Steve Kass

It’s bad enough that Google News considers the Washington Times a news organization, but attributing the Times’s rubbish to George Washington?

I have my doubts about some of the other George Washington quotes Google News offers, too.

If the South Korean government can find a way to satisfy the letter of the law while channeling their economic activities away from Iranian institutions — non-Iranian banks, maybe in Dubai — that’s the first step.

CNN doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should, given that they’re easily as irresponsible as their buddies at [expletive deleted]. Today they’re fanning the fires about “illegal immigration,” the current euphemism for people we don’t like because they’re brownish and speak another language especially Spanish. Writer Arthur Brice devotes a big chunk of a 900-word article on CNN.com today to a discussion of “anchor babies,” the current not-so-euphemism for babies of people we don’t like because they’re brownish and speak another language especially Spanish. Here’s my brief rant on the article, “Report: 8 percent of U.S. newborns have undocumented parents.”

Before ranting, though, let me be one of the first to greet all these new and beautiful U.S. citizens: “¡Welcome, and bienvenidos!”

This rant has two parts. First, let’s see what “have undocumented parents” means, so we know more about this 8% on whom the goons will be spreading their invective. The phrase shouldn’t mean anything other than “have undocumented parents,” but somehow it does, and not just because of headlinic license. It means “has at least one undocumented parent.” Here’s the relevant wording (emphasis mine) from the Pew report Brice describes:

A child has unauthorized immigrant parents if either parent is unauthorized. A child has U.S.-born parents if all identified parents are U.S.-born.

Well, that’s stupid. The asymmetry reminds me of the definition of Colored, as in for the purpose of what school you can go to, what train car you can sit in, and what drinking fountain you can use, and, before the 14th amendment was ratified, as in whether you were a U.S. citizen, more or less.

Next thing you know, today’s goons who want to abridge the Fourteenth Amendment will find a way to damn not only these youngsters but sus hijos y nietos también, no matter what, probably because fuck the Constitution and Bill of Rights, God tells them to.

Not to mention that “[s]ome pregnant women from other countries are traveling to the United States to give birth and then taking their babies back home to raise them as terrorists that would return to attack America,” a concern raised by Texas state representative Debbie Riddle, “a Republican,” that Brice thought fit to pass on.

Tattooing the letter U on them to start, maybe? (You can bet they’d have no problem paying for that medical procedure with government dollars.)

Part 2: The word “anchor babies” doesn’t appear in the Pew report, but instead of leaving it out of the article entirely, Brice fills us in. He knows that more people will read an article if it’s about anchor babies.

“Babies born to illegal alien mothers within U.S. borders are called anchor babies because under the 1965 immigration Act, they act as an anchor that pulls the illegal alien mother and eventually a host of other relatives into permanent U.S. residency,” says an organization called The American Resistance, which has described itself as “a coalition of immigration crime fighters opposing illegal and undocumented immigration.”

Minor partial credit to Brice for using the past tense when mentioning The American Resistance, but he forgot to mention that they are “no longer an active – or updated – Website or effort,” and haven’t been since 2006, according to — well, themselves, in a message they left on the web four years ago. The fact that Brice names them at all is goofy, to put it kindly. There are dozens of non-moribund organizations he could have called up. A Youtube link to a [expletive deleted] broadcast from within the last week, maybe.

That’s all. Have a nice week.

I need to work on plenty of things, but today I was reminded of one in particular: impertinently pointing out mistakes (or worse, “mistakes”). Especially when I’m being a know-it-all, and especially when no lives are in danger. This afternoon, deep in know-it-all, no-lives-in-danger territory, I impertinently pointed out a “mistake.”

The reminder came a few hours later when I tripped over my own recent commission of the same “mistake” (blue arrow). Ouch.

In January, 1985, Bob Moody and I visited Dick Slansky at Los Alamos National Laboratory to begin collaborating on what would eventually become a book. Driving back to the Albuquerque airport, we stopped to fill up at a NewMexigas service station. This is what I saw at the cashier’s window.

