Models Again Models Again "Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models." --- G.E.P. Box recently quoted by Dick DeVeaux in his talk "Math is music, Statistics is literature"
Moral? It is both cheaper and safer for artists to work from photos! As for statisticians, well --- there are several things one could say.
"Whatever" --- Bart's Canonical Non Sequitur Bathos is from the Greek βάθος, meaning depth. As used in English it originally referred to a particular type of bad poetry, but it is now used more broadly to cover any ridiculous artwork or performance. More strictly speaking, bathos is unintended humor caused by an incongruous combination of high and low. (More? see the source:VW)
Care for another cool word? Try corvids, the bird group which includes crows, rooks, magpies. Following this up, I learned to my surprise that blue jays are also of the corvidae group.
Less Rounded More Fulfilling Charles McGrath finds in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies...
"...a reminder that, E. M. Forster's famous pronouncement notwithstanding, ''flat'' characters are sometimes much more entertaining than round ones. "
Training for Life "Anyone who has been to an English public school will feel comparatively at home in prison." --- Evelyn Waugh Decline and Fall (1928)
A Winstonian Variation"If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions." --- Sir Winston Churchill (incomplete wiki source)
Not Gladwell At All When is a book begun? When you reach the "typing point." -- JMS
A Strachey Twist "The Crimean War brought many new experiences, and most of them were pleasant ones."
--from Lytton Strachey's cheeky 1921 biography Queen Elizabeth (p. 200).
Biographers vs Novelists?According to Peter Ackroyd, "The only difference is that the biographer can make things up, but a novelist is compelled to tell the truth."
I also like a zinger from Ackroyd's review of Gravity's Rainbow:: "... words would fail me if logorrhea were not so catching."
For more, see Emily Mann's interview with Ackroyd in the Guardian Review.
"Knock, Knock, Who's There?"This staple of school yard humor debuted in Macbeth, or at least that is the inference one draws from the notable list at pathguy of words and phrases coined by Shakespeare.
In Macbeth one also finds the phrase "in one fell swoop" which Larry Shepp morphs to "in one swell foop."
Unconventional by Design"Great art has dreadful manners." --- Simon Schama
Logical Frissance Dostoyevsky is said to have remarked, “Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence.”
What an erie sentence; it makes my brain rattle against the sides of the box.
Lonesome Dove"People need to believe that cowboys are simple, strong and free, and not twisted, fascistic and dumb, as many cowboys I've known have been.'' --- Larry McMurtry
No Guru Kudos for Drucker, Thanks. “I have been saying for many years that we are using the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too long to fit into a headline. " --- Peter Drucker, eschewing the title of management guru. The venerable Wikipedia has this and many other Drucker quotes.
A Farrago?According to an on-line dictionary, an assortment or a medley; a conglomeration.
William Safire once spoke of some sore losers and "their special farrago of resentments."
I never noticed this word until today, when I hit upon it twice in unrelated contexts.
P. G. Woodhouse on Wages of Labor"It's odd how soon one comes to look on every minute as wasted that is given to earning one's salary."
Advice from Boone's Pappy My dad once said to me, “Son, a fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan.” --- T. Boone Pickens to the NYTs 8/3/09
I have commented elsewhere on the art of fatherly advice.
Incidentally, all chess players know Kotov's command:"Play with a plan!" They also know that this is easier to say than to do.
An Extinct Idea? "Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart." --- From Ernst Jünger's preface to the 1929 English edition of Storm of Steel.
A "Secretion of Time" Michel Foucault used the term "a secretion of time" to denote "a small thing that condenses 'the spirit and malaise of an epoch.'"
A notion that reemerged recently via the Siné Affair, a typically French tempest in a teapot.
Favorite examples? the WIN or "Whip Inflation Now" buttons of Gerald Ford, Carter's attack rabbit, Monica's black dress, and, of course, GWB's landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.
Things Change"In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state." ---Charles de Montesquieu
Delusions Past "If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone, 'America died from a delusion that she has moral leadership." --- Will Rogers, speaking in the 1930s. Now, after eight years of retreat from the moral high ground, the delusion is more remote --- but just as dangerous.
Was It Groucho or Shaw?"When someone suggested that Shaw ought to have offspring with Isadora Duncan, he is said to have replied:'It might have my body and her brains.'" --- Jaques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to Present (p. 694).
