Aside from the fact that the news this country has a new Prime Minister who is a racist liar I was bothered by the phrasing on BBC News last night. I haven’t really watched TV news for a long time, I find it patronising and reliant on the personal story rather than the facts, I don’t enjoy watching it. I viewed a little on catch up last night just to see what they said about the tory party leadership result.
Marginal Error
Boris Johnson won by a MARGIN of two to one.
Now, what the actual fuck does that mean? I mean, I’m not happy Johnson won but that’s the shitty system we have. I’m really asking what does the phrase “by a margin of two to one” mean?
Does it mean that Boris got around 66% of the vote and Hunt 33% [or thereabouts]? In which case the margin is 1/3 of the electorate or you could even say the majority was 100% of Hunt’s vote. What you can’t say is the MARGIN was a ratio of 2:1 without DEFINING what the other side of the ratio is. Fucking hell, people need to understand that maths and words have meanings.
My instinct is that these numbers are the relative share of the vote, but the news chap doesn’t say that. He says MARGIN. The margin is the majority? I don’t know. How is margin defined in this case. A quick inspection of Wikipedia has the definition that MARGIN is the percentage of the difference relative to total turnout.
So, I think it would be best for the BBC and other news outlets to have used the phrase:
Mr Johnson won with a margin of around 33% of the turnout.
There’s a big news story around at the moment that the over 75s in this country are going to have to pay for a TV licence. I’ve got some thoughts on this matter which I will communicate here.
In the UK the TV Licence pays for some of the BBC along with some of Channel 4 and, I think, channel 5. It used to be more of a licence to operate receiving equipment which just happened to be used to pay for public broadcasting. I think nowadays it is considered to be a tax by people which goes directly to the BBC.
The reason the BBC are going to charge the over 75s is because the GOVERNMENT has chosen to withdraw that part of the funding for the BBC. It seems amazing to me that the majority of the anger is placed at the BBC where it should be placed directly at the government. The media which isn’t funded by the government has a massive issue with the BBC funding and targets it a lot about everything.
Much like the anger placed at immigrants or the NHS or housing or local councils the real anger should be directed at the GOVERNMENT because they set the fucking rules. Annoyed with people dodging tax? Then moan at the government, they set the rules, they produce the law. It’s the government’s fault. The fact that the anger is deliberately directed away from the government is astonishing.
Local councils get their funding from two main sources, the national government and the taxes, council tax, placed on those who live in the area. The national government has spent years reducing the amount it sends to the local councils and so the only way to make up the shortfall is to charge more to locals. Where does the anger go? To the local council, not to the national government.
I don’t see that just because you are old you shouldn’t have to pay for a service that you use. It should probably be means tested. There are plenty of old folk out there who can afford this and they should pay slightly more to allow those who struggle to have access to services. It’s how society should work. Some parts of society struggle and the rest of us should help, it’s the morally correct thing to do.
There seems to be a perception that poor people or people who struggle through life deserve it. Their failure must be because they haven’t worked hard enough, that they have made poor choices. This is incorrect. The poor work hard, those who struggle work hard. It’s the way our current society works that produces parts of the population who struggle and always will. We must change society to make it work for all people.
Over the last year or so I’ve been writing album reviews for this site as a way of adding content easily. I’ve been doing this in the knowledge that anything I’ve bought in terms of EBM would be reviewed once I had completed my pre-2011 albums.
The very first album reviews were written in April 2013. I started adding them because it’s a way of expressing myself and writing communications on this site. I also thought it would be interesting to see what I would write about the music and how it affects me.
For the last few years I was missing all the electronic albums off when going through the music on my NAS drive. I thought that my original plan was to write reviews of metal stuff and then start again on the EBM stuff. Last night I found out I was wrong.
I was watching Aesthetic Perfection with my niece and looked up on this site when I had seen AP before and whether she was with me or not. As part of the search results where were some album reviews of the AP stuff. I was a little surprised as I didn’t think I had written them.
Now I’m stuck. I’m going to have to go through all the album reviews to see where I finished the EBM stuff and then eventually, once I’ve finished my current plan of only metal reviews, I’ll go back and fill in all the music that I’d started but thought I’d not done.
Scanning down the BBC News headlines page I came across a few headlines that bothered me and I think they show a disconnect between what the public think and what is correct. This has always been the case but social media and the ease of connectivity now means that people who are wrong can gather together and think that being in a community of like-minded people means that their views are correct.
Holocaust Denial
Apparently 5% of the population do not think the holocaust happened. Whether this is the same as denial I am not sure. Perhaps they just haven’t appraised the evidence. Apparently 45% of people polled didn’t know how many people were killed in the holocaust but I think that is more forgivable. To know something happened is one thing but to know numbers about it is another. As long as they all know it was a bad thing then we should be ok. There were 17 million victims in total.
