Your tax dollars spent on voodoo

Not literally, but: the US Army is distributing handheld polygraphs to our soldiers in Afghanistan. Polygraphs simply do not work.

I'm totally in favor of doing this, if the soldiers are properly briefed.

The thing is, the Talibani and their supporters will believe the polygraphs work, and they'll be an effective bluff, like the famous cop-and-colander story.

Speaking of how Creationists are wrong

You know how evolution deniers always claim that we never see evolution happening, so it's just imaginary, made up to deny the non-materialistic answer? It's a stupid argument ("We can't see gravity, so it's just something antireligious people made up to deny that angels move the planets around") but not only is it illogical, it's contrafactual.

As reported in the National Geographic online, scientists transplanted some Italian lizards to an island off the coast of Croatia in 1971. Now, in 2008, their descendants have radically evolved, from insectivores to herbivores, developing "cecal valves" that let them digest cellulose, along with changes in head anatomy that let them consume tough plant matter.

Major anatomical changes in about 30 generations. Ben? Ben Stein? Do you want to do a crockumentary about that, or will you ignore it to make irrelevant Holocaust accusations?

Of course, to actual biologists this is a very interesting experiment in terms of MacArthur's and Wilson's work in island biogeography. I look forward to future reports.

Boomers can recite this whole scene

I don't know if it's true, but it seems to me that everyone (male) I went to school with can recite great chunks of Monty Python dialogue, decades later.

Here's a sketch that's still vivid in our memories even now.

I hates them

I hate Creationists. Not because they're wrong. Everyone is wrong about stuff at some time, I've been wrong that I know of plenty of times.

I hate them because they're either lying or crazy. Every one of them.

For an example of the lying kind, see Expelled. This Ben Stein-hosted documentary purports to show that "intelligent design" (Creationism pretending to be science) is excluded from the halls of academe because Big Science doesn't want to hear any dissent. Oh, and Darwin caused the Holocaust.

It's just plain lies. What isn't outright lying is mere distortion. They lied to their interview subjects, repeatedly. The movie itself is a string of lies. It's the antithesis of science, which depends on honesty. (I'm not claiming that all scientists are totally honest, but nothing angers a real scientist more than dishonest reporting of results.)

And when you think about it, lying to make a point sure sounds like false witness.

Putting a bad face on your business

Advertisements are your attempt to show new customers who you are and why they should buy from you. Therefore, you should probably proofread them.



For instance, while literacy is not necessarily the skill I mostly look for in a manicurist or hairstylist, frankly I don't want them too stupid. If their boss can't tell "formally" from "formerly" or "has" from "have", I don't want them working on me. Of course, only a true nitpicker would bother to point out the incorrect ellipses (always three full stops) used incorrectly.



Also, I don't want anyone who claims to have a doctorate but who can't spell "digital" working on my hearing aid. (Ironically, he spells it right one line later.)

The first seen on Motor Parkway in Hauppauge, the second on a shopping cart in Glen Cove, NY.

Aaah ... I haven't actually lived up to my domain name for months.

When Design Fails: United Flunks The Test

I'm going to Worldcon this year. Their official airline is United, so I tried to book at their site.

It's clear that nobody actually designed their reservation system. I would bet that they copied bits of it from other people's systems without ever having someone sit down and test it or even think it through.

Let me show you one reason I think so:


I live in the New York area. I can conveniently fly from any of four airports: Islip, LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark. Naturally I would like to check all those airports for the best price. For no good reason, United decided to force me to pick only one airport at a time to check rates. (Note the round "radio buttons" for each airport, which limit you to a single choice.)

A well-thought-out system would let me pick any number of airports and check them all in a single operation. That's what computers are good at, right? Doing repetitive work so us humans don't have to?

I tried to suggest this to United directly, but their web site has no way to send feedback.

After I gave up and tried to check one airport at a time, I discovered that the Select button didn't actually work (on Mozilla Firefox). Another stupid interface problem: to select cities whose names start with "I" one must click on a one pixel wide sans-serif letter. One pixel.

Thanks, United, for making me resent the very idea of buying tickets from you.

If any United employee reads this, I'd be grateful if you'd report this problem to your management, since they seemingly have a corporate policy of ignoring their customers.

I'm a media star, again!

I'll be appearing on The Computer Mechanics (Rogers television, Canada) Wednesday 9 April, and again 16 April.

Not treating sick babies: your tax dollars at work

Dr. David Gorski points out today that (US) federal money is being spent to test homeopathic (that is, useless) remedies on poor sick children.

Yes, my bucks are taken out of my wallet and sent to practitioners of nonsense to refuse to actually help dying babies.