A more familiar version of this quote has Groucho Marx responding to a suggestion of Marilyn Monroe: "Yea, but what if it had my looks and your brains?"
For more morphed quotes, see the page Evolutionary Variations on Quotes or the related Meta-Quotes page
Edentulous Regulations Well, those would be regulations without teeth. No quote this time; I just wanted a place to use this cool word.
Incidentally, I recently lost old No. 30, one of the six-year molars. This was the first of my adult teeth to go, so the adjective "tendentious" now has new meaning for me.
"When somebody hears the G550 they ordered won't be delivered until the first quarter of 2013, they rattle their briefcase full of cash and don't understand why they have to wait." --- Robert Baugniet, spokesman for Gulfstream, explaining how new buyers from emerging markets are sometimes unaccustomed to waiting.
It's a funny story, but let's see if Baugniet keeps his job. Jet customers hate it when you insinuated that they are bumpkins.
“Offshore drilling is a mouse; the Everglades is an elephant.” --- Mr. Guest of Earthjustice on the occasion of the acquisition of land from US Sugar by the State of Florida.
"Italians come to ruin most generally in three ways: women, gambling, and farming. My family chose the slowest one." -- Pope John XXIII
"FCC indecency rules have to do, essentially, with sex, poo-poo and pee-pee." --- Bob Thompson, Syracuse University (Professor of Popular Culture).
"...the border town of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, just across the bridge from Eagle Pass, Texas, has the distinction of being the place where nachos were invented. The story of their creation is the Rashomon of Mexican cuisine: Everyone has a different version." --- David Lida introducing one of his articles on Mexico.
"There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican." — Raymond Chandler in a classic Noir introduction.
"Our top accountant is famous for his loyalty to the firm. He hasn't taken a vacation in years."
Oops. If there is ever a reliable "tell" in business this is it. Such an loyal employee needs to be "honored" with a nice (domestic) vacation ASAP while you call in the consulting forensic accountants.
"Guilt is terrible. It leads people to irrationality and terror. The political and social forces behind the movement to combat global warming and turn energy green are, to me, a form of paganistic spiritualism displacing conventional religions." --- Ken Fisher Forbes (6/23/2008)
Allegedly there is a famous Chinese saying: "All religions are fingers on one hand, but Buddhism is the palm." --- Personally, I think there is something to this palmistry connection.
"France consumes only half as much oil per capita as America, yet the last time I looked, Paris wasn’t a howling wasteland."
I wanted someone to make this point for me, though it is with reluctance that I quote Paul Krugman (NY Times, 5/12/08).
“It appears that surgeons are more satisfied than patients after total knee replacement.” --- Dr. Pieter H.J. Bullens, surgeon with a sense of humor.
"If real petroleum geologists are sure of anything, it is of the biological origins of the overwhelming majority of all exploitable accumulations of hydrocarbon fuels." --- Daniel K. Simon.
I did think there was more room for controversy here, or even possibly that the pendulum had swung to favor the theory of abiologic origin. Puzzle for the plant theory guys: How did methane become so common in the cosmos? Simon's statement is very carefully made, but it may not even cover the Ghawar field which has been pretty exploitable. Also, most oil shale is conceded to be abiologic, and it is getting more "exploitable" every day.
"I’ve been too early on a lot of things, but now I have enough money to be as early as I want.” --- T. Boone Pickens, in a Fortune Interview 5/30/08, when asked if his move into wind energy might be ahead of the curve.
J. Paul Getty once said his success was based on “rising early, working late, and striking oil” --- from the Web page of Cholla Petroleum , for whom I wish the best of luck with the NW 1/4 of Section 163 Block 1 (H &GN RR Survey) of Dickens County, Texas.
"Ethanol is a scam!" --- Jeff Mackie, ranting on CNBC.com Fast Trade (5/20/2008).
There it is: The truth in four words. If you need two more words add: Farm Lobby.
"Moral indignation is envy with a halo." --- H.G. Wells (Recently quoted in Forbes)
"Too few have the courage of my convictions." --- Robert M. Hutchins. Not a bad quip for a college president.
