The Hollywood Coin Flip -- 7/26/24
Hollywood Sign Los Angeles California - Panoramic view from behind the sign - Paul Reiffer Professional Landscape Photographer



Today's selection-- from This was Hollywood by Carla Valderrama. How Hollywood became Hollywood:


“Hollywood became the film capital of the world through the flip of a coin. In 1911, director Al Christie was making Westerns in New Jersey and had grown tired of the inappropriate landscape there. He wanted to try filming in California. His producer, David Horsley, favored Florida, thinking it would be cheaper. Christie had a silver dollar. ‘Heads for California and tails for Florida,’ he declared. It was heads. On the train west, the two met a theatrical producer who told them Hollywood was a pretty place. ‘None of us had heard of Hollywood before,’ Christie recalled. 


“Indeed, in the first decade of the 20th century, it was another city, on the other side of the country, that played host to the film industry, still just in its infancy. It was a boomtown, gloriously diverse in its scenic beauty, an Edenic paradise in which to build America's first dream factory. It was Fort Lee, New Jersey. While there were numerous studios in New York and minor film centers in Philadelphia and Chicago, the New Jersey town on the banks of the Hudson River provided something those larger cities couldn't. As narrative-driven motion pictures became a dominant form, it became clear that audiences preferred scenes set outdoors to be shot outdoors instead of on clumsily painted sets. Fort Lee's proximity to the river as well as to steep cliffs, waterfalls, forests, and farmland made it a natural choice. 


“And it was only fitting that the movie business set up shop in the home state of the man who had done more to pioneer film technology than anyone else. Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope was developed at his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, in the early 1890s, where the first motion picture studio in the world was built in December 1892. When Edison unveiled the Kinetoscope, he launched an entertainment revolution, with arcades that played the Kinetoscope films on individual-viewing machines popping up everywhere. Not long after, another revolution began, as newly formed moving picture companies began selling admission to see their products on large screens in theaters. An industry was born. 

Nestor Studios, Hollywood's first movie studio, 1912


“As it grew, so did Edison's stranglehold on the technological patents that made it all possible. In December 1908, eleven film companies, including Edison's, formed a new organization, the Motion Picture Patents Company, known as the Trust. The companies pooled their patents for essential equipment, from projector machines to cameras to sprocket holes on film. Their plan was simple: Prevent anyone outside the Trust from making motion pictures in the United States. And they went to great lengths to make their plan a reality. 


“‘[W]e were shadowed, harassed, threatened and assaulted,’ said Carl Laemmle, founder of the Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP). Edison hired detectives to spy on and harass the independent filmmakers who weren't paying royalties to the Trust. Double agents posed as actors or technicians and gathered information on these ‘pirates.’ Once, Laemmle and his cameraman hid all night in a Fort Lee cellar with his camera while sleuths from the Trust scoured the neighborhood. According to Laemmle, ‘[C]ameramen were selected in the early days not for their artistic ability, but for their fistic prowess.’

 

“When surveillance and harassment didn't stop the independent filmmakers, the Trust turned to violence. They hired gangsters to burn down independent studios and destroy their equipment.

‘They found that by shooting holes through the camera, they could stop their use, and that became their favorite method,’ filmmaker Allan Dwan said. 


“Eventually, independent filmmakers hired gangsters of their own. According to Laemmle, today's commonplace industry jargon meant something else entirely on a film set back then. ‘When the present-day director instructs his cameraman to “shoot,” he probably does not realize that a similar order a couple of decades ago may have been taken literally,’ Laemmle explained. ‘A six-shooter was part of a cameraman's equipment in the early days.’


“Independents were now hiring lawyers to beat the Trust in the courts. But all of this was expensive and taking time away from making films. So, many of the independent companies began to search for a new home where they could ply their trade without interference from Edison or the Trust.


“‘That's one of the reasons most of us went to California, and distant places,’ Dwan said.


“If a Trust representative should happen to make the journey west, Southern California had the added benefit of being close to Mexico, where their patents were meaningless.


