Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Junior Wizard, or T*rr*rist in Training?

When I was a boy I was quite interested in chemistry. It may have started when my older sister gave me a very nice chemistry set.

But after a while I wasn't content with just the experiments described in the booklet that came with the chemistry set, nor with making a few simple things.

The father of my best friend in grade school owned a pharmaceutical supply business. I was allowed to go to their retail counter and buy anything I wanted: any chemicals, any apparatus. Maybe I had a special privilege because they knew me. I might even have been given a discount.

I bought  lot of nice professional apparatus—beakers, flasks, stands for holding all that stuff. And I bought the ingredients for making gunpowder.

My gunpowder never worked, probably fortunately. I could have hurt myself. Also, I think that if it had worked, and if I had used all of the quantities of the ingredients I had obtained—which I never came close to doing—I could probably have blown up two or three houses.

Clearly that was a far more innocent time—when I could walk into that store and come out with the ingredients for gunpowder, in quantities of maybe a pound or two each—and not raise any eyebrows. Nowadays it would be, "Just stay there for a minute, please" while the guy goes in the back and phones the Department of Homeland Security. And then I'm taken in for questioning.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

New Math?

There have been some funny things going on regarding numbers, mainly in advertising, but I saw a similar thing in a PBS documentary TV program.

Evidently it's not expected, anymore, that people can understand fractions. Thus you don't or must not say, for example, "This product will cost you one-fourth as much to use." Instead it's expressed as "four times cheaper." To me that does not make any sense and I can only surmise that it means "one-fourth as expensive."

Some actual examples I've seen: "10x softer" (dentures are 10 times softer than teeth). I'm not sure this makes any sense. What are you counting down from? There is no "softness" scale, but there is such a thing as a hardness scale. So, to make good sense, it should be "one-tenth as hard."

Or (this one from PBS), hydrogen is "13 times lighter." Possibly that makes sense but, again, I feel it's expressed backwards and should be "one-thirteenth as heavy."

This one takes the cake for being meaningless: A certain product being pitched on TV "reduces body fat by over 200%." Well, you can reduce something by a certain percentage, but only up to a little over 99%. You get to 100% and it's all gone. So how can anything be reduced by 200%?

This should fall under the headings of how ridiculous and deceptive advertising is, and how things are dumbed down for the average boob-in-the-street. Another instance of the dumbing down of (or to) Americans?

Copyright © 2013.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Truth and Lies on the Internet

The Internet is a wonderful thing, as a source of information, there's no doubt. I personally rely on it for finding out a lot of things via Wikipedia and Google searches: how to do some homeowner-ly task, consumer reviews of products, health information, and much more. And this from someone who has a lifetime habit of turning to books and libraries to find things out.

Unfortunately, the Internet is a two-edged sword. It can also be used to spread incorrect "information."

About a week ago I was reading an article, "Ten Brands that Are Likely to Disappear in 2014," on the financial web site 24/7 Wall Street. This article said that Volvo cars are likely to disappear from the US market next year. I forwarded this information to two friends of mine who own Volvos.

One of those friends got somewhat alarmed and wondered if she should sell her car. The other one took a more critical view of the story and did some research on her own, finding a statement from Volvo's US arm that they have no intention of leaving the US market.

That got me thinking about the fact that you can easily locate contradictory information on the 'Net, and then I had to wonder about what percentage of Internet content might be reliable and what percentage not.

Shortly after that incident I received an email, one of those viral emails that has been forwarded many times before reaching me. The immediate source of this one was an old friend from high school with whom I re-established contact a few years ago. (I could tell a bit about this person that might be interesting but I don't want to get too far off my subject. Suffice it to say here that he is politically conservative whereas he knows, or should know, that I am not.)

This email listed some of the problems that the State of Illinois and the city of Chicago have. The problems are  undeniable but, according to this email, these problems are attributable to Democrats because—as the email asserted numerous times—there are no Republicans in Illinois. This is patently false. It mentioned former Illinois Governor George Ryan as being in prison and implied that this is among the many examples of the things that are wrong with Illinois. This is wrong because Ryan was recently released from prison. More importantly, the email conveniently ignored the fact that Ryan is a Republican.

The City of Chicago has a tradition of  voting Democratic; this long history might deserve comment, but again I don't want to go too far afield. However, the suburban counties that surround Chicago typically are Republican and elect Republicans on both the state and federal levels.

If anyone cares to look at the facts rather than making unfounded assertions, the makeup of the Illinois legislature (General Assembly) is thusly: Senate, 40 Democrats and 19 Republicans. House, 70 Democrats and 47 Republicans. Thus, the Democrats do have a majority in both houses of the Illinois state legislature; but I'd say that's a far cry from there being NO Republicans. The facts for the US Congressmen (Representatives) from Illinois are that there are 12 Democrats and 6 Republicans. In the US Senate, there is one Democratic Senator from Illinois and one Republican.

So—back to the email from my high-school classmate. The person who originated that email had very little regard for facts or truth. And I have found in the past that other emails—also forwarded to me by the same classmate—were also full of exaggerations, half-truths, and out-and-out falsehoods.* At the risk of making a rather sweeping generalization, I'm going to say that those on the Right very often play fast-and-loose with the truth. (I base that assertion partly on the fact that, on matters regarding homosexuality, they have been known to shamelessly promulgate lies.)

I think that those who forward these emails are just as guilty as those who first write them. Unfortunately, every person who receives such an email and believes it and forwards it is doing the world quite a disservice by adding to the general store of incorrect information out there.

However, on a brighter note, if the Internet is the problem, it can also provide the cure. I'd like to acquaint my readers with two 'Net sites that are dedicated to countering incorrect information that circulates on the 'Net—to setting the facts straight. They are FactCheck.org and Snopes.com.
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*I can recall three previous emails that this person forwarded to me. Two of them were anti-Obama and, when I did some checking, they were factually incorrect. The third was anti-Muslim.

I used to berate my students for what I felt was their mindless, mechanical, uncritical note-taking. I said, "My words go into your ear, through your neck and shoulder, down your arm and onto your paper, with no thought involved. I could say 'Black is white' and you would write down 'Black is white.'"

The point of this posting was that we tend not to be critical of what we hear and read. How many people would take the trouble to check on the content of an email they'd received, if they were planning to forward it or even if they were not?

Note added August 18, 2013. Also see my Friday, September 21, 2012 posting, "Lies from the Right, in Your Email Inbox."


Copyright © 2013.