There were three genuinely interesting and thought-provoking articles in the Indy today. It is a sad fact that I thought this was unusual enough to comment on.
Lovely skit on PR hacks following up unwanted emails.
Embargoes
Hmm. The list of signatories to this Early Day Motion praising homeopathy might be a good reason not to vote for my local MP in the soon-to-be-announced election. His voting record against the government is pretty strong, so maybe he’s a stealth Tory after all?
Lovely Mash on homeopathy:
The report could see government funding into the not-treatment being
stripped back to £1 as according to homeopathic theory it will have the
same effect as giving them £100 million.
Let’s hope the Simon Singh appeal goes well…
Apparently people just leave Chatroulette on during parties to see who comes along. I can’t even bring myself to fire it up! For those who don’t know, it is online chat with random people with a big next button so that they (or you) can move on if bored or freaked out.
Useful to read some challenge to thinking, but always critical to weigh new point evidence against the full set.
The contention from Stanford is that some farmers may find increasing crop prices beneficial. And this could well be true, just as the Southern UK should expect warmer summers and colder winters on the whole (which we might like).
On the weighing evidence front, it is good to see that someone has done the painstaking work of going through all of the references in detail of Bjørn Lomborg’s book Cool It. It doesn’t make for great reading. Lots of what we might call rhetorical tricks that could make us believe references are supporting a position that is in fact opinion not evidence-based.
Helpful myth debunker: UK manufacturing is twice the value it was after World War II.
The article also answers the obvious contextual question: how much has GDP increased in the same time frame / what is the trend manufacturing as a proportion of total output? The answer, manufacturing has shrunk to 12% of the economy from 50%, but this isn’t a fall in manufacturing, just slower growth relative to other sectors of the economy.
Interesting that manufacturing seems more volatile than the overall economy (15% drop vs 6%) so we couldn’t rely on a manufacturing-based economy to sort us out.
Nice graph showing how close the top three were in the men’s downhill, and how Bode was nailing it until the last split.
Separately, they started showing a great superposition of Lindsey Vonn and Julia Mancuso (I think) but I haven’t seen it again. There’s some similar stuff on Dartfish.
I had an import just sit there doing nothing in Lightroom 3 beta. It turns out I had some movies (.avi) ticked as part of the import and they were choking it. Untick them and the import ran perfectly.