rule of threes

this is not a good week for pop culture: monday, jon and kate (+ 8) filed for divorce, wednesday ed mcmahon died, and then yesterday both farrah fawcett and michael jackson died. plus, somewhere in the middle, the south carolina governor went missing, his people said he was hiking the appalachian trail, his car was discovered at the airport in atlanta, he came back and said, "oh i just needed an exotic getaway so i decided to pop down to buenos aires," and the next day he not so shockingly admitted an affair. not really pop culture, but definitely a crazy series of events.

here's what makes me sad about this week:
1. jon and kate's divorce. i briefly tivo-ed their show a year ago, but i found her grating and the show disingenuous and i cancelled - so it's not an attachment to the show that makes me sad. (although apparently they're still planning on keeping the show going, just one of them with the kids at a time. that's ridiculous! you're not jonandkate+8 anymore! move on.) it's sad to me that they got divorced because i don't like divorce, and i don't think that they are getting divorced for a "good" reason. i have no idea whether or not either of them cheated, but regardless of what did or didn't happen between jon or kate and anyone else, they both checked out of their marriage the minute they signed their first contract with tlc. honestly, i don't think that you can be a "normal" family and keep a strong marriage when you have tv cameras constantly surrounding you. marriage is hard work - it's work as a couple with no kids, and i can only imagine it's even more work when you have 8 kids. you need privacy and intimate family times to build a relationship. i firmly believe that marriage and family need to come before celebrity, and it makes me sad that a) they chose celebrity, and b) we live in a culture where that's okay. if you're going to be married, be fully committed to it, and take personal responsibility for that commitment.

2. the south carolina governor's disappearance and affair - primarily because it's an affair, and that simultaneously makes me sad and mad. as i was reading an article about it, though, i saw that his wife has known about the affair for the last 6 months .... and yet it was still going on! today on cnn, she's saying that his career isn't a concern of her's and that she's more concerned about the character of her children. ummm, except that you knew he was having an affair, he kept doing it, and you stayed. if he has an affair, you both talk it out, he stops, and you stay, by all means, terrific. but you're basically condoning his action with your lack of action at that point. that's sure character building for your kids. not to mention that when your husband used s. carolina's money to disappear to argentina for a week over father's day, he didn't leave anyone in charge of the state. you're providing a terrific role model for your family. on the flip side, his wife has known about his affair for 6 months and he's enough of a self-centered jerk to keep doing it?? for real? and he thought he had any shot at being in the 2012 presidential election? that is so going to come out, hello! and how narcissistic are you that you thought you could ditch your job for a week, fly to argentina to be with your lover, and that no one would notice? well played, you now have the entirety of america noticing, mark sanford.

relatedly, i know that in countries such as france, where president sarkozy has been married several (3?) times and in fact is currently married to the chick he had been having an affair with, adultery isn't a huge deal in politics. i do think it is a huge deal, though, and should be - and not just because morally and ethically i think cheating on your spouse is awful. a few months ago, my coworker and i were speculating on whether we thought any of the execs in our company have ever had an affair, and we decided that no, we don't think any of them have. as we were talking about it, she made the point that the kind of person you are in a relationship is the kind of person you are in business - if you can't be trusted in a marriage, you can't be trusted in business either. cheating in a marriage shows a general disregard for morality, a lack of commitment, a propensity for lying, etc - why would you want to be in business with someone like that? i very much agree with that sentiment, and i think it applies to politics as well. i want someone leading my state and my country who is commited to doing the job right, has a strong sense of ethics, is honest, etc. do people make mistakes? absolutely. but i think by continuing to have an affair 6 months after his wife found out, mark sanford showed pretty clearly that he didn't think his affair was a mistake, and that he has a pretty strong propensity for lying and a disregard for both general ethics and anyone but himself. rant over.

(sorry, i've been pondering the nature of affairs and divorce quite a bit lately - one downside to facebook is that you notice when people you went to high school with change their status from "married" to "single", and that makes me really really sad. i know it should make me thankful that i have a wonderful husband and a solid marriage, and i am, but i'm just so sad for people who don't.)

3. ed mcmahon, farrah fawcett, and michael jackson dying. i think i'm a little young to remember the heyday of, well, any of their careers - i know ed mcmahon from the publisher's clearinghouse sweepstakes, farrah fawcett from charlie's angels reruns during the summers growing up, and michael jackson from the tail end of his pop career, singing beat it in music class in 4th grade, and his crazy neverland ranch/marriage/child molestation drama in the 90s. the thing is, though, that them dying represents the ending of an era. who knows if my kids will even know who ed mcmahon and farrah fawcett are, and someday when i'm rockin out to billie jean or smooth criminal, they will look at me like i'm nuts - likely in much the same way that i look at people who listen to the all-elvis station on satellite radio. the three of them are just pop culture icons from my childhood, and it makes me feel a little bit old that they're dead.

