As a teenager in the 1970s, I listened to Cream and Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. The first rock concert I ever went to was Deep Purple at the Royal Albert Hall. (The first public performance of "Strange Kind of Woman.") My Dad, who was born in 1918, loved the Beatles, but I remember him accusing me of attempting to destroy the needle on our Dansette Bermuda when he heard the feedback on a track by the Nice.
As an older teen and an adult, my tastes shifted more to classical music, but that includes a healthy appreciation for some 20th century atonal and dissonant pieces.
So with that loud and progressive pedigree, I always wondered what on earth my kids could possibly deliver that would make me screech -- in the time-honored fashion of all parents -- "you call that noise music?"
I found it. Have you heard Justin Bieber's mind-bogglingly monotonous and whiny "Baby"? It sounds like someone's stuck a Casio drum track onto a British police siren and played it back with the treble knob turned up to 11. If the melody used a fourth note, I must have missed it. Not even a guest appearance by Ludacris can redeem this.
See, in my generation, we just removed the tasteful refinement from popular music. Today, the tendency seems to be to eliminate any discernible talent. (When did we dispense with requiring, oh, I don't know, a voice for a singing career?)
Due credit to my boys -- this mediocrity just happened to pop up on Nickelodeon between the reruns of Full House that they're currently glued to. Although I'm not sure their current devotion to this celebration of 80s adolescent hairstyling isn't just as suspect. (Personally, I'm watching reruns of The Avengers on Netflix. Class. Chemistry.)
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Tales from the City.
The New York Times has a regular feature on Mondays for readers' anecdotes and observations, some of them highly entertaining and some of them terminally banal and self-serving.
My favorite ever was the story of a young woman, dressed like a punk, who had hailed a cab. She was about to step into it when an older woman in business attire slipped in front of her and started to climb in instead.
"Excuse me," says the punk politely, "but don't you think it's rude to take my cab?"
The older woman barely paused. "Hey, this is New York," she sneered. "You gotta hustle."
Whereupon the punk grabbed her, dragged her out of the cab, and threw her and briefcase onto the sidewalk. Then she went off in her cab.
For sheer chutzpah in cab-claiming, you can't beat an event from my days at Citibank. A colleague of mine had just secured a cab on Park Avenue for a lunchtime trip, when she heard, "Young woman, I'm sure you weren't thinking of taking that taxi ahead of me."
It was the booming voice of an older woman, a formidable harridan who spent her time as a corporate gadfly, who had just emerged from the Bank's annual general meeting and was a good twenty yards back. My colleague was so stunned by the blast of sheer authority that she meekly stood aside, waited for the woman to waddle over, and then held the door open for her.
My own tale -- which I never submitted to the Times, but there doesn't seem to be a statute of limitations -- happened about twenty years ago. I was walking on the Upper West Side on a Sunday afternoon, past a small restaurant that was disgorging brunchers. Two women, possibly mother and daughter, were discussing another woman they'd clearly just dined with.
"And she had such a lovely voice," said the older lady.
"Well, she is a ballerina," replied the younger.
My favorite ever was the story of a young woman, dressed like a punk, who had hailed a cab. She was about to step into it when an older woman in business attire slipped in front of her and started to climb in instead.
"Excuse me," says the punk politely, "but don't you think it's rude to take my cab?"
The older woman barely paused. "Hey, this is New York," she sneered. "You gotta hustle."
Whereupon the punk grabbed her, dragged her out of the cab, and threw her and briefcase onto the sidewalk. Then she went off in her cab.
______
For sheer chutzpah in cab-claiming, you can't beat an event from my days at Citibank. A colleague of mine had just secured a cab on Park Avenue for a lunchtime trip, when she heard, "Young woman, I'm sure you weren't thinking of taking that taxi ahead of me."
It was the booming voice of an older woman, a formidable harridan who spent her time as a corporate gadfly, who had just emerged from the Bank's annual general meeting and was a good twenty yards back. My colleague was so stunned by the blast of sheer authority that she meekly stood aside, waited for the woman to waddle over, and then held the door open for her.
