I abandon my abusive relationship with Facebook
I have just deactivated my Facebook account, I hope for good.

This interview with Eben Moglen provides many of the reasons, and was probably as responsible as anything for my decision.

But the straw that broke the camel's back was a tiny one. What finally pushed me over the edge was this: "People who can see your info can bring it with them when they use apps.". This time, that meant that when women posted reviews of men they had dated on a dating review site, the review site was able to copy the men's pictures from Facebook to insert into the reviews. Which probably was not what the men had in mind when they first posted those pictures to Facebook.

This was, for me, just a little thing. But it was the last straw because when I read Facebook's explanation of why this was, or wasn't, counter to their policy, I realized that with Facebook, you cannot tell the difference.

For any particular appalling breach of personal privacy you can never guess whether it was something that they will defend (and then do again), or something that they will apologize for (and then do again anyway). The repeated fuckups for which they are constantly apologizing are indistinguishable from their business model.

So I went to abandon my account, and there was a form they wanted me to fill out to explain why: "Reason for leaving (Required)": One choice was "I have a privacy concern.":

Please remember that you can always control the information that you share and who can see it. Before you deactivate, please take a moment to learn more about how privacy works on Facebook. If there is a specific question or concern you have, we hope you'll let us know so we can address it in the future.

Facebook makes this insane claim in full innocence, expecting you to believe it, because they believe it themselves. They make this claim even after the times they have silently changed their privacy policies, the times they have silently violated their own privacy policies, the times they have silently opted their users into sharing of private information, the times they have buried the opt-out controls three pages deep under a mountain of confusing verbiage and a sign that said "Beware of The Leopard".

There's no point arguing with a person who makes a claim like that. Never mind that I was in the process of deactivating my account. I was deactivating my account, and not destroying it, because they refuse to destroy it. They refuse to relinquish the personal information they have collected about me, because after all it is their information, not mine, and they will never, ever give it up, never. That is why they allow you only to deactivate your account, while they keep and continue to use everything, forever.

But please remember that you can always control the information that you share and who can see it. Thanks, Facebook! Please destroy it all and never let anyone see it again. "Er, no, we didn't mean that you could have that much control."

This was an abusive relationship, and I'm glad I decided to walk away.

[ Addendum 20120210: Ricardo Signes points out that these is indeed an option that they claim will permanently delete your account, although it is hard to find. ]

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Longshot bets by time travelers
Back in February 2007, I started a blog article that was to begin as follows:

If you're a time traveller, one way to make money is by placing bets on events that you already know the outcomes of. The stock market is only the most obvious example of this; who wouldn't have liked to have invested in IBM in 1916?

But if making money is only your secondary goal, and your real object is to amaze your friends and confound your enemies, there may be more effective bets to place. I forget who it was who suggested to me how much fun it would be to go back to 1980 and bet that the cross-dressing star of Bosom Buddies would win back-to-back "Best Actor" Oscars within twenty years. But it's a fine idea.

Until today. I wonder what sort of odds you could have gotten in 1995 betting that within twenty years, the creators of "What Would Brian Boitano Do" ("Dude! Don't say 'pigfucker' in front of Jesus!") would win the Tony Award for "Best Musical".

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Adventures in systems administration

The toilet snake costs ten dollars. It is a three-foot long steel spring with a pointy corkscrew on the end. You work it down the toilet pipe while twisting it. It either breaks up the blockage, pokes the blockage far enough down the pipe that it can be flushed away, or else the corkscrew tangles in the blockage and you can pull it out. Professional plumbers use a much larger, motorized version to unclog sewer pipes.

People on the train stare at you if you are carrying around a toilet snake, I learned.

When I got home from work I snaked the toilet, and lo and behold, it disgorged a plastic comb. Mission accomplished, most likely.

Later on, Lila, who is three now and fascinated with all things poop, asked me for the umpteenth time why the toilet was clogged. This time I had an answer. "It clogged because someone flushed a comb down it. Do you have any idea who might have done that?"

