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Nov
20
2005

Hammer Hank Goldberg

If 8:50 on Monday night—the "JACKED UP" NFL Primetime segment—is the best five minutes of television all week, then I think there are really only two contenders for the worst.

  • That sycophant Michael Irvin's weekly fawning human interest story on NFL Countdown.
  • "Hammerin" Hank Goldberg's picks against the spread at the end of the 10:30 Sportscenter.

I'm going to discount the ESPN Sunday Night game in its entirety. It is more like slow, drawn out water torture than a sudden and effective "stupid stick beating." I don't want to defend Michael "I talked to T.O. and he said…" Irvin in any way, but I think Goldberg is much worse. In the words of Paul Maguire, "I'm a tell you what."

I'm not a gambler, but I know this: it is not a skill to pick games at .500 against the spread. You are supposed to be able to do that. Hence the spread. Although Hank is usually below the .500 mark, it is not by a statistically significant margin. In other words, you could not short his picks and make money, either.

Add to this annoyance his penchant for citing ridiculous, obscure statistics as excuses for his abysmal performance.

I would have done a lot better last week if I had remembered that Arizona was only winning 25% of the time after two wins on the road against east coast teams, or that Chicago has won their last two when the wind was southeasterly and above 20 miles per hour.

I made that quote up. Watch his segment next week and see if you can tell the difference. I am completely unable to explain why this human paraquat is allowed to return year after year.

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Nov
16
2005

A Positively Negative Meditation on Sloppy Code

A few years ago, my reaction to encountering code like this was very predictable. You could set your watch to it:

public XmlDocument FooBar()
{
    XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
    doc.LoadXml("<foo/>");
    XmlElement bar1 = doc.CreateElement("bar");
    doc.AppendChild(bar1);
    bar1.SetAttribute("id", "1");
    bar1.SetAttribute("value", "bar1");
    XmlElement bar2 = doc.CreateElement("bar");
    doc.AppendChild(bar2);
    bar2.SetAttribute("id", "2");
    bar2.SetAttribute("value", "bar2");
    // ...
    XmlElement bar30 = doc.CreateElement("bar");
    doc.AppendChild(bar30);
    bar30.SetAttribute("id", "30");
    bar30.SetAttribute("value", "bar30");
    return doc;
}

The problem with that should be obvious to anyone, and—if The Daily WTF is any indication—I think this is a common mistake. Times have changed, however.

These days, if I had to name my single biggest issue in dealing with code written by others I would have to give an example like this:

public Hashtable Batman(Hashtable ht)
{
    // ...
}

The problem here is not as obvious to your average first-year programmer, but I would summarize the difference like this:

  • It’s not well-defined what is going in.
  • It’s not well-defined what happening inside the function.
  • It’s not well-defined what is coming out (and this may vary depending on #1).

While these kinds of problems are often found together, it seems to be possible to find code that avoids one pitfall but not the other.

The main factor in my attitude shift, you could say, would be what I am personally working on. When the first example bothered me the most, I was only responsible for enhancing functionality created by others and/or fixing bugs in code of the same quality. It was easy to cite examples of bugs that would not have occurred—or at least would have been easier to fix—if the cut & paste keys had not been so liberally employed.

I spend most of my time now gluing together components in the large, working on architectural things that many developers will never know or care about, and debugging oddball problems. With that background it’s easy for me to say that a cut-and-paster with a thoughtful interface definition has done a good (or even very good) job.

Lack of functional abstraction doesn’t seem as reprehensible to me as it once did. You can always encapsulate it in some functional abstraction. Many great books have been written in prison, and many great software packages have been put together from pieces of spaghetti code.

The second example (the chaos point with no type safety) is another matter. This portends systemic instability. When I find this with the intention of encapsulating-and-never-speaking-of-it-again, it’s very difficult or impossible to locate all of the dependencies. I will usually cut my losses and start from scratch after encountering a few “function Batmans.”

I admit that this insouciance towards Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V is entirely the byproduct of self-interest. It's not that I think it's a good idea, it's just that I can't muster the energy to get upset about it. If a passionate new programmer were to vocally find fault with it I would wholeheartedly agree.

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Nov
16
2005

Press Innumeracy

I just finished reading this Reuters story, "Rising Sea Levels Threaten New Jersey." Nevermind the obvious question of whether we'd really be menaced by the disappearance of New Jersey. I would like to focus on details tangential to the main story, as is my custom.

