While we’re on the subject of what separates us from the beasts of the field: one night a few years ago I was having drinks with Akhil Sharma and Ethan Hawke. Doesn’t matter why. At some point, Akhil asked us — very suddenly, as I recall — whether we had read The Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo.

“No,” I said.

“No,” said Ethan Hawke.

Akhil looked into his cocktail very grimly and said, “Anyone who has not read The Confessions of Zeno is no better than a walking animal.”

I read The Confessions of Zeno shortly afterwards. I’m not sure what Ethan Hawke did. It was great — darkly rich and surprisingly funny. It’s mostly about quitting smoking. I recommend it, as I do Akhil’s extraordinary novel An Obedient Father, which is also darkly rich, but not funny. It’s mostly about unmentionable things which are unpleasant to think about closely. I remain a walking animal.

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone–a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. … Eating on the street–even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat–displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. … Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. … This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

The man who wrote these words was appointed to chair the President’s Council on Bioethics. That’s right — our federal stem cell policy was driven by a system of moral imperatives that includes “Ice cream must be eaten with a spoon, and indoors.”

(via Stephen Pinker in The New Republic.)

I woke up the other morning thinking to myself, you know what would be funny? To go from Toni Morrison’s depiction of Bill Clinton as the first black president to the observation that Barack Obama, having missed his chance to be the first black president, could still be the first Jewish president: child of immigrants, excels in school, good at basketball, bad at bowling, subject to whispers that his religious commitments might bind him to America’s enemies, etc. etc.

But nowadays you’ve got to Google a gag before you deploy it. And you quickly find that Harold Pollack got there first at Huffington Post, back in January — which didn’t stop Howard Fineman from using the gag in March in Newsweek, or Josh Gerstein from bringing it back in the New York Sun this week.

You have to figure that Google has a certain chilling effect on gag-based feature writing. Of course ten people are going to come up with the same joke. And if that produces ten different columns, then maybe the funniest one has a chance to get popular. Is it really better if the first person to post the gag online salts the field for everybody else?

In this case, it’s for the best — Pollack’s piece is better than its successors, and better than what I would have written. But can we shed a single tear for the gag-based features that, thanks to Google, never tasted life?

Reader challenge: come up with a “Barack Obama is Jewish” gag that doesn’t appear in Google. “Obamulke” and “Baruch Obama” have both been done, but I think I can claim priority on “Barak Mitzvah.” For what that’s worth.

Actually, the example of Bayesian reasoning in the post below doesn’t really give the flavor of Tenenbaum’s work. Here’s something a little closer. Abe and Becky each roll a die 12 times. Abe’s rolls come up

1,2,3,4,5,6,1,2,3,4,5,6.

Becky gets

2,3,3,1,6,2,5,2,4,4,1,6.

Both of these results occurs with probability (1/6)^12, or about one in two billion. So why is it that Abe finds his result startling, while Becky doesn’t, when the two outcomes are equally unlikely?

Extra credit: what does this have to do with arguments about intelligent design?

(If you like the extra credit question, you might want to read my colleague Elliot Sober’s papers on the topic, or even buy his book!)

Our friend Josh Tenenbaum, a psychologist at M.I.T., is in town to plenarize this Thursday at 3pm at the First Annual UW Cognitive Science Conference. He hasn’t posted a title, but he’ll be talking about his research on Bayesian models of cognition. What makes a model “Bayesian” is a close attention to a priori probabilities, usually called priors.

For instance: suppose you’re an infant, trying to figure out how language works. You notice that when you wake up, your father points out the window and says “Hello, sun!” Pretty soon you figure out that the bright light he’s pointing at is called “sun.” But the evidence presented to you is just as consistent with the theory that, when you’ve just woken up, the word “sun” refers to the bright light out the window — but before bedtime it means “the stuffed monkey on the dresser.” How, infant, do you pick the former theory over the latter? Because you have some set of priors which tells you that words are very unlikely to refer to different things at different times of day. You don’t learn this principle from experience — you start with it, which is what makes it a “prior.” According to Chomsky-style linguistics, you are born with lots of priors about language — you know, for instance, that there’s a fixed order in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence are supposed to come. If you didn’t have all these priors, you wouldn’t have a chance of learning to talk; there’s an infinitude of theories of language, all consistent with the evidence you encounter. Your priors are what allows you to narrow that down to the one that’s vastly more likely than the sometimes-it’s-a-monkey alternatives.

I don’t think Josh is going to talk about language acquisition, but he is going to talk about the ways that lots of interesting cognitive processes can be described in Bayesian terms, and how to check empirically that these Bayesian descriptions are accurate. Recommended to anyone who likes mathy thinking about thinking.

I spent last Wednesday morning working in the profoundly pleasant Prairie Cafe in Middleton Hills. This is the kind of unassuming place that you’d assume would make really first-rate breakfast and soups and maybe a heavily besprouted chicken-salad sandwich, but where you might hesitate to order a hot lunch. In fact, the corned beef hash, while homemade, was just so-so, while the reuben was really first-rate. The cold black-bean and corn salad that came alongside in lieu of coleslaw was even better, a crisp contrast to the thoroughly correct hot goopiness of the reuben.