______
My own tale -- which I never submitted to the Times, but there doesn't seem to be a statute of limitations -- happened about twenty years ago. I was walking on the Upper West Side on a Sunday afternoon, past a small restaurant that was disgorging brunchers. Two women, possibly mother and daughter, were discussing another woman they'd clearly just dined with.
"And she had such a lovely voice," said the older lady.
"Well, she is a ballerina," replied the younger.
Monday, May 10, 2010
What you gon' do with all that junk?
The editing of the novel continues. I wrote a long while ago of the novella-length document containing all my random notes, which needed to be raided before each chapter. Now the first draft is done, I went back to see if there were any plot points, dialog snippets, or observations that I'd missed.
No. Apart from a list of potential chapter titles, all puns on the word "sin" (the village where the murder takes place is called "Synne"), everything left -- now shrunk to ten pages -- is largely superfluous, including a set of insulting anagrams of the character name "Finsbury the Ferret" that I decided not to use. But there could be some ideas there for other novels.
"Fresh butt refinery" was my favorite.*
No. Apart from a list of potential chapter titles, all puns on the word "sin" (the village where the murder takes place is called "Synne"), everything left -- now shrunk to ten pages -- is largely superfluous, including a set of insulting anagrams of the character name "Finsbury the Ferret" that I decided not to use. But there could be some ideas there for other novels.
"Fresh butt refinery" was my favorite.*
*Also "shifty burnt reefer," "bent fruity freshener," and the appropriate "feisty fur brethren."
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Under the Whale.
New York's magnificent Natural History Museum does overnight sleepovers, and thanks to Secundus's boy scout membership, we were able to sign up the whole family for the event. It was originally scheduled for February, but one blizzard and two postponements later, it defaulted to the Mother's Day weekend.
Although I was a little disappointed that the exhibits didn't really come to life, like in that movie, it was great fun -- lots of activities for the kids, including a visit to the wondrous butterfly conservatory and a flashlight scavenger hunt through the dimly lit dinosaur galleries. And then we bed down on cots in the Hall of Ocean Life, under the lifesize blue whale, like displaced hurricane victims.
Wisdom and experience has taught me that on these communal sleeping expeditions, your best friends are a set of earplugs. Alas, the best that the drugstore had to offer weren't good enough to shut out the deafening snores of the dad just two cots down from me, and it took a while to fall into a fitful sleep.
Well before the morning wake-up call, I find myself being prodded severely. "You were snoring," hissed the mem-sahib, clambering back to her cot. I pantomime my identification of the true culprit and lie there grumpily till the lights come on, not sure whether I'm more offended by the interruption of my hard-won slumber or the wrongful accusation.
She's lucky it was Mother's Day.
Although I was a little disappointed that the exhibits didn't really come to life, like in that movie, it was great fun -- lots of activities for the kids, including a visit to the wondrous butterfly conservatory and a flashlight scavenger hunt through the dimly lit dinosaur galleries. And then we bed down on cots in the Hall of Ocean Life, under the lifesize blue whale, like displaced hurricane victims.
Well before the morning wake-up call, I find myself being prodded severely. "You were snoring," hissed the mem-sahib, clambering back to her cot. I pantomime my identification of the true culprit and lie there grumpily till the lights come on, not sure whether I'm more offended by the interruption of my hard-won slumber or the wrongful accusation.
She's lucky it was Mother's Day.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Load of Pollux.
Talking of twins, I told you I was an astronomical ignoramus. I paid more attention during this evening's dog walk and ran to the atlas when I got in. The two stars that smiled on me and Leila yesterday were Castor and Pollux, the brightest stars in the constellation Gemini.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
What's that again?
Here, a free sample, in case you didn't get time to do the Wiki:
"When identical twins reproduce with a pair of siblings, the resulting children are more related than half-siblings but less related than full siblings (they are genetically equivalent to 3/4 siblings) although they are legally double first cousins."
"When identical twins reproduce with a pair of siblings, the resulting children are more related than half-siblings but less related than full siblings (they are genetically equivalent to 3/4 siblings) although they are legally double first cousins."
Somebody up there likes . . . me?