"As Yogi Berra said, 'Even Napoleon had his Watergate.' " --- The real author of this "Yogi Quote" seems to be unknown, though Danny Ozark ---another baseball guy --- may be in line for some credit.
"I'm reasonably happy, but the money's not the point. It's an indication that I've succeeded in the grand adventure of understanding reality." ---George Soros in response to an interviewer's question.
"Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days." --- spoken by W. C. Fields (nee William Claude Dukenfield) in the movie My Little Chickadee (1940). Incidentally, The venerable Wiki has a marvelous inventory of WCF's lines.
"Academia doesn't get too interested in us --- we're too simple. What would the professors do? A great many of the formulas [they use to analyze securities and markets] are dead wrong." --- from the May 2008 BRK Annual meeting of stockholders (as reported).
"The last time I took advice, it only worked because I changed it." --- Anonymous, but let's just say it was from Yogi Bera, OK?
"Hey, honesty may not be the best policy, but it’s worth trying every once in a while, as my old chief, Richard Nixon, once said. He had a much better sense of humor than is usually believed." ---- Ben Stein (NY Times 3/30/08), original given within parentheses.
"The argument could be made the market in general does not understand the real nature of risk. In a market that was truly efficient, predictability would sell at a premium and stocks of companies whose future was difficult to forecast would sell at a price that reflected risk inherent in that uncertainly. In this world, if Coke's PE was 24, Cisco's PE would be around 3½." --- exact source TBA
"Where historians go wrong, the professional academic historians, is that they leave the best stories literally in the footnotes as if they are too frivolous to tell in the actual body of a text." --- Erick Larson, best selling non-fiction author of Thunderstruck and The Devil and the White City. (see an interview with EL)
“Those who travel the high road in Washington need not fear heavy traffic.” ---Former Senator Alan Simpson, quoted by Warren Buffett in his 2007 Letter to Shareholders. (3/2008)
"Wishful thinking can dominate much of the work of a profession for a decade, but not indefinitely."
--- Robert Shiller in "From Efficient Market Theory to Behavioral Finance" (Cowles Commission Report, 2002)
“The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” --- Emperor Hirohito on the occasion of the surrender of Japan to Allied Forces in 1945 (recently quoted by Paul Krugman in the NYTs; Krugman aimed to tar Bernanke's view of the subprime crisis with a similar brush.)
"Dr. Levy thinks he understands why these prevention strategies are given such short shrift. Prevention, he says, “does not have a face.” There are no personal stories, no individuals who can be pointed to as the success of prevention. It is just statistics." --- Gina Kolata, NYTs, 4/8/07.
Candidate Edwards understands this "face" issue very well, and he certainly has no need for statistics. With such finely honed emotional senses, why should he risk confusing himself with mere data.
"Guillaume François Antoine de Lhospital, Marquis de Sainte-Mesme (1651–1704) published (anonymously) in 1691 the world’s first textbook on calculus, based on John Bernoulli’s lecture notes. He seems to have written his name as above, but it is more familiar as L’Hospital (old French spelling) or L’Hôpital (modern French); I prefer the latter, since it stops students from pronouncing the s (which Larousse’s dictionary says is not to be pronounced)." --- Ralph Boas 1 writing in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1986,
"Today, investors are loathe to recall that the real total returns on stocks were negative for most 10-year spans during the two decades from 1963 to 1983 or that the excess return of stocks relative to long bonds was negative as recently as the 10 years ended August 1993. " --- Robert D. Arnott and Peter L. Bernstein "What Risk Premium Is 'Normal?" (AIMR, 2002, p. 84)
All true, but perhaps not entirely fair. The ten year bull market in bonds ending in 1993 may have been at least as much of a one-time wonder as the l803-2002 golden age of equities discussed by Arnott and Bernstein.
"It's pretty hard to see how margins can expand in an environment that produces a 2.5% increase in gross domestic product," --- Arnie Schneider, manager of Schneider Small-Cap Value.
Schneider is tied with three others with the best winning streak against the SP500, and he sees little hope for small caps to out perform big caps over the next year. (11/07)
His statement also suggests a testable principle. Take years where the ex-ante consensus forecasted growth rate was below historical median. How often did the small caps out perform? My guess is that Mr. Schneider has history on his side.