Notice the next-to-last paragraph,

Worldwide, sea levels are expected to rise between 0.09 and 0.88 meter (0.29 and 2.88 feet) between 1990 and 2100, the report said, citing figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Do you see anything amiss? Many scientists and engineers in the audience have already leapt out of their seats. I will explain the problem anyway, for those of you trained in the humanities.

The issue is one of precision. Or rather, too much of it.

What most likely occurred is that the Journalism major who wrote this lifted the metric figures from the published paper. Writing for a U.S. audience, he obviously needed English equivalents.

If you plug 0.09 and 0.88 meters through a conversion calculator, you get 0.29527559055118110236220472440945 feet and 2.8871391076115485564304461942257 feet, respectively. The author made the rookie mistake of cutting these off at the same number of decimal places.

This author, like most reporters, does not understand significant figures. The trouble is that the metric numbers quoted give one and two significant digits, respectively. His converted numbers erroneously give two and three significant digits.

I have gone to the trouble of rewriting his paragraph for him.

Worldwide, sea levels are expected to rise between 0.09 and 0.88 meter (0.3 and 2.9 feet) between 1990 and 2100, the report said, citing figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

You may think that this is a silly thing for me to be complaining about. Not so. Significant digits are one of the first lessons in every science class, from elementary school through the first few semesters of college. Anyone doing science reporting should at least be familiar with significant digits.

Given this, it is not difficult to understand why there is so much confused and idiotic coverage of the Dover Design trial (I am on board with refusing to call it "Intelligent") and why it is reported at least once a year that the speed of light has been exceeded (Everyone say it together with me: "Phase velocity vs Group velocity").

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Oct
17
2005

Secure in our Stupidity

Many of you may have heard stories about the CIA spending tax dollars on “remote viewing” and other paranormal spook activities during the cold war. Incredibly, many of these stories turn out to have been true.

Some senior officials kept an eye on the phenomenon. Kress reports that in November of 1976, CIA Director George Bush became concerned about reported Soviet advances in parapsychology, and called in the agency's RV researchers for a briefing. (Such concerns often provided the impetus for U.S. government parapsychology research; the fear that the Soviets were getting ahead in the mind-war game was widespread among paranormal enthusiasts at military and intelligence agencies) [source].

Not to be outdone, the military may have pursued avenues that were even more bizarre.

In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. [Emphasis mine, source].

Despite substantial effort and investment, none of this produced one single verifiable, reproducible result. Surely, the agencies involved have wised up.

Right?

Well, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that just yet.

It has recently emerged that the source for the New York City subway terror scare passed a polygraph test. Reading this I was, in a word, livid.

What does a polygraph test have to do with psychic spies? Although it probably is not apparent to readers familiar only with Law & Order, both of these instruments have about the same degree of accuracy.

(Please don’t email me about Law & Order. I love Law & Order. I am not throwing Law & Order under the bus.)

Polygraphs may be very popular on television, but there are legions of pretentious whores on television. The National Academy of Sciences agrees (in substance, anyway), giving this recommendation regarding the use of the polygraph by the government:

We have reviewed the scientific evidence on the polygraph with the goal of assessing its validity for security uses … Overall, the evidence is scanty and scientifically weak. Our conclusions are necessarily based on the far from satisfactory body of evidence on polygraph accuracy, as well as basic knowledge about the physiological responses the polygraph measures [source].

The fact that this instrument is being relied upon to safeguard American civilians should infuriate anyone even remotely scientifically literate. The government may as well be identifying terror suspects using a dowsing rod.

“Insane,” responded Drew Richardson, one of the FBI’s top polygraph experts until he retired a few years ago, in an e-mail to SpyTalk. “I would say placing any significance on an examinee passing some portion or all portions on eight out of 15 CQT polygraph exams with all exams having covered the same subject(s) is, in a word, insane” [source].

Further reading:

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Sep
14
2005

Dvorak at it Again

John Dvorak recently posted this plug for what appears to be a pseudoscience site, holoscience.com. Quote:

This site is devoted to looking at space science in a holistic, interdisciplinary manner. It also has some exceptionally cool images.

The comments on his blog appear to be either disabled or not working, so I will post a reply here.

This site appears to be yet another "theory of everything, the scientific establishment is against me" kind of site. Example quote:

"The Big Bang is already dead! The unheralded "Galileo of the 20th century", Halton Arp, has proven that the universe is not expanding."

Everything written in the News area of the site appears to be self published and not peer-reviewed. There seems to be a war going on at Wikipedia over another apparently self-published article about the "Electric Universe" theory espoused on the site. View the discussion here.

