H/T to Tim Harford.
January 17, 2012
January 16, 2012
It may be pseudoscientific gibberish, but it makes a good newspaper headline
It’s pretty much a certainty that your local newspaper and radio stations have been busy pushing the meme that today is “Blue Monday“. It’s actually a bit of advertising creativity that’s metastasized:
January is a depressing time for many. The weather’s awful, you get less daylight than a stunted dandelion and your body is struggling to cope with the withdrawal of the depression-alleviating calorific foods, such as chocolate, of the hedonistic festive period. January is one long post-Christmas hangover.
So there are many reasons why someone may feel particularly “down” during January. But every year, much of the media become fixated on a specific day — the third Monday in January — as the most depressing of the year. It has become known as Blue Monday.
This silly claim comes from a ludicrous equation that calculates “debt”, “motivation”, “weather”, “need to take action” and other arbitrary variables that are impossible to quantify and largely incompatible.
True clinical depression (as opposed to a post-Christmas slump) is a far more complex condition that is affected by many factors, chronic and temporary, internal and external. What is extremely unlikely (i.e. impossible) is that there is a reliable set of external factors that cause depression in an entire population at the same time every year.
But that doesn’t stop the equation from popping up every year. Its creator, Dr Cliff Arnall, devised it for a travel firm. He has since admitted that it is meaningless (without actually saying it’s wrong).
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January 14, 2012
How much is your time worth?
In an article about the recently approved high speed train link between London and Birmingham, Tim Harford points out a few oddities in the calculations that supposedly show how beneficial the new railway connection will be:
But it’s not just about forecasts — it’s about the value of time saved because of a faster journey, right?
That’s true. The high-speed link would save about 40 minutes on a journey from London to Birmingham. How much that is worth is an interesting question.
If you have a morning meeting it might mean an extra 40 minutes in bed.
It might indeed, which is priceless. HS2 Ltd told me that they use numbers from the Department for Transport. The DfT apparently values leisure time at about £6 an hour — this, intriguingly, implies that the UK government’s official position is that anyone under the age of 21 is wasting their time earning the young person’s minimum wage and would be wise to chillax in front of the Nintendo.
What about business travel?
Well, business travel is valued at £50 an hour. Unless the business travel in question is commuting, in which case it’s £7 an hour.
What?
Doesn’t make a bit of sense to me, either. Perhaps the idea is that commuting is eating into your leisure time, which is almost valueless apparently, whereas business travel is eating into your employer’s time, which is precious indeed. Complain to the DfT if you don’t like it.
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January 7, 2012
Booth babes = company with shitty products or zero new ideas
A useful rant about the companies who depend on “booth babes” to draw attention at trade shows:
CES, like many industry conventions, will be thick with “booth babes” — women paid to stand around in revealing clothing in order to draw men to the booths and see terrible products. That’s regrettable. Not only because it is sexist, but also because it just makes your company look like a bunch of undersexed nimrods.
If the only way you can get people interested in your product is to have a scantily clad woman appear next to it for no apparent reason, your products are probably awful. And besides, it’s boring. It’s just boring. It’s been done so many times, for so many years, that my only reaction to seeing a booth bunny is to think, “Here is a company that is completely out of ideas.”
Look, technology industry CEOs, if you want to stick a butt in my face, I’d be way more impressed if you made it your own fat ass. Butter up that big white rump of yours and squeeze it into a little red thong. Strap those mantits into a cheetah bra that lets your pale hairy cleavage see the light of day. Do that, and I promise you that I’ll listen to your pitch. (Even if it’s a little awkward for both of us!) Better yet, get the whole pasty, overpaid, C-level crew into some sexy swimwear. People will talk. You’ll be the buzz.
Full disclosure: I’ve worked (on the technology side) at companies who spent nearly as much time and effort hiring and “costuming” their booth babes as they did on the actual marketing campaign for their products. I don’t currently work with firms who do this, thank goodness.
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January 6, 2012
Weird local story gets a bit weirder
In Pickering, about 20 kilometres west of here, the regional police found that an abandoned home had been modified to add a “confinement room”. It’s in a fairly secluded area, so there were no immediate leads to who had made the modifications or who (if anyone) had been confined in it. Today, the National Post reported that the “dungeon house” has burned to the ground:
An abandoned Pickering farmhouse that was found to have padlocked dungeon in its basement burned to the ground early Friday morning, adding an unexpected twist to an already bizarre police investigation.
