Today, number 1 chose to take Mack and Lightning McQueen to nursery.
Toys of the Son Part 5
Today’s toy taken to nursery by #1.
Who To Support?
With two weeks to go before the NFL Super Bowl I have to decide who to support. My teams didn’t get there, New Orleans Saints and the Miami Dolphins. I cheered on the 49ers in the AFC championship as they beat the Saints and so were suitable of my support.
Now the choice is either the New York Giants or the New England Patriots. Too many support the Patriots, they are ridiculously popular in the UK. The Giants have Eli Manning as a quarterback and any Manning is irritating.
So I’ve decided to make my relationships more fun. My sister and her husband like the Patriots and Ades (one of the Fulham Five) likes the Patriots. That settles it. My cheers will go to the New York Giants.
Altogether now: D-Fense!
BBC Headline #5
BBC Headline from the website taken today:
Lagging pupils “don’t catch up”
This headline is lacking and, to be honest, the whole article is shocking. Headline problems are:
Quotation in Headline
No Shit Sherlock
Problematic Assumptions
Quotation in Headline
As long as someone wrote it or said it you can include it as a quotation in any headline or article. Say what you want. There’s always some nutter willing to give their opinion to give your leading headline some weight. “Crystal energies healed me” or “watch out for 23 December 2012! Those Mayans knew a thing or two”.
No Shit Sherlock
Pupils who are lagging behind in their work and understanding don’t then go on to catch up. Really! I need a whole BBC Headline to know this? How about “Some schools do really well!” or “Pupils getting better grades” or “Some schools not as good as others!”. There’s a distribution of schools or pupils, you can’t measure everyone and have everyone above average.
Problematic Assumptions
The biggest issue with the article and what the headline implies is that the bottom few pupils as measured by some arbitrary government test do not proceed to do well as measured by some other government arbitrary process. Have these people never heard of the Gaussian Distribution (the bell curve or normal distribution)? Some pupils will always be behind the others and will probably continue to be behind. Elsewhere in the article it is claimed that the top performers go on to get good grades later on. Holy Cow! This curve needs to be explained to them.
This is a graph of the Gaussian Distribution as everyone sees it:
The Gaussian Distribution as the government sees it (blue version):
No one is allowed to fail or fall behind or not be clever or be too far from the mean.
Descent into Skepticism
Most of my life I was little affected by “woo”. I think I had always been curious about some things like alternative medicine, but never really investigated it. Where would you go in the days before the internet? I didn’t care about it enough to go to the library. If I had I might have got a book by Deepak Chopra instead of Carl Sagan and perhaps that would have moved my life in entirely the wrong direction.
I can remember my dad saying to me in my early teens that if all other things had failed for a terminally ill patient then what harm was there in trying acupuncture? I think that was the only SCAM (I borrow Mark Crislip’s definition of SCAM here) I was aware of. When I was about 18 my mum trained in reflexology. She went to college and got a proper qualification and letters after her name. When she explained it to me, I paid attention and thought about it, but didn’t form a hard opinion. I was happy to let people believe what they wanted.
About 5 years ago (it’s currently 2012) my Dad bought me a fuel economy device(magnet) for my car that would also work on ANY vehicle. Now I was curious about this. I searched the internet and looked at the manufacturer’s website which tried to explain that the magnet aligned the fuel so it burnt more efficiently. I knew there is no ferrous material in hydro-carbons. I also now have progressed from an un-thinking 18 year old to having an engineering degree and about 15 years of reading about science and was hooked on this issue. Surely, my logic went, if a simple magnet could improve fuel efficiency then the car manufacturers would be buying all the magnets in the world. If it really worked it would be a standard component in all engines.
The magic-magnet manufacturer’s website had a money-back offer and lots of testimonials. How could so many people be wrong? I must have also stumbled upon a “skeptical” website with some information and a podcast. I was already listening to some BBC podcasts and so I subscribed to the skeptical podcast. I can’t remember which one it was, but probably “The Skeptic Zone” from Australia. From there it was a short journey into “Skeptoid”, “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” and “Skeptics with a K”.
