what about the plastic animals?

Lost Parrot

Last week it was a parakeet lost in Chelsea.  Yesterday it was a parrot lost on Broome near Centre.  Are these missing pets or feral monk parakeets?

I Probably Won't Need These Anymore

Cleaning through a few boxes I never unpacked after moving three years ago I found these. Let's see, a Fortran compiler, Word and Excel files backed up in March 1993, my BGSU office phone number, all on 3.5 inch disks, somehow I don't think I'll need these anymore.

Mr. Met Gets Angry

Mr. Met got upset earlier this week when Carlos Delgado got away.  Mr. Met says not to get him angry, and that I won't like him when he's angry.

Unrelated but important:  Attagirl hits the stores next Tuesday and Bettie Serveert will be in town on March 11th.

Godzilla vs. Cold Spring

There's a Godzilla shrine just off the main street of Cold Spring, NY. In the tub above Godzilla it says "Jed's Godzilla" and to the side in smaller print "In Memory of Jed Delarmi".

Math is so Depressing

I've been holding off on this for a couple of days but I can't contain myself any longer. Did anyone else see the recent news item that January 24th is the "most depressing day" of the year? If not, you can read it on MSNBC and on the BBC. If you do a Google search for "most depressing day" you'll find hundreds of pages that mention the article, many belonging to reputable news sites. In short, the articles report that Cliff Arnalls, whom the BBC identifies as a part-time tutor at Cardiff University in Wales and MSNBC identifies as a doctor who "specializes in seasonal disorders" at the University of Cardiff, (and Sheffield Today calls Arnalls a "leading psychologist") has devised an equation to measure the most depressing day. All well and good except… according to the BBC the equation is:

1/8W+(D-d) 3/8*TQ M*NA

where (I'm cutting-and-pasting the BBC explanation),

W is weather, D is debt - minus the money (d) due on January's pay day - and T is the time since Christmas.

Q is the period since the failure to quit a bad habit, M stands for general motivational levels and NA is the need to take action and do something about it.

MSNBC doesn't have the numbers and gives the equation as:

[W+(D-d)]*TQ M*NA

Let's look at the latter, simpler, equation and not concern ourselves with why one version has numbers and the other doesn't.

Does anybody with more than a sixth grade education see a problem with the equation? Better yet, how many mistakes can you find? Let's see!

The first problem is, uh, this is not an equation. There are some variables and arithmetic, but there's no equal sign. There's also two parts to the formula: [W+(D-d)]*TQ and M*NA, but no stated relationship between those parts. Are you supposed to add, subtract, multiply or divide them somehow, or are they totally separate entities. The variable we are meant to solve, T, is in mixed up with the rest of the variables. Mathematically we should be looking at something like

T = (X – W)/[(D - d)*Q]

To get an actual equation I've added a mystery variable, X, ignored the odd M*NA, and rearranged the other variables.

This is a nice algebraic equation. It's got a little subtraction action going on, some division and some multiplication. It does have two unknowns, X and T, and should only have one, T, for which we are trying to solve, but X is the least of our worries and I don't want to get bogged down in details.

W is weather. This is what first caught my attention. What does this mean? Is there a way to characterize weather by one number? Is it temperature? Precipitation? I don't remember seeing a variable like this in any of the meteorology classes I took or taught. This is a completely nonsensical variable.

D is debt. It is not clear if this refers to operating expense debt (like credit card balance, utility bills, auto loans etc) or also includes capital debt (like home mortgage and home improvement loans). I assume it is the former because the latter number is going to be really big if you've got a mortgage. Your mortgage might be $100,000 or much more. That number is severak orders of magnitude greater than the other variables in the equation (unless the mysterious X factor is of the same size) that T will always be much less than one. If Tis much less than one, the most depressing day of the year is a few minutes after midnight on December 26^th.

d seems to be your January paycheck, but it could be the amount of money you owe on your January pay day.  (D – d) will work as both variables are in the same currency. But, what is that currency? The guy is in Wales so I assume the currency is in pounds sterling. If you're trying to use this equation in the U.S. you'll have to first convert dollars to pounds (or euros to pounds, or yen to pounds, etc).

