Anecdotes from page 28 and page 126 of Sönke Ahrens' book, "How to Take Smart Notes." (Here).
NASA
NASA tried to figure out how to make a ballpoint pen that works in space. If you have ever tried to use a ballpoint over your head, you have probably realized it is gravity that keeps the ink flowing. After a series of protypes, several test runs, and tons of money invested, NASA developed a fully functioning, gravity-independent pen, which pushes the ink onto the paper by means of compressed nitrogen. According to this study, Russians faced same problem. So they used pencils.
WW2 Bombers
We can make it a habit to sense what is not in the picture, but could be relevant. One of the most famous figures to illustrate this skill was was mathematician Abraham Wald. During World War II, he was asked to help the Royal Air Force find the areas on their planes that were most often hit by bullets, so they could cover them with more armor. But instead of counting the bullet holes on the returned planes, he recommending armoring the plans where none of the planes had taken any hits. Royal Air Force/RAF had forgotten to take into account what was not there to see: All the planes that didn't make it back.
___
NASA story attributed to De Bono, "Simplicity," 1998. Staples now carries inexpensive Uniball "AIR" pressure pens.
Bomber story attributed to Mangel & Samaniego, 1984. Abraham Wald's Work; J Amer Statist Assoc. Here.
Friday, May 24, 2019
Sunday, May 19, 2019
A New Abbey Is Being Built in Orange County
A new Abbey (on an obviously medieval footprint) is being built in Orange County, after St Michael's Abbey raised $120M for new construction in 2018.
https://stmichaelsabbey.com/the-new-abbey/
In other news, north of Los Angeles, a very small "great books" college, Thomas Aquinas College, is doing well and has opened a Massachusetts campus.
https://thomasaquinas.edu/
Also north of Los Angeles, see the Benedictine monastery, St Andrew's Abbey.
https://www.saintandrewsabbey.com/
https://stmichaelsabbey.com/the-new-abbey/
In other news, north of Los Angeles, a very small "great books" college, Thomas Aquinas College, is doing well and has opened a Massachusetts campus.
https://thomasaquinas.edu/
Also north of Los Angeles, see the Benedictine monastery, St Andrew's Abbey.
https://www.saintandrewsabbey.com/
Sunday, May 12, 2019
Documentaries about Very Old People, 2018-2019
In May 2019, we have two new documentaries about very elderly people: Werner Herzog's Meeting Gorbachev, and a new documentary Ask Dr. Ruth / Ruth Westheimer.
But if we roll back a year, there have been several more documentaries about the very elderly.
The most prominent by far was RBG, about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But see also Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, but Wim Wenders, and Wait For Your Laugh, about the remarkable life of actress Rose Marie, performing from age 4 until her 90s.
Links
Meeting Gorbachev here.
Ask Dr Ruth here.
RBG here.
Pope Francis here.
Wait for Your Laugh here.
Lez Miz - The Parody
(mini review) May 12, 2019
We saw an INCREDIBLY funny show yesterday and I am sorry we saw it only on the closing day.
For a month or two, in the Santa Monica Blvd HWD theater row, there was a parody of Les Miz called LES MIZ AND FRIENDS. We knew one of the leads. It was in a 99 seat theater.
Click here:
The motife was that lead characters were gradually replaced by muppet-like puppet versions, but the use of the original Les Miz music, plus very funny parody lyrics, plus breaking the fourth wall, improv, etc, was really funny.
Example. Toward the end a couple of the actors paused and one asked, "Does anybody in the audience know what happens next?" Several call-outs, "Javert commits suicide!" "Javert jumps off the bridge!" The actor double-takes, waves his arms, yells, "IT WAS A YES OR NO QUESTION !!!"
During the second act battle scenes, Epinome takes a love letter from Marius to Cosette, and when she hands it to Jean Valjean it turns into a "who's on first" sketch ("Marius is in love with me? No? Cosette is in love with me? No?" "Just give the letter to Cosette!" "(turns letter upside down)...Marius is in love with Fantime...?")
