The Sicilian – Mario Puzo He is fantastic at what he does. I thought the downbeat ending is what makes this mafia story less popular than The Godfather.  But very enjoyable escapist entertainment.

Moonwalking With Einstein – Joshua Foer Fun, well-written, and interesting.

Bambi vs. Godzilla – David Mamet He makes arcane arguments, quotes in French, and is constantly cynical.  But I enjoyed this fast, fun read.

Three Uses of the Knife – David Mamet His book, “On Directing Film” made a big impression on me, and I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

The Mailroom – Compiled by David Rensin Fascinating.  A must-read for anyone working in entertainment.  Historically interesting how abusively un-PC the culture in Hollywood was in the 80′s and 90′s.  I find myself mentally referencing this book constantly.

Right Ho, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse So brilliant.  Just laugh-out-loud funny.  I’ve read this book before.  Wodehouse is a genius like no other.

Uncle Fred in the Springtime – P.G. Wodehouse Again, his usual linguistic brilliance.

Pirate Latitudes – Michael Crichton Beginning is brilliant, well-researched, and fun.  Later on it gets a bit silly.  This book is published posthumously, so arguably it’s not Crichton’s fault the story falls off toward the end.

Harry Potter – J.K. Rowling Yes, I finally read the series this year.  Each book is better than the last.  What wonderfully imaginative world-building.

Wigfield – Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinillo, Stephen Colbert At points as verbally brilliant as P.G. Wodehouse and yet not really a captivating tale as there is no likable protagonist.  Still, very, very clever.

Once a Pilgrim – Will Scully Wow, could not put this book down. One man holds off 1,000 looting, pillaging rebels in the ’97 Sierra Leone coup. True story.

Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian Incredibly well-researched with swash-buckling action sequences.  I’m now on the 7th book in this series and am loving every moment.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom – Baltasar Gracian Some good nuggets of 18th century wisdom.

Many Lives, Many Masters – Brian Weiss, M.D. A fun read; totally not peer-reviewed science.

Easy Riders and Raging Bulls – Peter Biskind Fascinating read about how and why studio movies made incredible movies from 1970 – 1980. Very illuminating.

Tchaikovsky – Letters to his Family So good.

Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster Enjoyed it much more than A Passage to India; lots of fun insight into people and places and behavior.

Whores for Gloria – William T. Vollman Great moments of poetry and innovation; ultimately, the ending left me hanging.

Desperate Characters – Paula Fox Really skilled craftsmanship, brimming with truth and insight.  Not a ton of forward plot here, but just excellently observed – like a good Mad Men vignette.  Extremely Franzen-esque in its honesty.

Agincourt – Bernard Cornwell Really fun and well researched; not literature per se, but a clever way to follow a long bowman through the events leading up to and including the Battle of Agincourt.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy Insightful and courageous but not my favorite Tolstoy.  I also read Prisoner of the Caucuses and that’s a bit more fun.

The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga A good read; really informative about the state of India and a page turner from an innovative new writer.

Dark Pastoral – Jessica Hutchins A collection of odd po-mo short stories; she has a gift.

Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl On surviving the Holocaust – very powerful book and filled with ideas on the meaning of life that resonate and inspire.

Some Screenplays I really enjoyed this year:  “White House Down” by James Vanderbilt; just dynamite execution.  “St. Vincent de Van Nuys” by Ted Melfi – a tear-jerker for sure.  “Django Unchained” by Quentin Tarantino – what a brilliant idea – challenging and fun.

First, the control group.  Here are average US birthdays by month (2009 census):

As one would expect, US birthdays average 8.33% per month (as 100% divided by 12 months = 8.33%).  Now, below are my friends’ birthdays by month:

Fully 25% of my friends are born in May and June.  And three of my friends share my exact birthday, June 18th.  When you consider the math of the Birthday Problem, this seems unlikely.  What are the odds of four individuals in a set of 167 sharing the exact same birthday?

By way of control group, only two of my other 167 friends share the same birthday with each other.

DATA SET

To obtain the data above, I took my 650+ Facebook friends and parsed 180 that I feel a genuine connection with (as many Facebook friends are acquaintances).  Of 180 friendships, I was able to scrape birthday data for 176 of them.  Creating the chart above.

THE BIG QUESTIONS

Why am I nearly twice as likely to have a friend born in the spring than the summer?  Why am I nearly three times as likely to have a friend born in June as a friend born in January?

Is this random chance or do other people notice trends among their friends as well?

