Category: Uncategorized

I’d like to know why it is that for things which companies can obviously make work if they want to, they sell things which don’t work. My biggest problems are with:
1. Glue:
I don’t know how many times I’ve bought glue which claims to stick things better than the original, only to have it fall apart on first use. Yet I know that it’s possible to make extremely strong glue because the furniture I bought from Ikea is made up of lots of short lengths of wood which have been glued together. But you can take a 2 metre 4cmX4cm beam made up of 30 cm sections and put it between 2 pillars and stand on it and it won’t break.
2. Car engines:
I know that truck, taxi and bus engines are built to run for 1 million km. So why can’t I buy a car that will do this? Why do companies advertise major advances in reliability (do they?) when they already know they can make a car run for 1 million km.

People always say shrinking populations are bad, and I can see that in the short term they are, but I really can’t understand how they can’t be a good thing in the long term. Low planetary resources etc….

Can anyone spot the irony in the text here? Purpose of ad – to get as many people as possible to buy the car. Message – if you buy the car, you’ll be unique, individual.
Actually there’s another irony in there. The slogan “go beyond” – most people in the target market will probably not go beyond (for a few years anyway) but instead go down to pick up the kids from the school 500 metres away. Or failing that drive around the streets of London.

Comes from:

I found this very entertaining and counterintuitive (the Monty Hall problem):
Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
See the extended entry for the answer plus caveats:

Continue reading “Really counterintuitive”

I read in the paper that 3.5 million British out of a population of about 60 million is taking Prosac style anti-depressants. That’s about 5% of the population and some of them are children. My guess is that going out for a run 3 times a week would cure a lot of people. Can a drug really cure you of an emotional disorder? I doubt it very much.
And while I’m on the subject, back pain is another one. Read this book instead of going to the doctor, even if you’ve been knocked out in bed for weeks by it – I pasted the reviews in the extended entry. I totally agree with them.

Continue reading “Medical rant – depression and back-pain”

Signatures can be fun. I was discussing the issue of what would happen if I refused to name a baby with a lawyer. Would they come and lock me up in prison? Would it be given a number? Apparently there are procedures. Then we passed onto this question – how is a handwritten signature defined legally – what happens if I dispute that I signed something. And it transpired that you can change your signature every time you sign something if you like. Also legally speaking, your signature can be anything you can do with a pen in a small box. So I’ve been experimenting – every time I have to sign some stupid bureaucratic thing, I scribble a totally different and unintelligible sign, with some interesting reactions. Reassuringly the bank said it didn’t match my registered signature (but I could change the registered one if I wanted). The next stage is drawing pictures like dogs, cats and stickmen.

If you want people to work, don’t give them permanent contracts where they can’t be fired for not working. It’s shocking how many people in such positions are earning money for doing nothing. There is no reason I can see why it shouldn’t be possible to fire someone who does no work (esp when it is in the order of a couple of days of a normal person’s output in 2-3 years.)

Those machines for blowing leaves from one place to another may be marginally more efficient than a rake, though looking at how they are used, they don’t seem to be.
But more importantly they pollute the environment with fumes, co2, production waste and noise. There seems to be a craze for them. I counted 3 in operation in a short walk this weekend. Perhaps they are a status symbol.
What’s wrong with a few leaves anyway? I don’t understand.
Here’s a movie I caught this guy doing the blowing and there were hardly any leaves. I suppose it’s a way of appearing you’re doing something important and getting paid for it.

It just struck me what the whole problem with this terror business is. The aim of terrorists is to frighten people as much as possible with the minimum of effort. They’re probably not really that bothered about killing people, perhaps they don’t even like it (although my guess would be they probably do a bit). I think they just want to cause panic and get maximum attention for their cause. So by getting in a big flap about the whole thing, and by this I especially mean the press and government reactions, we are actually giving them exactly what they want, and in a sense encouraging them to do more. I don’t mean to diminish the suffering of those involved, but seen on a macro scale, the response is really disproportionate to the events. In the last 4 years, about 10 islamic terrorists have killed a total of about 5000 people (if my figures are correct). For instance, compare the reaction of the press and government to the war on terror to their reaction to say road deaths, which kill millions of people worldwide, or chemical factory disasters such as Bopal, or wars, genocides, smoking, alcohol, global warming to name a few. The reaction is totally out of proportion and it is playing into these people’s hands.
Sometimes, perhaps even mostly, macropsychology is an exact parallel of micropsychology. When children have tantrums it’s best not to give them attention for it, even negative attention, because it teaches them that they can get your attention by playing up. I’m not hoping to change the worldwide reaction to it, just pointing out why our measures seem to be making the problem worse rather than better. Why the war on terror has made the world a more dangerous place.

You come across such blatantly poor science in the press. The above snippet is actually completely made up but reached several mainstream newspapers and web sites. See this for a debunking. There are so many findings published out there which if we stopped for 5 minutes to think about them we would realise that they were utterly meaningless. How could you possibly run a controlled experiment that would prove that????

For another example take a recent spate of articles about the science of happiness. See for example this. Reading the original new scientist article in detail I discover that all this was discovered by “a variety of methods such as asking people how happy they felt at random intervals over a period of time.” Nowhere is there any attempt to define what happiness is so that people understand the question in a standardised way. Nowhere is there any attempt to filter the effects of the fact that happiness is a status symbol in the west. You just ask people how happy they think they are and that is supposed to tell you if your public policy is working for example. Most people are embarassed to say they feel sad because it’s socially unacceptable.

Here’s another very poor science story. Marriage makes you live longer.

Haven’t these people heard of codependent variables.
1. If no-one wants to marry you you are more likely to be a miserable git who dies young of some psychosomatic disease. Just because there’s a correllation between two variables doesn’t mean that one causes the other. Sunshine makes people smile and wear less clothes. But we don’t conclude that smiling makes you wear less clothes or vice versa.
2. (linked to 1.) the sample of lifelong singletons is too small. Very few people are single their whole lives and those that are probably do so for reasons which are likely to affect their health. So you can’t say that the act of getting married improves your health or happiness.

Here are some more

Depression linked to heart disease
Mediterranean diet ‘extends life’(How can you possibly test the effect of two foods on longevity. First of all they can’t possibly have data on what people have eaten for their entire lives. Secondly they can’t possibly have enough controls who doesn’t drink red wine. How many teetotallers do you know?)