Proofiness - Charles Seife [126]
73
Due, no doubt, to the presence of that most feared of aquatic creatures, the statistical fluke.
74
The opposition to sampling, as with other forms of voter suppression, doesn’t run ideologically deep in the Republican Party any more than pro-minority, pro-voting-rights sentiments run deep in the thoughts of mainstream Democrats. If the roles were reversed—if it were primarily Republicans who were being undercounted—there’s little doubt that Democrats would be trying to suppress sampling while Republicans would be championing it. It’s all petty-minded scrabbling to gain a political advantage.
75
One theory is that people were afraid of taking a census that wasn’t approved by God. According to the Bible, when King David called for an unsanctioned census, God punished him by sending a pestilence that killed 70,000 Israelites in three days.
76
The “deck” was a deck of punch cards, which shows how long this technique has been in use—since the first half of the twentieth century.
77
The Constitution requires that all persons be counted, not just U.S. citizens or legal immigrants.
78
Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line gives a gripping account of one such case.
79
It’s hard to pin down exactly how many. Grigson himself testified in the mid-1990s that he was a witness in nearly four hundred capital cases; other sources put the number at around one hundred fifty to two hundred. But by all accounts, in the majority of these he found the defendant to be a sociopath.
80
This case came to my attention because my book Zero, as well as another book about the number zero, was cited as support for this opinion.
81
Despite the numerical absurdity in the decision, I think the case was decided correctly. There’s a line in the regulations that specifically deals with reinstituting service over a previously abandoned railroad, which seems to make it unnecessary to file an environmental report unless there’s an increase of at least eight trains a day. (But the regulations are so badly written that it’s hard to tell for sure.)
82
The same op-ed dinged Stevens too, correctly pointing out that the absence of evidence for a deterrent effect is not the same as evidence for the absence of a deterrent effect. In other words, just because you don’t have proof that capital punishment works doesn’t mean that it’s not working.
83
This is something of an oversimplification, because at least one person who has been exonerated through DNA evidence did in fact plead guilty to try to get a lesser sentence. This means that, strictly speaking, we shouldn’t exclude all of the admissions of guilt; we should add back the ones who admitted guilt but knew they were innocent. This would reduce the number to a bit less than one in twenty. (These numbers are obviously very sloppy—don’t forget the factor of ten thrown in as a rhetorical device—and shouldn’t be taken as anything more serious than a really rough guess.)
84
Yes, this actually happened. The missile in question was an anti-ballistic-missile rocket known as the THAAD, the test occurred on March 29, 1999, and the general was Lieutenant General Paul Kern of the U.S. Army’s Acquisition Corps.
85
As one reporter put it in 1969, “In the political backrooms, they talk about getting an ‘Alsop-proof ’ peace formula. That means a formula which columnist Joseph Alsop would accept, albeit grudgingly.”
86
An allegation that Bellesiles adamantly denied.
87
For those craving more detail about the interesting (and disturbing) implications of information theory, my book Decoding the Universe might appeal.
88
Ironically, the Soviets were cheating on their biological weapons treaty—just not on the nuclear test ban.
89
In French districts with electronic voting machines there was nearly a 30 percent difference between the number of voters who turned up at polling places and the number of votes recorded, compared to about a 5 percent discrepancy in traditional paper-ballot districts.