“Dwan felt secure in California. ‘I had my three cowboys, the Morrison brothers, arm themselves with Winchesters, hire some other cowboys, and station them outside our area of work. So, if anybody appeared carrying any kind of weapon, they were challenged by our people and disarmed.’ One day ‘a sneaky-looking character’ got off the train and asked to see the boss. Dwan suspected he worked for the Trust. They walked to an arroyo, a little stream under a bridge, which was full of tin cans. ‘To impress me, he whipped out a sidearm and fired at one of the tin cans in the arroyo. I immediately whipped mine out and fired,’ Dwan said. ‘He missed his, but I hit mine three times. He turned around towards the depot and ran right into the three Morrison brothers with three Winchester rifles aimed at him, and he decided it was about time to leave town.’ Dwan's company wasn't bothered by the Trust again.


“And then there were Al Christie and David Horsley and their fateful coin flip. Other film companies had established studios in downtown Los Angeles as well as neighboring towns like Glendale, Santa Monica, and Long Beach. D.W. Griffith had even made a film in Hollywood: In Old California (1910). But there were no studios in Hollywood; it was just a small town of God-fearing folk, once described by the Los Angeles Times as a place where ‘the saloon and its kindred evils are unknown.’”

This Was Hollywood Forgotten Stars and Stories
 
author: Carla Valderrama  
title: This Was Hollywood: Forgotten Stars and Stories  
publisher: Running Press Adult  
date:  
page(s): 2-4  

 







- The Demon Of Unrest - The Seeds Of The War Between The States

Today's selection-- from The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson. Though he had stellar credentials, President James Buchanan was a problem for the Democratic Party:

“A Democrat for nearly four decades, Buchanan had always been a problematic candidate in the eyes of the electorate, but this had nothing to do with his political competence. On paper, at least, he had one of the most illustrious records of any politician anywhere. From the age of twenty-three, when he won a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly, he had won eleven straight elections, which moved him firmly into the heart of federal politics. James K. Polk made him secretary of state; Franklin Pierce selected him as his vice presidential running mate, though Buchanan declined the opportunity. Buchanan was tall, handsome, blond, and apparently never had to shave. He did have one conspicuous imperfection: a misalignment of his eyes that caused his gaze to diverge in an alarming fashion. To compensate, he would tip his head forward and to the side with one eye focused on his listener, thereby imparting a look of skepticism or keen interest. One Sunday Edmund Ruffin spotted Buchanan on Pennsylvania Avenue in the midst of one of the president's solo walks through Washington. ‘As we first passed,’ Ruffin wrote in his diary, ‘he had one eye shut, (as is his frequent habit,) and with the other he stared at me as if he thought he knew me.’


“Otherwise, Buchanan seemed to be an ideal catch for any woman, but therein lay the problem: He had no particular interest in being caught. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor, a phenomenon American voters could not quite grasp. His one brush with marriage had occurred in 1819 when he became engaged to a young woman named Ann Coleman. She broke it off, complaining that he spent too much time attending to his public activities and not enough to her. Invariably, broken engagements raised public speculation. Coleman fled to Philadelphia both to recover her emotional health and to restore her social standing, but she died soon after her arrival, at twenty-three years of age, her demise attributed to ‘hysterical convulsions.’ Speculation further intensified when it became known that her father would not allow Buchanan to attend the funeral. The mystery of it all gave rise to questions as to whether Coleman might have killed herself or overdosed on some kind of sleep elixir, like laudanum, or had committed that worst of public sins, gotten pregnant out of wedlock, for clearly something had caused her father's callous treatment of Buchanan.

Portrait c. 1850–1868


“Buchanan had remained single ever since. Newspapers called him ‘Aunt Fancy.’ For years when he was in Washington he roomed with a fellow senator, William R. King of Alabama, himself an accomplished politician. The pair was so close both in public and in private that newspapers described them as a married couple, with Buchanan the husband, Senator King his wife. The death of King in 1853 left Buchanan bereft and alone.


“During the 1856 presidential election the Democratic Party wrestled with the problem of his bachelorhood and came up with a solution. Introducing him at the party's 1856 national convention, a fellow Pennsylvania Democrat announced, ‘Ever since James Buchanan was a marrying man, he has been wedded to THE CONSTITUTION, and in Pennsylvania we do not allow bigamy.’ Which prompted some wags to note that this particular wife was rather old. Others likened him to a spinster. Even Polk said that he ‘sometimes acts like an old maid.’ There was something fusty about him. A popular term of the day, ‘old fogey,’ seemed to apply. The press came to refer to him routinely as the ‘Old Public Functionary,’ or OPF for short.


