I Can't Decide

This is one of those stories that is so utterly bizarre that I genuinely can't make my mind up about which way to go on it.

Fox distorts pictures of NYT journalist/editor.

The journalist in question had the audacity to reveal that FOX's ratings are going down fairly badly.

At first I thought this was just pathetic and childish, the sort of thing you'd expect a thirteen year old to doodle in his French textbook.

Then I looked at how FOX had altered the pictures:



and it began to remind me of something. Now, dog-whistle links like "New York Liberal" notwithstanding, I did wonder if I'd read too much into it, but Needlenose made the exact same link.

So, like I say, I can't decide. Horrendously immature, or low-level bigotry?

Perhaps that should replace "Fair and balanced"?

My Head Is Exploding With Puns

Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.

Quite why anyone would be nuts enough to insist that the word "gay" must be replaced with "homosexual" wherever it appears is not immediately clear. If you are going to insist on such an insane policy, however, you probably shouldn't rely solely on Find/Replace. It could lead to problems.

Testify

Good ol' Kevin Drum takes some time out of his busy being-a-liberal schedule to slap down amateur statisticians:

Bloggers are fond of yelling "correlation is not causation" at any piece of research that comes to a conclusion they find distasteful, but what they almost never do is actually read the paper in question, which invariably addresses most of their concerns: research methodology; alternate explanations; potential intervening variables; results of similar studies in the past; shortcomings in the data set; etc. That's not to say that researchers always take every possible problem seriously enough, or that social science papers don't deserve heightened scrutiny. But it is to say that if, in 30 seconds, some possible problem with the research program occurs to you, it's almost a dead certainty that the person with a PhD who performed the study also thought of the same thing. And discusses it in the paper.

Amen, brother. This is a fractionally more statistically aware version of the "You haven't convinced me" argument that I've railed against before; it just lets you immediately dismiss findings without bothering to check how valid they are.

I always think that there's an easy test for whether or not your argument is bullshit when discussing the veracity of a scientific claim, and that's whether or not it can also be applied with regard to ideas you already absolutely believe. "Correlation is not causation" could be used as an argument questioning whether radioactive exposure is dangerous, for example. So if you can use your sound bite objection to call into doubt basic scientific facts, there's a strong case to be made that you're a fucking idiot.

That's not to say that no-one ever does mistake correlation for causality (I used to hammer this idea into schoolchildren back when I was still teaching), it just means that it's a mistake that needs to be found, not one that can just be assumed is there because that way you don't have to change your mind about anything.

Further Celebration Of The Inexorable Passage Of Time

Today BT gets one year older, which we celebrate here by offering up a song about the horsies she loves so much.

I Now Add Comics To The Geek Gumbo That Is This Blog

This might only be truly relevant for comic book afficionados, but Progressive Boink's deconstruction of why Rob Liefield is one of the most overrated comic book artists of all time (if not one of the most overrated artists of any stripe of all time across all sentient species) made me laugh so hard I required medical attention. Best line:

If this isn’t a drawing of a naked guy on fire anally violating a semi-nude grotesquery in midair I don’t know comic books.

Although, really, they're all brilliant.

Wanted For Crimes Against Cute Doggies

So one of my precious, precious doggies got set upon by a goddamn pit-bull whilst on the beach. Pictured here is the perpetrator (well, it's the same type, at least, and I'm really not that uncomfortable with racism as applied to dog breeds).

We also present my dog, pictured in happier times (i.e. without fucking holes in her fucking neck).

It looks like a fairer fight than it was, since Staffordshire Bull Terriers were specifically bred to ruin other dogs' shit, and Old English Sheepdogs, were they specifically bred at all, presumably were done so to create the illusion of a cowardly walking carpet. If Threepio had been a dog, he would have been a OES (Artoo would probably have been a spaniel). Storm ended up bitten fairly badly in three places.

Once this thing's owner finally bothered to arrive and grab hold of it, it twisted free and attacked Storm, biting my mother in the process as she tried to separate them. It then got lose again and went for Josh instead, which didn't go as well for the little git since Josh is made of somewhat sterner stuff. Both of them had to get injections, Storm's on antibiotics and we have to keep checking for infection, and given that it went for my mother (fortunately the damage is mainly superficial) the canine douche-bag is very lucky not to have been put down (and by lucky, I mean that the police won't do anything on the grounds it was my mother's fault for sticking her hands in the dog's jaws, apparently better to just have let it tear Storm's throat out).

