Does nobody else see the irony in this?
English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout
Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point
Sure, protest. But to do it by flouting one of Wikipedia’s own strong principles is undermining their credibility. And annoying. Organise a protest march, petition people, whatever. But to deliberately make things inconvenient for millions of people just to make a point is childish.
For about the past six weeks now, every time I go into a supermarket I check for toothbrushes. And I haven’t been able to find any suitable for use in our bathroom. There are two problems:
Arrrghh!!
Oh, and I had a dream last night in which we found a hidden stash of soft brushes lurking behind some hard ones in the store. We grabbed every single one to buy and hoard. I presume this is what everyone else does when they see soft toothbrushes in the store…
I guess with the Star Trek episodes done, I should post some other things here.
I donated blood plasma today – I think it’s my 44th donation. I usually do whole blood, but they don’t want my red cells for a few months after I visited South America earlier this year. I took a photo of myself hooked up to the apheresis machine (avoid if photos of needles are not your thing – photo here).
And I ran across this: Legend: an OGL fantasy roleplaying game rule set, available for the next week on a “pay what you want” basis, with all proceeds going to Child’s Play, a charity that uses gaming to make kids stuck in hospital feel a bit better. Cool – it’s always nice seeing people contribute work for a good cause.
Why do computer scientists insist we start counting at 0, and then put “0″ after “9″ on the keyboard??
Wow, it’s wet outside. I haven’t been out in rain that heavy in a year or two, at least. I was dry when I got off the train, literally 2 minutes walk from home. I had a heavy knee-length raincoat and an umbrella. By the time I got home, I was soaked through to the knees.
Sydney has had 160 mm of rain in the past 48 hours. There’s an enormous subtropical storm of some sort hanging off the coast. Apparently the swells out to sea are 10 metres, and waves up to 5 metres are hitting Sydney beaches.
So I was buying groceries at the supermarket and they had some odd looking fruit there that I didn’t recognise. Wife thought they looked interesting and grabbed a few. Then when we got to the checkout, the guy at the register put them on the scales, looked for a second, then asked me what they were. I said, “I have no idea.”
He had to get the woman on the next register to come over and identify them.
(They were nashi pears, although of a variety that I hadn’t seen before. I thought they were similar to nashis, but they looked different enough that I wasn’t sure. And it was cool to just say I had no idea.)
I can’t believe there’s such a thing as Milo breakfast cereal. Why don’t they just drop all pretence and sell Violet Crumble cereal, and Mars Bar cereal, and Toblerone cereal?
Dream from the other night:
I’d been on a trip to New York, and as usual I’d taken a lot of photos. In particular, there was one street scene of the surrounding architecture that I’d been pleased to spot, and had composed a lovely photo to capture it. But when I got back home and reviewed my photos, that one shot hadn’t turned out exactly as I’d planned it, for some reason.
So the next weekend, I left work on Friday afternoon, went to the airport, and hopped on a flight to New York. Some 24 or so hours later I was in New York, left the airport, got a taxi to the exact same location on the street, recomposed the photo, took it, hopped back in the taxi and went straight back to the airport, where I hopped on a flight home, just in time to go to work on Monday morning.
I didn’t even get to see how the re-taken photo turned out.
The Australian federal election is in two weeks. Someone pointed out to me one of the relatively new political parties running for positions in the Senate: Senator Online. It turns out they’re running two Senate candidates in every state.
Here’s the interesting part. They have only one policy. That policy can be summed up as:
For every bill that comes up for vote in the Senate, our senators will vote according to the results of a web poll that we run on that bill.
The fine detail is that this will happen on a state-per-state basis, there is a minimum threshold of registered Senator Online voters to get the senator to do anything, and the web poll result must be a 70% majority otherwise the senator will simply abstain. (And they’re going to be very careful to avoid web poll stacking.) But basically it’s opening up the Australian Senate to what is effectively an Athenian style direct democracy, where very voter has a direct vote in every bill, rather than letting elected representatives decide.
My initial reactions to this, in order, were:
Anyway, realistically speaking, it’s very doubtful that Senator Online will get a senate quota in any state. But still, it’s interesting to contemplate.
Why do so many people distrust science, scientists, and informed scientific consensus so much?
Maybe it’s old news, but I had an insight into this when looking at some stuff about Riedel wine glasses. (This is not a wine post, really.) These glasses are marketed as “scientifically” designed to maximise the experience and enjoyment of drinking a glass of wine. What’s more, they have dozens of different glass shapes, each “designed” to work best for some particular type of wine. The upshot is – if you believe this – that to enjoy your wine to the maximum you need to buy about 8 different sets of Riedel glassware.
Many people can spot the conflict of interest here. Obviously it’s to Riedel’s advantage if it’s true that to best enjoy your cabernet sauvignon you need a different glass to the one you drink merlot from. So if they say it’s true, then even the mildly cynical can easily come to the conclusion that they’re just making it up.
And what about those wrinkle creams? You know the ones, that are advertised as “scientifically proven to reduce wrinkles by 78%”. How do you even measure that wrinkles have been reduced by 78%? Does anyone really believe that?
The culprit here is advertising. Advertisers like to use “science” to promote their products, because it has a veneer of authenticity that gets some people to trust their products. But most of us have become habituated to “scientific” claims by advertisers and just mentally filter them out or assign a low weight to them and evaluate the products on our own criteria. Science has become something that you can choose to believe if you want – and maybe you’re gullible if you believe it.
Unfortunately, that’s a misguided representation of science. When hundreds or thousands of experienced scientists agree that something is most probably true because of all the research, data collection, analysis, and peer review that they’ve put in, it’s not the same as a claim on a commercial. It actually has serious weight behind it, and you better take on board the idea that what they’re saying is more likely to be true than not. Yes, there are counterexamples, but they are few in a vast edifice of consistent, established scientific knowledge. The odds of any given piece of scientific consensus turning out to be incorrect are very small indeed.
The problem is, large swathes of laypeople who don’t fully understand how science operates simply look on it as another marketing move. They feel free to be cynical, and to completely disregard what the scientific consensus says. Especially if they don’t like what the message is, or it makes them uncomfortable in some way.
Science is about uncovering the truth, not about concocting stories designed to sell a product. Stories can be made palatable. The truth is different; it doesn’t always fit the way we want the world to work. Disbelieving it won’t make you immune from it. Science has checks and balances to make sure that mistakes or lies don’t get propagated. That’s why it’s such a huge scandal whenever a scientist is found to have falsified data or lied about a research result. This is the absolute capital sin of science, and when it is discovered it is treated accordingly. Careers in science can be ruined by one instance. You can be pretty sure that the vast majority of scientists out there are keeping their noses clean, and when they say they have research to support some conclusion, that they really do have solid data behind it.
Advertising is a completely different beast. Judging science by the standards you use to judge advertising is simplistic and misguided. But it’s a trap that more and more people seem to be falling into, alas.