I’ve never heard of “Movers and Shakers” before and I am unlikely to give it a try, but its producer just gave the best description of the value of podcasting I’ve read in a while. (ᔥDave Winer, who also knows a few things about podcasting)
From the Antidotes to cynicism creep in academia:
Let me reiterate what I said before: when someone sends me a paper or a newspaper article about a paper, my view today is that the conclusions may or may not be valid. I don’t expect things to hold up just because this is a scientific paper (compared to a blog post), or because it is peer-reviewed (compared to a preprint), or because it is published in Nature or Science, or because it is published by a famous scientist. I think my view is reasonable and supported by evidence, at least in the fields I work in.
This is also my view, and applies equally to The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and JAMA as it does to Nature or Science. They are for-profit businesses who will do things for profit, not for elevation of science. The article goes on to list the titular antidotes from the position of a tenured professor of psychology working in Europe. My own antidote to cynicism creep in academia was slightly different.
I forgot to mark the 25th anniversary of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, a childhood-defining event if there ever was one (I was 15 at the time and a high school freshman). Well, today marks 25 years since the modest Yugoslav Army missile defense shot down the F-117 stealth bomber. The story is as good as a wartime story can get: there were no fatalities, the two main characters became friends, and the wreckage is now in a Belgrade museum, ignored by schoolchildren for whom these events are ancient history.
🏀 Remember these two nitwits shaking hands on a deal? Well, the deal is dead and the Caps and Wizards' owner suddenly has some nice things to say about DC. Quoth Wikipedia:
Eating crow is a colloquial idiom, used in some English-speaking countries, that means humiliation by admitting having been proven wrong after taking a strong position. The crow is a carrion-eater that is presumably repulsive to eat in the same way that being proven wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow.
🏀 Make that three in a row for Wizards, who almost blew an early 16-point lead against Chicago. It wasn’t the prettiest basketball, but I’ll take it. This increases the stakes for tomorrow’s home game with the Nets, if there is such a thing as “stakes” for a team that won’t have a post-season.
Janan Ganesh’s FT column today ends with an excellent quote which can also serve as the motto of American politics:
“We all know what to do. But we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”
He doesn’t cite the source because the FT readership would of course know who it was (I didn’t): Jean-Claude Juncker, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the European Commission. I thought re-election wouldn’t be a problem in Luxembourg since there were so few politicians around you were bound to circle back to the top spot, but there you go.
🏀 Another two wins in a row for the Wizards last week, and both of them at home. So starved were the fans for a W that there were half-standing ovations. This week is the last chance for another home win with Pistons coming to town before back-to-back games against Bucks and Lakers.
A message you don't often see in the Capital One Arena.
One of the problems I have with journalism is that too often style takes precedence over precision. This is obviously fine for fiction books, less so with non-fiction although who can tell the difference these days, and should be less and less acceptable as you go from monthly magazines, to the weeklies, to the dailies, until you get to real-time 24/7 news that should be all facts, all the time.
Har har.
As an example, here is a Washington Post article about the Dutch food industry described the Netherlands as “a bit bigger than Maryland”. The article’s whole point is how much food can be produced in a tight space, so having the readers understand how big or small the country of Nethelrands actually was is important. I have ties to both of these places and some sense of their relative sizes, and I always thought the Netherlands to be more than a bit bigger than Maryland. My adopted home state may take a while to drive across, but since it’s being eaten by the Commonwealth of Virginia from one corner and the Chesapeake Bay from the other, there isn’t much land there.
To confirm my suspicion I went to Wikipedia, which said that the land area of Maryland was 25,314 km2 while the Netherlands had 41,865 km2 total area, 18.41% of which was water, yielding 31,457 km2 of land — a full 25% more than Maryland. If if you wanted to be more conservative you could say that Maryland was 20% smaller than the Netherlands, but that is not the comparison WaPo made. See also how percentages change with different framing — caveat lector. If I thought a meal cost $35 with tax but then the bill showed $43.75 I’d be asking for an explanation, and so would WaPo writers.
Or is 25% margin of error good enough, if you are to preserve the tired journalistic trope of comparing one thing to another? Because this is a clear case of precision being sacrificed to the gods of style: at 25,314 km2 Maryland truly is the closest to the Netherlands of all the states of the Union and also has the benefit of being in WaPo’s local domain. The next closest, West Virgina, is at 62,259 km2 twice the size of the Netherlands. Or rather — let’s not make the same sacrifice here — almost twice the size.
On the other hand, this is a 2-year-old article and who cares anyway? While I did stop paying attention to the newspaper noise a while ago, I still leave space for it to change my perception — which this article would have done were the relative sizes within a single-digit percentage of each other. But then I check, and nope, another disappointment.
The latest walkalogue from Chris Arnade confirms what I have already suspected to be the case: that Belgium is the promised country, and that the area around Antwerp in particular is where I would want to be if I were still in Europe.
On a sadder note, it seems that Brussels is the capital not only of the European Union but also of McEurope, and is to be avoided.
Today was carved out for converting my ye old Blogroll to the new format by exporting all the RSS feeds I follow to OPML and then doing a little bit of cleanup, but of course a little bit turned into a lot and I couldn’t stop fiddling and where oh where has the day gone?
Until next week!