You may not be a believer in history lessons, but when the VIX is high and the CBOE Put/Call ratio is high, small cap value has historically been, shall we say, an unhappy holding. If you are a style box kind of person and you are not heading for the hills, then you might head for large cap growth.
2.5% Not Bad; I'd take it (12/20/2007); Looks like 0% or maybe less (5/22/2008).
"One characteristic of a rational forecast is that it should be less variable than the object being forecasted." ---Kevin J. Lansing writing in the FRBSF Letter (10/26/07)
Lansing reprises Shiller's argument that the stock market is "too volatile" when compared to the rational model that says current stock price is a forecast of the present value of the future returns.
The “finite pool of worry” bias. For example, if your car won't start, then Global Warming is not high on your list of concerns.
The “single-action" bias. This kind of error is well known to chess players. When you have identified one good reason for your opponents move, you tend not to look for other reasons for the move. A more serious case concerns radiologists who tended to stop looking for tumors after finding one --- thus leaving others undetected.
Well, you get the (admittedly geekie) idea.
Early in Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, Rene Thom asserts ---
"The use of the term 'qualitative' in science, and above all in physics, has a pejorative ring. It was a physicist who reminded me, not without vehemence, of Rutherford's dictum 'qualitative is nothing but poor quantitative.' "
What a bunch of quarrelling preschoolers!
Is there anyone on the planet who honestly does not understand that there can be qualitative insights and quantitative insights --- the worth of which can go either way?
"If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see the proof of elves. "--- Ariex (via Terrence Tao's quote page)
Another that I like comes via Tao:
"There are two rules for success: (1) Never tell everything you know..." --- Roger Lincoln
Next, when you are describing
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don't state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things
With a sort of mental squint.---Lewis Carroll
It is a delight to find a bad paper on a good topic. The bibliography is done, the issue is well posed, and the strawman sits there almost expecting to be poked with a stick.
---- Hey, I'll take credit for this. You can't legitimately quote yourself, so I left off the inverted commas. Incidentally, if you're a student looking for more research "advice" (a dangerous notion) you may want to see my related rant.
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us." --- Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18094428/
OOPS...and see next quote
A man always has two reasons for the things he does --- a good one and the real one. --- J. Pierpont Morgan
Quoted by Ron Chernow in The House of Morgan, p. 114, after telling about "closed door" peccadillo's of Charles Schwab, the Schwab that served as the first CEO of U.S. Steel --- not the discount broker.
"Yvonne poured herself a drink and melted into the chair across from Callie. She brushed a strand of moltenly hair from her eyes and proceeded to carve the ham. Callie watched intently. Juice streamed from the ham in rivulets like saliva drooling from the fierce jaws of a wild dingo poised over the dead carcass of its prey in the dingo-eat-dingo world." ---- from Atlanta Nights by Travis Tea.
If you like language and warm to schadenfreude, you'll have belly laughs as you read this book out loud to your friends.
In a nutshell --- It is bad by design.
The world is full of bad books written by amateurs. But why settle for the merely regrettable? Atlanta Nights is a bad book written by experts. --- T. Nielsen Hayden
"Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else." --- Bill Joy
"... bottled water is a good idea when traveling overseas, but it's a $22 billion scam in the US. It costs anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 times the cost of tap water. Unlike tap water, there is virtually no enforcement of health and cleanliness standards, nor is there fluoride to prevent tooth decay. The healthiest bottled waters are bottled from tap. And the bottles themselves pose an environmental disaster. Here's a 30 second clip from the episode for you to consider (click on the Watch Video Preview box). " --- David Cowan
The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill was a matter of luck. Still, it led to the California gold rush --- an evanescent event with lasting effects --- substantially, the creation of the city of San Francisco and the State of California.
The Black-Scholes Formula was also substantially a matter of luck. Also, in a way, it was just as evanescent as the California gold rush.
Its concrete use has now almost vanished, except through the vestigial (and inverted) notion of implied volatility. Still, from the formula's tailings new mines of derivative securities have developed that were unimagined during the days when the formula was to be believed.
Related Items: Statements of General Suttter on the circumstances of the discovery of gold at his lumber mill and the immediate consequences.