itchy

one downside to camping is the mosquitos, especially since i am more allergic to bug bites than the average joe (no, i'm not just being a wuss - i really am). i brought bug repellant with me, but totally failed to use it, and now have big itchy swollen welts on my legs as a reminder for me in the future. i just counted, and i only have 9 bites total on both legs, but good heavens it feels like a few dozen at the least. one at the top of my right calf was swollen to the size of a quarter yesterday, and i have enough on my ankles that every time i walk, the movement of the skin sends itchy hurty feelings all down the tops of my feet and up my legs. grrrrr. scott very sweetly asked me last night if there was anything he could do, and i asked if he'd be willing to do a below-the-knee amputation for me. he didn't go for it. i think they're getting better today, though - the swelling's all down, and they don't feel burning hot anymore.

our friend miranda (we went to telluride with her and her husband jordan) is an ecologist, and was telling us about a study she saw that concluded that mosquitos only purpose in the whole circle of life is to keep humans in check. i'd say that's about right.

a new take on political corruption

the freakonomics blog just sent me this op-ed piece from the washington post that i thought was far too interesting to not share. it's a great mix of cognitive psych, statistics, and political science analysis. it's like political csi!

The Devil Is in the Digits

By Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco / Saturday, June 20, 2009; 12:02 AM

Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran -- where he is thought to be highly unpopular -- and even Tabriz, the capital city of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi's native East Azarbaijan province.

Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad's vote share across Iran's provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections.

These pieces of the story point in the direction of fraud, to be sure. They have led experts to speculate that the election results released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed doors. But we don't have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what happened. Here's how.
We'll concentrate on vote counts -- the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces -- and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi's actual vote count in Isfahan), we'll focus on digits 7 and 9.

This may seem strange, because these digits usually don't change who wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

So what can we make of Iran's election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran's government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates -- Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai -- is reported to have received in each of the provinces -- a total of 116 numbers.
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year's U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.

But that's not all. Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran's vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.
Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 percent. And while our first test -- variation in last-digit frequencies -- suggests that Rezai's vote counts are the most irregular, the lack of non-adjacent digits is most striking in the results reported for Ahmadinejad.

Each of these two tests provides strong evidence that the numbers released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior were manipulated. But taken together, they leave very little room for reasonable doubt. The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.

welcome to colorful colorado! (western slope edition)

i am now firmly of the opinion that seeing the western slope in colorado should be on everyone's bucket list. we roadtripped to the bluegrass festival over in telluride, and holy cow, this is one beautiful state. big (7 hours to do a diagonal in the middle of the state), but beautiful. i spent a fair amount of the 7 hours each way with my camera in my lap, snapping pictures through the car window - i'll hopefully get them uploaded this week.

brief recap of the trip: stopped in frisco for early dinner at the bbq challenge (i was meat-ed out after like 4 samples and had to get some lemonade and mini-donuts to recover), tried to figure out which 14er was which while driving down hwy 24, ran across a whitewater rafting competition in salida, enjoyed some completely gorgeous scenery, put up our tent after midnight both friday and saturday nights, played spades for approximately 6 hours on saturday while listening to bluegrass (and actually really enjoyed a few of the bands), got rained on twice at the festival, categorized the hippies (dirty hippies, aging hippies, crazy hippies, etc) and got very tired of the smell of second hand pot, rode a gondola in pitch darkness with white aspen trunks looking like bones around us and an amazing view of the stars above, almost got to see the black canyon of the gunnison on the drive home but didn't because they charge $15 admission and we only wanted a 5-minute peek. plus lots of great conversation in the car in the middle. whew.

anyway, it was loads of fun, and having driven through the western slope, i think everyone else should do it too. especially hwy 50 between salida and montrose - wow. the front range mountains are beautiful, for sure, but they're all lodgepole pine and aspen. the western slope has some great rolling ranch land with sagebrush hills and gambel oak valleys, and mountains of spruce and ponderosa and fir mixed in with plenty of big deciduous trees. plus rivers and creeks and reservoirs and canyons. it's pretty fabulous.

i'm a happy camper

we're heading off tomorrow for camping and the bluegrass festival in telluride! i should be packing right now (so that i can do other things with my morning off tomorrow, like run errands or contact paper my shelves), but i'm sleepy and debating whether i should just go to bed - so instead i'm compromising and blogging. what?

i'm excited - we haven't gone camping in two years, but we did a trial run on putting our tent up and it went very smoothly. which is odd because we couldn't figure it out for the life of us last time and spent a weekend sleeping in a lopsided, slightly caved-in tent. i remember waking up in the middle of the night with claustrophobia because scott was breathing straight onto my face, so all i was getting was his carbon dioxide and very little oxygen, and the tent had sagged to just a few inches over our heads. and we didn't know how to put the rain cover up properly, so the sides of our tent were soggy. i think it'll go much better this time, though. we'll even get access to a shower the first night!

okay, i'm yawning, so i'm going to go haphazardly pick out clothes for camping that i'll probably just switch out in the morning anyway. it's remarkably hard trying to pick out clothes for a camping trip that's actually centered around another event. normal camping, we'd be doing hiking the next day so i'd pack scrubby clothes and big hiking shoes and a sweatshirt. but since we'll spend all day at a bluegrass fest, i want to be appropriate for all weather possibilities (30% chance of rain at the moment), comfortable, but still cute enough that i won't be ashamed to see pictures of myself later. flops or tennis shoes or hikers? jeans or shorts or comfy black yoga pants? cardigan or fleece or tshirt? supercomfy sports bra or one that doesn't give me uniboob? see? too many options.