Ever meet anyone who's life was saved by Deep Throat?

Vanity Fair will soon publish an article (warning, Adobe) revealing the identity of Deep Throat [UPDATE: There's an html version.] Apparently, Mark Felt is copping to it and Woodstein have now confirmed it (Washington Post story here.) I have to admit that I don't really care that much who it was, but I recall hearing somewhere that Nixon thought Felt was Deep Throat.

I think we'll soon realize that it was better not to know who DT was. Certainly, the speculation is much more interesting than the real story could ever be. The only good that could come from this is the cottage industry of theorists arguing that DT is actually someone else and trying to explain why Woodward and crew would lie about it.

Of course, I've got my favorite candidates:

• Alexander Haig - A claim made in Silent Coup, a book that is thoroughly unconvincing, but very enjoyable. Basically, the authors' account of the Watergate affair makes it sound very much like the plot to the movie Clue.


• Pat Buchanan - He appears on a lot of lists for reasons I can't understand unless, like me, it's just amusing to imagine Buchanan trying the patience of Woodstein with lengthy rants about Nixon's betrayal of the country on race relations or something as they politely make excuses to get back to the office.


• George H. W. Bush - Sure, it's wildly unlikely, if for no other reason than that no one would ever give GHW Bush the nickname "Deep Throat," but that's why I like this theory.


• Richard Nixon - While we're on outlandish theories... The idea of Nixon shuffling around a parking garage talking to himself, Secret Honor style, with Woodstein unsure whether any of what they were hearing is at all credible, gives me the giggles.


• Frank Wills - The security guard who interrupted the Watergate break-in. The idea that a guy could just happen to spot some duct tape and set in motion one of the biggest scandals in American history is just too preposterous for anyone with a conspiratorial mind.


• Linda Lovelace - If true, it would confirm "Deep Throat" as the most spectacularly successful, lazily selected pseudonym of all time.


• Jessica Lange - You see, that line in King Kong wasn't just an atrocious effort at provocative dialogue, it was a clue...


• Nora Ephron - She married Carl Bernstein not long after Watergate. I figure things didn't work out with Bob (too much of a boy scout) so she hooked up with Carl instead and dropped that line in King Kong to implicate Jessica Lange.


• Hal Holbrook - ...who then went on to play himself in the movie.

AWOL

Much like Dave Chappelle, your host has mysteriously skipped out for awhile to clear his head. OK, I've just been busy/lazy and haven't been posting or even checking the blog recently, which is why I missed the news that Operation Ironman leaked onto the net some time ago (via Problems of the World.)

Thanks to 1.21 Gigawatts! for the link.

Chappelle MIA, Stedman in hiding

I'm seriously hoping it's all a publicity stunt, but Chappelle has allegedly checked himself into a mental health facility in South Africa and has been there since late last month. I'm sure you've heard all the stories: he's high, he's crazy, he's cracking under the pressure of producing a show that's supposed to be worth $50 million even though he isn't as funny as Nick Cannon, etc. I don't know what's really going on, but if he can turn it into material that's half as funny as Richard Pryor talking about setting himself on fire, it'll be a triumph worth savoring. Here's hoping everything turns out OK.

In considerably better news, Comedy Central are finally releasing the 2nd season on DVD May 24th. Check the upper right corner of the main page for the show where the link to preorder candidly admits "It's about damn time!"

Damned if you do, damned if you... no, just if you do

The Onion's A.V. club dedicates their "Commentary Tracks of the Damned" feature this week to Alone in the Dark, a horror movie now on DVD despite having been released to theaters only about three months ago. I've been bad recently at keeping up with current horror movies and I have to admit that this one (from the same director as the execrable House of the Dead) was far down my list, but this description of the commentary track by said director (Uwe Boll) makes it sound like a worthy rental, if only for Schadenfruede. Boll "rants" "fumes" and "rails" at various points in the commentary, according to the A.V. Club description, opining on the inferiority of other (commercially more successful) films in the genre and at the weaknesses in his cast. Typically, I don't care much for commentary tracks, but that's because there's usually not enough bitterness and bile on display.

Remembering Irvine

Oliver Wang over at Soul Sides reminds us that Weldon Irvine took his life three years ago last month. He's also has posted a couple of Irvine tracks and an interview conducted in 2000. In the interview, Irvine talks about his early career and notes the substantial links between hip-hop and soul, especially soul in the 70s, that had contributed so much to his later career. I regularly get depressed about the weakening of those links, since a lot of rappers and even producers nowadays either don't even know what they're sampling or act like they don't care about it.

Irvine's albums can be a little hard to find, but I'd particularly recommend Spirit Man and Time Capsule. Also, Madlib released a tribute album last year, attributed to Monk Hughes and the Outer Realm, although that's not the place to go for an intoduction.