“None of this seemed to bother Buchanan, who on occasion even referred to himself as OPF, but his situation often left him feeling isolated. Upon occupying the White House, he recruited his vivacious niece, Harriet Lane, to come live there as his companion and social hostess, a role she embraced wholeheartedly.


“From the start of his political career Buchanan had demonstrated a pronounced affinity for Southerners and the South, despite having lived his whole life in Pennsylvania, where he owned a three-story, seventeen-room mansion called Wheatland situated on twenty-two acres of plantation-like grounds outside Lancaster. In the political vernacular of the time, this made Buchanan a ‘dough face,’ someone who seems outwardly to be one thing but is actually another. The South returned the affection: In the 1856 presidential election, Buchanan won almost universal support from the slaveholding states, with only Maryland choosing to stray. Four of Buchanan's cabinet members were wealthy Southern planters. A fifth, Navy Secretary Isaac Toucey, was from Connecticut, but he, too, was a doughface, a Northerner who embraced the Southern states' rights doctrine. For Buchanan the cabinet served as more than an advisory body. Without a wife and children he was lonely, as he himself acknowledged; his cabinet members, especially Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, a Georgian who once owned a thousand enslaved Blacks, were his personal companions, his friends, his family. This closeness had the effect of limiting his ability to view the political landscape with any degree of impartiality and caused him to act in ways that skirted the line between mere favoritism and treason. 


“As Senator Seward noted in a letter to his wife, Frances, ‘The White House is abandoned to the seceders. They eat, drink, and sleep with him.’”

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
 
author: Erik Larson

Lakota Elder Dan Explains English

By 

July 20, 2024

We didn’t see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was.

In his fascinating book “ Neither Wolf nor Dog, On Forgotten Roads With an Indian Elder” researcher and author Kent Nerburn answers an ad and discovers Lakota Elder Dan who, after thinking deeply and for many years, has decided we pale-face could use some help.

Stuck in the boonies, researcher Nerburn buys a cheap recorder and carefully transcribes what Elder Dan has to say, here about the English language – – –

He [Lakota Elder Dan] had taken on his formal manner again. He was once more the solitary orator, speaking the truths that he had worked out over so many years, with only an old friend, a white man, and a sleeping Labrador to hear him. I said a silent prayer to the gods of technology that my little discount-store tape recorder would catch his words so I could pass them on.Neither Wolf nor Dog: ...Nerburn, KentBest Price: $2.13Buy New $8.69(as of 06:56 UTC - Details)

“I am going to say some things that you should think about.” He drew in a large breath and began. “I grew up speaking the language of my people. It wasn’t until school I had to learn English. They just marched us into the classroom and started talking in English. We had to learn. “I remember how funny it sounded when I first heard it. There were so many words. The teacher could talk for an hour and not even stop. She could talk about anything. She didn’t need to move her hands, even. She just talked. Some days I would sit and watch her just to see all the words she said. One other boy once told me he thought she said as many words in a day as there were stars in the sky. I never forgot that.

“When I learned English I realized it was a trick. You could use it to say the same thing a hundred ways. What was important to Indian people was saying something the best way. In English you had to learn to say things a hundred ways. I never heard anything like it. I still watch white people talk and I’m surprised at all the words. Sometimes they will say the same thing over and over and over in different ways. They are like a hunter who rushes all over the forest hoping to bump into something instead of sitting quietly until he can capture it.

“I don’t mind this, mostly. But I don’t like it when it is used to hurt us or other people. Now I’m going to tell you some of those things that hurt because of the way people say them. I wonder if you ever thought of them.

“The first one is about the battles. Whenever the white people won it was a victory. Whenever we won it was a massacre. What was the difference? There were bodies on the ground and children lost their parents, whether the bodies were Indian or white. But the whites used their language to make their killing good and our killing bad. They ‘won’; we ‘massacred.’ I don’t even know what a massacre is, but it sounds like dead women and little babies with their throats cut. If that’s right, it was the white people who massacred more than we did. But I have hardly ever heard anyone talk about the white massacres. I don’t like it when people use that word only about the killing we did. It makes our killing seem uglier than yours, so it makes our people seem worse than yours.