Lila considered. "I don't know..." she said, thoughtfully. Then her face brightened. "Maybe Iris did it!"

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Linus Torvalds' Greatest Invention
Happy Guy Fawkes' Day!

On Wednesday night I gave a talk for the Philadelphia Linux Users' Group on "Linus Torvalds' Greatest Invention". I was hoping that some people would show up expecting it to be Linux, but someone spilled the beans ahead of time and everyone knew it was going to be about Git. But maybe that wasn't so bad because a bunch of people showed up to hear about Git.

But then they were probably disappointed because I didn't talk at all about how to use Git. I talked a little about what it would do, and some about implementation. I used to give a lot of talks of the type "a bunch of interesting crap I threw together about X", but in recent years I've felt that a talk needs to have a theme. So for quite a while I knew I wanted to talk about Git internals, but I didn't know what the theme was.

Then I realized that the theme could be that Git proves that Linus was really clever. With Linux, the OS was already designed for him, and he didn't have to make a lot of the important decisions, like what it means to be a file. But Git is full of really clever ideas that other people might not have thought of.

Anyway, the slides are online if you are interested in looking.

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Periodicity

The number of crank dissertations

dealing with the effects of sunspots

on political and economic events

peaks every eleven years.

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Second-largest cities
A while back I was in the local coffee shop and mentioned that my wife had been born in Rochester, New York. "Ah," said the server. "The third-largest city in New York." Really? I would not have guessed that. (She was right, by the way.) As a native of the first-largest city in New York, the one they named the state after, I have spent very little time thinking about the lesser cities of New York. I have, of course, heard that there are some. But I have hardly any idea what they are called, or where they are.

It appears that the second-largest city in New York state is some place called (get this) "Buffalo". Okay, whatever. But that got me wondering if New York was the state with the greatest disparity between its largest and second-largest city. Since I had the census data lying around from a related project (and a good thing too, since the Census Bureau website moved the file) I decided to find out.

The answer is no. New York state has only one major city, since its next-largest settlement is Buffalo, with 1.1 million people. (Estimated, as of 2006.) But the second-largest city in Illinois is Peoria, which is actually the punchline of jokes. (Not merely because of its small size; compare Dubuque, Iowa, a joke, with Davenport, Iowa, not a joke.) The population of Peoria is around 370,000, less than one twenty-fifth that of Chicago.

But if you want to count weird exceptions, Rhode Island has everyone else beat. You cannot compare the sizes of the largest and second-largest cities in Rhode Island at all. Rhode Island is so small that it has only one city, Seriously. No, stop laughing! Rhode Island is no laughing matter.

The Articles of Confederation required unanimous consent to amend, and Rhode Island kept screwing everyone else up, by withholding consent, so the rest of the states had to junk the Articles in favor of the current United States Constitution. Rhode Island refused to ratify the new Constitution, insisting to the very end that the other states had no right to secede from the Confederation, until well after all of the other twelve had done it, and they finally realized that the future of their teeny one-state Confederation as an enclave of the United States of America was rather iffy. Even then, their vote to join the United States went 34–32.

But I digress.

Actually, for many years I have said that you can impress a Rhode Islander by asking where they live, and then—regardless of what they say—remarking "Oh, that's near Providence, isn't it?" They are always pleased. "Yes, that's right!" The census data proves that this is guaranteed to work. (Unless they live in Providence, of course.)

Here's a joke for mathematicians. Q: What is Rhode Island? A: The topological closure of Providence.

Okay, I am finally done ragging on Rhode Island.

Here is the complete data, ordered by size disparity. I wasn't sure whether to put Rhode Island at the top or the bottom, so I listed it twice, just like in the Senate.

