Steve Kass

The Soda Police are getting noisier lately, but their concern for public health is a subterfuge. When it comes down to brass tacks (and I doubt brass’s slight lead content is going to kill you when used judiciously in plumbing, by the way), the S.P. don’t care most about the public health or about overweight kids at risk for diabetes and heart disease. They’re hell-bent on demonizing soda, especially soda made by Big Food and sold by the Big Chain Store and Restaurant Corporation.

Demon or not, it probably won’t hurt Americans to drink less soda on average than we do now. It will definitely help the environment if we drink less of anything that comes in individual single-use containers — even water — if there’s an environmentally friendly alternative already in place.

Here’s a simple two-part proposal to bring back running water.

BBRW Part 1. Require public water fountains everywhere.

Schools, parks, subway stations, airports, shopping centers, offices, stores, and more. We already require a lot of things, sensible and otherwise, so the means is in place. Require enough of them so no one has to wait in line. These water fountains (bubblers in Wisconsin and parts of New England) should have good water pressure, and they should be designed so they can fill up a bottle, too — or there should be some faucets for that. Simply making it possible to fill a personal water bottle in an airport — and yes, you can carry one through security so long as it’s empty — will reduce heart disease.

No flow restrictors, either; use spring-loaded knobs to conserve. (I’m not going to say a word about those infrared hand-wavy travesties.) Restrictors belong in kitchens and showers, if anywhere. It doesn’t need to take ten minutes to deliver half a cup of water. ADA compliant, but otherwise basic and solid. Call me nostalgic, but I like porcelain-coated cast iron.

Room-temperature, pure water is already available from every municipal water system. Only a little effort makes it ubiquitous. (If you’re afraid it will give you cancer, carry your own personal PET-free container full of home-purified water.)

BBRW Part 2. Require water to be available everywhere soda is available, for less.

If a restaurant offers a meal that includes soda, require it to offer the same meal with the same size tap water for less money. Less by at least half the restaurant’s own à la carte price for the included soda. Except during water emergencies, require restaurants to offer tap water when patrons are seated.

Stop the endless debates over soda vs. fruit juice, sugar versus high-fructose corn syrup, artificially-sweetened beverages vs. sugary ones, and aspartame vs. stevia extract. Bring back running water.

While I was initially drawn to this 2008 New York Times article by the phrase “Male and female sand dollars,” I’m certain that “fish mucus split” will be what sticks.

Even today, some things are worth repeating. Fish mucus split.

For your entertainment, a handful of the many hundreds of uncaught — one might say hairy — misspellings of public as pubic in the news over the last few weeks.

“Twenty-five environmental and pubic health groups asked Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday to abandon the state’s new plan for eradicating agricultural pests and explore a less toxic approach, such as crop rotation or planting neighboring crops that deter insects.”
— California’s new pesticide plan sparks protest, Los Angeles Times, June 24, 2011.

“While he intellectualizes with the unbending intensity of an adolescent, his political sense is remarkably subtle. And he is not afraid to advocate positions most adults, even those sharing the same views, would be afraid to support in pubic.”
— 13-Year-Old Serb Activist Contends With Bullies and Death Threats, New York Times,
June 6, 2011.

China introduces pubic tenders to promote shale gas exploration (headline),
Xinhua English News, June 30, 2011.

“Jackson schools superintendent leaving: Jackson Pubic Schools Superintendent Lonnie Edwards talks to the media about his contract ending.” (photo caption) — Contract expired, Edwards exits JPS, Clarion-Ledger, June 29, 2011.

“Beijing’s police do a remarkable job of silencing pubic displays of dissent, but occasionally the desperate find dramatic new ways of airing their grievances.” — Aggrieved Chinese Face Swift Police Repression, Voice of America, July 2, 2011.

“A full 7,000 pages of The Pentagon Papers are now declassified and available for pubic viewing online.”
— Evening News Online, 06.13.11, CBS News, June 13, 2011.

“The 28-year old actress surprised fans by coming out during a pubic service announcement for the Give a Damn gay rights campaign in April 2010 – four-months before she married ‘True Blood’ co-star Stephen Moyer in Malibu.”
— Anna Paquin: No-one [sic] questions my sexuality, Starlounge, June 29, 2011.