I now don’t want to let people believe what they want. I want them to know what works and what doesn’t. Human civilisation has developed the most sophisticated tool for understanding the world and how it works – SCIENCE. Now although science occasionally has its flaws it is a self-correcting system. The evidence wins-out eventually. There is no evidence for SCAMs, they just keep inventing more ludicrous mechanisms to explain their failure.
I’ve read around the subject, including Bad Medicine by Ben Goldacre and a couple of Robert Park books and, of course, Cosmos by Carl Sagan. There’re still a few books to read and magazines to subscribe to, but I consider myself educated in this realm. I understand evidence, trials and logical fallacies. The world needs to be educated about SCAMs.
If you are not sure what the harm is, then have a look at this site.
Socks on Hands
A long time ago in a college not that far from London, pretty much in the middle actually, there were a bunch of students in their first year at University. “Let’s enter the Field Cup”, someone suggested. “OK”, was the response.
The Field Cup was essentially a pub crawl for teams with challenges and forfeits in each pub. We were rookies and unfortunately for the older entrants we were doing quite well. We had taken some loot and even a Hall Of Residence Warden to the final judgement but, because we were up against a group of girls from the CGCU, we were docked just enough points to ensure we came second. Good try for a bunch of Fresher’s though!
We were in one pub, possibly The Queen’s Arms, and our challenge was to sing on the karaoke machine. Chrissy was lead vocals on “Let It Be” by The Beatles and we were backing singers. However, for some reason we were wearing our socks on our hands! That must have been a forfeit somewhere but precise details elude me, 20 years later. The precise details probably eluded me the next day too. We shall all remember Karl’s backing vocal calls of “socks on hands” to the rest of the pub! Hilarious!
You had to be there, really.
Excellent Adverts
It really doesn’t get much better than this Australian advert from the Shonky awards:
Or, you might want to have a look at this excellent Adobe advert:
France 1
Our first holiday together in France. We had spent the day across the channel before this but we joined some close friends for a holiday in Normandy. It is a holiday to remember because we discovered that son #1 was on the way.
19 July 2008 to 26 July 2008
We stayed in a gite not far from Carrouges in Normandy.
Places we visited:
Le Mans Circuit, including driving (twice) around the road section of the 24 Hours course.
Mont St. Michel
Omaha Beach and cemetery
Bayeaux and the Bayeaux Tapestry
Chateau d’Carrouges
Viewpoint in Parc Naturel régional de Normandie-Maine
The Big Bad Mouse
Now I’ll admit that picking on a children’s book and film is pretty poor but then perhaps the producers of these should make sure that their science is consistent. I am happy for books and tv shows to make changes to a rule of physics and then follow the consequences. For instance, The Octonauts seem to have no need of decompression when they do their deep dives, they also have open water in the Octopod which means the whole pod is pressurised, this, technologically is possible but very hard.
For some reason, the story of the Gruffalo’s Child has really piqued my criticism micro-chip. I’m happy for a creature called the gruffalo and I’m happy with talking animals and I can cope with an intelligent mouse. One, tiny scene has really bugged me though. Towards the end of the Gruffalo’s Child, SPOILER ALERT, the mouse climbs a tree and uses his huge shadow from the moonlight to scare the gruffalo child into thinking that there is a huge mouse who eats gruffalo. This size of shadow is impossible. The moon is so far away that any shadow on the ground will be, effectively, lifesize and so the size of the actual mouse. Perhaps, if the gruffalo child understood some basic physics it would have stayed in the wood and eaten the cocky mouse.
The diagram shows how the distance of the object from light source and the distance to the image are important in determining the size of the image. The mouse is so far from the moon’s light it will not be able to make a bigger shadow.
The above diagram shows that if the light source (A) is far from and object (circle BC) then the shadow thrown (circle DE) is small. Whereas, if the light source (A1) is close the object (circle B1C1) then the shadow is large (circle D1F). My original drawing is below:
I have since had some criticism from the USA about this post and I have included the text of the email here:
Dear Sir
I refer to your fooyah posting of January 9th, concerning the shadow-casting abilities of an intelligent mouse. I wish to point out that shadow up-scaling would be possible if the light rays reflected by the moon were partially obscured or reflected (perhaps by some dense foliage) thereby creating a quasi point source of illumination. The point source’s proximity to the subject mouse could then produce an enlarged, not to say terrifying, shadow.
Just saying.