Last night, I was walking the dog at about 10:30 p.m. The moonlight was making a few wispy clouds stand out, a couple of shades lighter than the dark sky. As I climbed a hill toward an area with fewer trees, I could see two brighter stars immediately in front of me -- they might have been Deneb and Vega, but I'm pretty clueless about astronomy.
While I watched, a straggle of cloud drifted below the two stars, and briefly took the form of a crescent before floating away. That formation was visible only for a few seconds and only to someone in my position. So the sky gave me my own personal smiley face.
I could use that. (Unless it was meant for Leila. Who is a good dog and deserves the sky's blessing.)
While I watched, a straggle of cloud drifted below the two stars, and briefly took the form of a crescent before floating away. That formation was visible only for a few seconds and only to someone in my position. So the sky gave me my own personal smiley face.
I could use that. (Unless it was meant for Leila. Who is a good dog and deserves the sky's blessing.)
Further up the family tree.
So I've been researching my family tree, a subject that is utterly fascinating to everyone on the planet, with the exception of those people who aren't me. It's an intriguing insight into one's roots -- I can go back more than 14 generations to 17th century Sussex on one particular, well-researched line. Or I could if there wasn't a strong suspicion that one rude forefather not too far back along this branch was illegitimate, making his father's ancestry a moot point. (I guess it was his mother who was the rude one.)
But because I'm living in America, I'm almost entirely dependent on the internet and the online availability of English census data going back to 1841 and the official register of births, marriages, and deaths from 1837. Online parish records are patchier. That's what's so useful about the websites that try to link you with other researchers, by spotting common names in your published family tree.
And last weekend, I made contact with Vicky in Manchester, England, because of our shared ancestor, Jeremiah Chadwick (1807-1890), my great-great-great-great-grandfather. Now, I'm particularly interested in this twiglet of the tree, because it contains just about the only direct forebear I've found with any claim to fame: Jeremiah's son Richard Sheldon Chadwick (1829 - 1892), who was a traveling lecturer, spiritualist, phrenologist, and a published poet. Vicky is descended from his sister, Mary, and because she lives where Jeremiah spent his days -- he was a revivalist preacher at the Manchester Mission -- she may have some insights into his life from local research.
But what brings compound interest and heritage together is this whole business of consanguinity -- roughly how many of your genes can you expect to share with someone else in your family? And it's back to the power of those pesky exponentials, only in reverse.
You get exactly half your DNA from each parent.* So your consanguinity with your mother or father, son or daughter is 50%.**
Every step on the family tree halves it. Grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and half-siblings: 25%. Cousins, great-grandparents, great-grandchildren: 12.5% or one-eighth. And so on.
Thus, while I'm more than delighted as a matter of family history to have obtained a signed first (i.e., only) edition of The Pleasures of Poetry, the Purgatory of Poets and other Poems by Richard Sheldon Chadwick, "The Teetotaler," from 1848, it's with the knowledge that we two literary men (and I use the term very, very loosely, in both cases) have only 3.125% of our genes in common. No bragging rights there. And I certainly didn't inherit his apparent aversion to alcohol.
So I attempted to calculate my relationship to Vicky. It's actually easier than you might think -- bear with me. First cousins share grandparents, second cousins share great-grandparents, etc. See the pattern? You count the number of "greats" and "grands" in the name of your "most recent common ancestor." The number is the degree of cousinhood. Simple.
But if you get different numbers, that's where "removal" comes in. In this case, the lower number is the degree of cousinhood, and the difference between the numbers is the removal. So Jeremiah, being my 4th-great-grandfather, gets me a score of 5 (4 greats + 1 grand). But Vicky has only 4; she's one generation closer to the esteemed Jeremiah. (She's younger than me, but clearly her branch wasn't in such a hurry to reproduce over the years.) Thus we are fourth cousins, once removed. Her new baby, born on Valentine's day this year, shares a birthday with 11-year-old Primus. They are therefore fifth cousins, once removed.
By contrast, the Queen of England is first cousin, 14 times removed from her namesake, Elizabeth I (1533-1603).
What does it mean? Well, in terms of consanguinity, you start with that first-cousin score of one eighth. Every additional degree of cousinhood is two more steps on the tree, which quarters the number. Every degree of removal is only one step, so that only halves it. It turns out that Vicky and I have less than one-thousandth*** of our genes in common. Or 0.09765625%.