“Today’s installment in people being booted off pubic transportation, this one involving saggy pants and the classic line, ‘My pants are up, sir.’”
— Jet Passenger Booted Over Baggy Pants, Newser, June 18, 2011.

“The measure — which appears to be one vote away from passage if it gets to the floor — is not on the immediate agenda but could be discussed after talks on tax cap, New York City rent control and pubic college tuition increases.”
— Key GOP Senators in Same-Sex Marriage Debate Meet Privately, WNYC, June 22, 2011.

“We have got to continue to elevate pubic expectation for public education in Madison County. We’re about to turn things over to the community."
— Business execs seek community involvement in schools, Jackson Sun, June 18, 2011.

“The burly, silver-haired author and historian, wearing a snug suit-coat, called the prosecution’s original case against him ‘massive’ and ‘over-reaching,’ and a direct result of what he called a libelous 2004 report by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that ‘tainted the wells of pubic opinion.’”
— Ex-media mogul Conrad Black ordered back to prison; wife faints, Chicago Sun-Times, June 24, 2011.

“An off-duty police officer who was working out at the facility observed the activity, said Paul McCurtain, pubic information officer for the St. Charles Police Department. Three male victims told police they were approached and inappropriately touched by Lawrence E. Adamcyzk of Rockford inside of the facility while they were either working out or playing basketball.”
— Suspects caught while fleeing from Elgin home charged in burglary, The Courier-News, June 28, 2011.

Feldis, the chief criminal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Anchorage, declined to say what involvement the Pubic Integrity Section might still have.
— Kott, Kohring get new trials, Anchorage Daily News, July 2, 2011.

Mitchel Ghiggia, 22, of 30 West Glen Ave., Port Chester, NY, was arrested Friday for two counts of third-degree assault, two counts of conspiracy to commit third-degree assault and creating a pubic disturbance.
— Arrests: First-Degree Threatening, Second-Degree Burglary, Stamford Patch.com,
July 1, 2011.

Southwest Airlines began nonstop service from Newark to Phoenix this month, just in time for my brother’s retirement party, which I attended last week.

Bob served the City of Campbell (California) for 23 years, and although he did not achieve all of his goals¹, he did leave a considerable legacy. Thanks to Bob, for example, the historic Ainsley House was moved to Campbell (and rotated 90 degrees), and Bob oversaw the development of many parks.

The Campbell City Council’s resolution recognizing Bob’s service is here, and his performance of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance (at another Campbell employee’s retirement party not long ago) is here.

But I digress. You’ve come here for the latest episode of Spirit Spelling Report.

Ironic Misspelling

“Millennium” (as “Millenium”, twice, on page 254)³

Unexpected nonmisspellings

• “apostasy” (as “apostasy”, on page 22)
• “Millennium” (as “Millennium”, in Spirit’s references to Chicago’s Millennium Park except on page 254)

Odd quotes

• “Throw any mammal in the water, and it will doggy paddle.” —Mark Uhen, paleontologist, in an article about whales.
• It goes back to me being a kid, to my sisters and I being given a quarter every Saturday to go to a double feature. —James Patterson, “World’s best-selling author” [emphasis added]

Lest you consider me uniquely picky about Spirit’s typography (which is lately much improved), I draw your attention to a fellow from Incline Village, Nevada, who wrote the editors to bewail their failure to italicize the price of Maryland Crab Cakes in a menu within a story about menus. (The other prices on the menu were italicized.) The editors’ cleverly sneaky response? “Usually we’re better at proofreading than we are at math.” Given the quality of proofreading in past Spirits, well.

Finally, a non-Spirit seat-pocket observation: The Late Spring 2011 SkyMall catalog was disappointingly thin. Economists, take note.

¹ The Campbell Soup Company remains in Camden, New Jersey, for example, despite Bob’s tempting offer to have the city’s water tower repainted Warhol-style.

² Etymology: Latin anniversāri-us returning yearly, < ann-us year + vers-us turned, a turning + –āri-us: see -ary suffix. [Source: The Oxford English Dictionary]

³ Although millenary (synonymous with millennium, from post-classical Latin millenarius) is correctly spelled with -n-, millennium (from classical Latin annus) is correctly spelled with -nn-. The OED notes that these spellings “have frequently been confused.”

