Would you click on this Google Adwords ad if you saw it?
Over a six-month period, 409 people did.
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Incorrect use of English
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.
LED’s on a bed
Is this ugly or cool? I can’t decide. Comments?
Monkeys and Typewriters
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.
Ceiling height affects how you think
A higher ceiling yields freer, more abstract thinking, here.
“A 10-foot ceiling correlated with subject activity that the researchers interpreted as ‘freer, more abstract thinking,’ whereas subjects in an 8-foot room were more likely to focus on specifics.”
The best quotes I’ve read in a while.
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
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…
World’s tallest man saves dolphin
Just reading the title of the article made me laugh out loud: “World’s tallest man saves dolphin”
Mongolian herdsman Bao Xishun was called in after the dolphins swallowed plastic used around their pool at an aquarium in Fushun, north-east China.
A little old, but still Quite Noteworthy.
The wonder drug for cancer is Vitamin D
Recent research is showing that Vitamin D may help drastically reduce cancer among women (and men?).
A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn’t take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.
And more.
The sun advice [of avoiding the sun or using heavy sunscreen] has been misguided information “of just breathtaking proportions,” said John Cannell, head of the Vitamin D Council, a non-profit, California-based organization.
“Fifteen hundred Americans die every year from [skin cancers]. Fifteen hundred Americans die every day from the serious cancers.”
Where have all the bees gone?
Fascinating turn of events on where the bees have gone.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-sci-bees26apr26,0,7437491.story?track=mostviewed-storylevel
Reshma’s theory: they all ended up in Dan’s apartment.