If we ever meet, I'm not expecting any family resemblances.
That's the power of reverse compound interest. For the two Queen Elizabeths, it means -- mathematically -- that only one gene in 65,536 is the same due to inheritance along the most direct line. (Which wasn't the line of succession, incidentally.) Since the current thinking is we don't have more than about 30,000 genes, that means Q.E.II is much more likely to have the same genes as Q.E.I because of sheer random chance than because of descent. Primogeniture, my arse.
And that's when it struck me. In my meager research to date, I've been concentrating on my pathway back through my direct ancestors, branching with each generation and thus doubling the amount of research, despite the dwindling records. What about all those bits that go out to the side, like your great-grandfather's sister's family, the stuff that serious researchers bother about? Did my great-great-aunt -- just a first name in a box, gleaned from a census form -- marry a Beechey? Did she have a daughter or a granddaughter who married a Beechey?
In other words, could the line back to my adoptive family be shorter than I'd ever imagined? Could I unknowingly have a greater level of consanguinity with a living Beechey than I do with that far, distant ancestor who happened to plug my birthname, Russell, into the line?
And, by the same reasoning, could those elitist Mayflower madames be more closely related to their dry cleaners or their doormen than to any 1621 pilgrim to these shores? I do hope so. This is, after all, America.
Which is all just an excuse to send you to this mind-blowing Wikipedia page about cousins. Skip the stuff I just lifted and get down to what happens when a set of half-siblings marries another set of half-siblings. Somebody's actually worked this out!
*** One in 1,024 to be exact. Sound familiar?
But because I'm living in America, I'm almost entirely dependent on the internet and the online availability of English census data going back to 1841 and the official register of births, marriages, and deaths from 1837. Online parish records are patchier. That's what's so useful about the websites that try to link you with other researchers, by spotting common names in your published family tree.
And last weekend, I made contact with Vicky in Manchester, England, because of our shared ancestor, Jeremiah Chadwick (1807-1890), my great-great-great-great-grandfather. Now, I'm particularly interested in this twiglet of the tree, because it contains just about the only direct forebear I've found with any claim to fame: Jeremiah's son Richard Sheldon Chadwick (1829 - 1892), who was a traveling lecturer, spiritualist, phrenologist, and a published poet. Vicky is descended from his sister, Mary, and because she lives where Jeremiah spent his days -- he was a revivalist preacher at the Manchester Mission -- she may have some insights into his life from local research.
But what brings compound interest and heritage together is this whole business of consanguinity -- roughly how many of your genes can you expect to share with someone else in your family? And it's back to the power of those pesky exponentials, only in reverse.
You get exactly half your DNA from each parent.* So your consanguinity with your mother or father, son or daughter is 50%.**
Every step on the family tree halves it. Grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and half-siblings: 25%. Cousins, great-grandparents, great-grandchildren: 12.5% or one-eighth. And so on.
Thus, while I'm more than delighted as a matter of family history to have obtained a signed first (i.e., only) edition of The Pleasures of Poetry, the Purgatory of Poets and other Poems by Richard Sheldon Chadwick, "The Teetotaler," from 1848, it's with the knowledge that we two literary men (and I use the term very, very loosely, in both cases) have only 3.125% of our genes in common. No bragging rights there. And I certainly didn't inherit his apparent aversion to alcohol.
So I attempted to calculate my relationship to Vicky. It's actually easier than you might think -- bear with me. First cousins share grandparents, second cousins share great-grandparents, etc. See the pattern? You count the number of "greats" and "grands" in the name of your "most recent common ancestor." The number is the degree of cousinhood. Simple.
But if you get different numbers, that's where "removal" comes in. In this case, the lower number is the degree of cousinhood, and the difference between the numbers is the removal. So Jeremiah, being my 4th-great-grandfather, gets me a score of 5 (4 greats + 1 grand). But Vicky has only 4; she's one generation closer to the esteemed Jeremiah. (She's younger than me, but clearly her branch wasn't in such a hurry to reproduce over the years.) Thus we are fourth cousins, once removed. Her new baby, born on Valentine's day this year, shares a birthday with 11-year-old Primus. They are therefore fifth cousins, once removed.