Another digression was on the weak roles of women relative to the several male leads, and then a comparison to Hamilton which is much more recent but has the same problem. The finale started, and then was paused to point out that the melody and rhythm were almost identical to Battle Hymn of the Republic.
It's a little hard to extract but there's another section where they point out that they have arrested someone thinking he is Valjean, but the lyrics also tell us elsewhere that Valjean's number 24601 is branded on his chest. "They found another guy the same height, same age, and same prisoner number tattooed on this chest?" "How did Victor Hugo explain this?" "He didn't! The branded number occurs only in the musical lyrics and in a different act. It's the biggest unforced error in the history of musical theater!"
It's a little hard to extract but there's another section where they point out that they have arrested someone thinking he is Valjean, but the lyrics also tell us elsewhere that Valjean's number 24601 is branded on his chest. "They found another guy the same height, same age, and same prisoner number tattooed on this chest?" "How did Victor Hugo explain this?" "He didn't! The branded number occurs only in the musical lyrics and in a different act. It's the biggest unforced error in the history of musical theater!"
Or, an outtake, "That's right, folks: Jean Valjean has become mayor of the one town in France where the Chief of Police is Javert, a man who has dedicated his life to finding Jean Valjean. But we digress, because this next scene depends on the mayor and chief of police never having met each other once in the previous five years."
___
The actors were very good as actors, as singers, and also as improve comedians which was a small but important part of the experience. There were two sections where they bring audience members on stage as extras.
It's written and produced by two of the ensemble, Nathan Makaryk and Geneveive Flati. Find some reviews through the links here.
Hear a 30 minute podcast with the creative team at LA Theater Bites online, here.
Hear a 30 minute podcast with the creative team at LA Theater Bites online, here.
Saturday, April 27, 2019
Thurman Arnold: Clarence Darrow Anecdote, Hard Work
Thurman Arnold (1891-1969) had a high profile career as an attorney, deputy attorney general for FDR, Associate Justice of the DC Court of Appeals, author, and founder of the firm Arnold & Porter. (Wiki here).
Memorable Anecdote
In his autobiography Fair Fights & Foul, he relays an anecdote from Clarence Darrow on how to build a successful legal career.
##
Text of Arnold anecdote:
Clarence Darrow, whom I knew and admired, once told me of an
occasion when he was asked to state for a magazine article the
principal cause of his success. He asked the interviewer what the
other successful people whose names were to appear in the article
had thought was the cause of their success. The interviewer in-
formed Darrow that most of them had said that their success was
due. to hard work.
“Put me down for that too,” said Darrow.
He continued, “I was
brought up on a farm. When I was a young man, on a very hot day
I was engaged in distributing and packing down the hay which a
horse-propelled stacker was constantly dumping on top of me. By
noon I was completely exhausted. That afternoon I left the farm,
never to return, and I haven’t done a day of hard work since.”
Darrow’s concept was accurate. I would advise any young man
who has an allergy toward hard work to train himself for the law,
where he can achieve reasonable affluence by writing, talking, and
thinking. Thus he will give the appearance of working hard, for
the hours are long and the law appears to the layman to be abstruse
and difficult. But, as I have observed before, legal learning
is the art of making simple things complicated, which should be an
easy task for anyone. Paradoxically, the great lawyer is frequently
one who can make simple and intelligible matters which lawyers
and judges regard as complex.
##
A 1974 one-man play about Darrow by actor Henry Fonda streams on YouTube, here.
Memorable Anecdote
In his autobiography Fair Fights & Foul, he relays an anecdote from Clarence Darrow on how to build a successful legal career.
- PDF in cloud here.
##
Text of Arnold anecdote:
Clarence Darrow, whom I knew and admired, once told me of an
occasion when he was asked to state for a magazine article the
principal cause of his success. He asked the interviewer what the
other successful people whose names were to appear in the article
had thought was the cause of their success. The interviewer in-
formed Darrow that most of them had said that their success was
due. to hard work.