Middleton Hills, it turns out, is a Duany Plater-Zyberk development in the “New Urbanist” style. Which means mixed retail and housing, walkability, density, stores fronting directly on sidewalks, cheap houses and expensive ones on the same block, and so on. Basically, if you take every feature of America’s soul-killing suburbs that people like to complain about, invert them, and build housing developments based on the result, you get something like New Urbanism.

As for me, I grew up in one of America’s soul-killing suburbs, and I like them! One of the nicest features of the Near West Side of Madison is that you can get on your bike and be in an authentically urban landscape in 15 minutes; or, after a 15-minute drive in the other direction, you can pull up in the oversized parking lot outside the even more oversized grocery store and load your station wagon until it groans.

Anyway, Middleton Hills. My first impression is that it’s charming; the houses all share a mild kind of Prairie style, but no two on the block look exactly alike. The main drag, Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, winds around a big and agreeably wild pond; lots of cattails, lots of birds, grass not too kempt. The street names do a good job of congratulating you for your participation in sustainable development — John Muir Drive, Aldo Leopold Way, and, best of all, Diversity Road.

My second impression is that it’s completely empty. You can see that the streets are laid out to encourage pedestrianism and unplanned human interaction, as in Princeton, a favorite town of Duany Plater-Zyberk’s, and mine. But at three in the afternoon, the only people I saw were a trickle of kids coming home from school, and a birdwatcher. The birdwatcher and I watched a sandhill crane for a few minutes. Then I sat down to continue revising a long-overdue paper with Michel and Venkatesh about sums of three squares. (Among other things, the paper features a careful explanation of the group structure — more properly, torsor structure — on the set of representations of a squarefree integer n as the sum of three squares. More on this when the paper’s finished.)

What makes Princeton’s streets lively and new-urban, of course, is that it has a big and interesting downtown, whose shops and restaurants serve not just Princetonians but residents of the surrounding towns. Middleton Hills has a grocery store, the Prairie Cafe, a pizza place, and a Starbucks — not enough to draw foot traffic away from Madison, or, for that matter, downtown Middleton. If this post pulls in a throng of reuben-lovers, I guess I’ll have done my bit for the New Urbanism.

I finished reading the red book, so I’m now a complete authority on my classmates in the Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1993.

• If you are a woman who went to Harvard and you’re not presently working outside the house, you call yourself a “stay-at-home mom” — but if you’re a woman married to a male alum and in the same situation, your husband might call you a “homemaker,” or even, in one case, a “housewife.”
• Triathlon is startlingly popular among my classmates. Alternative explanation: each and every person who completed a triathlon mentioned this fact in their entry. Actually, both might apply. Travel to non-western countries enjoys a similar status.
• Funniest sentence (intentional division) “I’m still in Washington, DC, eager to prove that a Jewish man with a law degree can make it in this town.”
• Funniest sentence (unintentional division) “Needless to say I am quite astonished that fifteen years have passed since we first set foot on campus.”
• Most of the really angry people don’t write in, so kudos to the person who started her entry “If you really gave a shit about what I have been doing with my life, I’d have heard from you by now.”
• Harvard does thousands of great things to its students and a few bad things, one of which is to promote the idea that the people eating Chickwiches on either side of us are fated to be the rulers of the world we’ll live in as adults. Not true, it turns out. On first glance, I think the members of our class most notable to the world at large are the executive producer of the Daily Show and the minority whip of the Florida State Senate.
• I sometimes buy old Harvard reunion books at used bookstores; these make very absorbing reading, if you dont mind the fact that you’re almost certainly going through a dead person’s memorabilia. The books from 35th and 50th reunions muse a lot about the meaning of it all — this is totally absent from the present book, apart from a few classmates who switched religions, or obtained one for the first time.
• Finally, if you’re reading this and you went to Harvard, please do click the “Chickwiches” link. It’s horrifying and disgusting in all the right ways.

Which are actual Britax carseats and which did I make up?

• Diplomat
• Monarch
• Overlord
• Emperor
• Royal
• Regent
• Viceroy
• Tyrant
• Viscount
• Chancellor
• Sultan
• Husky

It means “after whatever fashion.” I didn’t learn this in school — my high-school Latin stopped somewhere around “Petrus Cuniculus in arbo cum eius tres fratribus, Flopsus, Mopsus, Cottontalusque habuit.” I saw it on a slide in a history-of-mathematics lecture and had to go find out what it meant. Emmanuel just pointed out to me that, while “quomodocumque” hasn’t yet made it as an English loan-word, the OED does have the related “quomodocunquize,” meaning “to make money however one can.” The most recent cite is 1652, but in these near-recessionary times, quomodocunquizing — or even all-out quomodocunquism — may be poised for a comeback.

Dear fashionable women of Madison,

I can’t help noticing that lately you’ve been wearing a lot of big, blocky off-white trench coats with giant buttons and double-wide belts. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you that you look like a cross between my dad in 1979 and a subway flasher. Please reconsider.

Sincerely yours,

Quomodocumque