By contrast, the Queen of England is first cousin, 14 times removed from her namesake, Elizabeth I (1533-1603).
What does it mean? Well, in terms of consanguinity, you start with that first-cousin score of one eighth. Every additional degree of cousinhood is two more steps on the tree, which quarters the number. Every degree of removal is only one step, so that only halves it. It turns out that Vicky and I have less than one-thousandth*** of our genes in common. Or 0.09765625%.
If we ever meet, I'm not expecting any family resemblances.
That's the power of reverse compound interest. For the two Queen Elizabeths, it means -- mathematically -- that only one gene in 65,536 is the same due to inheritance along the most direct line. (Which wasn't the line of succession, incidentally.) Since the current thinking is we don't have more than about 30,000 genes, that means Q.E.II is much more likely to have the same genes as Q.E.I because of sheer random chance than because of descent. Primogeniture, my arse.
And that's when it struck me. In my meager research to date, I've been concentrating on my pathway back through my direct ancestors, branching with each generation and thus doubling the amount of research, despite the dwindling records. What about all those bits that go out to the side, like your great-grandfather's sister's family, the stuff that serious researchers bother about? Did my great-great-aunt -- just a first name in a box, gleaned from a census form -- marry a Beechey? Did she have a daughter or a granddaughter who married a Beechey?
In other words, could the line back to my adoptive family be shorter than I'd ever imagined? Could I unknowingly have a greater level of consanguinity with a living Beechey than I do with that far, distant ancestor who happened to plug my birthname, Russell, into the line?
And, by the same reasoning, could those elitist Mayflower madames be more closely related to their dry cleaners or their doormen than to any 1621 pilgrim to these shores? I do hope so. This is, after all, America.
Which is all just an excuse to send you to this mind-blowing Wikipedia page about cousins. Skip the stuff I just lifted and get down to what happens when a set of half-siblings marries another set of half-siblings. Somebody's actually worked this out!
*Doesn't mean you take after each one evenly. Each time a sperm or egg cell (a gamete) is formed, it grabs only half of the parent's chromosomes. It's a random process. You may have sprung from an egg that has a huge batch of dominant genes, easily overwhelming your dad's submissive ones, so you take after your mother more. Lucky you. But then there's all that jumbling and mutating to deal with in the process as well.
**It's 50% for siblings, too, but that's even more of an assumption. Because of the randomness issue (see previous footnote), any two gametes produced by the same person have, on average, about half of their genes in common. But in practice, two gametes from, say, a father could potentially have many more than half their genes in common, or hardly any. This means the actual consanguinity between siblings can vary enormously. For example, the Olsen twins aren't identical twins genetically, but they clearly share enough of the genes that govern their looks and sizes to get away with playing the same character on Full House.
**It's 50% for siblings, too, but that's even more of an assumption. Because of the randomness issue (see previous footnote), any two gametes produced by the same person have, on average, about half of their genes in common. But in practice, two gametes from, say, a father could potentially have many more than half their genes in common, or hardly any. This means the actual consanguinity between siblings can vary enormously. For example, the Olsen twins aren't identical twins genetically, but they clearly share enough of the genes that govern their looks and sizes to get away with playing the same character on Full House.
*** One in 1,024 to be exact. Sound familiar?
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
And I thought the Blue Book was for old cars.
As a poor, working-class kid growing up in the London suburbs, one of the things I loathed about England's class-ridden society was that I was expected to show deference to certain other human beings solely because their great-great-great-great-great-grandmother had bonked Charles II. Not that we saw that many Earls on Hounslow High Street, you understand, but there was that whole Royal Family, "God Save the Queen" thing.
Not expecting the revolution anytime soon -- nor having the guts to foment it -- I came to America, where I thought class would be different, and of course, it is. (Race replaced it years ago.) But even in New York City, where ill-gotten, ill-spent wealth whips breeding any day, there can still be that elitist, social register, Blue Book, Four Hundred undercurrent.
