More essential reading

A busy week, with many sending in links and ideas. Thanks everybody!

Art

That’s art, folks. I finally figured out how to get pictures off my crappy phone, so this pic comes late. The “exhibit” is already closed.

What? You don’t see it? That “waterfall” was one of five or six of the same, all placed at the ass end of the East River this past summer. New York City naturally paid millions to an “artist” so he could put up this idiotic leaky erector set.

This sad exhibit became funny when one or two of them had to be shut off because the salt-loaded spray was killing trees in Brooklyn.

Best part was that the city did a “study” proving that the “art” would bring in over $30 million. How? Well, once people heard about the “art”, they would flock to the area hotels and restaurants to be close to it. Statistics in action!

Statistics lecture

My number one son sent a link to this lecture. Peter Donnelly: How juries are fooled by statistics.

His “HTH” and “HTT” examples are similar to the Monty Hall problem which, along with his “99% accurate disease test”, are both detailed in the runaway best seller Breaking the Law of Averages: Real-Life Probability and Statistics in Plain English.

A word of caution before viewing the video: not all statisticians dress that badly. We do, however, all make the same jokes.

Soviet jokes sadly now applicable in the USA

Oleg Atbashian:

Economic justice:

* America is capitalist and greedy — yet half of the population is subsidized.
* Half of the population is subsidized — yet they think they are victims.
* They think they are victims — yet their representatives run the government.
* Their representatives run the government — yet the poor keep getting poorer.
* The poor keep getting poorer — yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
* They have things that people in other countries only dream about — yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

UF teachers sues to reduce teaching load

The Big KT sent this link to a story about University of Florida employee Florence Babb, who heads the—yes, this is an actual department—Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research.

Poor Babb teaches a full class every single semester, but the university, socked by the economy and not having enough money to pay for adjuncts to teach, wants her to squeeze in another.

However, poor Babb can’t handle it. So she ran to the union, and together they’re taking on the administration.

You might expect that I would be against poor Babb in this. But you’d be wrong. In fact, I’m writing a letter to UF to ask that Babb’s course load be reduced even more.

This is because I’ve seen her web page: “Her courses include Sex and the Global City, Feminist Ethnography, Gender and Cultural Politics in Latin America, and Sex, Love, and Globalization.”

Clearly, the less time poor Babb spends with students, the better off they will be.

Drink up, ladies

Researchers went from the observation that

all types of cancer studied in its non-drinking subjects was 5.7 per cent compared with 5.3 per cent for those subjects who had at least a drink a day, and up to 14 drinks a week

to the conclusion that there is a “very significant increase in cancer risk” for women who drink. They must have written their paper at the pub.

Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.