State	Largest city and its Population		Second-largest city and its population		Quotient
Rhode Island	Providence-New Bedford-Fall River	1,612,989	—
Illinois	Chicago-Naperville-Joliet	9,505,748	Peoria	370,194	25	.68
New York	New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island	18,818,536	Buffalo-Niagara Falls	1,137,520	16	.54
Minnesota	Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington	3,175,041	Duluth	274,244	11	.58
Maryland	Baltimore-Towson	2,658,405	Hagerstown-Martinsburg	257,619	10	.32
Georgia	Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta	5,138,223	Augusta-Richmond County	523,249	9	.82
Washington	Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue	3,263,497	Spokane	446,706	7	.31
Michigan	Detroit-Warren-Livonia	4,468,966	Grand Rapids-Wyoming	774,084	5	.77
Massachusetts	Boston-Cambridge-Quincy	4,455,217	Worcester	784,992	5	.68
Oregon	Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton	2,137,565	Salem	384,600	5	.56
Hawaii	Honolulu	909,863	Hilo	171,191	5	.31
Nevada	Las Vegas-Paradise	1,777,539	Reno-Sparks	400,560	4	.44
Idaho	Boise City-Nampa	567,640	Coeur d'Alene	131,507	4	.32
Arizona	Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale	4,039,182	Tucson	946,362	4	.27
New Mexico	Albuquerque	816,811	Las Cruces	193,888	4	.21
Alaska	Anchorage	359,180	Fairbanks	86,754	4	.14
Indiana	Indianapolis-Carmel	1,666,032	Fort Wayne	408,071	4	.08
Colorado	Denver-Aurora	2,408,750	Colorado Springs	599,127	4	.02
Maine	Portland-South Portland-Biddeford	513,667	Bangor	147,180	3	.49
Vermont	Burlington-South Burlington	206,007	Rutland	63,641	3	.24
California	Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana	12,950,129	San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont	4,180,027	3	.10
Nebraska	Omaha-Council Bluffs	822,549	Lincoln	283,970	2	.90
Kentucky	Louisville-Jefferson County	1,222,216	Lexington-Fayette	436,684	2	.80
Wisconsin	Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis	1,509,981	Madison	543,022	2	.78
Alabama	Birmingham-Hoover	1,100,019	Mobile	404,157	2	.72
Kansas	Wichita	592,126	Topeka	228,894	2	.59
Pennsylvania	Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington	5,826,742	Pittsburgh	2,370,776	2	.46
New Hampshire	Manchester-Nashua	402,789	Lebanon	172,429	2	.34
Mississippi	Jackson	529,456	Gulfport-Biloxi	227,904	2	.32
Utah	Salt Lake City	1,067,722	Ogden-Clearfield	497,640	2	.15
Florida	Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach	5,463,857	Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater	2,697,731	2	.03
North Dakota	Fargo	187,001	Bismarck	101,138	1	.85
South Dakota	Sioux Falls	212,911	Rapid City	118,763	1	.79
North Carolina	Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord	1,583,016	Raleigh-Cary	994,551	1	.59
Arkansas	Little Rock-North Little Rock	652,834	Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers	420,876	1	.55
Montana	Billings	148,116	Missoula	101,417	1	.46
Missouri	St. Louis	2,796,368	Kansas City	1,967,405	1	.42
Iowa	Des Moines-West Des Moines	534,230	Davenport-Moline-Rock Island	377,291	1	.42
Virginia	Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News	1,649,457	Richmond	1,194,008	1	.38
New Jersey	Trenton-Ewing	367,605	Atlantic City	271,620	1	.35
Louisiana	New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner	1,024,678	Baton Rouge	766,514	1	.34
Connecticut	Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford	1,188,841	Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk	900,440	1	.32
Oklahoma	Oklahoma City	1,172,339	Tulsa	897,752	1	.31
Delaware	Seaford	180,288	Dover	147,601	1	.22
Wyoming	Cheyenne	85,384	Casper	70,401	1	.21
South Carolina	Columbia	703,771	Charleston-North Charleston	603,178	1	.17
Tennessee	Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro	1,455,097	Memphis	1,274,704	1	.14
Texas	Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington	6,003,967	Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown	5,539,949	1	.08
West Virginia	Charleston	305,526	Huntington-Ashland	285,475	1	.07
Ohio	Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor	2,114,155	Cincinnati-Middletown	2,104,218	1	.00
Rhode Island	Providence-New Bedford-Fall River	1,612,989	—

Some of this data is rather odd because of the way the census bureau aggregates cities. For example, the largest city in New Jersey is Newark. But Newark is counted as part of the New York City metropolitan area, so doesn't count separately. If it did, New Jersey's quotient would be 5.86 instead of 1.35. I should probably rerun the data without the aggregation. But you get oddities that way also.