Who cares if you're directly descended from one of those English puritans escaping religious intolerance who stepped off the Mayflower and proceeded to be instantly intolerant to anyone in the Massachusetts Bay colony who didn't share their precise religious beliefs. After 20 years of Manhattan living, I find a phrase springs easily to my lips (along with "Fuhgeddaboudit" and "I'm walkin' here!"): "What, you think you're better than me?" Or a little more mildly, "Yes, but what have you done?" It was Samuel Johnson who said that, in terms of justifying questionable behavior, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." I'd add that "It's all in a good cause" comes in right behind it.
There's an odd kind of reverse snobbery, though, that may be equally noxious -- and I 've had these conversations: "My great-grandfather stepped off the boat on Ellis Island with nothing but his hat-blocking wrench, so what gives these immigrants the right to think they can just waltz in here. . .?"
Yes, but what have you done?
Do I have a chip on my shoulder? Well, of course I do, for God's sake. Proud as I am of the (somewhat peculiar) name Beechey -- spellable in 47 different ways, even without turning me into the adverbial "Beechley" or other close variations -- it signifies for me only the profound love and estimable values of my adoptive parents. Otherwise, in terms of heritage, race, bloodlines, breeding, ancestry and ancestors, it's as immaterial as a nom de plume or a wife's married name. Whether Sir William Beechey, portraitist of George III and Nelson and about the only famous Beechey*, showed up in my family tree was an utter irrelevance, since I could claim no share of his DNA. (Incidentally, he doesn't.)
Because I was the first to grab "beechey.com" as a URL, I often receive emails from Beecheys scattered around the world asking if we could possibly be related. (There's quite a contingent in New Zealand, and I had a request from South Africa.) And I have to explain regretfully that "Beechey" is just a label for me and point them in each other's direction.
So my own ignorance of my genealogy probably made me a little more intolerant of anyone who claimed some special privilege because of their descent, whether it's the right to think their grandfather's rise from poverty reflects on their own character or whether it's the right to ascend to the English throne and be called "Your Majesty." Your family tree, your family history is, of course, fascinating and well worth knowing and preserving. Your ancestors' achievements are a source of pride, but they don't make you important.
But now, making up for lost time, I've been researching my family tree on the birth side -- I'm a concatenation of the Russells and the Huggins.** And next time I get on this blog, I'll explain why this inverted-snobbish tantrum and yesterday's truly tedious diversion on exponentials have come together in my life this week. (They feature in the book, too, for similar reasons.)
If there's anybody awake out there, that is.
*Yet***.
Not expecting the revolution anytime soon -- nor having the guts to foment it -- I came to America, where I thought class would be different, and of course, it is. (Race replaced it years ago.) But even in New York City, where ill-gotten, ill-spent wealth whips breeding any day, there can still be that elitist, social register, Blue Book, Four Hundred undercurrent.
Who cares if you're directly descended from one of those English puritans escaping religious intolerance who stepped off the Mayflower and proceeded to be instantly intolerant to anyone in the Massachusetts Bay colony who didn't share their precise religious beliefs. After 20 years of Manhattan living, I find a phrase springs easily to my lips (along with "Fuhgeddaboudit" and "I'm walkin' here!"): "What, you think you're better than me?" Or a little more mildly, "Yes, but what have you done?" It was Samuel Johnson who said that, in terms of justifying questionable behavior, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." I'd add that "It's all in a good cause" comes in right behind it.
There's an odd kind of reverse snobbery, though, that may be equally noxious -- and I 've had these conversations: "My great-grandfather stepped off the boat on Ellis Island with nothing but his hat-blocking wrench, so what gives these immigrants the right to think they can just waltz in here. . .?"
Yes, but what have you done?
Do I have a chip on my shoulder? Well, of course I do, for God's sake. Proud as I am of the (somewhat peculiar) name Beechey -- spellable in 47 different ways, even without turning me into the adverbial "Beechley" or other close variations -- it signifies for me only the profound love and estimable values of my adoptive parents. Otherwise, in terms of heritage, race, bloodlines, breeding, ancestry and ancestors, it's as immaterial as a nom de plume or a wife's married name. Whether Sir William Beechey, portraitist of George III and Nelson and about the only famous Beechey*, showed up in my family tree was an utter irrelevance, since I could claim no share of his DNA. (Incidentally, he doesn't.)
