t also be more many, or manier.

A letter to the editor about Daylight Saving Time is today’s most-viewed article in the Panama City (FL) News Herald today, and it deserves more attention than it got over at whatwelookat.com. Letters to the editor routinely begin with their first sentence, but Gene Cabot’s letter begins with its first and longest sentence.

It’s daylight saving time again — called “summer time” in some of the many countries around the world that yearly move their clock hands and pretend that it’s earlier than it really is according to the sun.

Except that we don’t pretend it’s earlier than it really is according to the sun when we move our clocks forward for daylight saving time. We pretend it’s later than it really is. So much for Gene’s viewpoint that we should move daylight saving time to winter. If we had it backwards like he seems to think, it might make sense to move it to winter, but we don’t have it backwards.

Gene goes on to write,

The rationale now for daylight saving time is to save fuel, as people wouldn’t use as much electricity in the mornings because the sun was up.

Except that it’s in the evening, not the morning, that daylight saving time can cut down the amount of electricity used for lighting. With or without daylight saving time, in most parts of the U.S., the sun is up when people start their day, so there’s no effect on morning energy use.

Gene wraps up his confusing argument against a misconception by noting,

… in Miami with a Dec. 21 sunrise of 6:41 a.m. and sunset of 5:15 p.m. — they still had more than 11½ hours of sunlight, plus the twilight hours.

Except that in Miami (or anywhere else on Earth), 5:15 p.m. is only 10 hours and 34 minutes after 6:41 a.m. Unless I missed the news about Miami slipping into the Bermuda Triangle.

In today’s number news (State-by-state cremation rates in U.S.), we learn that “slightly more than a third of all persons who died in 2006 were cremated, according to the Cremation Association of North America.” Happily, the article contained the raw data, but only as an alphabetical-by-state table of numbers.

Here’s an illumination, as MapPoint is my amanuensis. Click to embiggen.

Explanation: Pie areas are proportional to the number of deaths; the yellow slice is cremations, the red non-cremations.

Pies for our nation’s two newest states are not shown. Alaska’s looks like a two-thirds size Vermont pie; Hawai’i’s looks like a one-third size Oregon pie.

I’m happy to headline the first Trying Zeugma prize winner: “Neckwear Ties Presidents to Universities,” in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education.

Neither of the preëminent historians of our age, Google and Bing, document any previous use of the expression “precipice of embarrassment.” I hereby lay claim.

Today’s eLetter from the folks at Fine Cooking began “Baked Pasta 259,200 Ways. We did the math.” As you can imagine, I did the Baked Pasta Recipe Maker math, too. I figure it’s 16,128,000 ways, or about 60 times the number Fine Cooking found when they did the math. Here’s the calculation. The recipe maker walked me through the following steps:

• Choose one or two of four Flavor Bases
• Chose one of three Sauces
• Choose two or three of nine Sauce Enhancers
• Choose one of eight Pastas
• Choose zero, one, or two of five Vegetables
• Choose two or three of six Cheeses

Assuming no choice combinations are forbidden (the recipe maker doesn’t appear to prevent you from adding olives and sherry vinegar to sausage and chicken in pink sauce, for example), you find total number of different ways to make a choice at every step by multiplying together the numbers of choices at each step.

It’s easy to count the number of ways to “choose this many of those Things.” If this many is k, and those Things are n in number, the number of ways to choose k of the n things is “n choose k,” sometimes written as C(n,k). These numbers can all be found in Pascal’s triangle. As it’s shown here, C(n,k) is in the row labeled with the n value, under the column labeled with the k value. Here’s how to use the triangle to find the value of C(9,3):

• To choose one or two of the four Flavor Bases, there are C(4,1) = 4 ways to choose one plus C(4,2) = 6 ways to choose two, for a total of 10 ways to choose this item.
• To choose one of the three Sauces, there are C(3,1) = 3 ways.
• To choose two or three of the nine Sauce Enhancers, there are C(9,2) = 36 ways to choose two plus C(9,3) = 84 ways to choose three, for a total of 120 ways.
• There are C(8,1) = 8 ways to choose a pasta.
• There are C(5,0) + C(5,1) + C(5,2) ways to choose up to two vegetables, or 1 + 5 + 10 = 16 ways.
• There are C(6,2) + C(6,3) to choose the Cheeses, or 15 + 20 = 35 ways

Multiplying these numbers of choices for each step yields 10·3·120·8·16·35 = 16,128,000 ways, about 60 times as many as Fine Cooking found when they did the math. Counting ways isn’t standard recipe math, and I’d like to note that Fine Cooking’s math is generally fine when it comes to ounces, grams, cups, servings, and calories.

The Journal of the National Cancer Institute just published the results of a large study evaluating the survival benefit of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy in the surgical treatment of breast cancer. In some mastectomy patients, breast cancer will reoccur in the remaining breast, and that risk can be reduced (but not eliminated) by removing the non-cancerous breast .

Contralateral prophylactic mastectomy lowers post-mastectomy five-year death rate by 30%

The five-year death rate after mastectomy was 11.5% for women who had both breasts removed. It was 16.3% for those who only had the cancerous breast removed. Adding a contralateral prophylactic mastectomy to the original surgery therefore reduced the five-year death rate from 16.3% to 11.5%. Almost a third fewer mastectomy patients died within 5 years when the had chosen to remove the second (healthy) breast, compared to mastectomy patients who had not chosen to remove the second breast. The bilateral mastectomy decreased the 5-year death rate by 29.4%.

This strikes me as a significant benefit. Suppose I have breast cancer and need a mastectomy. I can choose a single mastectomy and have a one-in-6 chance of dying in five years, or I can choose a double mastectomy and have a one-in-9 chance of dying in five years. One-in-9 sounds quite a bit better to me. If 100,000 women with unilateral cancer need mastectomies, performing 100,000 double mastectomies instead of 100,000 unilateral mastectomies will reduce the number of deaths in the first five years from 16,300 to 11,500. About 4,800 fewer women will die within five years.

Contralateral prophylactic mastectomy benefits only 5% of mastectomy patients.

The reporting of this study takes a very different viewpoint. It compares the survival rate, not the death rate, and notes that the bilateral prophylactic mastectomy increases the survival rate from 83.7% to 88.5%, “a difference of less than 5%.” Five percent sounds like a small number, but 5,000 lives saved sounds like a large number.

Point of view

Both statements (lowers by 30%; benefits only 5%) are the same. Only the intent to communicate is different. Whether prophylactic mastectomy is good practice depends not only on the change in five-year survival rate, and I don’t have more information.. For example, how does a double mastectomy (which for 95,000 of the women will not change the five-year death rate outcome) affect a woman’s well-being and general health over time? What is the cost to save these 5,000 lives, and how will the disparity of death rates change more than five years after surgery?

Good news

There is a good piece of news in the study: The study data identified a subgroup of women for whom double mastectomy had an even greater benefit: women 50 and younger with early stage estrogen receptor negative cancer. Removing the second breast had no benefit for women 60 and older, and the benefit for women in their 50s was uncertain, presumably because of the small number of bilateral mastectomies in the sample.

The journalists writing about this study generally downplayed the benefits. It would have been better for them to downplay the benefits on most of the women, but hype the discovery that there is a subgroup of women who might get a substantial benefit from this procedure. If you read the study, or find better summaries of it, you may find that this study can help patients and doctors make wise treatment choices (contralateral mastectomy sometimes among them). With luck and more studies like this, prophylactic mastectomies might in the future go only to those women whom they might help. With even more luck, we’ll improve our diagnosis and prevention of breast cancer and the number of mastectomies will go down.