The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Latter-day horoscopes

Today's Washington Post takes up the world-bending news that people put their Myers-Briggs types into their dating profiles:

The Myers-Briggs assessment categorizes people into one of 16 personality types, using an extensive questionnaire of nearly 100 questions such as, “Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world?” and “Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning?”

Many critics argue that people’s personalities exist on a spectrum — people possess varying degrees of both introversion and extroversion, logic and sentimentality — and therefore the Myers-Briggs test is an oversimplification.

Despite its shortcomings, the test has persisted with professional team buildingemployment recruiting and, now, for love.

Crafting an online dating profile is an art: Singles must whittle their most impressive yet personable characteristics into a few hundred characters. In an attempt to give a tl;dr on one’s entire essence, some daters display their Myers-Briggs personality type as a way of disclosing their essential selves.

As it turns out, people aren’t that great at figuring out to whom we’ll actually be attracted. In a study published in 2017, researchers asked singles to describe their ideal qualities in a partner. After examining daters’ stated romantic preferences, researchers created an algorithm to match participants based on their self-reported personality tastes. The machine could not predict who ended up pairing off. The researchers concluded that “compatibility elements of human mating are challenging to predict before two people meet.”

So I wonder, what's the MBTI equivalent of telling someone your sign is "Neon?"

If only I had a flight coming up this week

...I might have time to read all of these:

And now, back to work.

Afternoon articles

Just a few for my commute home:

  • New York Times reporter James Stewart interviewed Jeffrey Epstein on background a year ago, and it was weird.
  • The Post analyzes temperature records to find which parts of the US have warmed faster than others.
  • Chemist Caitlin Cornell may have discovered an important clue about the origin of life on Earth.
  • The site of the city's first Treasure Island store, just two blocks from where I lived in Lakeview from 1994-1996, might become an ugly apartment tower unless residents can block it.
  • Seva Safris digs into the differences (for good and ill) between JSON and XML.
  • Timothy Kreider delivers a stinging rant against gun-rights advocates: "The dead in El Paso and Dayton, whether they were shopping for back-to-school backpacks or just out having beers and hoping to get laid on a Saturday night, gave their lives so that you might continue to enjoy those freedoms."

I will now return to my crash-course in matrix maths.

How was Anne Frank found?

A former FBI agent is using "cold-case" techniques to figure it out:

Gertjan Broek, a lead researcher with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, believes that the search for an informant might prevent researchers from discovering what really happened. “By asking ‘Who betrayed Anne Frank?’ you actually assume tunnel vision already. You leave out other options,” he says.

It’s possible, Broek says, the Franks weren’t betrayed at all—instead they might have been discovered by accident. There’s a chance that those in hiding were discovered during a search regarding fraudulent ration coupons, he says after a two-year research project.

Another group of more than 20 forensic, criminology, and data researchers hope to narrow the margins to a single culprit. The team, led by retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke, is treating the investigation like a modern cold case. For years they’ve been combing through archives and interviewing sources around the world while also using 21st-century technology to crosscheck leads. The team has created a 3-D scan of Frank’s hiding place to see how sounds might have traveled to nearby buildings.

Regardless, it's fairly certain that Anne Frank was not a "Belieber."

Sunday afternoon link round-up

Including sitting with a lost dog for 45 minutes this morning, I've had a pretty lazy Sunday. Here are some of the articles I might read if I decide to do anything productive today:

Finally, in part because of the proportion of depressing things listed above, I want to post a photo of this dog:

Why? Because she's just that adorable. And not at all troubled by the newspapers.

Home safely

This morning, as Parker and I went for our pre-breakfast walk, we encountered this fluffy girl trotting down the street with no humans in sight:

We manage to corral her in a neighbor's yard, while I posted on Facebook and called animal control. She seemed healthy, well-fed, and accustomed to people and other dogs (though really scared and disoriented). Unfortunately she didn't have a name tag or a phone number.

Happy ending, though. After about 45 minutes her owners came by. They'd been canvassing the neighborhood for her. Apparently she jumped out of the car (saw a squirrel, maybe?) and then couldn't figure out where to go.

So, dog and family were reunited:

Her name is Ella, she's 2, and she's home.

Bear down

Yesterday, I attended my first professional NFL game* at Chicago's Soldier Field. I can't complain about the view:

The Bears did not play their best, but I had a great time at the game. And after, I got to walk in sticky August weather with a stadium's worth of people to the Red Line, which everyone loves after 11pm.

I'm being unfair. The tickets came from last April's Apollo After Hours, via a generous donation from one of our members and a lucky bid on my part. And now, I've been to a professional NFL game. And don't have to go to another one. (More on that, later.)

* "Professional football game" means something different in every country on earth; so I used the construct "professional NFL game" to distinguish between the US National Football League and what 7 billion other people call "football."

It was 50 years ago today

That Sgt Pepper taught the band to block a street in London:

It was on August 8, 1969, that the band snapped the photo that would change Abbey Road’s future forever. The following month they would release an album named after the northwest London street where it had been recorded, and that album’s iconic cover would seal the street’s fate. A photo of the Fab Four crossing the street in tidily-arranged profile made Abbey Road the site of the most famous crosswalk in the world.

In terms of traffic management, it’s been downhill ever since.

Getting the pose right is not easy. When the original photo was taken, police were on hand to stop traffic while photographer Iain Macmillan scaled a step ladder to get the right angle. Visitors ever since, by contrast, have had to contend with the fact that this quietly opulent street is actually quite busy with traffic, ever complicated by the daily gauntlet of posing fans.

I confess, I visited the famed zebra crossing in 2012. The actual Abbey Road Studios building is just behind it:

Dying for lack of a cause

Continuing my series on logical fallacies, we come now to "non causa pro causa," or false cause.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

"After this, therefore because of this." The argument attempts to attribute cause to the thing that happened before. (See, also, "correlation is not causation.") This is essentially where superstitions come from.

Example: "I've created a million jobs since I'm president," a politician claimed after six months in office. It turns out, that job growth was consistent with (but slightly lower than) job growth under the previous office holder going back six years, making it improbable that the politician had anything to do with the jobs.

Another example: "Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news - it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!" By that criterion, so were 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010. In fact, regulations governing air-transport flying were tightened in 2013.

Reductio ad absurdum

A "reduction to the absurd" tries to show that an assumption is false if a contradiction can be drawn from it. Usually, however, one or more of the premises of the argument is false.

The classic example uses a pair of syllogisms:

P1: A statesman acts in the public interest.
P2: Senator Jones is a statesman.
C1: Therefore, Senator Jones acts in the public interest. (Valid but possibly untrue.)

P3: Statesmen do not campaign for public office.
P4: Senator Jones campaigns for public office.
C2: Therefore, Senator Jones is not a statesman. (Valid but probably untrue given C1.)

The problem is probably premise #3. It's certainly the weakest link in the chain.

Another example: "America is the greatest country on earth, and we're making America great again." But...

Final example: "If your orders are always followed, then why was Private Santiago's life in danger?"

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to tease out the syllogisms of the last two examples.

Next time, a lot of questions, and squirrels.