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Welcome to the weblog, which gets updated whenever I have time to do it. Also new this week: Insufficient respect? (a rant).

Saturday 23rd February

It’s no secret that most of the world is both bemused and amused by the inability of the current US President to speak anything resembling coherent English, excepting the odd occasion when the English is OK but the mental coherence has gone. My current favourite Bushism, though, is one where we can’t be absolutely sure — given this is The Shrub after all — that he didn’t mean what he said:

"For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It’s just unacceptable. And we’re going to do something about it."

However, the Japanese this week found out that it is easy to "misunderestimate", as it were, the potential for chaos when such a muddleheaded president opens his mouth. A slip of the tongue and the yen plummets…

Good statistics can make poor advice. The problem with statistics — perhaps we should say, one problem with statistics — is that they create artificial boundaries, as an article in Slate highlights.

The absurdity began in 1997, when the National Institutes of Health issued a "consensus statement" purporting to advise women about when to get a mammogram… The NIH declared that an annual mammogram is extremely beneficial and definitely recommended for women ages 50-69. For women ages 40-50, it said, the evidence is unclear. Every woman should decide for herself, in consultation with her doctor.

This recommendation shares a flaw with many such pieces of statistically based advice we get from the government and other organizations dedicated to our well-being: It is detached from reality. It posits a world where risks and benefits change at a few discrete points (birthdays ending in zero), while the decision at hand allows for a variety of fine distinctions (mammogram definitely, mammogram maybe, mammogram probably not necessary, etc.). In reality, though, the opposite is true: The risks and benefits change gradually while the decision is a discrete yes-or-no.

How can the value of a mammogram to any particular woman be completely uncertain the day before her 50th birthday and overwhelmingly clear the day after? Ten years earlier, how can a mammogram be worthless or worse the day before her 40th birthday and possibly save her life the day after?

This is clearly true, and in a world where most people don’t have the faintest grasp of how statistics or probability works it is a problem. But it is probably a problem without a solution. Breast carcinoma is a disease which is less common in younger women, so there needs to be some separation out of the statistics for the younger women who aren’t so likely to get it and the older women who are more likely to — which means there have to be discrete boundaries, however artificial in the real world.

What is, I think, a particularly bad feature of these NIH recommendations is the end cut-off. If I were a seventy-year-old woman with no grasp of statistics I would be completely at a loss. If a mammogram is definitely recommended between 50 and 69, what should I do? If the recommendation stops at 69, does that mean I’m OK at 70 and I have nothing to worry about?

Chuck Jones, who probably did more than any other single person to bring a smile to my face when I was a kid — not that the amusement ever stopped — has died. No, I’m not going to say it. Simply RIP.

Tuesday 19th February

Here’s a sig I came across on Usenet:

If Microsoft invented plumbing, legions of hackers would smugly discuss the benefits of washing in a stream.

Thing is, if Microsoft invented plumbing a)only an idiot would trust it, so washing in a stream would be quite sensible, and b)half of us would already be dead from cholera.

It’s actually the first time in a while I’ve dropped into Usenet. Since Insa died, actually. Somehow that left me not in the mood for deep intellectual conversation. Or mind-numbing, crass stupidity, which I see is still in full flood.

What I’ve seen today shows that some people never learn. I’ve seen one guy wanting to know how to turn off the scrollbar in his site’s main frame even if it is necessary (guess the content’s not up to much) and another wanting to know how to make links completely unidentifiable — even down to stopping the cursor changing — until they’re clicked (which will be never, FFS!).

Someone’s put up a page called the The Absolute Pitz which brings together all the bad things you can do with very little effort in web design…

Nice to see that after the September 11th attacks the USA is still the same old place. eBay is now stocking items from or relating to the World Trade Centre — though I’m not sure which is worse, that or their critics’ description of the items as "icons of pain".

World Trade Center- related items posted for sale on eBay over the past 10 days include:

• "WTC uncensored photos." The blurb states: "Pictures include people preparing to jump from the windows, casualties on the ground, etc."
• Compact discs purportedly containing recorded police and fire radio transmissions from Sept. 11. The dealer invites bidders: "Relive this horrific day in history!"
• A CD containing Ground Zero photos shot by a paramedic and a police officer who worked at the site…
• Used Microsoft flight simulation software that allows players to fly between the Twin Towers.

Aw, shit, and there wus me wantin’ to fly into the towers.

This is one of those little things — rather like web deezyners wanting to cripple users’ browsers — which seriously make you wonder about the cranial content of most people. The BBC’s Nick Robinson runs a "newslog" (not one of those nasty weblog things, then?); on Monday he made the entry in question. It’s worth quoting the paragraph before that, because it is such a hope-inspiring one:

Tony Blair’s lost the benefit of the doubt with the electorate — eight out of ten voters tell pollsters they believe he does do favours for those who give Labour cash. Yet he’s behaving as if that’s not the case.

Unfortunately this welcome indication of sanity in the UK is immediately followed by a suggestion of widespread thick-headedness:

Last night on the telly I said that political honour was — like virginity — easy to lose but rather harder to re-gain. I’ve been inundated (well, contacted by a handful of viewers) pointing out helpfully that you cannot regain your virginity. Is irony that dead?!!!

“Multiple exclamation marks,” he went on, “are a sure sign of a diseased mind.”

Sunday 17th February

A report in today’s Sunday Herald states that about 50% of all fruit and vegetables in supermarkets is contaminated by pesticides. Some supermarkets are clearly working to reduce and ultimately eliminate all pesticide residues from their stock. However, the level of arrogant complacency in some quarters is typified by this quote from Stephen Ridge, the quality assurance director at Somerfield: If you want no pesticide residues, you have to buy organic.

In other words, if you want food uncontaminated by fairly nasty neurotoxins, you need to pay more. And people wonder why there are anti-capitalism demonstrations!

I’m by no means a fan of Jack McConnell, but he does at least seem to have grasped something that Tony Blair hasn’t (or can’t): spin doctors aren’t a solution, they’re part of the problem. Of course, Tony Blair is pretty much a politician without substance, so he really has to rely on spin.

Talking of spin doctors, Jo Moore finally got the push this week following some pretty damaging bickering with Martin Sixsmith. Her days have been pretty much numbered since it was revealed she suggested burying bad news on September 11th. I still think that cynical manipulation of the news is precisely what she was paid to do, and it’s a bit much penalising her for doing her job. If we don’t like the fact that she was doing such a job, the people who should be resigning are the ones who paid her to do it. [More…]

"Who the fuck is Muriel Gray?" says God.

Christian Fuckwits, Episode 26,243: In which Stradbroke Church has for 25 years had a five-pointed Christmas star atop its tower — but there’s a shock in store for the simple-minded worshippers when one of them realises that (the horror! the horror!) five-pointed stars, or "pentangles", are associated with witchcraft (oh no!) and the occult (gasp!). "It must be taken down," they cry. "Oh why wasn’t a good star, with six points, put up?"

Clearly having the symbol of another religion up there is OK so long as it’s a monotheistic one…