Shooting The Right Profile
My old band was called The Right Profile. (I talked about quitting in this radio show.) It wasn’t a great name probably but we stuck with it. I did love its provenance. It came from a song on The Clash’s London Calling, which is still one of my favorite records ever. “The Right Profile” was about the strange, sad life of the actor Montgomery Clift, who after a terrible car crash was shot from the right side. It was hardly the best song on London Calling – I wouldn’t even put it in the top five — but you come to love the names of people and things you loved, so I always loved The Right Profile.
So I was very jazzed to learn, via Variety, that a biopic of Clash leader Joe Strummer is in the works, to be directed by Julie Delpy, and it’s got a great title:
Details from The Right Profile are being kept under wraps, but the idea is to focus on Strummer’s life and his planned disappearance from the public spotlight in 1982. Pic is titled after the song “The Right Profile,” which appeared on the Clash’s seminal 1979 album “London Calling.”
An iconic figure of the British punk movement, Strummer died in December 2002, just a month before he and the Clash were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Can’t wait.
(HT: Mark Ehrenkranz)
More Heresy on Obesity
Obesity — its causes and consequences — is a frequent topic on this blog (and the podcast too). In the podcast, Eric Oliver argued that “the causal relationship between weight and maladies like heart disease, cancer, and even diabetes has not been firmly established.” That certainly strikes some as heresy. In a recent EconTalk podcast, noted heretic Gary Taubes lays out a well-argued position:
Taubes argues that for decades, doctors, the medical establishment, and government agencies encouraged Americans to reduce fat in their diet and increase carbohydrates in order to reduce heart disease. Taubes argues that the evidence for the connection between fat in the diet and heart disease was weak yet the consensus in favor of low-fat diets remained strong. Casual evidence (such as low heart disease rates among populations with little fat in their diet) ignores the possibilities that other factors such as low sugar consumption may explain the relationship.
Anyone for the paleo diet?
Addition Is Useless, Multiplication Is King: Channeling Our Inner Logarithm
TIME magazine has been running a series called “Brilliant: The science of smart” by Annie Murphy Paul. The latest column, “Why Guessing Is Undervalued,” quoted several results from research on learning estimation, a topic near to my heart. One result surprised me particularly:
…good estimators possess a clear mental number line — one in which numbers are evenly spaced, or linear, rather than a logarithmic one in which numbers crowd closer together as they get bigger. Most schoolchildren start out with the latter understanding, shedding it as they grow more experienced with numbers.
I do agree that children start out with a logarithmic understanding. I first learned this idea from a wonderful episode of WNYC’s Radio Lab on “Innate numbers” (Nov. 30, 2009). The producers had asked Stanislas Dehaene to discuss his research on innate number perception.
One of his studies involved an Indian tribe in the Amazon. This tribe does not have words for numbers beyond five, and does not have formal teaching of arithmetic. Read More »
Fun Things That Show Up on Flickr
Its content notwithstanding, what’s interesting to me about this picture is how jarring it is to see a black-and-white photograph these days. It instantly looks like an antique. There was a time, not so long ago, when 99 percent of serious photographers sneered at color photography. I worked at the N.Y. Times when it began printing color photographs in the news sections, and from some of the shrieking commentary you would have thought they were producing the color ink by pulverizing baby seals and kittens. The full-on proliferation of color photography is a good example of how quickly we get used to new things that we predicted we’d never get used to.
(HT: J.L.)
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 