Hi William, please refer to the list of papers on the article page going back to 1930 to show serious study in this field. A Google search will reveal 6,240 pages returned on a search for "'electric universe' + plasma" …. . –Bongani 19:38, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

No, thats a long list of papers which have something to do with electricity in space, and have nothing to do with EUM. One of the characteristics of pet/psuedo science [sic] is appropriating irrelevant papers that have the right-looking words in them. Any article that states That the Sun and stars are powered by an external electric current is (to be frank for just a moment) wacko nonsense. Any article that makes such a controversial statement, and then fails to back it up with a peer-reviewed paper, is unsuitable for wiki as "original research". … William M. Connolley 20:05:57, 2005-07-09 (UTC).

And as you can see the neutrality of the original article is disputed.

I can't believe Dvorak posted this, frankly. But it fits with the horoscope ad displayed prominently on his site. Holoscience does have "purty pictures," though.

Update (11:15) - It appears that Dvorak might have posters on his site other than himself. Not sure why or who they are, but I thought I should mention that the opinion I quoted above may not be directly attributable to the popular PC Magazine columnist.

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Aug
27
2005

DivX Sux

Look –

I am an end user of DivX. I could not possibly care less about how great the DivX codec is. To be honest, my discerning eye cannot tell the difference between a DivX-encoded movie and an animated GIF. I do not encode my own movies.

So given all of that, explain to me why in the hell I would want this notification icon.

The DivX notification icon makes me want to die

Even if you MUST create a notification icon, I still expect it to hide correctly. Instead, for some reason, it shows and hides itself about once a second while I am watching, say, a Channel 9 video.

This resizes everything on my taskbar. It is absurdly distracting, and makes it more difficult to concentrate on the video. If for no other reason, this makes DivX automatically the worst possible codec with which to record a movie.

DivX, you are not the coolest most amazing program ever written in the history of mankind. You are a stupid video format and you should operate behind the scenes where you belong.

A pox on you and your family.

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Aug
03
2005

Welcome to the Ass-End of the Enlightenment

According to this article, the word debate seems to be sorely in need of redefinition.

President George W. Bush stirred the debate on the teaching of evolution in schools when he said this week that he supported the teaching of alternative viewpoints - such as the theory of Intelligent Design - to help students "understand what the debate is about" [emphasis mine].

Please do not trouble yourself - I have already suggested a number of alternatives to the archaic meaning (“to engage in argument by discussing opposing points.“) to the custodians of Dictionary.com.

  1. Impassioned and reasoned logic countered with childish misrepresentations and/or outright lies.
  2. Deliberately creating confusion between the Scientific Process and a Scientifically-Conducted Gallup Poll.

If you are not looking forward to another unreasoning dark age, except this time with nuclear bombs, might I suggest taking this opportunity to donate to these charities:

  1. The Council for Secular Humanism
  2. Americans United

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Jul
03
2005

John Dvorak Benefits from the Public Stupidity he Decries

Something has been bothering me about John C. Dvorak’s site for the last few days. This post in particular drove me to write about it. Here is a screenshot of the post. I would like to point out two things.

John Dvorak promotes pseudoscience

Figure (1) is John Dvorak complaining about public ignorance and stupidity. For this, I would normally applaud him. Figure (2) is John Dvorak profiting from public ignorance and stupidity.

Perhaps Dvorak isn’t in control of the content of that ad. If that’s the case, hopefully he’ll stop using that particular vendor. If he doesn’t, I don’t think there’s anything you can call this behavior other than every gadfly’s favorite insult, hypocrisy.

Some of the comments to his post are seriously pretty scary. Somehow, these people are allowed to procreate.

There is a slight parallel here to My God Problem, which is a thought-provoking article by Natalie Angier that appeared in Free Inquiry magazine. Simply put, the point is this: you cannot turn a blind eye to certain (popular) superstitions and still bemoan the public’s inexplicable distaste for evolution.

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Feb
20
2005

Goodbye to the Good Doctor

Definitely the most upsetting celebrity death that I can remember.

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Jan
20
2005

Release Day 422: A Vignette


McFunley: did you name this page something impossible to remember correctly on purpose?
McFunley: this is a good anti-querystring hacking technique
DarrelHerbst: the twocheckboxcolumn.aspx?
DarrelHerbst: i remember it
DarrelHerbst: your mind is addled with coffee
McFunley: i typed "twocolumncheckbox" and "twocheckcolumnbox" and "boxcolumnchecktwo" before I got it right
DarrelHerbst: addled


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