A fire broke out at 140 Concession Rd. 7 outside of Pickering shortly after midnight and soon consumed the desolate building where police had been carrying out an investigation.
[. . .]
Before the blaze, police were trying to determine who built the “confinement-style” room with padlocks affixed to the very thick door, discovered in late November when crews went in to assess the building that had been scheduled for demolition.
Police said the house was last occupied in 2006, but the room was new — believed to have been built within the last year or two.
“I can’t get into what was in the room, but the way it was constructed — the time and effort put into it and the materials used — clearly indicated it was a room designed to hold somebody in,” Durham Regional Police Detective Darren Short said last month.
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January 2, 2012
The least welcome additions to “managementspeak” in 2011
Macro Man runs down a selection of words and phrases which became common last year:
We are nearly at the end of 2011 and another year of mayhem behind. We will be judging our 2011 Non-Predictions and trying to dream up some new ones for 2012 in the next fortnight or so but this week we have been able to get some long needed admin done. With it came a realisation that even if the financial industry is suffering the creative management community has been in full swing dreaming up new terms and phrases to camouflage the blindingly obvious. The evolution of ‘management speak’ means some phrases die and some survive and flourish. TMM really don’t know what determines the success of one term or phrase over another other than, as with the arts, adoption and patronage by the most respected in the field. TMM hope that this year’s rash of newcomers all die off naturally but we would like to help with a shove into their deserved obscurity.
TMM have noticed that every cause nowadays needs an “Awareness” campaign and though we feel that “doing” is of much greater importance than “awaring”, we will go along with the fashion and launch a Management Talk Awareness Week with the list of phrases and terms we have found most irksome this year.
So here are TMM’s top ten annoying phrases of 2011 (even if some are older) that we would like to see the back of.
“Hi, I hope all is well. We have identified a need to internalise our ideation of the requirements of the Stakeholder Community before we reach out to them.”
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December 29, 2011
Alternatives to ordinary houses: former missile silos
A former US Air Force missile silo (with a house and other buildings on the land above) was put on the market earlier this month at a low-low price of only $750,000:
Boing Boing has come across a cozy little place that any future super-villain would be happy to call home on Sotheby’s International Realty website. Situated in the scenic Adirondack Mountains of New York, this silo and air park were operational for a short time in 1961. Hundreds of these Atlas F missile silos were built across the U.S. in the 1960’s in anticipation of attacks on the country.
As if the promise of moving into your very own missile silo isn’t tempting enough, Sotheby’s has recently dropped the price from $4.6 million USD to a mere $750,000. Not a bad deal if you’re looking to save money on your lair so you can splurge on that death ray you’ve always wanted.
In addition to the house perched atop the missile, you may also be interested in the adjoining air craft hanger, seven buildings spread out over neighbouring acres of land and an additional log cabin with runway access. To get the whole package, it’ll cost you $1.76 million USD.
The article also linked to this related video:
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December 23, 2011
Choosing the right historical figures to appear on Canadian banknotes
Colby Cosh has some thoughts on who we should be celebrating by including their images on our currency:
Hilarity! Both of the metropolitan broadsheets in Alberta are throwing a tantrum about the Mint’s plans to dump the Famous Five feminists of the 1920s from the $50 bill and replace them with a picture of an icebreaker. Like most pundits who take a thwack at the occasional issue of personages and emblems on our currency, the authors of these editorials act like they have never been east of Flin Flon.
I ask you to sincerely disregard the epic loathsomeness of the Famous Five — that quintet of unsmiling prohibitionists, pacifists, and white supremacists, at least three of whom bear direct personal responsibility for a four-decade regime of sexual sterilization of the “unfit” in Alberta. Leave aside, too, the fact that women would obviously have been admitted to the Senate soon enough if there had never been a Persons Case. No, I ask you merely to look at the people other countries put on their paper currency. With the exception of Australia, which shares our fetish for early female politicians utterly unknown elsewhere, you’ll find they mostly like to put world-historical figures on there. Japan honours Noguchi, who discovered the syphilis spirochete. England honours Darwin and Adam Smith. Sweden remembers Linnaeus and Jenny Lind. New Zealand commemorates Edmund Hillary and Ernest Rutherford.
He invites the readership to provide their choices for banknotization. I thought the obvious suggestion was to include Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart — our Holy Trinity — on the banknotes.
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December 16, 2011
Reason.TV: Christopher Hitchens – Bah, Humbug on Christmas
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011.