So, given that these rabid bastards exist purely to rip the throats out of other dogs (this thing wasn't just vicious, it was pretty good with it target selection), wouldn't you keep the damn thing on a lead? How has it survived this long without being destroyed? Some of these breeds are now illegal in many countries, and I can see why.

From The Archives

It's now two on a Thursday morning, leaving me with four more days to finish the novel I sort of wrote back in November and wanted to actually end properly. Unfortunately writer's block has hit pretty hard (and if anyone has a cool name for a hideously be-weaponed battle cruiser, I'm open to ideas), so I'm basically just up drinking. Thus, in order to justify the damage to my liver, I choose to indulge in one of the activities I'd always assumed the internet was built for: relating stories about my insane friend Mad Richard.

Mad Richard is, at the very least, a statistical anomaly. In fact, he is a statistical anomaly on two fronts. Firstly, the very weirdest of weird shit constantly happens to him; Richard is liable to say "I had to hitch-hike home on a tractor" in much the same way you or I might say "I had to go inside because it started raining."

Secondly, none of the crazy events that seem to follow him around like probability-defying flies has ever managed to kill him. They totalled his bike once, and it's a miracle his liver survived celebrating R's nineteenth birthday (he told me once he'd only been drinking so hard because he'd misheard his biology teacher in school and thought he had two livers; the revelation that he had only the one was something he likened to discovering that Santa Claus was entirely fictitious).

In honour of Mad Richard, then, I present the conversation that occurred between us on the day R introduced us.

Mad R: Hey!

R: Hey Richard. This is my mate Squid.

SS: Wotcha.

R: How are things.

Mad R: Pretty awesome actually. I got a job!

This is clearly news of some surprise.

R: Really?

Mad R: Really. Of course, I had to lie a bit on the entrance form.

This is apparently news of considerably less surprise.

R: Christ, Richard, what did you do this time?

Mad R: I pretended to have eighteen years of fighter pilot experience.

R: You're only eighteen years old!

Mad R: Well obviously I had to lie about my date of birth, too.

R: Fine. Let's skip a number of steps and get straight to you telling us what this job actually is.

Mad R: You know what a black hole is?

R: Yeeeeeeees.

Mad R: And you know how anything fired into a black hole will be instantly crushed by the horrific gravitational forces such celestial phenomena generate?

R: I'm not sure I can cope with what's coming next.

SS: I find myself oddly curious from a scientific perspective.

R: You said that about "Pets Win Prizes".

Mad R: Anyway, the very instant NASA develop a vessel that can survive the pummelling already described, they're going to fire me into a black hole inside of it. You would not believe how much they're offering as payment.

There is silence for several seconds.

SS: I think we need to review.

Mad R: What do you mean?

SS: I mean that even if NASA are so blind they can't tell the difference between a man who's been flying for eighteen years and a teenager who's been breathing for eighteen years, and even if we skip over the somewhat inconvenient truth [1] that we're talking about singularities here, and "survive the pummelling already described" isn't really a question of bolting on an extra layer of steel or anything, and the equally problematical fact that we have no idea where to find black holes, much less how to get you there, then current scientific thinking about this stuff suggests you're gonna get tossed into another universe, or into the past, or something. You'll never return to collect your salary.

Mad R: Well, if I'm going to get thrown into the past, I hope it'll be to yesterday; I completely fucked up that assessed chemistry practical.

R: Is it time to get drunk yet?

Finis.

Right, that hasn't helped at all. I'm going to bed.

PS: I promised not to drone on about politics unless I came up with some angle I hadn't seen anywhere else, so I'll keep this brief, but I did want to mention that the White House has started dealing with irksome environmental reports that condemn them by no longer opening the e-mails they are contained in. This, by the way, is an excuse that has been tried by our undergraduates and failed miserably, so it's interesting that the "Leader of the Free World" is looking to get in on the action.

[1] I fucking copyrighted that! Damn Al Gore. DAMN HIM!