I also made a scatter plot. The x-axis is the population of the largest city, and the y-axis is the population of the second-largest city. Both axes are log-scale:

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Milo of Croton and the sometimes failure of inductive proofs
Ranjit Bhatnagar once told me the following story: A young boy, upon hearing the legend of Milo of Croton, determined to do the same. There was a calf in the barn, born that very morning, and the boy resolved to lift up the calf each day. As the calf grew, so would his strength, day by day, until the calf was grown and he was able to lift a bull.

"Did it work?" I asked.

"No," said Ranjit. "A newborn calf already weighs like a hundred pounds."

Usually you expect the induction step to fail, but sometimes it's the base case that gets you.

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Stupid crap
This is a short compendium of some of the dumbest arguments I've ever heard. Why? I think it's because they were so egregiously stupid that they've been bugging me ever since.

Anyway, it's been on my to-do list for about three years, so what the hell.

I pointed out that he had also been the Governor of California.

"Oh, yeah."

But it doesn't even stop there. Who says some actor is qualified to govern California? Well, he had previously been president of the Screen Actors' Guild, which seems like a reasonable thing for the Governor of California to have done.

"Huh."

Sometimes you can't think of the right thing to say at the right time, but this time I did think of the right thing. "My father," I said. "My brother. My husband. My doctor. My boss. My congressman."

"Oh yeah."

I asked my dad about this, and he wanted to know how that theory applied to the low doorways and small furniture. Heh.

I think Herbert Illig's theory is probably in this category, Herbert Illig, in case you missed it, believes that this is actually the year 1712, because the years 614–911 never actually occurred. Rather, they were created by an early 7th-century political conspiracy to rewrite history and tamper with the calendar. Unfortunately, most of the source material is in German, which I cannot read. But it would seem that cross-comparisons of astronomical and historical records should squash this theory pretty flat.

In high school I tried to promulgate the rumor that John Entwistle and Keith Moon were so disgusted by the poor quality of the album Odds & Sods that they refused to pose for the cover photograph. The rest of the band responded by finding two approximate lookalikes to stand in for Moon and Enwistle, and by adopting a cover design calculated to obscure the impostors' faces as much as possible.

This sort of thing was in some ways much harder to pull off successfully in 1985 than it is today. But if you have heard this story before, please forget it, because I made it up.

This acknowledgement is not intended to be apropos of this blog post. I just decided I should start acknowledging gifts, and this happened to be the first post since I made the decision.

[ Addendum 20090214: A similar equivocation of "your" is mentioned by Plato. ]

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License plate sabotage
A number of years ago I was opening a new bank account, and the bank clerk asked me what style of checks I wanted, with pictures clowns or balloons or whatever. I said I wanted them to be pale blue, possibly with wavy lines. I reasoned that there was no circumstance under which it would be a benefit to me to have my checks be memorable or easily-recognized.

So it is too with car license plates, and for a number of years I have toyed with the idea of getting a personalized plate with II11I11I or 0OO0OO00 or some such, on the theory that there is no possible drawback to having the least legible plate number permitted by law. (If you are reading this post in a font that renders 0 and O the same, take my word for it that 0OO0OO00 contains four letters and four digits.)

A plate number like O0OO000O increases the chance that your traffic tickets (or convictions!) will be thrown out because your vehicle has not been positively identified, or that some trivial clerical error will invalidate them.

Recently a car has appeared in my neighborhood that seems to be owned by someone with the same idea:

Other Pennsylvanians should take note. Consider selecting OO0O0O, 00O00, and other plate numbers easily confused with this one. The more people with easily-confused license numbers, the better the protection.

