Friday, September 5, 2008

Briefly Noted...

Tomorrow afternoon, the Boomerang Network is running Hey There, It's Yogi Bear. It's on at 4 PM Eastern but check your listing for the exact time if you want to watch or record it. It's not a bad little film and it was a happy part of my childhood.

• Posted at 3:01 PM · LINK

Friday Morning

I probably liked John McCain's acceptance speech a little more than some of the people in that hall did...and for the same reason. He didn't spend most of it demonizing Democrats and selling the idea that the world must be saved from Evil Liberals. There was a little of that, and you expect a little of that, but for the most part, he was Good Cop to Sarah Palin's Bad Cop. Some of the right-wing bloggers this morning are complaining that the ticket isn't Bad Cop-Bad Cop.

Still, there was plenty in McCain's shpiel to argue about. One part that leaped out at me was when he said...

[Obama's] plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.

The obvious response to that, and it's 100% valid, is that John McCain has spent almost his entire life receiving health care from a government-run system. For most of it, he could have afforded to go to any doctor in the country. Instead, he accepts the government-run system and tells us that at age 72, he's in great shape.

Obama's plan actually has an exemption for small businesses and a provision by which they can receive a Small Business Health Tax Credit to encourage them to offer health care to their employees. There would be nothing stopping anyone who can afford it from keeping exactly the same health plan they currently have. (You can read a summary of his proposals on this page.)

And I wonder if anyone in a non-government-run health care system has ever found any bureaucracy standing between them and their doctor. I hear rumors that once in a while, private health plans refuse to pay for things they're supposed to pay for.

• Posted at 9:46 AM · LINK

Getting Your Goat

Some folks who are writing me still don't understand The Monty Hall Problem as discussed here. They want to know, "Why does it matter if I switch or not? After the first door is opened, don't I just have a simple 50-50 chance?" Nope...but I can sure understand why you might think that. The explanations online are not all that clear. Let me take a whack at it...

Let's say you do not swap and you stick with your original pick. That means you have a one-in-three chance of picking the car. Nothing changes that. The fact that the host opens a door to reveal a goat does not change that because he will always do that. You still have the same one-in-three chance at the car.

Now, let's say you do swap. You still have that one-in-three chance of having selected the door that conceals the car but it's more significant that you have a two-in-three chance of having picked a goat in the first place.

When the host opens that door to reveal the first goat, he creates the following situation but only for the swapper. If you picked the car and you swap, you wind up with that other goat. If you picked that other goat and you swap, you wind up with the car.

It's twice as likely that you will be in the latter situation. There's a two-in-three chance that you picked a goat and so swapping will get you the car, whereas there's only a one-in-three chance that you picked the car and so swapping will get you a goat.

The key thing, and it's what makes this confusing to some people, is that when the host opens the door to reveal that first goat, it doesn't change the odds. He knows where an unpicked goat is and can always do that. He is not giving you any information you don't already have. You already knew that at least one of the unselected doors had a goat behind it.

What he is doing is creating the following position: Swapping will either change the right answer to the wrong answer or the wrong answer to the right answer. And since the odds are twice as great that you already have the wrong answer, swapping makes it twice as likely that you'll wind up going from wrong to right, as opposed to going from right to wrong.

There. That's about as simple as I can make it.

• Posted at 8:46 AM · LINK

Dancing Queen

This evening in New York, Mamma Mia will play its 2,845th performance, which will rank it as the 16th longest-running Broadway show of all time. Hello, Dolly! previously held that honor with its 2,844 performances.

One could argue, of course, that Mamma Mia enjoys a big advantage over Hello, Dolly! in that Mamma Mia is pretty much a starless show. People went to see Hello, Dolly! because Carol was in it...or Pearl or Ethel or some other huge force of theatrical nature. The long run on a star-driven show is often dependent on how long the star will stick around and drive. If Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick were still doing The Producers, it might still be running.

But the achievement of Mamma Mia is still quite impressive. A few months ago, it passed My Fair Lady..and at the rate it's going, it will almost certainly outlast Tobacco Road (3182 performances), Life With Father (3224), the original Fiddler on the Roof (3242), the original Grease (3388) and the original 42nd Street (3486). If and when it eclipses the last of these, it will be the 11th longest-running Broadway show of all time. After that, it just might stick around long enough to beat Miss Saigon (4097) and crack the Top Ten. That would take three more years but since it's still selling out after seven years, that seems quite possible.

After that, it gets rougher. The 9th, 8th and 7th longest-runs (The Lion King, the revival of Chicago and then Rent, which closes this weekend) are all at least 1600 performances ahead of Mamma Mia and still running. If you figure roughly 416 performances per year, for Mamma Mia to overtake Lion King, Lion King would have to close and then Mamma Mia would have to run another four years. Possible, not probable.

Before anyone asks: The current longest-running show on Broadway is Phantom of the Opera, which has been there since 1988 and has played close to 8600 performances. It not only has that distinction but will probably have it for the rest of our lives.

• Posted at 12:37 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

From the same 1972 episode of The David Frost Show as this clip, we have Stephen Sondheim performing a song of his called "Boy, Can That Boy Foxtrot." It was written for Follies but was cut and replaced by "I'm Still Here." Like most of Mr. Sondheim's discards, it had a considerable life after death. It turned up in several revues of his work — most notably in Side By Side By Sondheim, and Nathan Lane sang it in the movie, The Birdcage.

Here's a young S. Sondheim performing it...and proving the old adage that most composers would never hire anyone who sang their songs as poorly as they themselves do.

• Posted at 12:30 AM · LINK