THE SCIENCE OF BIRTHDAYS

Turns out, science has spotted many birthday correlations, none of which are properly understood.  For instance, children with autism are 16% more likely to be born in winter months. ¹ Spring babies are at a 17% higher risk of suicide.²

Other bizarre birthday statistics:

* US teen mothers are more likely to give birth in January than any other month ³
* February babies have a higher likelihood of narcolepsy ⁴
* Pilots are more likely to be born in March ⁴
* People with autumn birthdays have the longest lifespans; spring birthdays have the shortest. A person born in October will outlive a person born in March by an average of 215 days.⁴
* June and July babies consistently have the highest likelihood of short-sightedness⁴
*September babies get the best grades and test scores in school.⁴

Conclusions

I think astrology is malarkey. But is it possible that birth month affects personality? Is my statistical sample of 167 friends simply too small to be meaningful? It is interesting to me that among my very best friends, spring babies are still over-represented, with a distribution mirroring the chart above. Possibly science will begin to formulate explanations for the statistical correlations between birth date and personality, health, and aptitude.

This assumes that Friendship Value = [1. Discounted perceived value of past interactions] + [2. perceived value of current interactions] + [3. discounted perceived value of future interactions]. Working backwards:

3. “Discounted Perceived Value of Future Interactions” can be expressed as the summation of all future interactions (t) years from the present (t=0) where “i” = the discount rate at which the net present value of the opportunity costs of a friendship equals the net present value of the benefits of the friendship:

Or, for those that want to graph friendship as a continuous rate (where d=discount rate and λ = log(1+i) ), by the integration:

2. “Perceived Value of Current Friendship Interaction” may be expressed as:

1. “Discounted Perceived Value of all Past Interactions” may be expressed as:

And thus, total Friendship Value can be expressed as =

By this we see that friendship is in a constant state of entropy, buoyed only by the value of our current interactions and the perceived value of our future interactions.  Without the hope of future interactions, the value of a friendship will decline asymptotally, approaching but never reaching zero.

If the value of perceived future interaction declines, it affects the net present value of the friendship.  So if I am going to be busy for the next six months, this dramatically affects the current value of my friendship.

We can calculate the relationship between time and friendship using an inverse square law:

Where FV₁ = The Friendship value of a friend, FV₂ = The Friendship value of me, and t = the amount of time spent apart.

By this equation, as the net present perceived value of either or both friends decreases, the force of attraction between the friends drops proportionately. But when time is spent apart, the overall value of the friendship drops exponentially.

Thus, friendship is a function of time.  And if I value friends, logic compels me to leave work alone at some point to spend some time with them. I probably need to get out more.

Jaw Breaker – Gary Berntsen – a really fascinating and fun tell-all by the lead CIA operative in Afghanistan.

John Adams – David McCoullough – An incredible American story and deeply inspiring.

True Grit – Charles Portis – Extremely fun although the ending didn’t sit very well.

Making Movies – Sidney Lumet – Worthwhile.

Islands in the Stream – Hemmingway – Strong and innovative writing; humorous dialog and fun adventure.

Carry On, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse – Always a complete delight – Wodehouse is pure genius.

The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck – Really engaging story told with straight-forward powerful language; she’s fluent in Chinese and English so her language seems to reflect Chinese syntax and values.

Daydreaming and the Creative Writer – Sigmund Freud – more of an essay but makes great points equating the writing process to daydreaming, wish fulfillment, and the hero as the ego of the writer.

The Zombie Survival Guide – Max Brooks – In my opinion, this is the book that originated the current zombie fad in popular culture.

The Future of an Illusion – Sigmund Freud – Pretty astonishing work; he rather bravely asserts that religion and God are an illusion resulting from psychoanalytic needs and that the progress of humanity – from a standpoint of psychological maturity – rests in recognizing this illusion and embracing science.

Blink – Malcolm Gladwell – His stories and studies are fascinating and fun – always a pleasure.

Shooting to Kill – Christine Vachon – A specific and useful description of what an indy New York film producer does to actually produce a movie.

Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast For Crows, A Dance With Dragons – George R. R. Martin – Extraordinary plotting and world building; brutal on the protagonists and therefore the reader. But an overwhelming literary accomplishment.

Tess of the D’Ubervilles – Thomas Hardy – Compelling and innovative in its day.

The Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire – Isaac Asimov – Fun, clever, and wonderfully plotted.

Island – Aldous Huxley – Lots of interesting ideas, but absolutely no plot whatsoever.

A House Boat on the Styx – John Kendrick Bangs – A Bangsian fantasy comprised of compelling sketches.

Cities of the Plain – Cormac McCarthy – So much skilled dialog and his usual fantastic writing sense.

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston – Some fascinating writing – rich and colorful description and delightful dialog.