One interesting thing to note is that if your paycheck is greater than your debt then your answer is going to be negative (assuming X is greater than W), meaning your most depressing day is <em>before</em> Christmas!

The definition of Q is worded awkwardly, but I take it to mean the time, in days, since you broke your last New Year's resolution.

Multiply Q by (D-d) and you'll get something with units day-pounds sterling. This is excellent information as it tells us what the units for X and W must be! T is in days, if the denominator is day-pounds, the numerator must be days-squared-pounds sterling. I can't think of any weather measurements that have currency in their units, but I'm not a part-time tutor at Cardiff University!

That takes care of the nitty-gritty, what about the somewhat bigger picture? The date that a New Year's resolution is broken, personal debt, and salary vary from person to person. For example, I haven't broken any resolutions, from the equation I will be undepressed for an infinitely long period of time! In addition, weather and currency obviously depend on location. The weather factor for Cardiff is different than that for New York or Los Angeles. Since all these variables depend so highly on an individuals habits, financial situation, and location, how can one date for the most depressing day of the year be calculated?

Here's what's depressing, though. I've looked at dozens of news sites and blogs the past couple of days to see how others have reacted to this nonsense. A few have taken it with the seriousness it deserves, but the vast majority of places I looked at take the item as gospel. It is sad that no editor or journalist at any ofthe news sites had neither the rudimentary math competence or critical thinking ability, to see that this equation is a bunch of crap.  A sports column in the Birmingham Post treats the drivel as accepted fact, citing "statisticians and life-style gurus" as if people have actually done research on the topic.  Wait 'til January 24th of next year when your local TV news will report "today is the most depressing day of the year" and the concept becomes accepted as truth.  A place like Health Talk refers to the equation as a "complex mathematical formula". Complex? Since when is sixth grade math complex?

Luckily, there's Hugo Rifkind at The Herald in Glasgow, who pointed out how silly the concept is. However, Rifkind is the only other dissenter that I've been able to track down.

Conquering the Snow

2nd Ave in the East Village.

Almost everyone on 116th St. decided to park on the diagonal yesterday morning.

One for people from up north

It was a little chilly walking in the East Village last night and I hadn't had any carbs with my "dinner" so it was time for a little poutine from Pomme Frites.

Update of an earlier post: My upstate correspondents, Dad and Aunt Judy, have alerted me that this site was quoted in the Syracuse Post-Standard last week. In an article about blogger's opinions about the new Dinosaur BBQ in Harlem there are quotes taken from what I wrote and from Marie and dom's comments on posting. For some reason I was called "slidge" which is actually the name used by someone who left a comment. The reporter apparently didn't understand that Marie lives in Illinois, and was not talking about Dinosaur BBQ in her comment. The last two paragraphs of the article weren't given a source but they are from the Chowhound message boards.

After

Why did the livery cab driver drive through a snowbank to park on the sidewalk?

Nice to see Dad taking junior out for a stroll with his back to traffic on snow-slicked Broadway.

During

Something was up with the IRT line over the weekend.  With no explanation uptown express trains were running on the local lines Friday evening and Saturday morning before the snow began.  During the storm, when I took this picture, an announcement said the express trains were running local because of inclement weather.  No trains, express or local, came into the 96th St. station for 20-30 minutes, and the uptown platform was completely filled with people, so I decided to walk home. 

I felt guilty when taking photos of the geese.  Not guilty for taking the photos, but because the geese have learned that a person who stops is a source of food.  They were all on the pond and quickly waddled to see what I had for them.  They weren't interested in the camera.

Looking at Schomburg Plaza from across Harlem Meer.

Someone was riding a snowmobile around the neighborhood during the storm.  This was as close as I got to getting a picture of him.

Before

The greenmarket at Union Square had few vendors and few shoppers on Saturday morning. The guy who sells eggs for $4/dozen and the people who buy eggs for $4/dozen were among those that braved the chilly weather.

I felt much safer once the Verizon store closed.