“Here’s another one: uprising. You use that word to talk about anytime our people couldn’t stand what was happening to them anymore and tried to get our rights. Then you should call your Revolutionary War an uprising. But you don’t. Why not? There was a government taking freedom away from you and you stood up against it. But you called it a revolution, like maybe the earth was turning to something better.

“When we did it, it was called an uprising, like everything was peaceful and orderly until we ‘rose up.’ Well, maybe we should make those words backward and call those ‘downkeep-ings,’ because to us, we were being kept down all the time. I’d like it a lot better if history books said, ‘Then the Indians were kept down again,’ rather than, ‘Then the Indians rose up again.’ It would be more of the truth.

“See, that’s how the English language is used on us. It is like a weapon you use against us now that you don’t use guns anymore.

What about ‘warpath’? When you came out against us you ‘formed an army.’ When we came out to defend our families we went on the warpath.’ I won’t even talk about words like ‘bloodthirsty’ and ‘savage.’

“But those are things from the old days, and you probably don’t even think they are real any more. Well, they are.

“My little great grandson came home one day and told me they were studying the frontier in American history. I asked him what it was. He told me it was where civilization stopped. I almost told him he couldn’t go back to that school anymore. “Just look at that! They were teaching him that civilization only existed up to where the white men had reached. That means everything on the other side of that line was uncivilized. Well, we were on the other side of that line. We had governments and laws, too. Our people were better behaved than the people that came into our lands. We thought we were at least as civilized as the white man. But here is my little great grandson coming home from school talking about the frontier and civilization. It was like we didn’t exist.

“Every time you talk about the frontier you are telling us that we don’t matter. I looked up the word. It means the edge between the known and the unknown. Whenever you use it you are saying that our people are part of the unknown. You are teaching your children and our children a history that says Indian people were part of a big, dangerous, empty space on the other side of the line where people had laws and culture. It is like there were wildcats and poisonous snakes and Indians, and they all were the same – just something unknown that made the land dangerous.

“See, this is part of the big story you don’t even see. You teach about the frontier. You talk about the wilderness and how empty the land was, even though to us the land was always full. You talk about civilization like we didn’t have any, just because we didn’t try to haul big chairs and wooden chests across the desert in a cart.

“The way you teach it, America started from some ships that came to Massachusetts and Virginia. The people got off and had to push their way through some big empty land that was full of danger. When they got to these plains, they sent the wagon trains across the mountains and the desert, like little streams cutting their way through the earth. Once they got across, then more people followed their paths, and things were built along the way, and it was like these little streams of people became big rivers of people that all flowed across to California and Oregon and Washington. It was like the place was empty and you filled it up, and history is the story of how you filled it up and what happened while you were filling it.

“You can tell me you don’t think that way, but you do. I look at the history books of the kids. They start in the east and come west, all of them, like that is the way history happened.

“Just think what that does to our kids. It tells them to see the past like white people. It teaches them to understand this country like they were on those boats and covered wagons. That’s not the way it was to us. For us, this was a big land where people lived everywhere. Then some people came and landed on the shores in the east while others came up from the south. They started pushing us. Then some others came down the rivers from the north. All these people were fighting each other. They all wanted something from us – furs, land, gold. They either took it or made us sell it to them. They all had guns. They all killed us if we didn’t believe that God was some man named Jesus who had lived in a desert across the sea. They wouldn’t leave us alone.

“Pretty soon they set up a government way back somewhere in the east and said this all was their land. Not just where they lived, but everywhere they had been or even where they had heard of. If they could get one man to go to a place and put a flag in the ground, they said they owned everything between where they started and that flag. They started pushing us backward on top of each other. All of us who had lived side by side leaving each other alone had to fight each other for hunting land.

“We had to make deals with the” white men or else fight them. There wasn’t enough food. Everything started to fall apart. We lost the land our ancestors were buried in. We got pushed into little ponds of land. We were like fish who had been swimming in the sea who were sent into little ponds.The Wolf at Twilight: ...Nerburn, KentBest Price: $2.88Buy New $10.09(as of 06:56 UTC - Details)

“See, to us, American history is how the big sea became little ponds and whether those are going to be taken from us or not. It doesn’t have anything to do with thirteen colonies and some covered wagons going west. Our land was taken from us from every direction. We can look at the same facts as you and it is something completely different. But you build your history on words like ‘frontier’ and ‘civilization,’ and those words are just your ideas put into little shapes that you can use in sentences. The big ideas behind them are weapons that take our past from us.

