I'll Take "Think Outside the Box" for $100

The recent death of Alex Trebek leaves the venerable TV quiz show Jeopardy more than a little adrift. The show taped only half its season before going on break, and it doesn't want to just write off half a season. The studio probably wouldn't like to lose that much money coming out of pandemic-related hiatuses anyway, plus the many people who worked on the show with Trebek say he would have disliked a mid-season shutdown for its harm on the people with everyday kind of paychecks.

So far it seems like the plan is to get a rotating roster of familiar Jeopardy faces to finish out the season before making a move to a more permanent successor. The first is all-time winner Ken Jennings, whose 74 consecutive wins tops all other contestants. Some folks suggest Jennings should get the job permanently, but there are a number of problems with that. Chief among them is that he's a jerk. Or, more fairly, that he knows how to portray one on social media. You'd hope that Jennings, like a lot of other meatheads who use the platform, simply gave in to temptation to say something in front of people but without saying it to anyone's face. But even though the miracle of pre-taping can make certain similar outbursts would never make it on air, if they happened they'd be bound to have a corrosive effect on the show and its image.

Levar Burton is another potential permanent successor and would probably do a good job -- but here's where I, who will never be found guilty of being a very woke feminist, would like to stake out a spot for women. In a conversation via comment a couple of weeks ago with blogger Brian Noggle, I suggested Mayim Bialik would be a good choice. Bialik is personable and capable of projecting some nerdy host charm and holds an actual doctorate in neurobiology -- she was the Big Bang Theory cast member who already knew the science words in her script.

Brian also suggested actress Danica McKellar, perhaps best known as Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years and as the author of several books encouraging school-age girls to discount the idea that math is for boys and girls can't succeed at it. McKellar would probably also be able to project the kind of calm authority-with-a-twinkle-in-its-eye at which Trebek excelled. She's no slouch in the classroom either, graduating summa cum laude from UCLA with a degree in mathematics and being a named developer of something called the "Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem," explained in a paper she and another undergraduate helped their professor research and write.

I'm not a person who figures a woman should get a prominent role just because up until now a man's always had it. But part of me would like to see strong campaigns for either or both McKellar and Bialik if only because the eventual choice to go with yet another dude would help show what a fib show business tells us when it talks about its progressive and egalitarian character.

Plus, at 63 Burton's smack in the middle of the baby boom, while both Bialik (44) and McKellar (45) are Xers. It'd be kind of a nice change to see an Xer get a job instead of yet another Boomer.

Mystery!

The original John Calvin developed the doctrine of predestination as a way of trying to accomodate the absolute sovereignty of God in a world which also included the total depravity of fallen humanity. The more recent holder of that name dispenses with such matters in favor of even deeper theological questions in a reprint from earlier this week:

Could tigers be happy in a heaven where they couldn't eat people? And would people be happy in a heaven where there were no tigers?

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'

Over at Twisted Sifter, we find a link to a article about a scientist who was studying the riding of bicycles. In an experiment related to his paper, he turned a bicycle loose without a rider 800 times and mapped the different routes it followed before falling over.

The interesting thing is that the number of repeititions led to a largely symmetrical collection of paths. Although it's unlikely the bike followed the exact same path more than once, it begins each time on a similar straight line before beginning to wobble. Bunches of the wobbles start out the same before diverging, and only in a very few does the bike travel the longest distance before it falls over.

The map shows a couple of things -- one, we can see how an algorithm works. The equation is tweaked with at one variable or another and produces a different result, and the bike is tweaked by hitting an imperfection in the road, feeling a gust of air, not receiving a push at its precise balance point, and losing energy the longer it travels. 