Unfamiliar Fishes – Sarah Vowel – Always enjoy her voice and point of view.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee – Dee Brown – devastatingly good. Every American should read it – astonishing stories.

The Secret History – Donna Tartt – some really good prose writing.

The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War – Leonard Richards – Pretty interesting how everyone in congress in the 1800′s was packing guns and knives and dueling and brawling at every political debate.

Les Fleurs du Mal – Charles Baudelaire – Some of the poems are sensational; finding profound and beautiful ways to express new ideas on new topics, and influencing every poet who came after.

Michael Strogoff – Jules Vernes – He really created the art of modern adventure story-structure.

Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut – Interesting.

The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown – When he sticks to plot he’s great.

A broker is looking at three stock prices and notices a funny relationship. The three prices are all three-digit numbers. By subtracting the first number from the second number, she gets the same result as subtracting the second number from the third number. By subtracting the inverse of the first number from the inverse of the second number, and subtracting the inverse of the second number from the inverse of the third number, she still receives the exact same answer. Finally, each of the three numbers, minus its inverse, yields the same number (although a different number from the proceeding two operations).

What three numbers was she looking at? (NOTE: if you solve this without using palindromes, the solution is very elegant)

Email me your answer and I will send you a prize!*

*I do not have any prizes.  But you will have my heartfelt admiration.

After six rounds of edits, we choose music and send files to the rotoscoper. Then we begin color correction with the DP, Marlen Schlawin…

Jay and Marlen just love having their picture taken…

Then it’s time for Sound Design with Corey Eccles…

“Victory or Death” uses of lot of sound design. Everything from earthquakes to humpback whales to ocean waves are layered into the sound mix.

I like these photos because it looks like Corey is flying a spaceship.

Next step is rendering end credits and then we’re just about complete!

I have crunched the numbers and it appears he is correct.  Wikipedia is more liberal than America.

DATA SET

Of the 14,000,000 registered Wikipedians, it appears 347,000 have created user pages.  Of these 347,000 users, 23,190 individuals, or 6.7%, appear to have professed a political affiliation in the bios on their user pages by mentioning key phrases like “Liberal Party of Australia” or “Social Democrat,” etc.  This provides the following data set:

Liberal, Conservative, and Libertarian Wikipedians

There are some 57 countries where English is the official or de facto language.  Any of these peoples and more may be contributing to the English language Wikipedia.  Lumping together these Wikipedians into four basic categories, we get the following totals:

These totals contrast the overall US population in three important ways.

1. Liberals are slightly overrepresented as compared to the US population
2. Conservatives are decidedly underrepresented as compared to the US population
3. Libertarians are dramatically overrepresented as compared to the US population

To illustrate the disparity between the American population and the Wikipedian population, here is a chart showing the USA by political party (2008), using data courtesy of ElectionStudies.org:

Libertarians

What is particularly interesting is the preponderance of Libertarians on Wikipedia.  While Libertarians carried 0.04% of the vote in the latest US presidential election, they carry even less of a vote in other English speaking countries.  Indeed, it is somewhat unclear if any functioning Libertarian party currently exists in any English-speaking country besides the US.  So it is statistically interesting to find 10% of Wikipedians identifying as Libertarian.

Methodology, Notes, and Margin of Error

*This data was assembled using Boolean searches of the seed “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:”.

*Various search terms were excluded to prevent duplication.  For instance, a UK Wikipedian self-identifying as a “Liberal Democrat” must not be double counted in searches for the terms “Liberal” and “Democrat.”  Thus, Liberals were counted as follows:

liberal democrat site:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:
liberal -democrat -”australia” -philippines site:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:
democrat -liberal -social site:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:
Social democrat -liberal site:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:

Note that the “Liberal Party of Australia” is center-right, and thus excluded from searches for “Liberal.”  Userpages that mentioned both “Philippines” and “Liberal” were excluded as well because while the Philippines has a “Liberal Party” there is no corresponding “Conservative Party” so a fair tally of left-vs-right Wikipedians would have been disrupted.

*”Labor party” and “Labour party” were conducted as separate searches seeing as Wikipedians may belong to the Labor Party in Jamaica, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, etc.

*”Independents” are almost certainly undercounted.  The word “Independent” appears in many contexts in user bios.  Thus, this search only counted “Independent Party.”

*Many Wikipedians identify as “Anti-Communist.”  So the search for Communist excluded the term “anti.”

*Similarly, “Nazi” was not included in this search as so many Wikipedians appear to identify as “Grammar Nazis” or “Deletion Nazis” or “Wikipedians who have been called Nazis by other Wikipedians,” etc.