“I think that’s a lot of where our people went wrong with your people. We didn’t see the big ideas behind the words you used. We didn’t see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was. You named us savages so that made us savages. You named where we lived the wilderness, so that made it a wild and dangerous place. Without even knowing it, you made us who we are in your minds by the words you used. You are still doing that, and you don’t even know it is happening.

“I hope you’ll learn to be more careful with your words. Our children don’t know the old language so well, so it is your English that is giving them the world. Right now some of the ideas in your words are wrong. They are giving our children and yours the world in a wrong way.”

HERE For updates, additions, comments, and corrections.


The Best of L. Reichard White

The Birth Of Statistical Sampling




Today's selection-- from Against the Gods by Peter L. Bernstein. John Graunt and his breakthrough 1662 book, Natural and Political Observations made upon the Bills Of Mortality:


“Statistical sampling has had a long history, and twentieth-century techniques are far advanced over the primitive methods of earlier times. The most interesting early use of sampling was conducted by the King of England, or by his appointed proxies, in a ceremony known as the Trial of the Pyx and was well established by 1279 when Edward I proclaimed the procedure to be followed. 


“The purpose of the trial was to assure that the coinage minted by the Royal Mint met the standards of gold or silver content as defined by the Mint's statement of standards. The strange word ‘pyx’ derives from the Greek word for box and refers to the container that held the coins that were to be sampled. Those coins were selected, presumably at random, from the output of the Mint; at the trial, they would be compared to a plate of the King's gold that had been stored in a thrice-locked treasury room called the Chapel of the Pyx in Westminster Abbey. The procedure permitted a specifically defined variance from the standard, as not every coin could be expected to match precisely the gold to which it was being compared.


“A more ambitious and influential effort to use the statistical process of sampling was reported in 1662, eight years after the correspondence between Pascal and Fermat (and the year in which Pascal finally discovered for himself whether God is or God is not). The work in question was a small book published in London and titled Natural and Political Observations made upon the Bills Of Mortality. The book contained a compilation of births and deaths in London from 1604 to 1661, along with an extended commentary interpreting the data. In the annals of statistical and sociological research, this little book was a stunning breakthrough, a daring leap into the use of sampling methods and the calculation of probabilities—the raw material of every method of risk management, from insurance and the measurement of environmental risks to the design of the most complex derivatives.


“The author, John Graunt, was neither a statistician nor a demographer—at that point there was no such thing as either. Nor was he a mathematician, an actuary, a scientist, a university don, or a politician. Graunt, then 42 years old, had spent his entire adult life as a merchant of ‘notions,’ such as buttons and needles.


“Graunt must have been a keen businessman. He made enough money to be able to pursue interests less mundane than purveying merchandise that holds clothing together. According to John Aubrey, a contemporary biographer, Graunt was ‘a very ingenious and studious person ... [who] rose early in the morning to his Study before shoptime . . . . [V]ery facetious and fluent in his conversation.’ He became close friends with some of the most distinguished intellectuals of his age, including William Petty, who helped Graunt with some of the complexities of his work with the population statistics.

Table of Casualties in Natural and Political Observations Made Upon the Bills of Mortality (5th edition, published 1676)


“Petty was a remarkable man. Originally a physician, his career included service as Surveyor of Ireland and Professor of Anatomy and Music. He accumulated a substantial fortune as a profiteer during the wars in Ireland and was the author of a book called Political Arithmetick, which has earned him the title of founder of modern economics.

“Graunt's book went through at least five editions and attracted a following outside as well as inside England. Petty's review in the Parisian Journal des Stavans in 1666 inspired the French to undertake a similar survey in 1667. And Graunt's achievements attracted sufficient public notice for Charles II to propose him for membership in the newly formed Royal Society. The members of the Society were not exactly enthusiastic over the prospect of admitting a mere tradesman, but the King advised them that, ‘if they found any more such Tradesmen, they should be sure to admit them all, without any more ado.’ Graunt made the grade.