What this news article seems to be pointing out is that we clearly are not learning from the mistakes of the past. We are also pretty poor at appraising evidence. Too many people don’t understand how to read articles critically and to appraise their sources of information. Too many people can easily be swayed by group-think and the idea that many people saying the same thing over and over must be right.
What’s more these people also probably don’t care that they are wrong. They are going to believe what they want because they can. They also probably think that there isn’t objective truth. They probably struggle to cope with the idea that they can be easily manipulated and are possibly being used by other forces or that they are just stupid. The reason we have experts in certain fields of human endeavour is so that not everyone needs to be an expert about everything. People should be accepting of allowing us to defer our human knowledge to people who have spent their lives pursuing the best-as-we-know-it truth in these matters. We also need to understand that it’s not just a single expert we should trust but the consensus view of the world of experts.
This is what science does. Science changes its views with evidence and sometimes it changes quickly and sometimes its a more gradual change but over time the direction of scientific knowledge is to getting things correct. In terms of history we should listen to the consensus view of academics while we learn more and more. In terms of economics we shouldn’t really listen to anyone because it’s not a science, more a dark art. In terms of Brexit we should listen to the lawyers, the economists and the scientists. We should not be listening to the MPs because they aren’t experts in those fields. They are people elected by us to represent us whom, we would think, have the best interests of the country and its citizens as a whole. But we should also recognise that they are human and so fundamentally flawed individually.
We also need to understand that sometimes we just won’t know and answer to a particular problem or that the question isn’t a valid question. Think about something from history, something like what Masham said to Queen Anne. We can’t know what was said but we can use the best evidence we have to try and build a picture. Think about the start of the universe, we have a pretty good idea of what happened and asking “what” is a very legitimate question. The problem with that one is asking “why”. Although why something happens is a legitimate question the answer is unknowable and this makes the question reasonably void. It is these gaps in answers to questions that humans don’t seem to like and in those are inserted many stupid theories along with the concept of god.
Education is how we get out of this. We need to educate the country in particular matters so that people understand why and how. This is not an easy process. To allow a decent explanation to the country on matters of importance with a series on TV or radio or the internet somewhere. Mind you, you can’t make the horse drink. Some people will choose to be willfully ignorant and others are just ignorant. Personally I think this is correlated to good effect with empathy, but that is something I haven’t investigated.
Holocaust
This is how it is done. We educate people. We let them understand the experiences. We talk to them. We hope they are willing to listen and learn. I do think, however, that there is an awful lot of the Dunning-Kruger effect going on with people who choose not to learn.
Asstrology
Two more headlines next to each other on the very same BBC News front pages as the others in this communication. I did not read each article and that may be the start of the problem but I want to point out the following:
Astrology is bollocks and, unfortunately, people fall for its charm and simplicity. Perhaps if we could educate people more about appraising evidence and understanding a little more physics we could kill off this bollocks and other religious bollocks too.
Finally, putting a question mark at the end of a headline does not good journalism make. It is really lazy. It implies that the answer is yes but also shows that the journalist doesn’t really have any proper evidence to answer the question because otherwise the question mark wouldn’t need to be there. If you have evidence then it is fact and you can write something like that as an indictment of underfunding of our roads. But if you are just using “anecdotal evidence”, or to give it its proper name; “anecdotes”, then you are just a lazy piece of shit and you shouldn’t be a journalist.
Always remember when your aunt starts telling you that she took activated carbon tablets and that cleared up her cancer that the plural of anecdotes is not evidence. People are flawed and terrible at understanding evidence. That is why science and experts exist.
A couple of nights ago I was watching television in the evening when I could hear the sound of a large or low helicopter. I didn’t move but consulted 360 Radar and observed that it was a Royal Navy Merlin helicopter flying over. It struck me as a little odd but not enough to make me move. I see Apaches and Chinooks a couple of times a year and given there are DIO training areas in east Kent there’s reason for the activity.
Turns out I was rather wrong.
Mirror Headline
The next day there was quite a bit of news about the Special Boat Service or maybe the Royal Marines on social media although most of the mainstream press kept away from it. I probably should have followed the Merlin on 360 Radar a little longer, but my television show was deemed more worthy.
The news yesterday was about what the Bank Of England reckons could happen if we exit the EU with various agreements. Most headlines I could see focused on the idea that we are going to screw over the economy if there is a “no deal” Brexit.
Bank warns no-deal could see UK sink into recession – BBC News
This seemed to be scaring all people into accepting any sort of deal, even the one the PM has fleshed out. But what most headlines have failed to point out is that ANY exit from the EU will cause massive financial harm to the UK.