*While India and Pakistan represent massive English speaking populations, their political parties – being somewhat unique and endemic – were not counted in this search.

*Further exclusions could be added to these boolean searches to refine the data.  For instance, a Wikipedian saying, “I disagree with the Labor Party” would be counted as a member of the Labor Party in this methodology.  Nevertheless, it is assumed such search errors would occur equally for all parties and thus keep proportions consistent.  Furthermore, random spot checks for associations like “Hate” & “Labor Party,” “Dislike” & “Labor Party,” and “Disagree” & “Labor Party,” yield zero results.  And moreover, the 6.7% sample size is fairly robust when accounting for margin of error.

This month, the Los Angeles Times interviewed the Academy Executive Director, Bruce Davis, and it appears we finally have some answers.  According to Davis:

1. “There’s no easy way to tell who did the casting in a movie.”
2. “We’re not looking for a lot of new categories. People think the award show is long enough.”

Fascinating.  To the first point, Davis is referring to the fact that Producers often cast the starring roles, and Casting Directors often fill out the supporting roles.  To the second point, it’s just sort of interesting the Oscars can squeeze every above the line credit into a four hour show, with the sole exception of Casting Director.

To appreciate the role of Casting Director, consider how many thousands of teenagers Allison Jones had to wade through before discovering the likes of James Franco, Jason Segel, Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Linda Cardellini, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse.  Or consider Lisa Beach and Pat McCorkle’s casting of School Ties (1992) that launched the careers of Brendan Fraser, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Chris O’Donnell and Cole Hauser.

The Casting Society of America has petitioned the Academy three times in the past 15 years to add an award for Best Casting Director.  This would bring the Oscars in line with the Emmys and the Spirit Awards.  Here’s hoping they are someday included.

DNA measures 34 angstroms long by 21 angstroms wide for each full cycle of its double helix spiral. 34/21 = the Golden Ratio.

As folks know, the Fibonacci sequence and its corresponding Golden Ratio can be observed throughout nature, from the arrangement of leaves on a stem to the spiraled florets on the head of a sunflower.  But what about man-made Fibonacci sequences?

Here are some Fibonacci sequences I have observed that are created strictly from humans being human beings:

CHANGI AIRPORT, SINGAPORE 6:00 A.M.

Arriving for an early flight, I witness a terminal opening for the morning.  The first security guard enters the security check.  He walks through the metal detectors, passes his bags through the x-ray, and then runs the metal wand over his body.  Then clips on his security badge.

Thus screened, the first security guard performs the same operation on the second security guard.  While the new guard clips on his badge, the first guard screens a third guard.  Now the first two guards screen two more while the third clips on his badge.

Factoring in the pause time while each newly screened guard clips on his badge and turns on equipment, I realize that the rate at which security guards pass each other through the security check is a Fibonacci sequence.

THE KISSING DISEASE

The incubation period for mononucleosis – the time between exposure to the contagion and the appearance of symptoms – is roughly one month.  Once exposed to the virus, a person carries it for life and can theoretically pass it on for several years.

Thus, imagining a population in which (1) the “Kissing Disease” is introduced by a single person and (2) every person kisses exactly one new person each month, the spread of mono throughout the population is a Fibonacci Sequence.

1. MONTH ONE: 1 carrier; 1 incubating
2. MONTH TWO: 2 carriers; 1 incubating
3. MONTH THREE: 3 carriers; 2 incubating
4. MONTH FOUR: 5 carriers; 3 incubating

CHRISTMAS FIBONACCI

I witnessed the following Fibonacci Sequence at a Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.  In a special ceremony, the minister turned off the church lights and distributed unlit candles to every member of the congregation.

The minister’s candle was the only lit candle.  He used it to light the first candle in the first pew.  While that person’s candle flame gathered strength, the minister lit a second person’s candle.  Now two people could light candles while the third person’s flame gathered strength.  Soon there were eight people with lit candles and five who could light other people’s candles.  Thus the brightness of the dark room accelerated in accordance with the Fibonacci sequence.

Following comments from my Chess Music post about translating famous chess games into music, a reader requested to see the Ode to Joy on a chess board. Again, mapping algebraic chess notation to scientific pitch notation allows us to play Beethoven on a chess board.

I transposed the Ode to Joy from D Major into C Major for simplicity’s sake (apologies to Beethoven). From there, you can see how the notes E, E, F, G, etc, become E3, E6, F3, G3, etc on the chess board.

Note: my chess program automatically flips the chess board every move which makes the video a bit tricky to follow. But you can still get a neat sense of the symmetry of Beethoven’s melody showing up visually on the chess board.