Watching Sunday night TV

Its been a long time since I've watched TV of any kind, and I'd forgotten just how annoying the ads are. I find it especially frustrating when an ad runs multiple times in a single commercial break. One such ad was for a new Fox show "Are you smarter than a 5th grader" in which, Jeff Foxworthy asks questions to see if people can recall "what is a trapezoid."

I realize that its supposed to be tongue-in-cheek; precisely because the bar is set so low that we take pleasure in those who cannot even pass it. But still, its sad that we seem to be lowering rather than raising what we urge people to achieve, and I don't see how this could be a good thing.

Perhaps this is on my mind because, in a scary bit of synchronosity, I watched the movie Idiocracy this weekend. At the time of my watching, I kind of felt like the movie had about 15 mintues of funny stuff, but was unfortunately 90minuntes long. Now, I can kind of see some of the points it raised, and fear it might be a clarion-call for our collective mental decline. (It is just a little scary that Luke Wilson has to be harbinger of the dumb.)

Returning to the "Smarter than a 5th grader," the funny part its that my buddy Kevin has already figured out the next step in our cultural mental decline. He joked that he doesn't so much care if he's smarter than a 5th grader. What he wants to see is a show: "are you tougher than a 5th grader?" In which adults of various ages and physical fitness try to beat up a 5th grader...

Perspective

So, here's some perspective for you. I'm in the wealthiest 99.76% globally. Combine that with the fact that I'm pretty happy, and life looks quite good right now.

And interesting point...

It never fails to impress me just how difficult it is to measure happiness...you'd think with something as central to our lives, we'd be better at it. Still, this is a pretty good discussion of the problem, from crooked timber:

For those who came in late, and probably didn’t imagine economists ever thought about happiness, the crucial finding is that “Cross country data shows pretty consistently that on average happiness increases with income, but at a certain point diminishing returns set in. In the developed world, people are not on average happier than they were in the 1960s.”

The data that supports this consists of surveys that ask people to rate their happiness on a scale, typically from 1 to 10. Within any given society, happiness tends to rise with all the obvious variables: income, health, family relationships and so on. But between societies, or in Western societies like Australia over time, there’s not much difference even though both income and health (life expectancy, for example) have improved pretty steadily for a long time.

I’ve long argued that these questions can’t really tell us anything, and an example given by Don Arthur gives me the chance to put it better than I’ve done before, I hope.

Suppose you wanted to establish whether children’s height increased with age, but you couldn’t measure height directly.

One way to respond to this problem would be to interview groups of children in different classes at school, and asked them the question Don suggests “On a scale of 1 to 10, how tall are you?”. My guess is that the data would look pretty much like reported data on the relationship between happiness and income.

That is, within the groups, you’d find that kids who were old relative to their classmates tended to be report higher numbers than those who were young relative to their classmates (for the obvious reason that, on average, the older ones would in fact be taller than their classmates).

But, for all groups, I suspect you’d find that the median response was something like 7. Even though average age is higher for higher classes, average reported height would not change (or not change much).

So you’d reach the conclusion that height was a subjective construct depending on relative, rather than absolute, age. If you wanted, you could establish some sort of metaphorical link between being old relative to your classmates and being “looked up to”.

But in reality, height does increase with (absolute) age and the problem is with the scaling of the question. A question of this kind can only give relative answers.

Well, that's a thought that's gonna to fester...

One of the more interesting things I've found through American Footprints is Inside Iraq. It "chronicles daily life in a war zone through the words of Iraqi journalists in McClatchy's Baghdad Bureau as they risk so much each day to survive." I can't vouch for its veracity, but it certainly appears valid. My take is that if this is a fraud, these guys are very good in both what they've written, and how they write it; complete with the sort of language mistakes I've seen in non-native English writers.

That said, some of the posts from Inside Iraq are the most heart-wrenching as well as thought provoking I've seen in a while. For example, this one, questioning the allegiances of the current Iraqi government should push ever truly come to shove:

If the war started between U.S. and Iran, on which side the Iraqi government will be?

He goes on to point out that:

Please remember the Iraqi government is an Islamic government led by Islamist. Many of them were living in Iran for more than 25 years.

Many members of the current Iraqi government prefer to speak to you in Persian rather than Arabic

There are a host of reasons why even a Shi'ite Islamic Iraqi government wouldn't go towards Iran, 160k American troops being a primary one. But still, it is a thought that's gonna fester...

Fastest Mardi Gras Ever

For tensies we went to Clarendon's Mardi Gras parade, just to see what it was like. Sadly, it was raining, and the parade was motorized, and it was a little cold. So, the whole thing was done in less than 15 minutes. And I don't mean that it took 15 minutes to pass our place on the sidwalk, I mean that we showed up at the endpoint of the parade at 8:13, to see the last float driving past...

So, here are some pictures, of Dave with a funny wig and Ellen. The last float. And, a dog with beads. Enjoy!