Events, happenings and circumstances

Attended the APWBWGTTD last night at Manuel's, which was a good time, but really looking forward to the MIT Time Traveler Convention. As I have other plans tomorrow evening, I'll have to find an opportunity to go sometime later (after going back to RSVP, of course,) but I look forward to seeing you all there.

On the Huddle House Paradox or, the Perils of Progress in Statistical Analysis

Yesterday, a colleague dropped by my office to ask a question. Usually, when folks do this, it's either about judicial politics, statistics, or movies. I can answer questions on these subjects with (respectively) decreasing levels of accuracy, but increasing degrees of confidence.

Anyway, my colleague had a statistical puzzle. He had some old results run a couple of years ago on some data and had just re-run the same estimation on a different computer, using a different (newer) edition of the same software and gotten results that were exactly the same except for one coefficient, which was a different number and had the opposite sign. It was a random effects, time series regression model and everything, even the error component summaries and model fit stats, were precisely the same up to six, seven, eight decimal points except that one variable coefficient (and its standard error.)

I couldn't come up with an explanation, since if it was some kind of conventional error, like changes in the data while transferring computers or somesuch it should change more than just that one coefficient estimate. My guess was it had something to do with the updated software or the computer, because blaming the software or hardware is the easiest thing to do, and recommended he call the software company's help line.

Sure enough, the guy on tech support told him that it was probably due to some change made in subsequent updates to the routine he was using. He didn't say it, but I assume the implication was that the current results were right and the previous results were wrong. This was a bit reassuring, but more than a bit unsettling.

It's unsettling due to what I'm choosing to call, "The Huddle House Paradox." Huddle House, as some may know, is a chain of restaurants spanning the southeast that are sort of like a combo of Waffle House and Shoney's. They serve diner-type food and are open 24 hours. I believe their current motto is "Always Open, Always Fresh" (there's a corporate headquarters near where I live,) but for many years their motto was "Best Food Yet" and that can still be seen on various locations and the headquarters. One way of reading "Best Food Yet" is in its likely physical context, a string of fast food eateries scanned in search of a quick bite, in which case the motto assures the searcher that Huddle House will provide better food than anything he or she has seen so far. Another way of understanding it (more natural, given the language used) is chronologically: that Huddle House's current fare is the best they've yet devised. Taken to its Zeno-esque extreme, this means that Huddle House's food at time T is not as good as its food at time T + 1 (using whatever units of time one wishes, even extremely tiny intervals.)

Without knowing the food quality limit (the highest possible quality that Huddle House food could theoretically achieve) or the functional form of its time-dependent improvement (the impact of an increase in T on food quality) except that it is asymptotically increasing in T toward the FQL, this puts a potential customer in a tough position. Seeking to maximize the quality of one's meal, the rational strategy is always to wait another unit of T in order to enjoy whatever increase results. So, with the constant promise of the "best food yet," one should always defer eating at Huddle House.

Before anyone thinks that this post itself is the peril of statistical analysis, I'd like to point out that I thought of this when I was about 12 years old, although I wouldn't have expressed it in these terms at that time.

You can escape this paradox by adding on conditions, like an increasing hunger function, independently changing prices or satisficing (although, food being an experience good, you can never know where on the food quality function you are without eating it) but taken as is, Huddle House's apparently strong promise is fatal to their enterprise and their potential customer's interest.

My colleague's statistical problem raises another version of the same issue. As successive versions of statistical software correct the estimation procedures of canned routines and introduce more sophisticated versions of familiar models (dealing with more data issues or in a more satisfactory fashion,) one is always advised not to run any particular model until the next version of the software corrects the problems in the last version.

Sure, the improvement function in software quality isn't as smooth as in the Huddle House Paradox, but the basic idea is the same, especially since updating the software online is increasingly common. You could always avoid the problems inherent in using canned estimators by programming your own, but even when I write my own programs for models, I don't actually devise the language its written in or code the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm or whatever it is making my model go. Add in hardware improvements, advances in statistical theory and in the known properties of estimators, and better (more) data collection and you get the same problem compounded in several dimensions.

In short, to maximize the correctness of any statistical analysis, it is always advisable to defer doing it.

That's why I've taken this bit of time to share this with you.

What's Wayne Brady doing?

So, Comedy Central has stopped production on Chappelle's Show, a year to the day after the last original episode aired. I've been waiting for the third season to begin at least as much because it appears that the DVD release of the second season won't happen until it does. There are rumors of "creative differences" and "personal problems," but nothing definite.

If they do go with Brady and need a Neal Brennan replacement, I'm available. I've got this idea to do "True Washington Stories" with famous DC figures doing funny stuff. I see Colin Powell taking John Bolton out for a drive, making him smoke PCP and shooting him in the knee-cap. I think I could get a whole show out of having Scalia tool around the country smacking people and yelling "I'm Antonin Scalia, biatch!"