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For a variety of reasons, I’ve decided to move my blog (back) over to blogger. The new location is here. Please visit me at my new location!
As promised, some more details and pictures from my trip in Japan:
After arriving at Narita airport, I took the train to Utsunomiya (宇都宮) where my friend Dai lives. We hadn’t seen each other for five years or so. The next day (May 29th) we took a road trip to Nasu (那須).
Nasu is a pretty mountainous area. We took a small hike to look at the azalias that are in bloom in Japan now. To get there we had to cross this suspension bridge. It swayed a lot while walking across. Scary.
We also went to a place called sesshouseki (殺生石), literally “killing rock”, so called because poisonous gases leach from the ground and kill any animals that get too close. Needless to say, that includes people, so you can only get so close before you reach a sign warning you not to get any closer. There is a lot of sulfur coming out of the ground, so the area smells like it’s filled with rotten eggs.
Geothermal activity has its good points, too. There are a lot of hot springs in the area. We stopped by one and soaked our feet for a while.
Now I’m at my friend Misato’s family’s house in Togane, Chiba prefecture. Here’s a picture of the room I’m staying in:
That’s all for now.
I just got into Japan the night before last. After arriving in Narita, I went to visit my friend Dai in Utsunomiya. Yesterday Dai took me to Nasu. We’re about to get on the train to head back to Tokyo and meet our friend Akemi.
I’ll post some pictures later.
Ken Miller has written a nice piece for the Boston Globe debunking Ben Stein’s Expelled, and the whole ID movement with it.
A voice like Ken Miller’s is important – because he is a Christian who also accepts the fact of evolution. If any religious-minded readers feel uneasy about this compromise, please do have a look here.
It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I myself am wholly sympathetic to the careful maintenance of religious belief in the light of new science. Far better, in my opinion, not to form beliefs about the world on the basis of religion in the first place. But people like Ken Miller should at least provide a voice of reason to those who are religious.
As I final treat I’m embedding a brief video in which Miller talks about a specific prediction that our common ancestry with the (other!) great apes makes about our genome. In particular, while the other apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, we only have 23. This means we “lost” one since our last common ancestor with the chimps. But it didn’t just disappear – we can see where the two older chromosomes fused to form our chromosome number 2. This kind of stuff is just too cool – and also shows the way science works.
Things are getting busy here as the end of the semester approaches. I just finished the latest (and maybe last?) draft of my first generals paper, which you can find here. But there’s no time for slacking, as I continue to work on my second GP. With any luck, that will be up on my site soon as well.
I get regular emails from the Barack Obama campaign, and the one that came today contains a piece of rhetoric involving numbers that annoys me. I should preface the post with a disclaimer: the gripe is not specific to the Obama campaign; if I were receiving emails from the Clinton or McCain campaigns, I’m sure I’d find the same kind of misleading rhetoric there as well.
So here’s the offending text:
In February alone, more than 94% of our donors gave in amounts of $200 or less. Meanwhile, campaign finance reports show that donations of $200 or less make up just 13% of Senator McCain’s total campaign funds, and only 26% of Senator Clinton’s.
OK, read that through, and think about what the words mean, and whether you’ve learned anything or not about how the campaigns of the respective candidates are financed.
The implication is clear: the Obama campaign gets more of its funds from small contributions than the McCain and Clinton campaigns do. But this implication is generated by a clever manipulation of words that, with a bit of thought, are seen not to support this claim at all.
Take the first sentence:
In February alone, more than 94% of our donors gave in amounts of $200 or less.
What does this mean? It means there are a certain number of donors, and that 94% of the donors gave $200 or less. We learn nothing about what percentage of the total dollar amount of campaign contributions are from donors who gave $200 or less. The distinction is important; this is not the same thing as saying that 94% of Obama’s total campaign funding comes from people who gave $200 or less.
Let me make this concrete: Say that there were 100 donors, and 94 of them gave $200. This makes the above sentence true. Now say that the remaining 4 gave 100,000 dollars each. So the total dollar amount of campaign contributions is 94*200 + 4*100,000, which comes out to $418,800.
Now we can ask what percentage of total campaign funds were from donors giving less than $200. The answer is given by dividing the amount given by those donors by the total campaign funds, which comes out to about 4.5%. So, in this made up example, the percentage of total campaign funds coming from small donors is only 4.5%, despite the fact that 94% of the donors were small donors.
Now, consider the second sentence from the offending paragraph:
Meanwhile, campaign finance reports show that donations of $200 or less make up just 13% of Senator McCain’s total campaign funds, and only 26% of Senator Clinton’s.
It should be clear at this point how meaningless and misleading this juxtaposition is; we learned nothing about what percentage of Obama’s total campaign funds came from donors giving $200 or less, and we also learned nothing about what percentage of donors to the Clinton and McCain campaigns gave $200 or less. But the text asks us to make a meaningful comparison between the percentages given in the two sentences. So the cooperative reader thinks ‘Oh, I guess this means that the Clinton and McCain campaigns are getting most of their money from big donors, while the Obama campaign is getting most of its money from small donors’. The problem is that this conclusion does not follow from the facts given. The mathematically unsophisticated or lazy reader might even come away from the email thinking that 94% of Obama’s campaign money comes from small donors, compared to the 13% for McCain and 26% for Clinton, which is definitely false.
This sort of numerical trickery makes me mad, and even though it’s completely commonplace in any kind of political rhetoric, that doesn’t make it ok. Given the degree of innumeracy in the population, I suppose it is quite effective though.
I just saw on the BBC that Arthur C Clarke has died. For science and science fiction lovers, this is sad news.
I got back into Fort Worth last night – I had a layover in Cleveland and got onto the same plane as my sister.
First day back and what did I do? Do you have to ask? I went with Quang to eat pho dac biet! mmmm
So it started snowing this morning. And it kept snowing. And snowing. And snowing. At this point I think there is over 6 inches, with no signs of letting up. There is a severe weather warning across southern Massachusetts.
The university was closed due to the snow, so I finally have a chance to get some work done! I’ve already finished my statistics project and proofread and commented on a friend’s abstract. With any luck I’ll get all the other immediately do-able outstanding work done tonight, so it’ll be off my mind as I go into the weekend.
Let’s hope the weather lets up before Tuesday – otherwise my trip home might get delayed.
Here is a link to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, signed on December 10th 1948. It is fun (where by fun I mean sad) to go through the thing and consider how many of these agreements are or are not being kept by our (let alone other) governments in the 21st century.