"Foreigners are often amused that the Dutch have one word, schoon, for both clean and beautiful." --- Anthony Baily, Vermeer: A View of Delft (p. 69)
What a sympathetic notion for mathematicians, for whom clean, clear proofs (and facts) are invariably the most beautiful.
"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people." --- Justice William Orville Douglas
"Inverse vandalism noun.
Creating something for no other reason than the sheer fact that you can create it. Most Web pages are acts of inverse vandalism."
I love this new concept, as recorded in near real-time by that wonderful site, Word Spy.
"An attorney who treats a client like a hypothesis would be disbarred; a Ph.D. who advocates a hypothesis like a client would be ignored."
--- Lee Epstein and Gary King (Chicago Law Review, 2002)
Life is pretty random, but not purely random --- not 50-50.
Your job every day is to sort out the 51s from the 49s, or at least the 60s from the 40s, and never ever should you forget that a 95 is not a 100.
No quotes --- I'll suffer the blame.
"In all of recorded history there has not been one economist who had to worry about where his next meal was coming from." ---- Peter F. Drucker
"I'm amazed. Some people take better care of their cars than their bodies. It's weird." --- Cardiologist Charles Karaian
For me this is a telling quotation. Statisticians are often asked to do what simply cannot be done.
It is all too human to offer false hope: "Oh, sure, we can do something here."
It takes a lifetime to learn to say, "Sorry, Friend, this is not possible. You ask too much of our modest tools."
"Statistical analysis is only as good as the numbers that you run," said Ben Witherington III, Professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky.
Replace "as good as" with "at most as good as" and it's ready to serve, but hey, why do I quote a theologian on statistical inference?
Keep your eyes on Statistical Science (or the Annals of Applied Statistics) ...and keep your fingers crossed that this is the only place you'll see Theologians quoted on statistical inference.
Note for San Francisco Old Timers: Do you hear an echo of a Herb Caen society quip? (or for movie fans, the voice of Danny DeVitio as journalist Sid Hudgens in LA Confidential)
"Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." -----Richard Feynman
"Any science that calls itself a science is not a science. Consider Chemistry, Physics and Medicine compared to --- say --- Political Science or Computer Science." ---- a quip from well-known computer scientist Jon Bentley. (Incidentally, this quote had a role in the naming of the IMS journal Statistical Science.)
"Remember that nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all." — Arthur Balfour.
From a man who helped to shape the history of the Middle East, we might have wished for more. Still, it was his story, and he stuck to it.
"I would rather fail in a cause that will ultimately triumph than to triumph in a cause that will ultimately fail." — Woodrow Wilson
Wilson's quote has more style, but I can't argue that he actually delivered a higher level of statecraft.
"Americans are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be alcoholic, a dope fiend or a wife-beater, but if a man doesn't drive a car, everybody thinks that something is wrong with him.''
---- Art Buchwald, March 1996, via Jonathan Borwein.
As a member of Philly Car Share, I heartily endorse PCS's urban-wise program. It is economical, ecological, and a dominant strategy to car ownership in Philadelphia.
Making Parking Pay: "Ratio of Los Angeles city revenue from parking meter-related fines to parking meter coins collected: 10 to 1." --- Michael Schrage, LA Times
In the category of Best Abstract for a Paper in Economics: The prize goes to this baby.
Next, everyone's favorite, the mesmerized economists. They provide hours of innocent fun, well worth the minute they may take to download. Don't forget to explore the picture with your mouse. The economist are cutest when watching the index go South!
David MacKay's feature-by-feature comparison of his recent book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms with J.K. Rolling's less recent Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
"There's no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting." --- David Letterman
"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals." --- Winston Churchill
"Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced." --- Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."--- Oscar Wilde
"I don't make jokes. I just watch the Government and report the facts." Will Rogers
"Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance." --- Sam Brown
To keep this page as fresh as possible, it is often restructured --- say by morphing a group of quotes into a rant.
Among the rants that have been formed this way, I warmly recommend:
- "Market Quotes" --- Quotes that Poke Financial Markets
- The theory of meta-quotes,
- On language (and languages),
- Thinking, Understanding, and Computing
- More Quotes
- Leadership and Decision Making (essay frame)
- The Full List of Rants
Let me know if you fail to find an item that you need, or if you find a link that is broken.
Nothing Goes Past a Dancing Elephant. You can quote me on that.
