Thursday, August 16, 2007
Globular pseuds
Having just been to see Othello am able to play the pseud for once. The usually entertaining back page of the TLS (where a light column has replaced the traditional light review of a light book), entirely wrongly claims that Othello kills Emelia.
Sparked on today's DT which had some disparaging remark about complicated statistics - with the clear inference that whoever put them together made them complicated because he or she was lazy or incompetant or both. Which does not help to promote understanding that it is difficult to render a complex world into neat statistics. I am reminded of my days in population statistics. You might think that the population of Britain was a simple enough idea. But then you have to think about what Britain do you mean. What about Northen Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands? What about the Scilly Isles and Gibralter? And after that you can start thinking about which people to include. People who live in Britain or people who happen to be here at some date or other? We probably only have a very vague idea of the number of tourists in the country at any one time. In the future one might ponder about whether to include people who have been frozen and in the meantime you can ponder about whether you want non-civilians, like US airmen, who might be living here for years - and who make quite a differance in the areas in which they are concentrated? This last making a differance once you start asking for areas smaller than Britain. What then about the inmates of hospitals and asylums? Do they count where they are inmated or where they usually live? All of these things can be dealt with and covered by footnotes in proper publications - but getting a straightforward figure to use in a newspaper article may not be straightforward . It all depends what one is using the figure for. And it all gets a lot more difficult when you start talking about something really tricky like crime. To the extent that I do not suppose anyone has much idea about whether certains kinds - maybe quite a lot of kinds of - of crime are rising or falling.
Calmed down by a further ration of calves liver for tea. BH has certainly got this one down to a fine art now.
Which, together with the coverage of the pectorals of the president of the workers republic, prompted me to speculate about the nature of the regimes which prompted such republics in the first place - and came up with the conceit which follows.
We suppose we have a country called Megaisle. Megaisle is inhabited by two guilds, the Plumbers' Guild and the Bankers' Guild. The people in the two guilds do not have all that much in common, or to do with each other, but they do occupy the same space (up to a point anyway) and there is a currency union - the central bank for which is operated by the Bankers' Guild. The general idea is that the people in the Plumbers' Guild produce all the goods and services which people at large need to consume. Beer, books, bacon, beans, badger grooming and all that sort of thing. People in the Bankers' Guild, by contrast, only produce money. They rush around a great deal and burn up a good deal of energy but the results of all this, apart from money, are supplies of status and position, goods which they care greatly about but which are not needed by or available to Plumbers. They can however use the money they create to buy goods and services from the Plumbers.
The Bankers do recognise that some Plumbers may get a bit fed up with this so they have come up with three palliatory measures. First, they offer a small number of scholarships each year to Plumber children to attend Banker school, with the possibility of incorporation into the Bankers' Guild for good behaviour. Second, they allow good looking Plumber females to marry into the Bankers' Guild. And third, Banker children may, if they choose, spend part of their gap years doing community service in Plumber areas. All of this does not quite do the business though. It has to be admitted that there are some disgruntled Plumbers who take especial pleasure in making a real mess of mowing the verges and painting the yellow lines in Banker areas.
I thought I might apply to the Institute of Neo-quantitative Societal Modelling (part of Kingston University) in order to do an MPhil on the subject. Perhaps the application of the model to post-Norman Conquest England. Doing some distant but dodgy regime of this sort enables one to get carried away without upsetting anyone.
Sparked on today's DT which had some disparaging remark about complicated statistics - with the clear inference that whoever put them together made them complicated because he or she was lazy or incompetant or both. Which does not help to promote understanding that it is difficult to render a complex world into neat statistics. I am reminded of my days in population statistics. You might think that the population of Britain was a simple enough idea. But then you have to think about what Britain do you mean. What about Northen Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands? What about the Scilly Isles and Gibralter? And after that you can start thinking about which people to include. People who live in Britain or people who happen to be here at some date or other? We probably only have a very vague idea of the number of tourists in the country at any one time. In the future one might ponder about whether to include people who have been frozen and in the meantime you can ponder about whether you want non-civilians, like US airmen, who might be living here for years - and who make quite a differance in the areas in which they are concentrated? This last making a differance once you start asking for areas smaller than Britain. What then about the inmates of hospitals and asylums? Do they count where they are inmated or where they usually live? All of these things can be dealt with and covered by footnotes in proper publications - but getting a straightforward figure to use in a newspaper article may not be straightforward . It all depends what one is using the figure for. And it all gets a lot more difficult when you start talking about something really tricky like crime. To the extent that I do not suppose anyone has much idea about whether certains kinds - maybe quite a lot of kinds of - of crime are rising or falling.
Calmed down by a further ration of calves liver for tea. BH has certainly got this one down to a fine art now.
Which, together with the coverage of the pectorals of the president of the workers republic, prompted me to speculate about the nature of the regimes which prompted such republics in the first place - and came up with the conceit which follows.
We suppose we have a country called Megaisle. Megaisle is inhabited by two guilds, the Plumbers' Guild and the Bankers' Guild. The people in the two guilds do not have all that much in common, or to do with each other, but they do occupy the same space (up to a point anyway) and there is a currency union - the central bank for which is operated by the Bankers' Guild. The general idea is that the people in the Plumbers' Guild produce all the goods and services which people at large need to consume. Beer, books, bacon, beans, badger grooming and all that sort of thing. People in the Bankers' Guild, by contrast, only produce money. They rush around a great deal and burn up a good deal of energy but the results of all this, apart from money, are supplies of status and position, goods which they care greatly about but which are not needed by or available to Plumbers. They can however use the money they create to buy goods and services from the Plumbers.
The Bankers do recognise that some Plumbers may get a bit fed up with this so they have come up with three palliatory measures. First, they offer a small number of scholarships each year to Plumber children to attend Banker school, with the possibility of incorporation into the Bankers' Guild for good behaviour. Second, they allow good looking Plumber females to marry into the Bankers' Guild. And third, Banker children may, if they choose, spend part of their gap years doing community service in Plumber areas. All of this does not quite do the business though. It has to be admitted that there are some disgruntled Plumbers who take especial pleasure in making a real mess of mowing the verges and painting the yellow lines in Banker areas.
I thought I might apply to the Institute of Neo-quantitative Societal Modelling (part of Kingston University) in order to do an MPhil on the subject. Perhaps the application of the model to post-Norman Conquest England. Doing some distant but dodgy regime of this sort enables one to get carried away without upsetting anyone.
# posted by Jim @ 11:04 AM 