I lost it. Doubled over laughing, I stumbled back to the car, managed to grunt and point Bob towards the sign (he immediately lost it, too), and, thanks be to god, controlled the convulsions well enough to grab my camera and take a photo. [Click on the thumbnail for a larger uncropped version.]

This being the funniest thing ever, I jumped on the chance to share it later when I started posting stuff on the internet Bitnet. You can see the quote in my signature in this 1989 post to comp.dcom.telecom. (Also available in the TELECOM Digest & Archives.)

I used the quote in my signature off and on for some years, and in 1995, I contributed it to a web collection of funny signs. You can find that contribution here.

Unfortunately, an apparent misquoting of this sign (“We will sell gasoline to anyone in a glass container.”) now appears in many places on the web. The misquoting makes no sense to me as a funny thing, and I’ve seen no photo to back it up.

Here’s for setting the record straight.

Scientific American, you ruined my day, but thanks, I needed it.

Silly me for thinking the Math Wars ended when Mathland bit the dust a couple of years ago. Last May, according to this month’s Scientific American, the Seattle School Board adopted the “Discovering Mathematics series, a reform-math high school text that uses student investigations as a means of discovering math principles—such as using toothpick models to derive recursive sequences.”

I looked at it for as long as my stomach could bear — at least at the one chapter that’s available online as a .pdf file here. It’s wretched. Wrong. Not only wrong like in I-don’t-like-it wrong (which it also is), but falselike wrong. And bad, stupid, dumb, and foolish, among other things. It would take me too long to point out all the things wrong in just the first few pages. (I won’t lie. There were some good things, but not many.)

I don’t think the students who wouldn’t have gotten much out of mathematics curricula in the ‘60s will do any better with this. For the students who want to learn mathematics, unfortunately, school will be even more of a waste than it used to be. They should do their best (especially if they go to public school in Seattle) to learn mathematics from the Internet, which is not nearly so wrong as Discovering Mathematics. With luck, any poor grades they get in stupid reform math courses won’t count against them, and if College Board caves and reforms the SAT to correlate with grades in stupid reform math courses, there will hopefully still be pressure for them to keep the AP and SAT II tests. If everything falls apart, kids that like math can drop out of school, learn from the Internet, then make a living tutoring the hapless victims of the new reform math.

Oh, and if you ever see an elevator whose “control panel displays ‘0’ for the floor number,” when it’s at the basement, please take a photo and send it to me.

Original title: Over 90% of Research Studies Make Me Want to Scream (P < 3E-12).

Shania Twain is in the news today. No, her new album still isn’t out, but her face is in the spotlight. It turns out someone “applied” the latest “research” to “determine” that she has the perfect face, “scientifically” speaking. The distance between her eyes and mouth are precisely 36% of the length of her face, and her interocular distance is exactly 46% of its width. These proportions, according to an article in press at Vision Research, are universally optimal (among low-resolution, mostly Photoshopped images of a few white women).

Garbage. Poppycock. Nonsense. Balderdash. Crap, crap, crap of a research paper, right from sentence 1: “Humans prefer attractive faces over unattractive ones.”

But you came here for the pictures. (more…)

Today’s clicking (especially from fivethirtyeight.com) led me to two strikingly similar declamatory reports about high school student’s knowledge of civics, complete with chart-laden survey results.

“Arizona schools are failing at [a] core academic mission,” concludes this Goldwater Institute policy brief.

“Oklahoma schools are failing at a core academic mission,” announces this Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs article.

When asked to name the first president of the United States, only 26.5% of the Arizona high school students surveyed answered correctly. Only 49.6% could correctly name the two major political parties in the United States. An even smaller percentage of Oklahoma high school students gave correct answers to these and other questions from the U.S. citizenship test study guide. None of the thousands of students surveyed in either state answered all ten questions correctly.

The shocking thing is that these are garbage studies. Made-up numbers, probably. The acme of vulpigeration. Evil. Makes me sick. (Glad I coined the word, though.)