“Put me down for that too,” said Darrow.
He continued, “I was
brought up on a farm. When I was a young man, on a very hot day
I was engaged in distributing and packing down the hay which a
horse-propelled stacker was constantly dumping on top of me. By
noon I was completely exhausted. That afternoon I left the farm,
never to return, and I haven’t done a day of hard work since.”
Darrow’s concept was accurate. I would advise any young man
who has an allergy toward hard work to train himself for the law,
where he can achieve reasonable affluence by writing, talking, and
thinking. Thus he will give the appearance of working hard, for
the hours are long and the law appears to the layman to be abstruse
and difficult. But, as I have observed before, legal learning
is the art of making simple things complicated, which should be an
easy task for anyone. Paradoxically, the great lawyer is frequently
one who can make simple and intelligible matters which lawyers
and judges regard as complex.
##
A 1974 one-man play about Darrow by actor Henry Fonda streams on YouTube, here.
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
Brecht's Three Penny Opera: A New Film from Germany
Bertolt Brecht was Weimar Germany's version of Orson Welles - a young dynamo. And Kurt Weill was the forerunner of Andrew Lloyd Webber, bringing homage-or-parody of diverse musical styles into the modern musical theater.
See it all brought to life in a new German film, Mackie Messer: Der Dreigroschenfilm (The 3-Penny Film).
How I ran across this...the film hasn't played in the U.S. yet. It had its run in October 2018 in Germany.
I loved the 2018 Netflix series Babylon Berlin, a richly complex drama with intersecting plot lines set in Berlin in 1928. (16 episodes, about 12 hours). I wrote about it in great detail here. One of the significant supporting players is the heir to an industrial fortune, Alfred Nyssen (rhymes with Thyssen?) played by Lars Eidinger.
Lars Eidinger had a small but well-played role in the recent German film, Never Look Away, about German artist Gerhard Richter, set in the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's. (German title, Werke ohne Autor). The director is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who directed the award-winning The Lives of Others (Das Leben des Anderen) in 2006. I had to do some googling to realize that the character (a museum docent) in Never Look Away was the actor I recalled from somewhere - which was Lars Eidinger from Babylon Berlin. This google search turned up the Youtube trailer of a 2018 German film, Mackie Messer: Der Dreigroschenfilm. It stars Lars Eidinger. (Trailer here).
Prior Films
Three Penny Opera was filmed by Pabst in 1931 (and banned by the Nazis in 1933). There was a US version with Raul Julia in 1989 as Mack the Knife (here).
New Film!
This is a stunning German production.
The DVD was released in early April 2019, and I got a copy from Amazon.de. To my surprise it doesn't have any English subtitles, and I variably can follow 50%-80% in German.
It's a big budget, big cast production. It's also a whimsical film. It opens on the afternoon of the premiere of Three Penny Opera, amidst crisis, screaming actors, edgy producers, and a bemused but unrelenting Brecht, as played by Eidinger. Most of the movie takes place in either a fantasy world or in Brecht's imagination, as he consents to a film version and we see him in vignettes of his debates and fights with the film production company.
Eventually, we end up in a courtroom, as did the actual film effort in 1930. Brecht had a mixed court victory - the 1931 version was produced and released, but an angry and dissatisfied Brecht won the right to make his own, improved, idiosyncratic version (which never happened).
Brecht wrote a long essay about this, Der Dreigroschenprozess (The Three Penny Trial).
Basically, the new movie allows us to see an elaborate highlights reel or abridged version of Threepenny, with all of its main songs brought to screen. The acting and production values are excellent.
There's a creative bent, breaking the fourth wall a lot. Brecht will be arguing with his producers in their office, and the camera pans left, and we're suddenly in a Dickensian street scene from the play. At the end, the actors are dancing and singing across modern London rather than Dickensian sets. The film closes with Eidinger, in costume as Brecht-1929, leaving the Theater am Schiffbauerdam into the Berlin of our modern day, surrounded by modern video cameras and reporters, and he sits by the (real) Brecht statue in the Brecht park and gives us his final thoughts on what we've seen.
