Last year in Tokyo I was surprised at the number of American flags I was seeing on clothing and accessories. So I counted the number I saw. In ten days I counted 14 clearly identifiable unambiguous flags including several on children’s clothing.
To me, that was an astounding number and showed overflowing popular Japanese support for America just after the American success in defeating Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army. This was true because the Japanese would never expose children to any form of potential shame or ridicule.
This year I again counted American flags on clothing (I never count brand name flags, like Ralph Loren) and accessories. In ten days I counted two.
I’m a statistician so what do these two numbers tell me?
Let me suggest the statistics first. My sample size in ten days is “several tens of thousands of people.” I counted 1,500 people passing in front of me one hour while drinking coffee in a narrow alley near a street corner. So a number like several tens of thousands of people seen in ten days is reasonable. The distribution is therefore a Poisson named after Simeon-Denise Poisson (1781-1840).
It appears that the base number of spontaneous American flag anyone would see in ten days in Tokyo is 0,1,2. That means that the 14 that I saw last year was, just what I thought it was, an astounding outpouring of support for the American armed forces that defeated Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army.
How much the Japanese knew about the victory I don’t know. My favorite, and the greatest military historian alive, John Keegan, has called the U.S. military victory in Iraq one of the two greatest military successes in history.
The victory was a special tribute the most important architect behind it, Donald Rumsfeld.
If there were a God, that God would punish all the public officials who called for Rummy to step down this year.
Cute quirk. I used the term "astounding" to refer to an event that had a near zero likelihood of occuring by chance. Near zero is one divided by an astoundingly large number. My hero Charles Sanders Peirce used one divided by an astoundingly large number to describe the chances that the signature on a will of a celebrity heiress was real not a forgery.
Peirce refered to the number 10 to 127 power as more than the number of grains of sand. It turns out that the number is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.
Its time for Peirce-like forensic statistics to be used on the CSI programs. Teach statistics as well as biology.