Cartoon. Please don’t riot.

 

Beating a raccoon to death in Kenosha

 Rioters reveal their soul.

Wrong again

I didn’t think I could be shocked by anything in US politics anymore. I was wrong. That's literally, literally, a Democrat campaign event. That's really the candidate beating a woman to death in effigy. 

A Few Heist Novels

I have been reading or rereading some heist novels during the lockdown. Here are a few micro-reviews.

• Black Wings Has My Angel, Chaze. Romantic heist noir in the James M Cain tradition. A.
• Fallout, Disher. Contemporary crime in Australia. Parker-lite but fast and lean. B.
• Northern Heist, O'Rawe. Based on a real heist in Ireland. A bit arty, but an interesting setting. C+.
• The Rare Coin Score, Stark. One of the very best Parkers. Personalities destroy the heist. A.
• Clean Break, White. The basis for Kubrick's The Killing. The film follows the book closely. A.
• The Case of the Unhappy Angels, Homes. A hard boiled detective story from the 1940s. By the author of Out of the Past. B+.
• The Big Gold Dream, Himes. Himes's precise, cold, vivid prose, with the usual manic plot. A-.
• Dead Skip, Gores. Not a heist (although Parker makes an appearance!) but a hard boiled detective yarn from the early 70s B+. 
• The Grifters, Thompson. One of Thompson's best: short, fast, mean. A.
• Breakout, Stark. One of the weaker Parkers. C-. Still better than anything by Don Winslow!
• Hostage for a Hood, White. Another winner from Lionel White, whom I shall read more of. The heist goes wrong even before it starts, and turns into a kidnapping. A-.
• The Black Echo, Connelly. Not really a heist, but Harry Bosch investigates a heist. I liked it but won’t rush to read another. B-. 
• Prelude to a certain midnight, Kersh. Gerald Kersh was the best selling author in England in the 40s. This is a unusual, intense, dark and funny book. Not the strongest plot but one of the best books on this list. Easily the harshest one. A.
• Swag, Leonard. Heists in my old neighborhood, the suburbs of Detroit. Fast and funny, but somehow not involving. B.
• The Name of the Game is Death, Marlowe. A terrific read from 1962. Jim Thompson with a toothache, and as good. A thief with a fondness for pets but not for people. A.
• Final Notice, Gores. The second DKA novel, almost as good as Dead Skip. B. 

Facebook and Twitter Practice Medicine Without A Licence

Both have censored actual physicians. Details.

Awful, even for Biden

Just breathtaking. Ignorant, divisive, lying.

A Brief History of the Paperback

From The New Yorker.

Nigerian Slaver

An excellent article by a Nigerian journalist.

Uyghurs rounded up

In China.

The Acme of Romantic Noir

Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliot Chaze is a pulp heist novel from 1953. It’s both brutal and romantic. It has, and deserves, a grand reputation. It's in the tradition of The Postman Always Rings Twice. And it’s cheap!

Niemöller

Spelt “Katz”.

More on pooled testing

Machine learning can help.

Coyne guts the Pinker mob

Jerry Coyne looks at the campaign against Steven Pinker. He guts it like a fish.

A random example of “killed by police 2019”

This website displays a random case from a database of all police killings in the USA in 2019. It selects another case each time you reload.

Taleb Test

My point is that you cannot do "science" without knowing & rigorously applying statistics & you cannot do statistics without knowing & rigorously applying mathematical statistics & you cannot do mathematical statistics without knowing & rigorously applying probability theory.

I think this is a testable hypothesis. Ask the next research chemist you meet to explain the Carathéodory Extension Theorem.

Fake Science: A How-To

Even worse than it sounds actually. Here.

Bullshit from Taleb

I'd say it's an isolated demand for rigor. 

In reality it’s a discrete process, and Taleb's nowhere differentiable continuous model is as much an idealization as Levitt's. Except Levitt doesn’t pretend otherwise.

I see I am not the only one to have noticed this.

Really bad.