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.

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.

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. First, the 2009 Most Bogus Regression award winner, Figure 2A:

Forget about faces. I’m seeing a butt-ugly relationship between the residuals and the model variable. Not only that, but the choice of a quadratic model has no theoretical basis beyond an expectation of U-shapedness, yet I’m supposed to believe that the vertex of this parabola better represents some ideal ratio than, say, the actual ratio people tended to find most attractive? I don’t think so. The actual preferred ratio looks to be a bit smaller than Shania’s, by the way. The scatterdots aren’t hard to read. Apologies for not having picked a canonical celebrity to call out.

Here’s what I think. The authors, whether intentionally or not, used a sleazy trick to generate model-fitting data. They threw in extreme and unnatural faces on each end to add life to some uncorrelated data having to do with real human face ratios. Let’s put a face on the graph. Heck, let’s put three faces on the graph, including two with more extreme ratios than the authors included. The middle one is from Figure 1 of the paper. The others are modifications of faces from Figure 1.

Given two faces, one human-looking and one Photoshopped to look inhuman, what do you think people answer when asked which is “more attractive”? Whatever it means to say humans “prefer attractive faces,” I’m sure they also prefer human faces, or faces that could by some stretch of the imagination be a living human’s face. Most real human faces fall somewhere between the green lines I drew, where there’s nothing going on, data-model-wise.

To hide the insanity (and here it’s hard to buy a lack of intent), the published paper includes face images with ratios between 0.30 and 0.45 only.

Ladies, you look just fine the way you are.

References.

1. Pallett, P. M., et al. New ‘‘golden” ratios for facial beauty. Vision Research (2009), doi:10.1016/j.visres.2009/11/003.
2. “Perfect face dimensions measured,” BBC News.

Picture:

“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.]

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.

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.

I wasn’t expecting the pithy retort:

British coins do not carry the name of the country of issue – neither do those of the USA

Coins of the USA, of course, do carry the name of the country of issue. Instead of sending the BBC feedback (which I did), maybe I should have offered to sell them my collection of “faulty” US coins on which the words United States of America appear. I’d have taken a mere £20 a piece.

At least BBC News attributed their “factfile” facts. They came from the London Mint Office. Despite its august name, the London Mint Office isn’t the Royal Mint. It’s more like a British Franklin Mint, I think. According to their web page, the London Mint Office is

a wholly-owned subsidiary of one of Europe’s most successful direct marketing organisations’, the Samlerhuset Group.

How the London Mint Office qualified for a .org domain beats me. Not to mention how any of this qualifies as news.