_
IMDB here.
German: Wikipedia here, film website here.
It actually may have played one night only in NYC, in January 2019 - here.
YouTube trailer here.
For a review of the film in English, by Luisa Rollenhagan by LA Review of Books, January 2019, here.
Closing Thought
Around 1990, I was in Toronto and saw a small local-theater production about the making of Three Penny Opera, the young Brecht, the young Weill banging away composing on a piano, millennials of 1928 trying to bring their play together against the odds.
Threepenny Opera last ran commercially in 2015 in Los Angeles. There was also a 2016 production at USC.
I mentioned that von Donnersmarck directed Eidinger in Never Look Away. That film stars Tom Schilling, who starred in one of my favorite movies, 2014's "Coffee In Berlin."
For an article on Brecht's brief time as a medical student, here.
Maybe (?) English translation of the new 3PO film is absent from the DVD because it would run afoul of prior English translation rights and restrictions for the work.
I mentioned that I had seen Lars Eidinger in Babylon Berlin and in Never Look Away, which led me to triangulate his role in Mackie Messer. Another actor, Hannah Herzsprung, plays the protagonist's brother's wife, Helga Rath, in Babylon Berlin, while in Mackie Messer she plays a double role as Polly (in the visualized drama) and as actress Carola Neher (in real life 1929; lifespan 1900-1942). Carola Neher appeared in multiple Brecht works. Sadly, she was arrested by the Nazis as a Communist in 1936, surviving 6 years in political prisoner camps, dying of typhus in 1942.
See it all brought to life in a new German film, Mackie Messer: Der Dreigroschenfilm (The 3-Penny Film).
How I Ran Across This...
How I ran across this...the film hasn't played in the U.S. yet. It had its run in October 2018 in Germany.
I loved the 2018 Netflix series Babylon Berlin, a richly complex drama with intersecting plot lines set in Berlin in 1928. (16 episodes, about 12 hours). I wrote about it in great detail here. One of the significant supporting players is the heir to an industrial fortune, Alfred Nyssen (rhymes with Thyssen?) played by Lars Eidinger.
Lars Eidinger had a small but well-played role in the recent German film, Never Look Away, about German artist Gerhard Richter, set in the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's. (German title, Werke ohne Autor). The director is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who directed the award-winning The Lives of Others (Das Leben des Anderen) in 2006. I had to do some googling to realize that the character (a museum docent) in Never Look Away was the actor I recalled from somewhere - which was Lars Eidinger from Babylon Berlin. This google search turned up the Youtube trailer of a 2018 German film, Mackie Messer: Der Dreigroschenfilm. It stars Lars Eidinger. (Trailer here).
Ok, So What is the "Mackie Messer" Movie?
Prior Films
Three Penny Opera was filmed by Pabst in 1931 (and banned by the Nazis in 1933). There was a US version with Raul Julia in 1989 as Mack the Knife (here).
New Film!
This is a stunning German production.
The DVD was released in early April 2019, and I got a copy from Amazon.de. To my surprise it doesn't have any English subtitles, and I variably can follow 50%-80% in German.
It's a big budget, big cast production. It's also a whimsical film. It opens on the afternoon of the premiere of Three Penny Opera, amidst crisis, screaming actors, edgy producers, and a bemused but unrelenting Brecht, as played by Eidinger. Most of the movie takes place in either a fantasy world or in Brecht's imagination, as he consents to a film version and we see him in vignettes of his debates and fights with the film production company.
Eventually, we end up in a courtroom, as did the actual film effort in 1930. Brecht had a mixed court victory - the 1931 version was produced and released, but an angry and dissatisfied Brecht won the right to make his own, improved, idiosyncratic version (which never happened).