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The Census Bureau's data file
Last week I posted an article about calculations with data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. I'm thinking about writing that up in more detail, but today I learned something so astonishing that I couldn't wait to mention it.

The data is available from the Census Bureau's web site. It is a CSV file. Most of the file contains actual data, like this:

20220,,"Dubuque, IA",Metropolitan Statistical Area,"92,384","91,603","91,223","90,635","89,571","89,216","89,265","89,156","89,143"

table with row headers in column A and column headers in rows 3 through 4 (leading dots indicate sub-parts),,,,,,,,,,,,^M
"Table 1. Annual Estimates of the Population of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2006",,,,,,,,,,,,^M
CBSA Code,"Metro
Division
Code",Geographic area,"Legal/statistical
area description",Population estimates,,,,,,,"April 1, 2000",^M
,,,,"July 1, 
2006","July 1, 
2005","July 1, 
2004","July 1, 
2003","July 1, 
2002","July 1, 
2001","July 1, 
2000",Estimates base,Census^M
,,Metropolitan statistical areas,,,,,,,,,,^M

(I've translated ASCII CR characters to ^M sequences so that you can see that although the lines of the file are CR-LF terminated, some of the items contain extra LFs for no particular reason.)

Well, all this is minor. My real complaint is that some of the state name abbreviations are garbled:

19740,,"Denver-Aurora, CO1",Metropolitan Statistical Area,"2,408,750","2,361,778","2,326,126","2,299,879","2,276,592","2,245,030","2,193,737","2,179,320","2,179,240"

Then I sent email to an acquaintance who works for the Census Bureau (identity suppressed to protect the innocent), pointing out the errors so that they could be corrected.

My contact checked with the people who produced the data, and informed me that, according to them, CO1 was not an error. Rather, the 1 was a footnote mark, directing me to a footnote at the bottom of the file:

"1Broomfield, CO was formed from parts of Adams, Boulder, Jefferson, and Weld Counties, CO on November 15, 2001 and was coextensive with Broomfield city.",,,,,,,,,,,,^M
"For purposes of presenting data for metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas for Census 2000, Broomfield is treated as if it were a county at the time of the 2000 census.",,,,,,,,,,,,^M

I would like to suggest the following as a basic principle of computerized data processing:

Data files should contain data.

There's a larger issue here about confusing content and presentation. But "Data files should contain data" is simpler and easier to remember.

I suspect that this file was exported from a spreadsheet program, probably Excel. Spreadsheet programs desperately want you to confuse content and presentation. This is why one should not use a spreadsheet as a database.

I now recall another occasion when I had to deal with data that was exported from a spreadsheet that was pretending to be a database. It was a database of products made by a large cosmetics company. A typical record looked like this:

"Soft-Pressed Powder Blusher","618J-05","Warm, natural-looking powder colour for all skins.  Wide range of shades-subtle to vibrant.  With applicator brush.","Cheeks","Nudes","Chestnut Blush","All","","19951201","Yes","","14.5",""

"Water-Dissolve Cream Cleanser","6.61E+01","Creamy cleanser for drier, more sensitive skins.  Dissolves even the most tenacious makeups.","Cleansers","","","","Sub I, I, II","19951201","Yes","1","14.5",""

Back to the Census Bureau, which almost screwed me by putting a footnote on a state name. What if they had decided to put footnotes on the population figures? Then I would have been really screwed, because it would have been completely undetectable.

No, wait! It's all become clear. That's why they put the commas in the numerals!

[ Addendum 20080129: My Census Bureau contact tells me that the authors of the data file have seen the wisdom of my point of view, in spite of my unconstructive and unhelpful feedback (I said "Wow, that is an incredibly terrible idea") and are planning to address the issue in the next release of the data. Hooray for happy endings! ]

[ Addendum 20080129: My Census Bureau contact tells me that they do sometimes put footnotes on the data items, so don't laugh too hard at my remark about the commas. ]

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Smallest state capitals
I think it was James Kushner who first suggested that I consider the question of which U.S. state capital had the smallest population in relation to its state's largest city. For example, New York City is the largest city in the United States, but the state capital of New York State is Albany, with a population of about 850,000. The population of New York City exceeds that of Albany by a factor of around 20.

