Common Law & Public Accomodations

[I]f an inn-keeper, or other victualler, hangs out a sign and opens his house for travelers, it is an implied engagement to entertain all persons who travel that way; and upon this universal assumpsit an action on the case will lie against him for damages, if he without good reason refuses to admit a traveler. 

–Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

via LGM

Devil in the Grove

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm old enough that I became aware of Thurgood Marshall first as a Supreme Court justice--one of the two stalwart liberals on the court in the '80s. At some point (college?) I learned that he was also the lawyer who won Brown vs. Board of Education, which amazed me as it seemed like enough accomplishment for a lifetime, not a precursor to a long career.

This book goes back a step earlier in his career, pre-Brown, when he travelled the country as a senior NAACP lawyer, taking not only desegregation cases but also being one of the few men who would stand up in court for black criminal defendants being railroaded. It opens with him somehow getting an acquittal for black defendants accused after a riot, then getting out of town without being killed--a real danger in this case. Because their remit was not to be a general legal aid society, and because they had limited resources, he and his colleagues took only cases in which they believed the accused were innocent. Sadly there was no shortage of those in the late '40s, and the main narrative in the book centers on an egregious one in Florida.

The above makes it sound like this book is mostly about Marshall, which is what I thought when I started reading it. But it is at least as much about the corrupt sheriff Willie McCall. The book is written as such a gripping narrative that telling much about the case would feel like giving away spoilers for a seventy-year old series of events. But I will say I'm so used to civil rights narratives being framed as a story of triumphant progress that it took me a long time to realize, quite horribly, that the George Martin quote applied here: "If you think this is going to have a happy ending, you aren't paying attention." It has it's lighter moments and successes, and it's a story of an underdog fighting for justice, grippingly told, but it's not a feel-good book.

My only complaint is the flip side of it being such a good read--it's often written as a breathless you-are-there-narrative, not history. You read about what Marshall was thinking when he faced a probable lynching (roughly "It is never a good thing for a black man in a police car when the officers turn onto a dirt road at night") but it to get the source you need to look up the footnote (Marshall himself, in this case) and there's certainly no discussion about whether I should completely believe the story or maybe 90% believe it because maybe Marshall told a different version another time?

But this is a quibble. Even if you discounted everything that wasn't a matter of public record or agreed to by unsympathetic witnesses there's enough of interest and outrage to make this a phenomenal read.

Salt, Please!

I consider this one of the great TV rants:

Mutants

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body by Armand Marie Leroi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Near the end of this book the author pulls out the quote per molto variare la natur e bella--Nature's beauty is its variety--and it could be a motto for the book itself. Given that most of the book is about the human body developing dramatically abnormalities, usually during development, beauty is an odd word. I found some accounts difficult to read. But the ability for human biology to survive and sometimes prosper in so many different forms was just amazinga.

The book is a discussion of various conditions that have very visible effects--dwarfism, giantism, Siamese twins, people with no hands or feet, people with hands and feet but no arms and legs, people covered with more hair than Chewbacca, and so on. Some are fatal at birth, some at a young age, but most are not. A surprising (to me) number of people founded lines still prospering today--so a Chinese sailor missing the top his skull and clavicles founded a line that has several hundred descendants with the same symptoms.

If the existence of a whole family sharing such an unusual trait makes you wonder if scientists can do some sort of genetic analysis and figure something out about how genes interact with the body, well, answering that is the book's main concern. (Spoiler alert: Yes.) Most of the discussion is on gene expression and signalling pathways, in more detail than I expected. I'd call it roughly a Scientific American level of discussion. I'm not well qualified to judge the scientific soundness but in the small number of cases I knew anything at all Leroi seems to have done a good job presenting both conclusions and uncertainty.

The title--presumably picked by the publisher--is misleading though, as many problems are teratogenic or even nutritional and hove nothing to do with genetics. (Thalidomide and iodine deficiency induced issues, for example.) I don't begrudge "Mutant" for eye catching value but throwing in "genetic" in the subhead continues the annoying trend in popular science writing of implying everything biological is genetic.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary by Caspar Henderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was not the book I expected when I ordered it, but I completely loved it.

I thought I was getting a coffee table book about biology with lots of pictures, instead turns out it's mostly words. (The hardcover is beautifully laid out, though.) The book is twenty-six essays titled around different, often weird, animals. Only some are primarily about their nominal subject. Some are riffs on biological features specific to the animals, others move into more general ruminations about folklore or philosophy or environmental hazards.

To take a couple examples, the opening essay is on the axolotl and spends around half the essay on medieval tales about salamanders dancing in fire and other interpretations of those amphibians--before describing a bit about evolution of the first land animals and how the tiny guys were doing cute little push ups back in the day, before getting around to saying something about the creature itself. Or, for humans, the distinctive feature he picks out is our feet--we're a two legged creature that walks instead of hopping and a lot follows from our bodies need to accommodate that. Chapters on octopuses, Gonodactylus smithii, dolphins and pterosaurs, on the other hand, are more straightforward zoology. (A few bits don't work that well, hence the book narrowly avoiding a 5-star rating.)

Since I have a visceral dislike for the sort of essay that starts with quantum entanglement and ends with the 'interconnectedness of the universe' or something, it took me a while to figure why the barely-science essays didn't bother me. (Beyond the fact that they often quite interesting on their own.) I think it's because Henderson clearly was fascinated by and respected the science; he knew the difference between when he was saying "This is what we've learned from science" and "This bit of science puts me in mind of this story I heard" and doesn't confuse the two.

In closing, here's a picture of a Yeti crab: .

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How could you not love someone with a smile like this?

I'm like six book reviews behind, but it's easier to post a picture of a paddlefish:



And this isn't one of your foreign exotic beauties, either--lives in the heartland of the USA.

But near extinction, dammit.

via PZ Myers.

The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant” is not Itself Statistically Significant

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/signif4.pdf

A paper that I read years ago (via a Cosma Shalizi post on the file drawer problem) and then totally failed to find when I wanted to re-read it.  Up there with the "No Free Lunch Theorem" as being simultaneously blindingly obvious and something that I'd never thought about.

It discusses exactly what the title says.  A highly significant result may be indistinguishable from an insignifcant one, statistically speaking.

Comparisons of the sort, “X is statistically significant but Y is not,” can be misleading.