Misinformed
Published on 25 Jan 2018There are 21 facts in this video
June 13, 2018
Misinformed – Canada
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June 2, 2018
QotD: The Dunning-Kruger Effect
In the early hours of April 20 1995, police knocked on the door of McArthur Wheeler and arrested him for holding-up two Pittsburgh banks the previous day. Wheeler could hardly have been surprised that the police were on to him: wearing no mask or disguise, he had ambled into the banks during business hours and brandished a gun in full view of security cameras. Nevertheless, he was astonished, protesting “but I wore the juice!” Wheeler had formed the erroneous belief that lemon juice rendered people invisible on video.
Wheeler is now a legend in psychology, since it was his regrettable escapade that inspired two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, to figure out whether we have a good sense of our own strengths and weaknesses. Dunning and Kruger set tests of grammar, logic and even having a sense of humour to a group of undergraduates. Then they asked them how they stacked up to others in the group. Was their grasp of logic and grammar better or worse than average? Were they better able than other students to distinguish funny from unfunny jokes?
Most students thought that they were above-average logicians, grammarians and wits but the Dunning-Kruger effect is not mere overconfidence. The competent people in the study had a reasonable grasp of where they stood in the pecking order. The incompetent ones were blissfully unaware of their incompetence. The good students knew that they were good; the bad students had no clue that they were bad.
Perhaps because Dunning and Kruger opened their 1999 research paper with the story of McArthur Wheeler, the Dunning-Kruger effect has now become a popular insult in some corners of the internet. We chuckle at people who are far too stupid to know that they are stupid. Unfortunately, such mockery misses the subtlety and universality of the effect. All of us are incompetent in some areas. When we stray into them, the Dunning-Kruger effect may be lurking.
The fundamental problem is a person trying to diagnose his own incompetence is — almost by necessity — likely to be missing the skills needed to make that diagnosis. Not knowing much grammar means you’re poorly placed to diagnose your ignorance of grammar.
Tim Harford, “Can trivia help us to be less ignorant of our own ignorance?”, TimHarford.com, 2016-09-06.
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May 29, 2018
Us vs Millennials
Owen Benjamin
Published on 7 Mar 2017If you’re like me you’ve felt very alienated by how fast the world changes and how different each generation becomes. Hopefully this video helps you understand what’s happening.
hugepianist.com for tour dates and podcasts
@owenbenjamin twitter
@owenbenjam instagram
whydidnttheylaugh@gmail.com
write to me! I get very lonely. Feed the bear.
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May 26, 2018
Remy: The Longest Time (TSA Version)
ReasonTV
Published on 25 May 2018Remy prepares summer travelers for groping season.
“The Longest Time” parody written and performed by Remy. Background vocals and Mastering by Ben Karlstrom. Video produced and edited by Austin Bragg.
—–
LYRICS:
Whoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time
If you book a ticket for a flight
Stow your baggage and some of your rights
Travel, you’re hoping
But first you’ll get a groping
And you’ll be waiting for the longest timeMy last job? I guess it paid the bills
This pays more for using the same skills
At first we hound you
Then we put our arms around you
And you’ll be waiting for the longest timeWhoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest timeSupervisors try to sneak bombs by
Of 100, 80 make it by
I like those chances
I forgot how nice your pants is
I haven’t touched them for the longest timeI had other jobs at the start
I said to myself “just follow your heart”
Now I know the woman that you are
I’ll swab your Magic cards
And you’ll miss your connection…Who could guess what consequence this brings
We have issues keeping nicer things
Our record’s so bad I think you ought to know this summer
you’ll be waiting for the longest timeWhoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time
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May 25, 2018
QotD: Muggeridge’s Law
While Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn process of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.
Tom Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A literary manifesto for the new social novel”, Harpers, 1989-11.
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May 24, 2018
QotD: Hunter S. Thompson on the importance of breakfast
It is not going to be easy for those poor bastards out in San Francisco who have been waiting all day in a condition of extreme fear and anxiety for my long and finely reasoned analysis of “The Meaning of Jimmy Carter” to come roaring out of my faithful mojo wire and across 2,000 miles of telephone line to understand why I am sitting here in a Texas motel full of hookers and writing at length on The Meaning of Breakfast……. But like almost everything else worth understanding, the explanation for this is deceptively quick and basic.
After more than ten years of trying to deal with politics and politicians in a professional manner, I have finally come to the harsh understanding that there is no way at all – not even for a doctor of chemotherapy with total access to the whole spectrum of legal and illegal drugs, the physical constitution of a mule shark and a brain as rare and sharp and original as the Sloat diamond – to function as a political journalist without abandoning the whole concept of a decent breakfast. I have worked like 12 bastards for more than a decade to be able to have it both ways, but the conflict is too basic and too deeply rooted in the nature of both politics and breakfast to ever be reconciled. It is one of those very few Great Forks in The Road of Life that cannot be avoided: like a Jesuit priest who is also a practicing nudist with a $200-a-day smack habit wanting to be the first Naked Pope (or Pope Naked the First, if we want to use the language of the church)….… Or a vegetarian pacifist with a .44 magnum fetish who wants to run for president without giving up his membership in the National Rifle Association or his New York City pistol permit that allows him to wear twin six-guns on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and all of his press conferences.
There are some combinations that nobody can handle: shooting bats on the wing with a double-barreled .410 and a head full of jimson weed is one of them, and another is the idea that it is possible for a freelance writer with at least four close friends named Jones to cover a hopelessly scrambled presidential campaign better than any six-man team of career political journalists on the New York Times or the Washington Post and still eat a three-hour breakfast in the sun every morning.
Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.
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May 21, 2018
Work in high tech? You’ll instantly recognize this office
Alistair Dabbs on the utterly interchangeable (except for the bogs) modern high tech office suite:
As an itinerant freelancer, my work takes me to a variety of tech-savvy business premises. And while small companies each have their own style of office layout, every larger organisation from mid-size to corporate looks almost exactly the same as another.
Except for the toilets. You can learn a lot about a business by its bogs.
So as I turn up for an on-site booking and sit for a short while in a reception space that has been arranged identically to those depicted in every business furniture catalogue ever printed, later to stride through yet another open-plan office of the same old rows of grey desks and the same old blue carpet tiles, I am overwhelmed by the tedium of déjà vu.
So on arriving at the designated meeting room – always featuring a frosted glass wall, a boardroom-style table with a faux teak effect surface and luxury adjustable chairs that refuse to be adjusted unless you violently bounce up and down on them like an over-excited child on a Space Hopper – I drop my things in the corner furthest from the door and enquire about using the washroom facilities.
As I am given verbal directions for the nearest toilet, I make a cursory check under the table which has been designed for up to 20 persons and confirm, yes, there are just TWO power sockets, as per usual, and no extension cable of any description. A quick glance behind the massively undersized TV at the end of the room reveals another six wall sockets that are, as I confidently expected, all occupied by plugs already – one for the TV and the other five for various components of the impossibly complicated video conferencing system that no one knows how to use, least of all the IT department that had lobbied strongly against its purchase in the first place.
So far, so identical. Now let’s find out what this place is really like.
[…]
Unlike this particular unfortunate, I return from the grunting rooms this day refreshed and with a spring in my step. My face smarts invigoratingly with aftershave and creamy odours waft from my gesticulating soft palms – vanilla from the left, coconut from the right.
Back in the meeting room, I am soon brought back to Earth and my surroundings merge into the amorphous generic semblance of every other office building in the western world.
A large cupboard that does not match the rest of the furniture has been installed in the most awkward place to squeeze past; it is locked but almost certainly contains nothing but a layer of dust, a torn corner from a Post-It note and a single paperclip. The aircon has just two settings: Arctic or Sahara. Everyone is forced to use a Guest Wi-Fi login whose permissions have been devised by a recent graduate of a free Cyber Security MOOC to prevent access to personal emails, cloud drives and the internet in general. A ceiling light flickers every two minutes. Halfway into the meeting, the room begins to vibrate to the intense scream of a workman’s drill on the other side of a wall, and continues for the next six hours.
I could be anywhere.
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May 18, 2018
Minnie the Moocher by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry
imamazedby
Published on 25 Jul 2010Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in Jeeves and Wooster.
I DO NOT OWN Jeeves and Wooster! ;(
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April 26, 2018
QotD: Drama critics
Nobody loves them, and rightly, for they are creatures of the night. Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? I doubt it. They come out after dark, and we know how we feel about things that come out after dark. Up to no good, we say to ourselves.
P.G. Wodehouse, Over Seventy: An Autobiography with Digressions, 1956.
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April 25, 2018
April 24, 2018
QotD: Bisexuality
The word ‘bi-curious’ makes me feel even more like heaving. Just because I was in love with a girl for six months two decades ago, a swath of unappealing ‘straight’ females for quite a while saw fit to try it on with me after a few Babychams. ‘But I want to experiment with my sexuality!’ they would wail as I ejected them into the night. ‘Then buy a Bunsen burner and a Petri dish, and stick ‘em where the sun don’t shine!’ I would squeal indignantly. And the current Special Snowflake simper of ‘sexual fluidity’ makes me feel like burning a rainbow flag – it sounds like something you’d ask the pharmacist for a cure for in a hushed voice, all the while itching madly.
But the act of being bisexual – I prefer to call it ‘sexually flexible’ or even better ‘spontaneous’ – is truly to have drawn the golden ticket in the tombola of dirty joy. Yes, some bisexuals are miseries – my ex-girlfriend once sniggered to me that at every Freshers’ Week at the universities she attended, there was inevitably a Bisexual Stall bearing the legend ‘Twice the fun’ and manned by a creature whose misery was so tangible that he made Morrissey look like Little Mary Sunshine. With certain women, you get the feeling that having had mutually dismaying relationships with as many men as they could physically manage, they decided to bat for both sides sheerly in order to double the number of potential partners they can make as miserable as they are.
Julie Burchill, “In praise of bisexuality”, The Spectator, 2016-08-20.
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April 23, 2018
QotD: The knife
A simple edged tool is likely to be the human ur-tool, especially as tool-using hominids moved farther away from sources of flint or obsidian. IMO, any adult human — and most children past a certain degree of maturity — ought to carry a knife. Otherwise you’re just a chimp with a haircut.
Roberta X. “My Kershaw! My Kershaw!”, The Adventures of Roberta X, 2016-08-17.
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April 18, 2018
Bo Burnham – Today’s Country Songs
J GiL
Published on 8 Jul 2016
H/T to Victor for the link.
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April 17, 2018
Yes Prime Minister – Official Secrets – Expelling the Russians
Navyblue95
Published on 29 Dec 2016
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April 11, 2018
Penn & Teller: Dalai Lama and Tibet
infinit888
Published on 13 May 2008Mainstream media seems to be only pushing the story about an oppressed Tibet and referring to the Dalai Lama as a saint.
This is a compilation of clips from Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! “Holier Than Thou” speaking about Tibet and the Dalai Lama.
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