Catching Up With Jim Cramer

Jim Cramer is scary. Personally, I'd rather watch an investment/finance television program hosted by Boris Karloff.

Cramer throws things, he shouts the world's most pointless catch-phrases (and his "boo-yah" sounds a lot like my burping, so I find the possibility that he actually means to emit that sound especially freaky) and there's a vein on his forehead that always seems about to burst.

Still, Cramer's personal story is fascinating. He's a "Citizen Cramer" figure, likely to end up alone in a mansion mouthing the name of a favorite childhood toy as he expires. So I keep coming back, if not to Cramer's show, at least to thoughts about Cramer as a symptom of ... whatever is it in the contemporary world that has made him a public figure.

For those who didn't follow the "Pisanis of the world" scandal last month, I'm loathe to review it. Here's a link to bring you up to speed, though.

http://www.slate.com/id/2162460

After all, pop culture obsessions whiz by so quickly these days we never know if we're all on the same page. What is the gossip about over your cubicle wall? Who has the best voice, or the worst voice, or the oddest hair, on American Idol? Do you debate about who'll get the estate of Anna Nicole? Or are you more concerned about the dancing talents of the soon-to-be-ex-wife of a Beatle? The intercontinental adoptions of street urchins by Hollywood starlets?

For a little while last month, the story of Jim Cramer and his indiscretions seemed to be in that elite company. This month, he has confirmed the comparison. Because, like so many such scandals, this one has just blown over, without consequence. Maybe there's another shoe yet to drop, but probably not.

If he really has survived it, then here's a boo-yah for him.

Chrysler, Exclusivity, and an Auction

Kirk Kerkorian has put a bid on the table. He wants to buy Chrysler from Daimler-Chrysler, for $4.5 billion. There are lots of conditions attached to that, and the most likely deal-breaker of the bunch is that he wants a two month period during which he and his investment company, Tracinda Corp., will have the exclusive right to examine Chrysler's books.

Two month exclusivity? Daimler doesn't want to 'go steady' yet. Daimler wants to flirt with a number of prospects. Or, in less romantic language: Daimler wants an auction. Other bidders or potential bidders are likely to find their interest piqued by the very public interest Kerkorian has expressed, and Daimler is best off letting them all stand on a level floor for now, which means denying KK his exclusive access.

By the way, one of those other bidders is: Cerberus. More confirmation for my quasi-conspiracy theory of Cerberus, which is simply: that hell-hound is everywhere.

Meanwhile, over at Deal Journal, Dennis Burnham is having some fun translating Kerkorian speak into English. He's posted a two-part series on this, here's the URL for the first of those parts.

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2007/04/05/translating-kerkorians-chrysler-letter/

And, if you don't want to read through it but would like a bit of the flavor, you're at the right place already. KK -- trying to boost his own cred, wrote, "Tracinda has been the controlling shareholder of MGM Mirage (originally MGM Grand) for twenty years–having built it into a public company with a market capitalization of nearly $21 billion today." Burnham translates: "Dr. Z, do you like craps? I can hook you up at a nice table."

Yuck yuck.

Rachel Plummer

Free career advice today (and worth every penny) for you younger readers who are still puzzling over the "color of your parachute" and all that.

Do you want to write for a living? Have you heard how daunting a market it is? how high the entry barriers? You heard right, alas.

But one route to making a solid living with keyboard, mouse, and word processing software (or pen and paper, if you're a determined luddite) is that described last year by Rachel Plummer.

Her own career turns on the distinction, especially in the juvenile market, between a publisher and a "book packager." If you go into a bookstore and look at the juvie or the "young adult" shelves you'll see series, like Sweet Valley Twins. The book packager will hire the writer, and provide him/her with a two-to-three page outline about what has to happen in the story.

There are plenty of gears to the machine. The writer gets an agent, the agent contacts the packager, and of course that relationship between the packager and the actual publisher is ... well ... none of your business.

