Silver and Gold

Posted on February 23, 2009

I like Nate Silver, the adorkable math whiz with his square black frames and Lewis Skolnick haircut. Silver is a math prodigy, best known for perfecting something called logistical regression—which my two times taking high school geometry leaves me unable to explain.But the gist is this: In 2008, Silver used a math model he originally developed for baseball statistics to correctly choose the presidential winner in 49 of 50 states. On his website, FiveThirtyEight.com, Silver also correctly id’d every Senate race, making him quite the star in political circles, quoted by Bill Kristol, interviewed by Keith Olbermann, and described by the New York Times as one of the breakout online stars of the year.Yet when New York Magazine asked him to use his sabermetric formulas to correctly predict the Oscars, he should have known it was a bridge too far. Sabermetrics might be a good fit for baseball, where empirical data and algorithms make day-to-day sense. Baseball’s a stat sport where performance averages are fluidly tracked. The same, in some sense, holds true for politics, where voter performance state-by-state, and even city by city, is trackable and therefore trendable.The Oscars, however, seemed far-fetched. Can art be mathematically predicted?New York was willing to give it a go. Of the hullabaloo, they wrote, “Informally, it involved building a huge database of the past 30 years of Oscar history. Categories included genre, MPAA classification, the release date, opening-weekend box office (adjusted for inflation), and whether the film won any other awards. We also looked at whether being nominated in one category predicts success in another…” Read more

Kick and Turn

Posted on February 18, 2009

  La Grave, French AlpsBy Dan Aufhauser Read more

Sharing: John T. Cacioppo & William Patrick

Posted on February 16, 2009

In the Kalahari Desert of northwestern Botswana live tribes of hunter gatherers called the !Kung San. They are often described by outsiders as living proof of the survival advantages of strong social bonds. “Most creatures get what they need to live from their physical surrounding,” researcher Roy Baumeister wrote. “Humans, in contrast, get what they need from each other and from their culture.” A quick look at the !Kung’s physical environment shows us why they are so deeply embedded in each other’s lives.Coming alone into the !Kung’s home range, a city dweller would find miles and miles of dust and scrub vegetation. If dehydration didn’t kill him first, the same city dweller would most likely starve to death pretty quickly. Yet archaeological excavations show that this region has been occupied by the same cultural group, living the same way in the same spot, for more than eleven thousand years. In the Kalahari, rainfall is scarce, summer temperatures exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit, winter temperatures dip below freezing, and given the presence of lions, “fast food” could easily refer to you or me. Living off the land in a place this harsh makes clear why early humans could ill afford to be nasty and brutish, at least not toward members of their own social group.Even though the !Kung live in the midst of seemingly limitless real estate, a Kung village is half a dozen huts tightly clustered around a small, cleared circle. Despite any desire for privacy, all doors face in toward the communal space. If you were to spend the night in such a village and see lions’ eyes gleaming in the darkness just outside the ring of cooking fires, you might begin to appreciate why, for early humans, feelings of isolation were linked with fear, the fear that still remains at the core of our experience of loneliness.The anthropologists, Irven Devore and Richard Lee, first made contact with the !Kung living in the Gobe area of the Kalahari in 1963. Six years later a young woman named Marjorie Shostak arrived in Gobe for a two-year stay. She had no particular training in fieldwork—she was simply in Africa with her husband, the physician and anthropologist Mel Konner. But she decided to make use of her time by becoming fluent in the !Kung language and trying to get beyond the cultural and professional barriers to understand hunter-gatherer life on a personal level. The result was a book entitled Nisa:The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, in which Shostak’s account of life among the !Kung was interspersed with vivid monologues by the woman she called Nisa. The book became a literary sensation because it did not portray ancestral society as a war of all against all, or as a tableau vivant of the noble savage. Instead, it presented ancestral life as a soap opera, a tangle of intense social linkages in all their messy melodrama. Read more