We also see how an algorithm doesn't always work and why sometimes, Amazon suggests really odd books for you given your previous taste. The "tweaks" in both the algorithm and the paths of the bike are random and can't be predicted with much precision. Until more data gets entered -- in the form of more tweaks in either the algorithm or the bike path, there's not very much that can be predicted about where the bike will end up on this attempt. When Amazon's algorithm acts before it has enough data, it might wind up recommending you read a book about and printed in ancient Sanskrit. You'll tell it no and it will make that another tweak in its path.

And by the way: 800 times! I hope that was done over a couple of days or so.

Fraud Fraud?

The most interesting response in this Gizmodo story in which some scientists were asked to name the biggest scientific fraud of the last 30 years comes from a lady named Felicitas Hessellmann, a researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Most frauds, she said, aren't all that big. Really big frauds can be hard to pull off, especially in a world of instant communication. So most frauds are middle of the road, making it hard to find a big one, let alone name one as more fraudulent than another.

On the other hand, the ones the other two interviewees name -- the tobacco industry's in-house research labs and the claim that vaccines cause autism -- were pretty big frauds. So maybe the answer's usually somewhere in between.

Thanksgiving

Ate meatloaf.

Not sorry.

May you have much for which you are grateful.

Backfire

By several accounts, President Trump is acknowledging that his attempts to question and even overturn vote totals he believes are in error will not succeed. He's set the transition process into motion and directed his staff to cooperate with the incoming folks likely to be working in a Joe Biden administration.

But of course he's not stopping his claims that the 2020 presidential election was so steeped in fraud that, rather than narrowly losing, he actually won by an amazing landslide. Both the president and his legal team continue to lay the blame for his defeat at the hands of incompetent or dishonest election officials. Or an electronic voting system run by a company whose leadership donated extensively to Democratic caniddates. Or thousands if not millions of fradulently cast mail-in ballots. Or anything, apparently, other than his own lack of discipline, immaturity and manifest character deficiencies and the fact that, as lousy of a candidate as Joe Biden is and as much of a grifting hack as Joe Biden is, he possesses the indisputable advantage of not being Hillary Clinton.

And here's the thing I think a lot of people overlooked. He's going to keep doing so. Donald Trump will literally never stop claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him until he's buried in a hideously garish golden coffin. And major media outlets will remain consistently unable to see that what they claim are an endless series of dunks on the president actually give him exactly what he wants: endless notoriety. And everybody who predicated their support for Biden on the idea it would send Trump home to obscurity will have to put up with seeing and hearing about him almost as often as they do now.

It's kind of ironic. More than one anti-Trump pundit or politician hinted that in order for some of the civil unrest the nation's been responding to in various cities and states to disappear, Biden would have to win the election. That'll probably turn out to not be good enough in the long run to keep the break all windows crowd at home.

What would have been certain if Trump had won, though, was that his time on the national stage would have a natural end. He'd serve his four years and then go the way of ex-presidents, especially if they are Republican: To being treated as if they did not exist. The one use to which they are put -- comparison with some current Republican as a way of proving just how crazy Republicans are today -- would clearly not suit the president. Yes, he'd be president and yes, the media would not be able to shut up about him for five seconds and they'd keep shoving his face onto the screen. But after four years it would be over, because there are term limits on presidents.

There are no term limits on whiners. The president can and will, once he leaves office, continue to claim the election was stolen. He'll use it as a launchpad for a 2024 run. He'll never go away now, and everyone who thought they were getting rid of him will find out he'll perform a kind of perverse Obi Wan Kenobi and become more powerful even though they thought he'd been struck down.

And his opponents have only themselves to thank.

Somebody Wake Zarathustra

A helicopter with some folks from the Utah Department of Public Safety and the Utah Division of Wildlife Resource was flying in southern Utah, counting wild bighorn sheep when it spotted something.

A shiny metal monolith, standing all by itself in a red rock cove. The different departments are investigating but as of today still didn't have a handle on what exactly the thing was supposed to be or who put it there. The best theory right now is that it may be part of some oddball art piece, which, maybe. I dunno.

I mean, I'm not saying it's aliens...