It sounds like you have to be able to put your hack hat on though. "I learned how to finish a book in the time allotted me by dividing the book’s contract-established word count by the number of days to deadline and not stopping until I finished the required word count each day," Plummer says.

But, hey, why should I give you bits and pieces? Here's the whole.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/specialty_writing/juvenile_market.htm

Lady Vols the Champions

The Tennessee Volunteers won the women's college basketball championship, beating Rutgers last night 59 to 46.

That isn't an unusual outcome. It's their seventh national title since Pat Summit has been coaching. Although this is their, and her, first title since 1998, that doesn't really mean the program has been fallow for the last decade -- it's been to the final four during five of those intervening years.

So one of the traditional powerhouses of the game, won a championship. "Big Whoop" you might be tempted to say, if you come from some place outside of Tennessee and if you use corny expressions like "Big Whoop."

The significance for me is that it illustrates what a great year the Marist women had. As I explained in my March 20 entry,
http://cfaille.blogspot.com/2007/03/three-cheers-for-red-fox.html

the women's team from my alma mater not only got into the 64 team tournament this year (itself an unprecedented achievement not only for them but for their whole conference) -- they won the first two rounds against heavily favored team. This means (since its a single-elimination tournament the math isn't too hard) that they were one of only 16 teams still standing when the inexorable brackets matched them against -- Tennessee.

Okay, they lost to Tennessee. The score was 65-46. Look at that sentence again, and look at the score of the final game, at the top of this entry, again. Marist scored as many points against the Lady Vols as Rutgers did in the final game. Both teams lost to the Lady Vols, and both scored exactly 46 points in the process.

So Marist was defeated only by the team that defeated everybody else, and in doing so they did as well against the unbeatable Vols (on the offensive side, anyway) as the team those Vols played in the final. I'm just basking in some reflected glory here.

Oh, by the way. On the men's side of the tournament, the Florida Gators won the title, beating out Ohio State.

Riemann hypothesis

My recent reading has included a book by John Derbyshire, who bravely attempts to explain the Riemann hypothesis, and efforts to prove or falsify it, to those of us without much formal education in math.

This problem seems to have been the inspiration for the drama Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for best play and became the basis for a Hollywood movie. That movie starred Gwyneth Paltrow as Catherine, a young woman who learned mathematics from her father, and who may have devised an extraordinary solution to a long-standing puzzle about prime numbers. [On Broadway, Mary-Louise Parker was Catherine.]

In the meantime, and in the real world, the Riemann hypothesis remains unproven.

What is it? Just to test whether I've been wasting my time with the book, I'll try to explain it now. It involves the distribution of prime numbers, and the fact that primes are bunched up in the lower numbers but become more scarce further up the line. The early primes are: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so forth. They're already beginning to thin out, even in that brief series.

The thinning continues. There are 26 primes of less than 100. Between 401 (inclusive!) and 500, there are just 17. Between 901 and 1,000, there are only 14 primes.

Is there a rule that governs this thinning out? Yes, the rule is (unsurprisingly) called the Prime Number Theorem (PNT). That isn't the Riemann hypothesis (RH) though. The RH proper is something Riemann suggested as a rather incidental spin-off of his work on establishing the PNT.

In order to state the PNT, one has to invoke complex numbers (numbers with both a real and an imaginary component), and the complex value of something Riemann called the zeta function, because he was too humble to call it the "Riemann zeta function" as everyone else now does, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function

The Riemann hypothesis is that the real part of any non-trivial zero of the zeta function is 1/2.

We're almost to the point where that bare statement makes some sense. The "zero" of any function is that value at which the function produces a result of zero. Simple example: x squared – 6x + 9 = y. [I write "x squared" because I haven't figured out superscripts here.] The "zero of f(x)" in the relevant sense is that value of x for which y = 0. In this case, 9 - 18 + 9 = 0, so the zero of f(x) is 3.