Brecht wrote a long essay about this, Der Dreigroschenprozess (The Three Penny Trial).
Basically, the new movie allows us to see an elaborate highlights reel or abridged version of Threepenny, with all of its main songs brought to screen. The acting and production values are excellent.
There's a creative bent, breaking the fourth wall a lot. Brecht will be arguing with his producers in their office, and the camera pans left, and we're suddenly in a Dickensian street scene from the play. At the end, the actors are dancing and singing across modern London rather than Dickensian sets. The film closes with Eidinger, in costume as Brecht-1929, leaving the Theater am Schiffbauerdam into the Berlin of our modern day, surrounded by modern video cameras and reporters, and he sits by the (real) Brecht statue in the Brecht park and gives us his final thoughts on what we've seen.
 |
| As Brecht ("How Good is Eidinger as Brecht?") |
 |
| In Babylon Berlin |
 |
| In Never Look Away (Werke ohne Author) |
IMDB here.
German: Wikipedia here, film website here.
It actually may have played one night only in NYC, in January 2019 - here.
YouTube trailer here.
For a review of the film in English, by Luisa Rollenhagan by LA Review of Books, January 2019, here.
Closing Thought
Around 1990, I was in Toronto and saw a small local-theater production about the making of Three Penny Opera, the young Brecht, the young Weill banging away composing on a piano, millennials of 1928 trying to bring their play together against the odds.
Threepenny Opera last ran commercially in 2015 in Los Angeles. There was also a 2016 production at USC.
I mentioned that von Donnersmarck directed Eidinger in Never Look Away. That film stars Tom Schilling, who starred in one of my favorite movies, 2014's "Coffee In Berlin."
For an article on Brecht's brief time as a medical student, here.
Maybe (?) English translation of the new 3PO film is absent from the DVD because it would run afoul of prior English translation rights and restrictions for the work.
I mentioned that I had seen Lars Eidinger in Babylon Berlin and in Never Look Away, which led me to triangulate his role in Mackie Messer. Another actor, Hannah Herzsprung, plays the protagonist's brother's wife, Helga Rath, in Babylon Berlin, while in Mackie Messer she plays a double role as Polly (in the visualized drama) and as actress Carola Neher (in real life 1929; lifespan 1900-1942). Carola Neher appeared in multiple Brecht works. Sadly, she was arrested by the Nazis as a Communist in 1936, surviving 6 years in political prisoner camps, dying of typhus in 1942.
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
Do You Recognize Betteridge's Law of Headlines?
From time to time, journal articles and Op Ed's are titled with a question and a question mark. There's a name for that.
I ran across this topic while reading the genomics blog at CDC, in a July 2017 article by Scott Gross and Dave Dotson. Here. As they discuss an article called, "Cost effectiveness of pharmacogenetic guided treatment: Are we there yet?" (Verbelen et al., 2017, here), they opened by citing Betteridge.
The gist of Betteridge's Law: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word, NO."
For more on Betteridge, see Wikipedia here. Calling this principle Betteridge's Law dates to about 2009. Wikipedia also dates it to Marr in 2004 and earlier examples.
Here's a headline that would invite puzzlement: "Is Betteridge's Law True?"
 |
| From Lancet Oncology today: Op Ed title and question mark |
___
Footnotes.
Not to be confused with (William) Beveridge, a father of the UK NHS.
In Gross and Dotson, they believe that "cost effectiveness of PGx" is too broad a topic, and it's better to ask when and where PGx is cost effective, not "if it is."
There are exceptions. For example, MedPage Today "Are Medical Meetings Skewed Toward Big Pharma Trials?" (Yes!) Here. This headline was highlighted I believe on Twitter by Vijay Prasad at OHSU circa 10/1/2019.
There are exceptions. For example, MedPage Today "Are Medical Meetings Skewed Toward Big Pharma Trials?" (Yes!) Here. This headline was highlighted I believe on Twitter by Vijay Prasad at OHSU circa 10/1/2019.
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