If Brexit is disruptive rather than disorderly, GDP falls 3% over the five years to 2022, house prices slide 14%, and unemployment reaches 5.75%
If a close trading relationship is agreed, the economy could still be 1% smaller than if the UK had remained in the EU but 1.5% higher than the bank’s most recent estimate.
If it is less close, the economy’s growth could be 3.75% less than if the UK had remained in the EU and 0.75% less than forecast over the last inflation report.
These figures cover the period to 2023. – BBC News
So, it’s pretty shit for all scenarios but just really shit for nearly all of them. I mean, we could just NOT LEAVE you stupid bastards.
I hate this whole issue. We are led by people desperate to argue for making our country a worse place. Fuckin’ stupid.
So, I’m feeling grumpy today. Just am. Not sure why. And then I go and stupidly read an article in on the BBC News website about most babies being born at 4am. You can read the article here and I’ll be taking quotations from it.
Four o’clock in the morning is the time most babies are born spontaneously in England, with the majority arriving between 01:00 and 07:00, a study shows.
So, four o’clock is the “average” of 01:00 and 07:00. Is that how they worked this out? I’m not sure. I’m probably not going to read the original paper but it does seem a strange thing to say. Assuming that spontaneous births are reasonably random the actual number arriving at 04:00 would be quite small and the variation could be little.
While planned C-section births tended to happen on weekday mornings, births after induced labours were more likely to occur around midnight.
This makes sense. C-Sections in the morning to then make sure everyone is fine during the time when the medical cover is best. Inductions probably happen at that time because they are started in the morning and it takes that long for the effects to show. These are not surprising figures and make utter sense.
It’s this next bit that turned me into a rage.
Overall, more than 70% of births took place outside regular working hours.
And
The researchers said there could be implications for staffing of midwives and doctors, with only 28% of births taking place between 09:00 and 17:00 on weekdays.
So, an event that is reasonably random is spread throughout the day? About thirty percent of births happen in a time frame covering roughly 30% of the amount of time in a day. THIS IS WHAT WE WOULD EXPECT. The working day covers 1/3 of the 24 hours in a day and the number of births in that time period is about 1/3. This sentence made me swear out loud in our staff common room earlier today, much to the ammusment of my colleagues.
I know I shouldn’t really but I have a few spare moments and thought I should share my thoughts.
I HATE THE DAILY MAIL
I’m not going to justify it. I’m not going to say much apart from moaning about this headline:
EXACTLY
Fuck the Daily Mail. EXACTLY. Really. Have you looked at the outfits and seen they are EXACTLY the same. No you haven’t you fuckers because they aren’t EXACTLY the same. Fuck You you racist piece of shit newspaper.
Sometimes, just to irk my ire, I sometimes have a look at the Daily Mail Online. I have a bad habit of reading the headlines on newspapers whenever I go into a newsagents and that often leads me to distress as it’s clear to see the agenda that the mostly right wing press is pushing to those who still read these pieces of shit. Every now and then I glance down the front page of the DM online edition just to see what the world’s most popular website is saying.
Not since 1970
This might seem to be an innocent headline given the toxic racist bullshit the DM usually peddles but there’s more to it than that. This headline is DESIGNED to reinforce the idea that a system of measurement when Britain was GREAT is still in use by some and the baby boomer generation should be proud of using Fahrenheit. Let’s be clear on two three fronts:
Fahrenheit hasn’t been used by the Met Office since 1970. Get the fuck over it you old arseholes.
Baby-boomers are the ones who have taken the most from this country and then fucked it over for the younger generations.
The younger generations are slowly getting their shit together and are going to take over. I can’t wait.
Have a look at news headlines and see the derision placed upon the younger lot by the old.
Time
The front page version of this headline had CAN’T in block capitals. As though reading a clock with hands is something that people SHOULD be able to do.
WHY?
This generation spend absolutely no time looking at analogue clocks so why should we expect them to be able to use one in an examination hall? Have a look around railway stations and airports. See any analogue clocks? Nope, didn’t think so. This headline is there again to push the idea that any change from the values of the baby-boomer generation are bad changes. GTFOI.
[apologies for irks and ire which mean roughly the same thing]
You see, sometimes the news headline writers don’t get it right. Below is the front page headline from BBC News.
Pay Gap Headline
It makes it look as though firms are rushing to publish their details because they want to. They want the world to know how much they don’t pay women. It makes it look like there’s a race to publish, like they really want to get that information out there. But, when you click, you get more details:
Reality
This article goes on the explain the reality. Firms are behind in publishing their details. It’s funny isn’t it, the original headline makes it look as though companies can’t wait whereas the reality is they haven’t been bothered to publish the details so far. Perhaps it’s time for new headline writers but not those employed at the Daily Mail though.