The zeta function generated by the search for the PNT though, turned out to have an infinite number of zeros, each complex numbers. Some of these zeros (the "trivial" ones) are generated when the variable s (don't ask) is an even negative integer: -2, -4, -6 and so on. But that leaves us with the non-trivial zeros and the question: do they all (as Riemann believed) have a real component of exactly 1/2?

No wonder the Anthony Hopkins character lost his mind, and Catherine seemed on the way to losing hers.

"Gotcha!" says NYTBR

Brian Doherty, a senior editor at Reason magazine, has written what he calls a "freewheeling history" of the modern libertarian movement, centered on five figures of enormous importance: von Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard, and Milton Friedman.

The New York Times has run a rather mean-spirited review of the book, in which critic Leonhardt plays trivia games of "gotcha."

Here's a sample from the review, "In a single chapter, Milton Friedman is described both as an active writer at Stanford University and, accurately, as deceased."

Well, yes. That kind of thing can happen when one of the crucial figures upon whom a book is based happens to die while the book is in page proofs. Leonhardt doesn't seem very lion-hearted here, more like a jackal.

Another example of this critic's oh-so-substantive contribution to the conversation about serious ideas, about liberty and sovereignty and such, is this gem: "And almost everything about 'Radicals for Capitalism' is too long: the terms ('Popperian falsificationist'), the sentences that sometimes run more than 100 words, and the book itself, at more than 700 pages."

That seems a remarkable expression of anti-intellectual bias. "Why shucks, I can't handle dem big words, Brian. That's why I write book reviews for this down-home cornpone type publicashun." If you aren't interested in the intellectual history of recent political and economic ideas, you won't read the Doherty book at all. If you are interested enough to read the book, you'll probably already know that there's been a lot of debate over whether such ideas can be considered "scientific," what is the demarcation of science, and so forth. You'll be ready for the term "falsificationism," modified by the name of its best known advocate.

The whole Leonhardt review reads like a sad failed effort at a fisking.

Baigent/Leigh lose their appeal

On Wedesday, the UK's court of appeals upheld a trial court ruling last year against Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. These are the author of non-fiction (but quite speculative) works on the life of Jesus and the history of Christianity.

Dan Brown, author of the phenomenally successful (but poorly written) novel the Da Vinci Code, acknowledged that much of that book was a simple novelization of the Baigent/Leigh theories. That was never in question. The problem for the plaintiffs is that they have no intellectual property in the ideas they espoused, only in the words they used to espouse them.

And Dan Brown seems to be able to do his own bad writing without lifting there.

Nominally, at least, the defendant in this case wasn't Brown himself but his publisher, Random House, which put out a statement after the appeals court's judgment this week, saying the case was a tremendous waste of time and money.

"Misguided claims like the one that we have faced, and the appeal, are not good for authors, and not good for publishers," it said. "But we are glad that the Court of Appeal has upheld the original judgment and that, once again, common sense and justice have prevailed, helping to ensure the future of creative writing in the UK."

Yet the claimant's lawyer, Jonathan Rayner James, doesn't seem to have given up the fight entirely even now. He said at a hearing earlier this year that issues still remain (i.e. another lawsuit may be launched) concerning the role of Brown's wife, who did much of the research.

A few words of wisdom from Kenny Rogers might be of value to Mr. Rayner James. Sometimes you gotta know when to fold 'em.

Lord Justice Bernard Rix made the point that Brown never disguised the nove's use of the Baigent and Leigh work. In fact, he works it into the book. Much of the expository material in the book is put into the mouth of a character called Leigh Teabing, an anagram of "Leigh Baigent." Teabing refers to the best-known book of those collaborators, "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," callin it "perhaps the best known tome" on the subject.

"That is not the mark of an author who thought that he was making illegitimate use of the fruits of someone else's literary labors, but of one who intended to acknowledge a debt of ideas, which he has gone on to express in his own way and for his own purposes," said Justice Rix.

Good point.

So why am I rehashing all this? It simply seemed an appropriate way to start Holy Week.