“The Royal Society owes its origins to a man named John Wilkins (1617-1672), who had formed a select club of brilliant acquaintances that met in his rooms in Wadham College. The club was a clone of Abbe Mersenne's group in Paris. Wilkins subsequently transformed these informal meetings into the first, and the most distinguished, of the scientific academies that were launched toward the end of the seventeenth century; the French Acadernie des Sciences was founded shortly after, with the Royal Society as its model.


“Wilkins later became Bishop of Chichester, but he is more interesting as an early author of science fiction embellished with references to probability. One of his works carried the entrancing title of The Discovery of a World in the Moone or a discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable there may be another habitable world in that planet, published in 1640. Anticipating Jules Verne, Wilkins also worked on designs for a submarine to be sent under the Arctic Ocean.

We do not know what inspired Graunt to undertake his compilation of births and deaths in London, but he admits to having found ‘much pleasure in deducing so many abstruse, and unexpected inferences out of these poor despised Bills of Mortality .... And there is pleasure in doing something new, though never so little.’ But he had a serious objective, too: ‘[T]o know how many people there be of each Sex, State, Age, Religious, Trade, Rank, or Degree, &c. by the knowing whereof Trade and Government may be made more certain, and Regular; for, if men know the People as aforesaid, they might know the consumption they would make, so as Trade might not be hoped for where it is impossible.’ He may very well have invented the concept of market research, and he surely gave the government its first estimate of the number of people available for military service.


“Information about births and deaths had long been available in parish churches, and the City of London itself had started keeping weekly tallies from 1603 onward. Additional data were available in Holland, where the towns were financing themselves with life annuities-policies purchased for a lump sum that would pay an income for life to the owner of the policy, and occasionally to survivors. Churches in France also kept records of christenings and deaths.

Hacking reports that Graunt and Petty had no knowledge of Pascal or Huygens, but, ‘Whether motivated by God, or by gaming, or by commerce, or by the law, the same kind of ideas emerged simultaneously in many minds.’ Clearly Graunt had chosen a propitious moment for publishing and analyzing important information about the population of England.


“Graunt was hardly aware that he was the innovator of sampling theory. In fact, he worked with the complete set of the bills of mortality rather than with a sample. But he reasoned systematically about raw data in ways that no one had ever tried before. The manner in which he analyzed the data laid the foundation for the science of statistics. The word ‘statistics’ is derived from the analysis of quantitative facts about the state. Graunt and Petty may be considered the co-fathers of this important field of study.


“Graunt did his work at a time when the primarily agricultural society of England was being transformed into an increasingly sophisticated society with possessions and business ventures across the seas. Hacking points out that so long as taxation was based on land and tillage nobody much cared about how many people there were. For example, William the Conqueror's survey known as the Domesday Book of 1085 included cadasters—registers of ownership and value of real property—but paid no heed to the number of human beings involved.


“As more and more people came to live in towns and cities, however, headcounts began to matter. Petty mentions the importance of population statistics in estimating the number of men of military age and the potential for tax revenues. But for Graunt, who appears to have been a tradesman first, at a time of rising prosperity, political considerations were of less interest.


“There was another factor at work. Two years before the publication of Graunt's Observations, Charles II had been recalled from exile in Holland. With the Restoration in full sway, the English were finally rid of the intellectual repression that the Puritans had imposed on the nation. The death of absolutism and Republicanism led to a new sense of freedom and progress throughout the country. Great wealth was beginning to arrive from the colonies across the Atlantic and from Africa and Asia as well. Isaac Newton, now 28 years old, was leading people to think in new ways about the planet on which they lived. Charles II himself was a free soul, a Merry Monarch who offered no apologies for enjoying the good things of life.


“It was time to stand up and look around. John Graunt did, and began counting.


“Although Graunt's book offers interesting bits for students of sociology, medicine, political science, and history, its greatest novelty is in its use of sampling. Graunt realized that the statistics available to him represented only a fraction of all the births and deaths that had ever occurred in London, but that failed to deter him from drawing broad conclusions from what he had. His line of analysis is known today as ‘statistical inference’—inferring a global estimate from a sample of data; subsequent statisticans would figure out how to calculate the probable error between the estimate and the true values. With his ground-breaking effort, Graunt transformed the simple process of gathering information into a powerful, complex instrument for interpreting the world—and the skies—around us."

Against the Gods The Remarkable Story of Risk
 
author: Peter L. Bernstein  
title: Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk  
publisher: Wiley  
date:  
page(s): 74-81