At the other end of the scale, of course, we have state capitals like Boston, Denver, Atlanta, and Honolulu that are their state's largest cities. For these states, the population quotient is 1, its theoretical minimum.

Well, James, it only took me thirty years, but here it is.

I tried to resolve the question manually a few weeks ago, by browsing Wikipedia for the populations of likely candidates. Today I took a more methodical approach, downloading the U.S. Census Bureau's July 2006 estimates for populations of metropolitan areas, and writing a couple of little programs to grovel the data.

I had to augment the Census Bureau's data with two items: Annapolis, MD, and Montpelier, VT are not large enough to be included in the metropolitan area data file. I used U.S. Census 2006 estimates for these cities as well.

I discarded one conurbation: the Census Bureau includes a "Metropolitan Division" in New Hampshire that consists of Rockingham and Strafford counties; this was the most populous identified area in New Hampshire. It didn't seem entirely germane to the question, so I took it out. On the other hand, including it doesn't change the results much: its population is 416,000, compared with Manchester-Nashua's 402,000.

The results follow.

State	Capital and its Population		Largest metropolitan area and its population		Quotient
MD	Annapolis	36,408	Baltimore-Towson	2,658,405	73	.02
IL	Springfield	206,112	Chicago-Naperville-Joliet	9,505,748	46	.12
NV	Carson City	55,289	Las Vegas-Paradise	1,777,539	32	.15
VT	Montpelier	7,954	Burlington-South Burlington	206,007	25	.90
NY	Albany	850,957	New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island	18,818,536	22	.11
MO	Jefferson City	144,958	St. Louis	2,796,368	19	.29
KY	Frankfort	69,068	Louisville-Jefferson County	1,222,216	17	.70
FL	Tallahassee	336,502	Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach	5,463,857	16	.24
WA	Olympia	234,670	Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue	3,263,497	13	.91
AK	Juneau	30,737	Anchorage	359,180	11	.69
PA	Harrisburg	525,380	Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington	5,826,742	11	.09
SD	Pierre	19,761	Sioux Falls	212,911	10	.77
MI	Lansing	454,044	Detroit-Warren-Livonia	4,468,966	9	.84
NJ	Trenton	367,605	Edison	2,308,777	6	.28
CA	Sacramento	2,067,117	Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana	12,950,129	6	.26
NM	Santa Fe	142,407	Albuquerque	816,811	5	.74
OR	Salem	384,600	Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton	2,137,565	5	.56
DE	Dover	147,601	Wilmington	691,688	4	.69
VA	Richmond	1,194,008	Washington-Arlington-Alexandria	5,290,400	4	.43
ME	Augusta	121,068	Portland-South Portland-Biddeford	513,667	4	.24
TX	Austin	1,513,565	Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington	6,003,967	3	.97
AL	Montgomery	361,748	Birmingham-Hoover	1,100,019	3	.04
NE	Lincoln	283,970	Omaha-Council Bluffs	822,549	2	.90
WI	Madison	543,022	Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis	1,509,981	2	.78
NH	Concord	148,085	Manchester-Nashua	402,789	2	.72
KS	Topeka	228,894	Wichita	592,126	2	.59
MT	Helena	70,558	Billings	148,116	2	.10
ND	Bismarck	101,138	Fargo	187,001	1	.85
NC	Raleigh	994,551	Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord	1,583,016	1	.59
LA	Baton Rouge	766,514	New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner	1,024,678	1	.34
OH	Columbus	1,725,570	Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor	2,114,155	1	.23
AR	Little Rock	652,834	Little Rock-North Little Rock	652,834	1	.00
AZ	Phoenix	4,039,182	Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale	4,039,182	1	.00
CO	Denver	2,408,750	Denver-Aurora	2,408,750	1	.00
CT	Hartford	1,188,841	Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford	1,188,841	1	.00
GA	Atlanta	5,138,223	Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta	5,138,223	1	.00
HI	Honolulu	909,863	Honolulu	909,863	1	.00
IA	Des Moines	534,230	Des Moines-West Des Moines	534,230	1	.00
ID	Boise	567,640	Boise City-Nampa	567,640	1	.00
IN	Indianapolis	1,666,032	Indianapolis-Carmel	1,666,032	1	.00
MA	Boston	4,455,217	Boston-Cambridge-Quincy	4,455,217	1	.00
MN	St. Paul	3,175,041	Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington	3,175,041	1	.00
MS	Jackson	529,456	Jackson	529,456	1	.00
OK	Oklahoma City	1,172,339	Oklahoma City	1,172,339	1	.00
RI	Providence	1,612,989	Providence-New Bedford-Fall River	1,612,989	1	.00
SC	Columbia	703,771	Columbia	703,771	1	.00
TN	Nashville	1,455,097	Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro	1,455,097	1	.00
UT	Salt Lake City	1,067,722	Salt Lake City	1,067,722	1	.00
WV	Charleston	305,526	Charleston	305,526	1	.00
WY	Cheyenne	85,384	Cheyenne	85,384	1	.00