I have to agree and I replied saying that before I wrote this post I had thought about water droplets focusing the moon’s light to create a light source close to the mouse. I’d then forgotten this side of the argument. In fact a frozen, pure, droplet that had grown in size with succesive layers of water freezing on it without boundary layers (one continuous freeze whilst growing) could create a lens that would allow for the size of the mouse’s shadow. Diagram to follow if I can be bothered.
BBC Headline #4
Headline from the weekend on the iPhone app:
Fast rail link ‘to be approved’
This headline is showing signs and symptoms of:
Quotation in Headline
Not Being News Yet
Quotation in Headline
As long as I can find a crazy person and get them to say something or even take a quotation from another magazine or news source I can write pretty much whatever I want as long as it has quotation marks. What this does not do is actually mean that it is true. Someone’s opinion does not make fact. “Earth to reverse rotation” in a headline isn’t true but as long as some idiot said it to a reporter it could be in a headline. Standards at the Beeb have definitely slipped in this age of 24 hour reporting. Quick, get the story, even if it’s wrong!
Not Being News Yet
Unless the BBC have found the institutionalised corruption in the upper echelons of society that blights our individual and societal gains for the riches of the few then this is a headline about an event that hasn’t happened. Now, I don’t want to get picky (yes I do) but, shouldn’t news be about things that have happened? If the BBC had uncovered fraud and bribes then this would be news but I doubt the headline would be as they wrote it.
BBC Headline #3
Today’s (this isn’t going to be daily) rubbish BBC Headline taken from the iPhone app is:
This headline suffers the following afflictions:
Quotation in Headline
Wrong Story Implied
Quotation in Headline
As said before, you can write anything you want in a headline if someone has said it! Just ask a chiropractor about curing colic!
Wrong Story Implied
When you go and read the story you find that it’s actually a quotation from a shadow minister attacking his leadership about their stance on attacking the government (which is the job of the opposition). The real story is probably about the breaking ranks of the shadow cabinet and that a senior member of the Labour Party has spoken “off message”.
BBC Headline #2
My second example of a poor headline from BBC News. This time it’s from their website rather than the iPhone app.
This headline is poor in the following categories:
Quotation in Headline
No Shit Sherlock
Secondary Source
Quotation in Headline
You can write anything in a headline if you put it in quotes. Just ask any old nutter or naturopath what they think about something.
No Shit Sherlock
Is this really news? Are we to assume that the USA does not spy on other world powers? The only interesting thing is the existence of a super-spy-plane, but given rumour and speculation on the web this isn’t a surprise either. The USA have always had secret stuff. Are they going to some out and deny it? No, because that would mean guilt in many people’s eyes. Are they going to confirm it? No!
Using a Secondary Source
The text below the headline shows the article is essentially lifted from another publication which means the BBC can print anything in the original article as it counts as a source. Have they independently confirmed any of this? I doubt it.
BBC Headlines
This is, hopefully, going to be a semi-regular blog post topic. I’ve decided now is the time to give this website some meaning other than my vanity project! It’s taken a while to think about and find my area of “expertise” but this is it:
Rubbish headlines on the BBC News website
It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel! I used to have an image of the website here but have decided it was a copyright infringement. All headlines will be linked to the original stories.
Headline taken from the BBC News iPhone app. As a first example this is a goody. We have two main headline issues:
- Unreasonable extrapolation
- Quotation in the headline
Unreasonable Extrapolation
Take a science paper and then make the most extreme possible prediction based very loosely on the science. As an example, lemon juice killing cancer cells in a petri dish does not lead to drinking lemon juice curing cancer in a human.
Quotation in Headline
Anyone could be asked for a quotation and then that used in a headline. Quotations need to be in context so the reader can decide their validity. For example a peddler of quackery might insist (incorrectly) that there is plenty of evidence for the efficacy of homoeopathic products but that does not mean that should be in a headline. People rely on headlines being true.
Spiderman web “closer to reality”
I don’t think anyone would be taken in by this headline. Get the credit card out! I want a wrist ejaculator now so I can fly from building to building.
My previous iPhone backgrounds
This ought to even it up a bit.
Main screen:
Lock screen:
My latest iPhone backgrounds
Not really interesting but just my latest iPhone backgrounds.
Normal background:
Lock screen:
