Eric The Blue

Sarah Palin weighs in on a Minnesota race not involving Michele Bachmann

If you are from Minnesota, and wondering which of the two Republicans vying for the party's endorsement for governor is crazier, you will probably be interested to hear that today, on her Facebook page, Sarah Palin endorsed Tom Emmer.  Figures.  He's a teaparty kind of guy and wears his craziness on his sleeve.  The other fellow, Marty Seifert, is closeted.  His point is that Emmer only talks crazy, whereas he, Seifert, working quietly in the legislature, has actually enacted crazy laws.

Speaking of Sarah Palin reminds me of John McCain. To his everlasting discredit, he is responsible for making her a national figure.  (Though, to be fair, the millions of idiots who adore her should get most of the blame.)  Tina Brown recently put it well while deconstructing the campaign appearance that Palin made on McCain's behalf in Tucson, Arizona, back in March:

By using Palin to pander to the Tea Party, however, McCain showed his willingness to repudiate everything that made him special, just so he can hold on to a Senate seat. It’s like the Hanoi Hilton in reverse: He held out under physical torture, but under political torture it seems he’ll say and do just about anything.

Well put, yes, but  it needs an editor: By using Palin to pander to the Tea Party, McCain again showed his willingness to repudiate his own narrative about himself, just to hold on to a Senate seat. 

Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?

Shakespeare did.  A recent article in the local daily suggests that the conspiracy theorists are gaining ground, but read closely.  The idea is that Shakespeare, a provincial yokel who never attended university or traveled outside of England, could not be the author of some thirty plays that do not so much depict the world as reproduce it on the page and stage in all its many colors.  Writing is confessional; you have to have lived it to describe it; and the Earl of Oxford, not Shakespeare, has the needed biography.

But the Earl of Oxford died in 1604.  Around ten of the plays were written after that.  In a more fundamental way, the Earl of Oxford could not have lived them, or written them.  William Shakespeare did.

The article names some of the Earl of Oxford's champions: a few actors, a newspaper guy, three justices of the Supreme Court.  Call me an elitist, but why are there no literary scholars among them?  Here is Harry Levin, writing about 35 years ago in his General Introduction to The Riverside Shakespeare:

The figure of Shakespeare as a practical man of affairs, although well attested by the evidence, seemed rather too modest to occupy the lofty pedastel erected by the Bardolaters.  Hence the strange proliferation of irresponsible theories proposing rival candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's work, most of them titled and all of them colorful but none of them circumstanced to  have done the job--as William Shakespeare indubitably was.

Still true, and the proliferations continue apace.

The principle of Occam's razor--simple explanations are to be preferred to more complicated ones--recommends we conclude that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays.  The alternative view requires too much intrigue, too many conspirators.  The reason the editors of the First Folio attributed the plays to their friend and contemporary, William Shakespeare, is that he really did write them.  Ben Jonson's famous poetic tribute was just that, a poetic tribute to the author, not an exercise in advancing a very intricate web of intrigue and deceit.

Netflix: Madmen, season 3

Though I don't necessarily hear from my legions of devoted readers, they must all be wondering about the recent absence of my inimitable reviews of the Netflix rentals screened at our house after the kids are in bed.  The explanation is that we have ceased watching movies so that we can watch episode after episode of Mad Men.  I gave my initial imprimatur here.  We are now well into season 3--in a recent episode Pete Campbell, after taking a sabbatical from bad behavior, performed a favor for the nanny in a neighboring apartment and then demanded repayment in sexual currency.  In the same episode, Betty Draper, having accompanied her husband on a business trip to Rome, rebuffed a young Italian at an outdoor bar with the line, "You are not a gentleman."  But he was only making inquiries, and the viewer is supposed to notice that, compared to Pete, he's a knight.  I think this is maybe what more fawning critics call "layered storytelling."

I love Mad Men but not unreservedly.  For example, the Draper's colored maid: I hate it when the camera lingers on her silently thinking decent, knowing thoughts while surrounded by the joyless philandering of the affluent white characters.  Faulkner pulled it off with Dilsey but the successors are all false and call to mind this word: patronizing.  One way to make a hit series is to be abundantly clear about who the good people are, so that, after some close calls, they can satisfyingly prevail at the end of every episode.  One thing I love about Mad Men is that it does not do this, there are no pure-good characters--except this damn maid.  I wish she'd break into the liquor cabinet.  Something! 

Some more calculus problems

Here's a problem from Amanda's most recent calculus quiz.  A print shop is to make a poster with a four-inch margin at the top and bottom, a two-inch margin on the sides, and a print area of 50 square inches.  What are the dimensions of the smallest poster--least area--that can be made.

Well, if the horizontal print area is x, and the vertical print area y, then xy = 50 and y = 50/x.  The area of the entire poster might then be expressed by the equation (x + 4) (50/x + 8).  Expand this equation and you get 50 + 8x + 200/x + 32.  Differentiating, we arrive at 8 - 200/x ².  So an extreme value exists where 8 = 200/x ², which would be when x = 5.  And when x = 5, y = 10.  Alack, this is where I quit when working the problem, which did not ask anything about the print area but rather about the dimensions of the whole poster.  That would be (5 + 4) x (10 + 8), or 9 x 18 inches.

Martin Gardner, in Calculus Made Easy, is fond of similar problems involving various shapes or solids inside of bigger ones--for example, find the volume of the largest cylinder inscribed within a cone the height of which is the same as the radius of its base.  It would help to draw a picture but I am not clever enough for that--even if it is possible.  You will have to imagine a cone--the often orange thing that kids use to mark a goal for their pick-up soccer games, or that the highway department uses to keep cars off a patch of road they are working on.  The cone the problem describes has a height equal to the radius of its base and it also has a cylinder--a solid shaped like a can of anything at the grocery store--inside of it.  If the cylinder is tall, its radius will be small; and as the radius gets bigger and bigger, finally approaching that of the cone, its height shrinks and the shape becomes "squat."  Its radius can't be greater than that of the cone or else it won't "fit."

The volume of a cylinder is the procuct of pi, its height, and its radius squared.  The one we are talking about is limited in the respect that it must be inscribed within the cone, which is to say that the sum of its height and radius is equal to the radius (which is the same as the height) of the cone. The state of affairs suggests the following algebraic expression

h + r = R

where h refers to the height of the cylinder, r to the radius of the cylinder, and R to the radius of the cone.  It follows that

h = R - r

in which case the volume of the cylinder may be rewritten thus to eliminate one variable:

A = (pi) r² (R - r) = (pi) R r² - (pi) r ³. 

Now we differentiate and set the derivative equal to zero to determine the extreme value:

A' = 2 (pi) R r - 3 (pi) r ²
2 (pi) R r = 3 (pi) r ²
2 R = 3 r
r = 2R/3

To maximize the volume of this inscribed cylinder, make its radius two-thirds that of the cone. 

It may seem strange that the solutions to both problems are so regular and involve 2/3 or the ratio 2-to-1 instead of some more complicated fraction.  But if you work a lot of these problems you begin to notice that this is almost always the case.  The poster with the smallest area has one dimension exactly twice that of the other.  The cylinder with the greatest volume has a radius exactly two-thirds that of the cone in which it is inscribed.  You can verify, if you are a dweeb, that a cylinder of a given volume will have the maximum surface area if its height is exactly twice the length of its radius. 

Miscellany

The kitchen table, breeze coming in the open window, Twins on the radio, leading 5 to 3 as the kids nap and their mother shops--what did I do to deserve this?

April, probably on account of the first line of Eliot's "Waste Land," is Poetry Month.  Perhaps it is the cruellest month for mental health events: everything coming to life, except maybe you, the contrast adding to the distress.  Here's another poignant, April-ish poem that I thought of today while contemplating the color of some shrubbery in our backyard. It's by Frost, who called it  "Nothing Gold Can Stay":

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

I have some recommended readings on the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church: Hendrik Hertzberg's Comment, in the current New Yorker; Hans Kung, (how do you make an umlaut?) at the NYRB Blog; and, for some deep background, a book review, by Joan Acocella, of Garry Wills's Why I Am A Catholic--all deserve your attention.  Hertzberg, implicitly rejecting the notion that the Church is the victim of unfair media attacks, observes that the priests who have been disciplined are those whose offenses have been reported in the media.  If it were left to the Church, there would be no consequences for anyone except the molested children.  He concludes, ringingly:

 

To the extent that the Church manages to purge itself of its shame—its sins, its crimes—it will owe a debt of gratitude to the lawyers, the journalists, and, above all, the victims and families who have had the courage to persevere, against formidable resistance, in holding it to account. Without their efforts, the suffering of tens of thousands of children would still be a secret. Our largely democratic, secularist, liberal, pluralist modern world, against which the Church has so often set its face, turns out to be its best teacher—and the savior, you might say, of its most vulnerable, most trusting communicants. 

 

Hertzberg's the best.  The Twins--I'm "live blogging" their game now--blew their lead but just a minute ago, thanks to a solo homer by Orlando Hudson, their new second baseman, took a 6-5 lead in the bottom of the seventh inning.  If they hold on, they will raise their record to 9 wins, 3 losses.  The baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint, and today's game isn't even over, but the Twins are looking like the team to beat in their division. 

 

What was the topic of that last paragraph?  It had sexual crime, sports, and The New Yorker magazine, so I might as well conclude by noting that Amy Davidson, a New Yorker editor and one of my favorite bloggers, has been on the Ben Roethlisberger story, and the Steeler's quarterback was the subject of the following "short" in today's Minneapolis paper.  I quote the entire text:

 

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation's month-long investigation into a rape accusation leveled against Ben Roethlisberger uncovered an allegation--unsubstantiated--by a second woman that the Steeler quarterback forced  himself on her.

 

The incident allegedly occurred during a party at Roethlisberger's house in Georgia.  A woman not interviewed by authorities claims the quarterback pulled his pants down and told her she could "do whatever she wants," according to the GBI report.

 

A week later, the woman attended another party thrown by Roethlisberger.  She claims the 28-year-old quarterback was drunk and forced his hand up her skirt.  She was able to escape and informed her father of the incident, but he apparently encouraged his daughter not to pursue a criminal complaint, the report states.

 

In other NFL news: The Dolphins traded receiver Ted Ginn Jr. to the 49'ers for a fifth-round pick. ... Former Gophers tight end Matt Spaeth signed a one-year tender with the Steelers. ... The Seahawks signed former first-round receivers Mike Williams and Reggie Williams.

Twins win! Six to five. Twins win! (Twins win!)

Pleasures of calculus

I'm still enjoying Amanda's calculus course.  She uses her book, so I read up the topics on the syllabus in my old textbook, or in Martin Gardner's Calculus Made Easy, and we then work the problems from her homework together.  The couple that calculates together, sticks together. 

So here's a recent problem in "related rates." A ten foot ladder stands straight against a wall.  Then someone starts moving its bottom end away from the wall at the rate of one foot per second.  How fast is the top of the ladder going down the side of the wall at the moment the bottom of the ladder is six feet out from the wall?  Eight feet out from the wall?

Maybe your intuition is that the top of the ladder moves, if not at the same steady rate as the bottom, at least at some constant rate.  But it is relatively easy to verify that that is not so.  After six seconds, for example, the base of the ladder will be six feet from the wall.  How far will the top of the ladder have gone down?  Since the ladder is always ten feet long, we are considering a right triangle with a base of six feet and a hypotenuse of ten feet.  From the Pythagorean Theorem, it follows that the height is eight feet (8² + 6² = 10²), and that in the first six seconds the ladder has gone down two feet.  Two seconds later, however, the base is eight feet and the height is only six feet, so the ladder went down as far in those two seconds as it did in the first six. Determining instantaneous velocity at certain points is a problem in calculus.

The key to solving the problem is to analyze this constantly changing right triangle.  If we call the height of the ladder on the wall h, and the distance from the bottom of the ladder to the wall b, then

h² + b² = 10². 

What we are looking for is the ratio of the change in height to the change in time--dh/dt, in the language of calculus.  Differentiating implicitly, we get

2h (dh/dt) + 2b (db/dt) = 0.

Now, let us recall that we are looking for dh/dt when b is six and eight, respectively; also, that db/dt, the ratio of the change in the length of the base to the change in time, is a constant one foot per second.  So all that really remains is to make the necessary substitutions and then do the algebra:

2h (dh/dt) + 2b = 0
h (dh/dt) = -b
dh/dt = -b/h

When b is six, h is eight; and when b is eight, h is six--remember our right triangle with the hypotenuse a constant ten.  So at the instant the bottom of the ladder is six feet from the wall, the top of the ladder is going down the wall at the rate of 9 inches per second.  When the bottom is eight feet from the wall, the top is going down at the rate of 16 inches per second.

There she goes again

In her latest Star Tribune column, Katherine Kersten explains why the Catholic Church is getting a bum rap.  It stands for universal, timeless values in an age of moral relativisim, and so the pope of modernism, also known as The New York Times, is obliged to discredit its mortal enemy with secular encyclicals masquerading as journalism.  That is why, unless the perpetrator is a priest, you never read in the paper stories of sexual abuse of minors.  She has it all figured out.  Sometimes kids are molested by priests and sometimes by their uncles and stepdads.  It's not like the church has a special problem.