I’m saddened to write that the great essayist and writer Christopher Hitchens is dead at the age of 62. He had been weakened by the cancer of the esophagus that he disclosed publicly in 2010 and the treatments he had undertaken to fight his illness. Reason extends its condolences to his wife, family, and friends.
As is clear to anyone who has read even a sentence of his staggeringly prolific output, Hitchens was the sort of stylist who could turn even a casual digression into a tutorial on all aspects of history, literature, and art. As a writer, you gaze upon his words and despair because there’s just no way you’re going to touch that. But far more important than the wit and panache and erudition with which he expressed himself was the method through which he engaged the world.
The Toronto Star has a small collection of quotations which do give a sense of the man’s range and wit:
5. About Sarah Palin: “She’s got no charisma of any kind, [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”
6. “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
[. . .]
8. About Mother Teresa: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
9. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”
[. . .]
12. About Michael Moore: “Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.”
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A very Calvin & Hobbes Christmas
H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.
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December 11, 2011
QotD: Alcohol
It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring. Kingsley grasped this essential fact very early in life, and (so to speak) never let go of the insight. This does not mean that there are not wine bores, single-malt bores, and people who become even more boring when they themselves have a tipple. You will meet them, and learn how to recognize them (and also how to deal with them) in these pages.
In my opinion Kingers — which I was allowed to call him — was himself a very slight cocktail bore. Or, at least, he had to affect to be such in order to bang out a regular column on drinks for the pages of a magazine aimed at the male population. In “real” life, Amis was a no-nonsense drinker with little inclination to waste a good barman’s time with fussy instructions. However, there was an exception which I think I can diagnose in retrospect, and it is related to his strong admiration for the novels of Ian Fleming. What is James Bond really doing when he specifies the kind of martini he wants and how he wants it? He is telling the barman (or bartender if you must) that he knows what he is talking about and is not to be messed around. I learned the same lesson when I was a restaurant and bar critic for the City Paper in Washington, D.C. Having long been annoyed by people who called knowingly for “a Dewar’s and water” instead of a scotch and water, I decided to ask a trusted barman what I got if I didn’t specify a brand or label. The answer was a confidential jerk of the thumb in the direction of a villainous-looking tartan-shaded jug under the bar. The situation was even grimmer with gin and vodka and became abysmal with “white wine”, a thing I still can’t bear to hear being ordered. If you don’t state a clear preference, then your drink is like a bad game of poker or a hasty drug transaction: It is whatever the dealer says it is. Please do try to bear this in mind.
Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
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December 10, 2011
QotD: G.K. Chesterton on waiting for a train
[. . .] And most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences — things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys’ habit in this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen. Their meditations may be full of rich and fruitful things. Many of the most purple hours of my life have been passed at Clapham Junction, which is now, I suppose, under water. I have been there in many moods so fixed and mystical that the water might well have come up to my waist before I noticed it particularly. But in the case of all such annoyances, as I have said, everything depends upon the emotional point of view. You can safely apply the test to almost every one of the things that are currently talked of as the typical nuisance of daily life.
G.K. Chesterton, “On running after one’s hat” (1908), republished in Quotidiana, 2007-12-10.
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December 9, 2011
“An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
Hard to refute the latest xkcd take on Christmas music:
December 2, 2011
“There is no prophecy for 2012. It is a marketing fallacy”
The BBC attempts to debunk the “2012 is the end of the world” notion that the Mayans are supposed to have predicted.
The date marks the end of one of the periods of roughly 400 years into which the Mayan calendar is divided.
Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropological History has also tried to counter speculation that the Maya predicted a catastrophic event for 2012.
Only two out of 15,000 registered Mayan texts mention the date 2012, according to the Institute, and no Mayan text predicts the end of the world.
“There is no prophecy for 2012. It is a marketing fallacy,” Erik Velasquez, etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told Reuters.
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November 29, 2011
Oh, the jarmanity!
The Reg reports a terrible traffic accident in Yorkshire:
A flood of yeast extract has blocked the M1 motorway in South Yorkshire after a truck containing the Marmite ingredient crashed and spilled its load.
The road is still closed this morning, according to the latest traffic information, as cleanup workers scoop 23.2 tonnes of the gloopy brown stuff off the road surface.
[. . .]
The dumped yeast extract was described as “waste” by the BBC, so is highly unlikely to now end up in Marmite jars.
Left uncleaned, the vitamin-rich syrup, packed with denatured yeast cells, could cause a minor biohazard as it is highly nutritious to bacteria cultures.
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