Because I was the first to grab "beechey.com" as a URL, I often receive emails from Beecheys scattered around the world asking if we could possibly be related. (There's quite a contingent in New Zealand, and I had a request from South Africa.) And I have to explain regretfully that "Beechey" is just a label for me and point them in each other's direction.
So my own ignorance of my genealogy probably made me a little more intolerant of anyone who claimed some special privilege because of their descent, whether it's the right to think their grandfather's rise from poverty reflects on their own character or whether it's the right to ascend to the English throne and be called "Your Majesty." Your family tree, your family history is, of course, fascinating and well worth knowing and preserving. Your ancestors' achievements are a source of pride, but they don't make you important.
But now, making up for lost time, I've been researching my family tree on the birth side -- I'm a concatenation of the Russells and the Huggins.** And next time I get on this blog, I'll explain why this inverted-snobbish tantrum and yesterday's truly tedious diversion on exponentials have come together in my life this week. (They feature in the book, too, for similar reasons.)
If there's anybody awake out there, that is.
*Yet***.
**Hugginses? Huggins's? I'm only definitively opinionated about possessives. Plurals puzzle me.
***Meaning I have high hopes for my kids.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Einstein was right.
Albert Einstein was once asked what he thought was the most powerful force in the universe. He replied, "compound interest."
And it's true (of course it's true, you condescending git, bloody Einstein said it) that exponential growth -- compound interest being a type of exponential growth -- can produce effects that are utterly counter-intuitive. Like that old Indian story about the sage who beat a king at chess and asked as his reward "merely" for a grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, etc. The king thought he'd gotten off lightly, but by the time he'd reached the 64th square, there wasn't enough rice in the kingdom to meet the demand.
(I put this story into This Private Plot. In more detail. You'll have to wait.)
It's like the betting tactic called an accumulator, where you place all your winnings from one horse race onto the next, and so on. The Economist once had an article (which I couldn't find before writing this, so the details are fuzzy and probably fabricated) that calculated what would have happened if you'd started with a dollar in the 1920s and, by good fortune, switched your accumulated investments at the beginning of every calendar quarter into the sector of the economy that was going to perform best during that quarter -- gold, or real estate, large-cap stocks, etc. Of course, the final number was some ludicrous sum, probably greater than GDP of the entire solar system.
And, of course, nobody did it. Because nobody can reliably predict the economy, especially economists. If they could, they wouldn't stick around being economists. They'd be Grand-Dukes or Hugh Hefner or something. Anything but an economist. Even a mystery novelist, and we don't make any money.
The Economist followed this up with an alternative calculation -- what happens if you switch your accumulated earnings into the sector that was the best performer in the previous calendar quarter? In other words, if your investment strategy is, like most people's, just a little reactive. You can't predict the future, but you move as quickly as you can to catch the rising tide. It's once a quarter -- surely the trends will keep going just for a few weeks more?
Uh-uh. In this scenario, if I recall, you end up with a net loss over the years. Or perhaps about a hundred bucks, the price of a Starbucks coffee in, oh, 2012. In other words, if you hear about a good-performing investment, it's already too late for you.
Now with this in mind, suppose I'm a shyster (not too great a stretch). I pick, say, 1,024 likely millionaire investors and write them a letter, boasting of my prowess at foretelling investment performance. (Why 1,024 and not a round 1,000? Pay attention.) And to prove it, I'll predict which way Apple's share price will go by the end of the week. But to half of those investors, I say it'll go up; the other half get a letter saying it'll go down.
At the end of the first week, in which Apple has increased in value, I forget about the 512 investors who got the "Apple goes down" letter -- and they'll forget about me long before the next scam -- and I send the other 512 another letter. Again, one half get the upswing prediction, the other half the downswing.
Well, you see where this is going. After just six weeks, I'm down to a mere sixteen potential investors. Ah, but those sixteen people have just watched me predict, with uncanny accuracy, the performance of a leading stock for six weeks in a row. So by now, they've probably taken the bait, and I can stop -- I don't even need to go the full ten weeks that would bring me down to my last surviving (but hugely impressed) millionaire.