Hooked

Posted on February 14, 2009

By Sean McGannThe first time I was with a prostitute was in Amsterdam, a very logical and appropriate place to have your initial experience with a hooker. It’s the sort of town where you do things of that nature. Use drugs, go to the Anne Frank Museum, check out their world-renowned tulips, shoot heroin while on a tour boat, etc. And do them all without guilt or fear of prosecution. It’s a beautiful place, not the kind of place you want to raise a child, but a beautiful place nonetheless.I landed in the late morning and from the airport I took a train that dropped me just outside the Red Light District—ground zero for prostitutes. Now let me get one thing straight before I go any further. I didn’t fly to Amsterdam for hookers. In fact, when I arrived hookers were the farthest thing from my mind. I had nothing against them; they just seemed like something that other people did… like playing professional baseball or smoking crack. Hookers were fine, just not for me. Or hadn’t been until this moment in my life.At the train station I was given a flyer for a nearby hostel, and not having any other options, I decided I would stay there for my first night. Once I checked in and got things sorted, my jet lag caught up with me. I climbed in my bunk and slept a good part of the afternoon, but when I awoke I was sullen. People on the move enjoy a freedom of the mind that only happens on the road. There was action all around me… but it felt out of reach. And by action I mean unconventional behavior. Outlaw sensibilities navigated by an uncompromising desire to see what else is out there. Exploration, investigation and inquiry clothed in renegade escapade. I sought higher learning. And by high… I mean: high.And then, suddenly, as though an act of God, our Heavenly Father and protector, I felt the bed shake. One of my fellow travelers was insisting I get a drink with him. Eureka! An alcoholic beverage just outside the Red Light District was exactly what I needed. Perhaps things would get interesting after all. Kevin was Irish and loved the Doors (Into this house we’re born. Into this world we’re thrown.) That was really all of the connection we needed. Irish is Irish. I may have been born in the damp woods of the Great Northwest, and he may have born in the religion soaked streets of Dublin, but we shared the same blood, and pale skin, and knew valuable fugitive poetry. That was enough and we began to drink immediately. Read more

Art Underground: Don Quackenbush

Posted on February 12, 2009

Solar WindsBy Don Quackenbush

Walkabout Jones wants to feature artists of all kinds. Submit your paintings, graphic art, photography, drawings and other forms to “Art Underground” at walkaboutjones@gmail.com

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Park and Ride

Posted on February 10, 2009

Cosmic JourneyBy Jenny Tanedo

Hollywood Reefer

Posted on February 6, 2009

I haven’t been sure what to do with this space. Whether it should be a blog, or more like journalism, or something else altogether. Today, it feels more like a confessional. I’m struggling with the marijuana business. Struggling more than my pride would care to admit. It wasn’t supposed to be so hard, but now I feel the space between perception and real life. I’m sure the marijuana folk are reading on with wry eyes, thinking to themselves, “No shit.” Who said it would be like a walk in the park? What business ever is? I started this project as a novice, knowing how marijuana got to my bong about as well as I know the finer points of cottage cheese production. There are cows and machines. There are plants, bags and trucks. The invisible hand delivers it to me. I never thought of the hand’s day to day. Its careful balancing of dreams with the mortal load.My dad told me last spring that ninety percent of new businesses fail. In most cases, they do because they’re underfunded or the entrepreneur lacks proper training in the given field. Dad was a theater major in school who chose sales as his stage. Everything that he knows about business comes from personal experience, so I didn’t doubt the veracity of what he was trying to convey. Businesses fail because they lack essential resources; either the money to brace the learning curve, or the expertise to shorten it. This applies to all marketplaces facing the winds of competition, including medical marijuana. If we were going to have a chance at success, I would somehow have to find my way behind somebody’s counter.When a job magically fell in my lap, it felt almost like divine intervention. Maybe this is peculiar sentiment—thanking providence for the chance to mule medical maryjane from Fallbrook to the Mexican border. It wasn’t a gig that most drivers approached with any degree of enthusiasm. My forerunners largely were tweakers and drunks, willing to hustle for low to no pay. My boss didn’t seem to care so much who he sent to patient’s houses, so long as his money got back to him and stock weighed out at the end of the day. A friendly, funny, well-spoken driver who came on time and did smooth work was so unheard of to his biz that soon he paid me double. Read more

Art Underground: Kasia Polkowska

Posted on February 5, 2009

Agate Landscape By Kasia Polkowska

Walkabout Jones wants to feature artists of all kinds. Submit your paintings, graphic art, photography, drawings and other forms to “Art Underground” at walkaboutjones@gmail.com

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Now on MyTunes

Posted on February 4, 2009

Niggas vs. Black People – Chris RockPineapple Rag – Scott JoplinGood Times – Sam CookeCan’t Take My Eyes Off of You – Four SeasonsReel – Doc WatsonMean Old World – Eric ClaptonL – O – V - E – Nat King ColeIn the Dark – Nina SimoneWindy – Wes MillerAndy Warhol – David BowiePrayer of St. Francis – Sarah McLachlanAnything But Love – Ethel WatersA-Punk – Vampire WeekendBig Yellow Taxi – Joni MitchellOne Dime Blues – Blind Lemon JeffersonStoned Soul Picnic – The Fifth DimensionSister Rosetta – Robert Plant and Allison KraussO Lonely Soul – Mary’s DanishSt. Augustine – MoeDig our playlist? How many places offer a mix of Cab Calloway and Temple of the Dog? Jim Croce and State Radio? Kenny Rogers, Etta James, Sam Cooke and Johnny Cash? Now it’s your turn to play music savant. Send us your top five songs of all time and we’ll start adding your choices to the site. Whether it’s old, new, country, folk, jazz, rock, or straight-up funk, what matters is that it’s musical nirvana from the very first note. So dust off your records, maximize your music files, and send us your picks of legendary licks. Mail them to “myTunes” at walkaboutjones@gmail.com Read more

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