The Sandman

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An interesting perspective on Spiderman 3’s Sandman:

Considering his strength and versatility, I bet any construction firm would have hired him in a flash. Since his primary motivator was health care for his daughter, maybe a Public Works department would have been a better fit, what with the better benefits and all.

Why did Sandman finally talk to Spiderman at the end of the movie? Why didn’t he do this earlier? Why did it have to happen only after a lot of destruction happened? Despite having seen the movie a few weeks ago, the plot holes of the movie still bother me.

10 items or less Cheaters

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I read an article about a study of cheaters in the “10 items or less” lane in supermarkets. The study was done by John Trinkaus at the Zicklin School of Business in CUNY, who covertly monitored these lanes over a span of nine years. Emphasis is my own.

As many of us may have seen for ourselves, Trinkaus found that some shoppers using this lane had more than 10 items. Some cunningly placed their items in groups of 10 and paid for each group separately. Trinkaus found that about 80 per cent of all the supermarket lane cheats were female van drivers.

More details about these female van drivers:

Trinkaus has also shown that 96 per cent of women van drivers break the speed limit, compared with 86 per cent of male ones, and in one study, a staggering 99 per cent of female van drivers failed to come to a complete stop at a T-junction with a stop sign, compared with 94 per cent of the total.

Classic.

Incorrect use of English

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I saw this site on incorrect word use and common English errors a long time ago, and recently rediscovered it. It has a list of 1202 incorrectly used English words. Fascinating to at least scroll through.

Those who know me know that my favorite is irregardless. I love the site’s smarmy response:

Regardless of what you have heard, “irregardless” is a redundancy. The suffix “-less” on the end of the word already makes the word negative. It doesn’t need the negative prefix “ir-” added to make it even more negative.

Monkeys and Typewriters

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Thanks, Erich, for the link!

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by “bashing the hell out of” the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it.

The best quotes I’ve read in a while.

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From Overcoming Bias.

Quantum physics is not “weird”. You are weird. You have the absolutely bizarre idea that reality ought to consist of little billiard balls bopping around, when in fact reality is a perfectly normal cloud of complex amplitude in configuration space. This is your problem, not reality’s, and you are the one who needs to change.

And, one of the most simple yet insightful statements I have ever read.

Surprise exists in the map, not in the territory.

Think about it.

White officials call more fouls on black players

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From a study by Justin Wolfers and Joseph Price.

An academic study of NBA officiating found that white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players, The New York Times reported in Wednesday’s editions.

The NBA is violently objecting to this study, citing internal research on better, more robust data.

Looking at each study’s data set makes this story more interesting.

  • The Wolfers and Price study uses publicly available box score data, with calls by referee “teams”.
  • The NBA study uses internal data that lists calls made by individual referees

A request by Wolfers and Price to obtain the NBA’s data set was rejected.

The NBA needs to stop this hard and fast. How can they do so? Either hope it blows over or make their data set publicly available. Citing their private data set will not do enough to convince skeptics.

I wonder if, they did decide to release their data set, they would try to “massage” it to remove racial biases. If they did that, I wonder if it would be possible to identify if massaging occurred, similar to the Freakonomics story about the Chicago Public Schools teachers…