My maternal grandfather died in 1973. Thirty-eight years later, which is to say last week, I discovered some of Manny’s property, escheated to the Massachusetts State Treasurer and awaiting claim by him or his heirs.

My grandfather’s unclaimed assets, as well as a long-forgotten bank account of my own, turned up when I searched for him (and me) at MissingMoney.com, a clearinghouse for unclaimed property. All but about a dozen U.S. states list their unclaimed property at Missing Money, and the states that don’t have similar online search pages of their own. (California and New York, for example.)

The money I found won’t make me rich, but it should just about cover a show and a nice meal when my sister visits next month.

And it turns out that “searching for other people’s unclaimed funds” is an amusing distraction.

If Manny were still alive, he would show up at #7 on Wikipedia’s list of verified oldest people in the world. Life is short; make the most of it.

Year after year, thousands of Americans are devastated to discover that their community has been stricken by a disease cluster. Some rare and frightening disease of unknown cause has visited their community like a plague. Residents are afflicted at rates many times the national average.

Despite years of study, billions of dollars, massive lawsuits and at least two Hollywood movies, little progress has been made towards understanding, let alone preventing, disease clusters.

The general public continues to suspect and blame environmental causes, especially chemicals with names that are hard to pronounce. The real reason for most disease clusters is likely something else.

Math.

Yes, math. Look at this map.

This map shows the 2009 rate of aleatorum gravis, an emerging and debilitating disease that currently affects only one American in 5,000. In some communities, however, the disease is rampant. Counties with rates more than five times the national average are shaded in red, and those with more than twice the national rate are shown in the darkest shade of green. [Click on the image or here for the full U.S. map.]

Nebraska.

Clusters of a. gravis are concentrated in the nation’s heartland, especially Nebraska and neighboring states. Why? If you wanted, you could look for and find potential causes alarmingly close to each cluster. A gas pipeline, a chicken farm, a power plant, a landfill. Or you could have a lawyer look for you.

Look as hard as you want, but the fact is that the cause of these disease clusters is mathematics. There is no such thing as a. gravis. The map shows the result of randomly giving each U.S. resident the disease with a 1-in-5,000 chance. (Mathematica notebook and links to population and geographic data files available on request.)

Math, indomitable math, caused these clusters.

Randomness.

Cases of non-communicable disease come in clusters just by chance. So do bags of M&Ms that have more blues than average, but it’s hard to drum up fear about them. Randomness and uniformity are not the same thing.

By chance alone, some counties will end up with higher rates of any randomly-occurring disease than other counties. The Central Limit Theorem proves it. Which counties is anyone’s guess, but because of the Law of Large Numbers (not subject to repeal), small counties are more likely than large ones to end up with unusually high (or low) rates. Sanity check: When was the last time you read about a disease cluster the size of a large city, as opposed to a census tract, county, or neighborhood?

Science.

Do some diseases have non-random environmental causes? Sure. Cholera, to give a famous example. That’s why local and national governmental agencies like the CDC and the National Cancer Institute take reports of disease clusters seriously. But the good scientists there also understand the math, and I trust their advice about public health policy more than what I hear on the local newscast, on Oprah, or from yet another celebrity non-scientist.

Reminder: John Snow was a scientist. (He also drew a map to make his point, which was a darn good idea.)

By the way, you don’t even have to be in a red county to jump on the bandwagon of fear and woo. You can still decide your neighborhood is a disease cluster (when it’s not), get everyone riled up, and make a scary video. Or you can write for a shameful woo-purveying media giant. For free. Specifically, the one behind the recent stench of pseudoscience in the air about disease clusters, and who’s getting no link from here. If the miasma theory of disease were true, scientists would be dropping like flies from what they read.

Pseudoscience and pandering to unjustified fear waste society’s resources and sidetrack scientists from research that might make the world a better and less scary place.

Via Alan Boyle of Cosmic Log: this has to be embarrassing.

You create the first synthetic life form. You thoughtfully encode in its DNA wise words from three giants of literature and science: Joyce, Oppenheimer (quoting Felix Adler), and Feynman.

And you get one of the quotes wrong.