Nineteen of fifty state capitals are their state's largest cities.

Vermont is an interesting outlier here. It makes fourth place not because it has a large city, but because its capital, Montpelier, is so very small. I tried doing some scatter plots, to see if anything else jumped out, but they weren't very illuminating. If anything, the data is suprisingly evenly distributed. Here's an example:

[ Addendum 20080129: Some remarks about the format of the Census Bureau's data file. ]

[ Addendum 20090217: A comparison of the relative sizes of each state's largest and second-largest cities. ]

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An Austrian coincidence
Only one of these depicts a location in my obstetrician's waiting room where the paint is chipped.

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Girls of the SEC
I'm in the Raleigh-Durham airport, and I just got back from the newsstand, where I learned that the pictorial in this month's Playboy magazine this month is "Girls of the SEC". On seeing this, I found myself shaking my head in sad puzzlement.

This isn't the first time I've had this reaction on learning about a Playboy pictorial; last time was probably in August 2002 when I saw the "Women of Enron" cover. (I am not making this up.) I wasn't aware of The December 2002 feature, "Women of Worldcom" (I swear I'm not making this up), but I would have had the same reaction if I had been.

I know that in recent years the Playboy franchise has fallen from its former heights of glory: circulation is way down, the Playboy Clubs have all closed, few people still carry Playboy keychains. But I didn't remember that they had fallen quite so far. They seem to have exhausted all the plausible topics for pictorial features, and are now well into the scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel stage. The June 1968 feature was "Girls of Scandinavia". July 1999, "Girls of Hawaiian Tropic". Then "Women of Enron" and now "Girls of the SEC".

How many men have ever had a fantasy about sexy SEC employees, anyway? How can you even tell? Sexy flight attendants, sure; they wear recognizable uniforms. But what characterizes an SEC employee? A rumpled flannel suit? An interest in cost accounting? A tendency to talk about the new Basel II banking regulations? I tried to think of a category that would be less sexually inspiring than "SEC employees". It's difficult. My first thought was "Girls of Wal-Mart." But no, Wal-Mart employees wear uniforms.

If you go too far in that direction you end up in the realm of fetish. For example, Playboy is unlikely to do a feature on "girls of the infectious disease wards". But if they did, there is someone (probably on /b/), who would be extremely interested. It is hard to imagine anyone with a similarly intense interest in SEC employees.

So what's next for Playboy? Girls of the hospital gift shops? Girls of State Farm Insurance telephone customer service division? Girls of the beet canneries? Girls of Acadia University Grounds and Facilities Services? Girls of the DMV?