No way these are real studies. Danny Tarlow over at This Number Crunching Life has taken a mathematical hammer to the Oklahoma “study” quite effectively. (The blatant similarity of the Arizona “study” blows away any shred of possibility that the Oklahoma study is legit. I’d love to see Danny’s face when he sees the Arizona report.)

What’s frightening is that this kind of snake oil has far too good a chance of surviving as fact (which it isn’t) and influencing public policy.

The guilty parties? The Goldwater Institute, which as you might guess is a conservative “think” tank. The OCPA, which describes itself as “the flagship of the conservative movement in Oklahoma.” Matthew Ladner, the author of both reports, who is vice president of research for the Goldwater Institute. And last but not least, Strategic Vision, LLC, which Ladner says “conducted” the studies. In my opinion, the word is concocted. Read about them yourself.

[Updated with correct business name: Strategic Vision, LLC.]

[Corrected 1 Nov 2009]

In most of North America, Daylight Saving Time ends early tomorrow morning. You know the drill: when the clock strikes 3:00 2:00 AM tonight, turn it back to 2:00 1:00 AM. (Just once. At 3:00 2:00 the second time, leave it alone.) If you’re in Newfoundland, however, you have a lot more work to do. You flip your calendar to November, wait one minute, flip it back to October (and turn your clock back), wait 59 minutes, then turn it to November again. I’m not kidding. Daylight saving time in Newfoundland ends at 12:01 AM (which occurs at 10:31 PM my time), not at 3:00 AM like everywhere else.

As far as I know, this is the only place on the planet where the day of the week (and this year, the month, too) ever goes backwards. Hasta ayer!

Instructions Turn your calendar forward to November 2009 right after 11:59:59 PM on October 31, 2009. November 2009 (first time) lasts for one minute (red line), until 12:01 AM (Daylight Saving Time). At 12:01 AM on November 1, 2009, set your clock back an hour and also turn your calendar back a month, to October 2009. October 2009 then resumes for another 59 minutes (shaded box), until 12:00 AM (Standard Time) on November 1, 2009. Then turn your calendar forward to November and go to sleep.

[Added 1 Nov 2009] Thanks to my brother for pointing out that DST ends at 2:00 AM, not 3:00 AM. FWIW, I wasn’t the only one to think DST ended at 3:00. The TV listings at titantv.com showed the change an hour late also.

I’ve got my doubts about whether the “KFC Double Down” is a hoax or for real. If it were real, wouldn’t someone have uploaded a photo of it to Flickr other than the photo in the news? And as far as I can tell, there’s only one source of all the reporting. One picture of the menu, one picture of the food, and one video of a commercial. Ain’t no one gone to Omaha to check it out? [The Consumerist, Treehugger, Orlando Sentinel, etc.]

Whether the Double Down is real or not, this is a good occasion to point something out:

“Associated Content” is not a real news organization.

A commenter to one blog let readers know the Double Down was real, because the “real” media had reported it (Associated Content, that is). No. AC only sorta looks like real news. Its contributors are all freelancers, and while some of them do a reasonable job of summarizing the web, others don’t or they just make stuff up. It’s like reading bad college papers (which is different from reading bad journalism). Unfortunately, Google News seems to have been hoodwinked into treating them like a real news organization. Watch out for them.

The Double Down, on the other hand – yeah, I’d try one, hold the sauce please.

Update (August 24, 2009): Rene Lynch of Daily Dish, a Los Angeles Times blog, writes, “We lobbed a call to a media representative,” and that “[the] sandwich does indeed exist.” I’m beginning to believe this thing exists, despite Lynch’s odd prose. It would have been simple to write “A KFC media representative confirmed that the sandwich does exist.” Unless of course Daily Dish only lobbed a call, but didn’t communicate with the media rep, or if the media rep had no connection with KFC. Daily Dish reports that the sandwich is being tested in Providence, Rhode Island, and Omaha. I’m driving to Boston this weekend, and I’m on the fence as to whether it’s worth swinging by Providence on the way back.

What the Daily News says.