In plain English, then, the Catholic Church is a moral beacon to our benighted age and its priests are no more likely to rape little Billy than is Uncle Joe.  If Uncle Joe goes to jail instead of to a new parish, that is only because reports of his crimes are more apt to reach the ears of moral relativists. 

Church strikes out

Every year, the end of the college basketball season coincides with the start of the baseball season, and this year, in these parts, where temperatures have been so consistently ten or more Fahrenheit degrees above average that the global-warming skeptics are the only ones not talking about the weather, the confluence of two sporting seasons has been joined by anticipation of the start of the gardening season.  It won't be long now till I can stand with the hose in my hand watering flowers while listening to John Gordon call the Twins game on the radio.  All would be as it should if you did not have to read in the paper about priests molesting young children and their superiors worrying about the Church, not the kids.

It's gotten so that I am less outraged by the criminal acts performed by disturbed men than I am by the people who go on TV and try to explain it away.  My bad, but the crimes were performed out of my sight, sometimes in the confessional booth, a place I will never see, whereas the apologists speak on the screen in my living room.  Yes, Michael Tomasky, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, is despicable.  But did you see the Very Reverend David O'Connell, the president of Catholic University, on The News Hour the other day?  Answering a question about the pope's role in ignoring crimes and protecting sexual predators in clerical robes--well, that's not quite the way Margaret Warner put it--he said:

I mean, this is all a very, very complicated matter. . . .  We have to remember, I think, in all fairness, that we tend to judge situations that happened 20, 30, 40 years ago by our knowledge of today and our standards of today.  And I don't know that that's always altogether fair. . . .

You know, you have to understand, when--when--when someone is in charge of a very large diocese, as Archbishop Ratzinger was, Cardinal Ratzinger was, at that time, it's very natural and normal that they would hand off certain matters to personnel directors or vicars or other people. . . .

The Very Reverend O'Connell was wearing his clerical collar, in the way of a crooked cop wearing his dress blues before the grand jury.  Oh, it is so very complicated!  Presumably, the complicatedness explains why the Catholic Church, which usually puts itself forward as the champion of timeless standards of morality that have been corrupted by the modern world, now suggests that the pope was to some degree corrupted by the lax practices of "twenty, thirty, forty years ago," and should not be judged by more stringent standards that prevail today.  It would all seem too convenient even if O'Connell had not hurdled ahead and put it all on unnamed personnel directors, vicars, and "other people." 

The only people who never earn a mention are the violated children--the deaf boys, for example, whose repeated complaints about the priest who molested them at their school in Milwaukee were ignored by church officials who no doubt on other occasions loved to yammer about the Church's devotion to "the most powerless members of society."  This particular priest worked at the school in Milwaukee from 1950 until 1974, when he was transferred to the Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin.  He died in 1998, still a priest.  It is not known how many kids he damaged.

The past few days at Power Line

Over at Power Line, flecks of white spittle fly off my monitor as I endeavor to take the temperature of the local branch of the lunatic fringe.  Hinderaker, in a March 31 post, asks in his title "Is Obamacare unconstitutional?" before following it up with one called "The Illegitimacy of Obamacare."  Yesterday his deconstruction of a CBS interview with President Obama included the following insights:

Note how Obama immediately starts talking about the "vitriol" of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. This is a bad joke: has Obama never listened to Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow et al.? I've never watched or listened to Beck, but Limbaugh is a more moderate and sophisticated analyst of the political scene than, say, Paul Krugman or E.J. Dionne.

Here is sidekick Johnson striving to be competetive.  The context is the claim that black Democrats are lying about being harrassed by race-baiting tea-party types:

Among other things, one of the involved congressmen is Rep. James Clyburn, a member of the House Democratic leadership and a past master in the cynical deployment of the race card. I conclude as have many others that these allegations were orchestrated by the Democrat/media axis to stigmatize the opposition to Obama's program of national socialism as racist and to suppress dissent. 

Ah, "the Democrat/media axis" and "Obama's program of national socialism" in a single sentence! Game on, Hinderaker!  Meanwhile, Mirengoff, the third philosopher, concludes, in a post entitled "March job numbers show improvement, but nothing dramatic":

Overall, the March report confirms that the job picture is improving, but suggests that the improvement is occurring slowly. 

Possibly he swallowed the valiums prescribed to his co-authors.  Or perhaps he is just approaching profundity from a different direction--"what every jackass knows" instead of "stuff crazy people say."