Being Wrong

I enjoyed this paragraph from Tim Harford’s Financial Times piece on the reasons for, and consequences of, politicians’ love of certitude:

It is not clear why we enjoy certitude so much – certitude being the subjective experience of feeling certain. In contrast – as Kathryn Schulz observes in her wonderful book Being Wrong – there is simply no psychological experience of “being wrong” at all, only the lurching realisation of having been wrong until a moment ago.

I’ve never been a huge fan of being wrong. Now I can claim that I’ve never experienced it.

Finally

I’ve finally found a way to make England habitable.

I’ve always been bewildered yet faintly impressed that the rest of the world can survive with Fanta as its primary, and often only, carbonated fruit drink. I don’t think I need to point out to people who have tasted it that Fanta is the juice of Nazis.

Novel Dutch Immigration Requirements

From Johann Hari’s recent article decrying Britain’s acceptance of Muslim homophobia:

In the Netherlands, they now show all new immigrants images of men kissing, and if they object, they tell them they should go and live somewhere else.

If that’s true, it makes me like the Netherlands even more than I already did.

When Eileen took me to Amsterdam for my birthday in 2009 we stayed in a B&B run by a delightful (and delightfully stereotypical) gay Dutch couple. I couldn’t help but feel pity for all those people who refuse to get over their own problems with other people’s sexuality, because they will continue to deny themselves the opportunity to enjoy the company of so many good people.

UCD offers certificate in jabbing people randomly with pins

Via Buzz, an Irish Times opinion piece about Irish third level educational institutions offering new courses in sorcery (or its modern-day equivalent):

The Graduate Certificate in Healthcare (Acupuncture) at UCD is aimed at those with a primary degree in health care, eg medicine or physiotherapy. This is a part-time course delivered over one year. The programme “provides education in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) that will equip the healthcare professional with the necessary skills to assess and treat a broad range of acute and chronic musculoskeletal conditions”.

This reflects extremely poorly on the Graduate School of Life Sciences, which offers the course. Perhaps worse than that, it also implies that some significant number of graduates coming out of UCD’s undergraduate courses in medicine are unable to distinguish real medicine from quackery. Otherwise there would be no-one going into this new program.

Maybe if UCD had turned down the road of pseudo-science sooner I could have gone straight from my theoretical physics degree into a postgraduate diploma in intelligent falling.

Some Advice

Don’t use data roaming when on holiday in Japan:

That’s a phone bill that cost as much as my last holiday.

Differentiating the Sexes

My higher level maths class for Leaving Certificate (the state exam at the end of secondary school in Ireland) was entirely populated with boys. I think there were one or two girls in the class at the beginning of the year, but they found the subject too time-consuming relative to the six or seven others that students study at that age; they dropped maths to ordinary level pretty early in the year.

My Leaving Cert. physics class was similarly populated.

In my first year of theoretical physics in university, one of my thirteen peers was a lady. In second year, she was no longer around. I studied almost entirely under male lecturers, and I graduated surrounded by male classmates.

My life is one big anecdote in support of the proposition that men are better at maths and hard sciences than women are. It’s particularly important, then, for me to always be aware of that wonderful assertion that “the plural of anecdote is not data”.

In that light, putting away my anecdote and replacing it with real data, we can find out the truth about gender and maths: that poor female performance in maths is strongly correlated with societal gender disparity; that stronger male performance in maths is accompanied by a corresponding weaker male performance in maths (i.e., that us guys push out both ends of the bell curve—for every genius there’s, well, someone less successful); and that young girls are more likely than young boys to inherit the maths anxieties of their teachers, setting them off on a course towards poor maths performance in later life. In short: women underperform in maths when they spend their lives being told that they will.

I’m delighted to see real results based on real data about maths performance. We will desperately short-change ourselves if we continue to discourage half of our potential mathematicians and scientists with baseless stereotypes. Not only that, but we’ll condemn more young men to an academic life devoid of the fairer sex. I moved out of physics into computer science for the girls, which gives you some indication of the sorry state of the physical sciences.

Maybe computer engineer Barbie will help.

Is That All?

I’m happy to live in a world where I can read a blog post about two extraordinarily large stars in orbit around each other; think, “that orbital period makes it sound like they must be pretty close to each other”; and within moments have Google presenting me with the answer that these two stars are a mere 42,000,000km apart. We truly live in the future, but what we’ve got down here is like nothing compared to what’s happening up there.

I Don’t Even Know Anymore

Gawker reports on the introduction of a sarcasm punctuation mark. Well that’s a real useful idea.

Original?

Apparently the Writer’s Guild of America has nominated Avatar for an award for Best Original Screenplay. This is surprising news. I had no idea Avatar even had a screenplay. I thought James Cameron had just organized a big game of charades and Sam Worthington took three hours to mime Ferngully before anyone in the cast or crew was able to guess it.

Also, for reference, here’s a definition of “original”:

Fresh, different, pioneering

I do not think it means what they think it means.

An Unbeatable Scheme

1. Take one promotion code offering free gambling credit when you deposit a small amount of cash in an online gambling site.
2. Sign up for said site and deposit money, earning yourself a supermarket voucher of equal value as well as credit to use on the site.
3. Bet the deposit money and the bonus money, earning at least a fraction (if not a multiple) of the total amount, and almost certainly more than the initial investment.
4. Do not become addicted to gambling.
5. Cash out all winnings.
6. Go out and buy new suits.