[ Pre-publication addendum: After a little more research, I figured out that SEC refers here to "Southeastern Conference" and that Playboy has done at least two other features with the same title, most recently in October 2001. I decided to run the article anyway, since I think I wouldn't have made the mistake if I hadn't been prepared ahead of time by "Women of Enron". ]

[ Addendum 20070913: This article is now on the first page of Google searches for "girls of the sec playboy". ]

[ Addendum 20070915: The article has moved up from tenth to third place. Truly, Google works in mysterious ways. ]

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Tough questions
It's easy to recognize a good question: a good question is one that takes a lot longer to answer than it does to ask. Chip Buchholtz's example is "what is a byte?" To answer that you have to get into the nitty gritty of computer architecture and how, although the information in the computer is stored by the bit, the memory bus can only address it by the byte.

One of the biology interns asked a me a good one a couple of weeks ago: he asked how, if Perl runs Perl scripts, and the OS is running Perl, what is running the OS? Now that is a tough question to answer. I explained about logic gates, and how the logic gates are built into trivial arithmetic and memory circuits, how these are then built up into ALUs and memories, and how these in turn are controlled by microcode, and finally how the logical parts are assembled into a computer. I don't know how understandable it was, but it was the best I could do in five minutes, and I think I got some of the idea across. But I started and finished by saying that it was basically miraculous.

My daughter Iris asks a ton of questions, some better than others. On any given evening she is likely to ask "Daddy, what are you doing?" about fifteen times, and "why?" about fifteen million times. "Why" can be a great question, but sometimes it's not so great; Iris asks both kinds. Sometimes it's in response to "I'm eating a sandwich." Then the inevitable "why?" is rather annoying.

Some of the "why" questions are nearly impossible to answer. For example, we see a lady coming up the street toward us. "Is that Susanna?" "No." "Why is it not Susanna?"

I think what's happening here is that having discovered this magic word that often produces interesting information, Iris is employing it whenever possible, even when it doesn't make sense, because she hasn't yet learned when it works and when not. Why is that not Susanna? Hey, you never know when you might get an interesting answer. But there might be something else going on that I don't appreciate.

But the nice thing about Iris's incessant questions is that she listens to and remembers the answers, ponders them deeply, and then is likely to come back with an insightful followup when you least expect it.

Order Make Way for Ducklings with kickback no kickback

Speaking of poop, last month Iris asked a puzzler: why don't birds use toilets? I think this was motivated by our earlier discussion of bird poop on our car.

In Make Way for Ducklings there's a picture of the friendly policeman Michael, running back to his police box to order a police escort to help the ducklings across Beacon Street. He's holding his billy club. Iris asked what that was for. I thought a moment, and then said "It's for hitting people with." Later I wondered if I had given an inaccurate or incomplete answer, so I asked around, and did some reading. It appears I got that one right. Some folks I know suggested that I should have said it was for hitting bad people, but I'd rather stick to the plain facts, and leave out the editorializing.

Order The Defeat of the Spanish Armada with kickback no kickback

So I was reading the Mattingly book this evening, and Iris was eating and playing with Play-Doh on the kitchen floor. After the eleventh repetition of "Daddy, what are you doing?" "Reading." I decided to tell Iris what I was reading about. I said that I was reading about ships, that ships are big boats; they carry lots of men and guns. Iris asked why they carried guns, and I explained that often the ships carried treasure, like spices or gold or jewels or cloth, and that pirates tried to steal it. Iris asked if the cloth was like a wash cloth, and I said no, it was more like the kind of cloth that Mommy makes quilts from, or like the silk that her silk dress is made of. I explained about the pirates, which she seemed to understand, because toddlers know all about people who try to take stuff that isn't theirs. And then she asked the question I couldn't answer: Why were there men on the ships, but no women?

I was totally stumped; I don't even know where to begin explaining to a three-year-old why there are no women on ships in 1588. The only answers I could think of had to do with women's traditional roles, with European mores, social constructions of gender, and so on, all stuff that wouldn't help. Sometimes women were smuggled aboard ship, but I wasn't going to say that either.

I don't usually give up, but this time I gave up. This is a tough question of the first order, easy to ask, hard to answer. It's a lot easier to explain wastewater treatment.

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