At least you can fix it. Imagine if there had been a typo on the Golden Record. Or if you’d flubbed the first words ever spoken from someone standing on the surface of the moon.

(I remember very well being befuddled when I heard Neil’s flub live – well, give or take a second or so, though this calculation is wrong – and I remained befuddled when I read it the next day, and I was unconvinced by the initial explanation a couple of weeks later.)

[To decode this post’s title, use the DNA decoding table here.]

Earlier today, I virtually ran into the husband of one of my choir buddies. Virtually, like on Twitter.

Adding to the amusement, check out the similarity between his (2007) Twitter profile picture and my (2001) Drew web page (sadly in need of an update, I know) picture:

Briefly, it went like this: I happen to follow Ivan Oransky (of Retraction Watch) on Twitter. Ivan, good scientist that he is, always cites his sources, and his source for this tweet today was David Berreby of bigthink.com, with whose wife I sing in The Dessoff Choirs.

Small world, or big Twitter.

Come hear the wonderful music (Bernstein, Dove, Ives, Walker, Brahms, Jameson, Górecki, Barber, and Conte) Dessoff is preparing for its next concert. Or come to our Gala fundraiser. Or both.

I spent a good chunk of the last 24 hours at one of my favorite hangouts, Language Log. My reason for lingering was to pore over (in good company) some interesting graphs Mark Liberman had put up about the ever-controversial adverb “literally.” [Link: Two Breakfast Experiments™: Literally]

The graphs purported to show, inter alia, “a remarkably lawful relationship between the frequency of a verb and the probability of its being modified by literally, as revealed by counts from the 410-million-word COCA corpus.” [Aside: Visit COCA some time. It’s beautiful, it’s open 24/7, and admission is free.]

Sadly (for the researcher whose graphs Mark posted), there was no linguistic revelation; happily (for me and other mathophiles) the graphs highlighted a very interesting statistical artifact. Good stuff was learned.

Instead of rehashing what you can find in the comment thread at Language Log, what I’ll do here is give a non-linguistic example of this statistical artifact. First, a very few general remarks about statistics.

Much of statistics is about making observations or drawing inferences from selected data. In a nutshell, statistical analysis often goes like this: look at some data (such as the COCA corpus), find something interesting (such as an inverse relationship between two measurements), and draw a conclusion (in this case, a general inference about American English, of which COCA is one of the largest samples available in usable form).

Easy as a, b, c. One, two, three. Do, re, mi.

Sometimes. The mathematical underpinnings of statistics often make it possible, given certain assumptions, to make inferences from selected data with some (measurable) measure of confidence. Unfortunately, it’s easy to focus so hard on measuring the confidence (Yay, p < 0.05! I might get tenure!) that you forget the assumptions or you get careless about how you state an inference or calculation.

When bad statistics happens, there’s often a scary headline, but I can’t think up a good one at the moment and I’ll go straight to the (artifactual) graph.

This graph shows that for not-too-small cities, there’s a modest negative relationship between city size and homicide rate: on average, smaller cities tend to have higher homicide rates.

But the truth is that among not-too-small cities, smaller cities don’t tend to have higher homicide rates than larger ones. Here’s a better graph:

This graph shows almost no relationship between city size and homicide rate.

What’s going on, and what’s wrong with the relationship that shows up (and is real) in the first graph? The titles hold a clue (but don’t count on such clear titles when you see or read about graphs in the news). The first graph only shows cities that had at least 10 homicides in 2009. For that scatterplot, cities were selected for analysis according to a criterion related to the variable under investigation, homicide rate. That’s a no-no.

The 10-homicide cutoff biased the selection of cities used in the analysis. Most very large cities show up simply because they’re large enough to have 10 or more homicides, but the smallest cities that appear are only there because they had high enough homicide rates to reach 10-homicide threshold despite their relatively small populations. For the first graph, I (pretendingly) unwittingly chose all large cities together with only some smaller cities, specifically smaller cities with unusually high homicide rates for their size. Then I “discovered” that smaller cities had higher homicide rates.

Oops. It’s an easy mistake to make, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it happens often. I can easily imagine medical studies that compare the rates of some disease among cities and exclude any city that has “too few” cases of the disease to analyze.

Statistics is a powerful tool. Follow the instructions.