Hang on, why did I get started on this? Oh yeah, that exponential growth thing also works in reverse. Numbers get smaller very quickly if you keep halving them, instead of doubling like the chessboard conundrum. From about a thousand* investors, we're down to a mere sixteen in only six weeks, and only one remaining if I'd gone for ten weeks. But the point about my shysterdom is that, somewhere along the journey -- likely, long before even six weeks are up -- I only need one or two of those astounded and greedy millionaires to hand over their fortunes to me to, er, manage, and it's next stop Bimini.
(Where is Bimini? And do they have extradition orders?)
And that's what I want to write about: family trees. But another time, because this is quite long enough.
*It was 1,028 because it's an exponential of two.
And it's true (of course it's true, you condescending git, bloody Einstein said it) that exponential growth -- compound interest being a type of exponential growth -- can produce effects that are utterly counter-intuitive. Like that old Indian story about the sage who beat a king at chess and asked as his reward "merely" for a grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, etc. The king thought he'd gotten off lightly, but by the time he'd reached the 64th square, there wasn't enough rice in the kingdom to meet the demand.
(I put this story into This Private Plot. In more detail. You'll have to wait.)
It's like the betting tactic called an accumulator, where you place all your winnings from one horse race onto the next, and so on. The Economist once had an article (which I couldn't find before writing this, so the details are fuzzy and probably fabricated) that calculated what would have happened if you'd started with a dollar in the 1920s and, by good fortune, switched your accumulated investments at the beginning of every calendar quarter into the sector of the economy that was going to perform best during that quarter -- gold, or real estate, large-cap stocks, etc. Of course, the final number was some ludicrous sum, probably greater than GDP of the entire solar system.
And, of course, nobody did it. Because nobody can reliably predict the economy, especially economists. If they could, they wouldn't stick around being economists. They'd be Grand-Dukes or Hugh Hefner or something. Anything but an economist. Even a mystery novelist, and we don't make any money.
The Economist followed this up with an alternative calculation -- what happens if you switch your accumulated earnings into the sector that was the best performer in the previous calendar quarter? In other words, if your investment strategy is, like most people's, just a little reactive. You can't predict the future, but you move as quickly as you can to catch the rising tide. It's once a quarter -- surely the trends will keep going just for a few weeks more?
Uh-uh. In this scenario, if I recall, you end up with a net loss over the years. Or perhaps about a hundred bucks, the price of a Starbucks coffee in, oh, 2012. In other words, if you hear about a good-performing investment, it's already too late for you.
Now with this in mind, suppose I'm a shyster (not too great a stretch). I pick, say, 1,024 likely millionaire investors and write them a letter, boasting of my prowess at foretelling investment performance. (Why 1,024 and not a round 1,000? Pay attention.) And to prove it, I'll predict which way Apple's share price will go by the end of the week. But to half of those investors, I say it'll go up; the other half get a letter saying it'll go down.
At the end of the first week, in which Apple has increased in value, I forget about the 512 investors who got the "Apple goes down" letter -- and they'll forget about me long before the next scam -- and I send the other 512 another letter. Again, one half get the upswing prediction, the other half the downswing.
Well, you see where this is going. After just six weeks, I'm down to a mere sixteen potential investors. Ah, but those sixteen people have just watched me predict, with uncanny accuracy, the performance of a leading stock for six weeks in a row. So by now, they've probably taken the bait, and I can stop -- I don't even need to go the full ten weeks that would bring me down to my last surviving (but hugely impressed) millionaire.
Hang on, why did I get started on this? Oh yeah, that exponential growth thing also works in reverse. Numbers get smaller very quickly if you keep halving them, instead of doubling like the chessboard conundrum. From about a thousand* investors, we're down to a mere sixteen in only six weeks, and only one remaining if I'd gone for ten weeks. But the point about my shysterdom is that, somewhere along the journey -- likely, long before even six weeks are up -- I only need one or two of those astounded and greedy millionaires to hand over their fortunes to me to, er, manage, and it's next stop Bimini.
(Where is Bimini? And do they have extradition orders?)
And that's what I want to write about: family trees. But another time, because this is quite long enough.
*It was 1,028 because it's an exponential of two.
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