A while ago I wrote about Carl Zim­mer’s use of the col­lo­quial name daddy-​​longlegs when refer­ring to har­vest­men, and how it hurt the inter­na­tional access­ib­il­ity of his writ­ing. Hon­estly, it wasn’t a big deal at the time (although it did bring in a celebrity com­menter!) and it looks utterly insig­ni­fic­ant com­pared to this. I’m going to assume that Dr Andrew Ross is as com­pet­ent as his pos­i­tion of col­lec­tion man­ager of fossil inver­teb­rates and plants at the Nat­ural His­tory Museum in Lon­don would sug­gest — which is very — and that he simply wasn’t care­ful enough about his use of words in inter­view. Dur­ing the course of the art­icle, he refers to this har­vest­man spe­ci­men both as a spider and in a round­about way as an insect as well. Not only are both incor­rect, but they’re also mutu­ally exclus­ive. It’s a real shame that given the oppor­tun­ity to get the word out and edu­cate the pub­lic a little, a senior employee of the Nat­ural His­tory Museum man­aged, instead, to mis­in­form the pub­lic through some­thing as simple as poor word choice.

Luck­ily there was a safety net this time; the BBC’s journ­al­ist, Rebecca Morelle, clearly knows her stuff, and she pre-​​empts his com­ments with the cor­rect defin­i­tion; that har­vest­men are arach­nids that are closely related to, without actu­ally being, spiders. I just can’t help feel­ing that it shouldn’t fall to a journ­al­ist to cor­rect the expert she quotes.

While on the sub­ject of sci-​​fi, I just found this (very) short story on-​​line, which I really enjoyed. It’ll take you less than five minutes to read, and you’ll be glad you did; go check it out.

It’s been a bad month; first Gary Gygax, and now Arthur C. Clarke.

Eer­ily, I found these com­ments, while going through some source code, here at work, yesterday:

StoreParameterChanges();

// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

StoreParameterChanges();

// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

StoreParameterChanges();

// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

Which, as well as being a strange fore­shad­ow­ing, just goes to show how great a cul­tural impact he had¹.

1. OK — so a pro­gram­mer quot­ing sci-​​fi isn’t that spec­tac­u­larly unlikely, but you get the point. [↩]

So, I’m a soft­ware engin­eer. I work for a large-​​ish com­pany that is a major player in the digital TV arena, and I think I’m con­sidered pretty good at my job. I think I’m paid slightly shy of aver­age for a developer of my age and exper­i­ence, but I like my job and my co-​​workers enough to let that slide. I have a reas­on­ably good income and no depend­ants, and if I wasn’t pay­ing out a stag­ger­ingly huge amount in debt repay­ments each month, I’d be very com­fort­able (rather than just pretty comfortable.)

So far, so aver­age. So can someone tell me how the hell I earn more than Wil fuck­ing Wheaton? This guy was in Star Trek for cry­ing out loud! And on top of that (or, depend­ing on your opin­ion of Wes, des­pite it,) he’s grown into one of the best, most nat­ural writers of the blog­ging gen­er­a­tion. Oh, and he’s a great spokes­man for unashamed geeks every­where too; I mean, did you hear his PAX key­note?

Hon­estly, it’s a sign of his tal­ent that it’s been years since I’ve thought of him as “that kid who played the annoy­ing one in TNG.”

So how come he writes enter­tain­ing, uplift­ing, even self-​​validating blog posts every day¹, pro­duces books that are truly a joy to read, is cap­able of whip­ping a con­fer­ence full of high income geeks into a frenzy, and yet is still wor­ried about how to provide for his kids, while I show up to an office every day, write code designed to make rich people richer, which may or may not ever be released, and some­how earn enough that my biggest worry is whether I can afford that new mon­itor this month without cur­tail­ing my pizza habit?

Is that fair?

Hell no. So here’s my plan. I bought “Just a Geek” ages ago, but have lost my copy some­where along the way. I bor­rowed “Dan­cing Bare­foot” once, and to my shame have neither bought nor Read “Hap­pi­est Days of Our Lives” yet. So I’m going to buy all three of them. This month. I’m not doing this as a char­ity thing; I genu­inely love his writ­ing, and want to own his books; I’ve just not got around to to buy­ing them. So I want the books, I’m sure he’d like the money. It’s a win/​win situation.

Because I know he’d hate the thought of people buy­ing his writ­ing out of char­ity, I’m not going to sug­gest every­one goes out and does the same, but I will point you all at his blog. Add it to your blog-​​roll (if you haven’t already.) Read it for a while. I’m pretty sure that, if you’re a geek or a gamer or just love good writ­ing, you’ll end up buy­ing his books for reas­ons he won’t hate.

Go. Now. Read.

1. I smile to myself, genu­inely cheered, when he writes about his kids — who I’ve obvi­ously never met — get­ting into role­play­ing, or Monty Python, or the right com­puter games, or any of the other things I love. [↩]

Even the BBC appears to use them rather too lib­er­ally. Take a look at this art­icle. There’s no sug­ges­tion any­where that the girl might have made it up; ware­house have apo­lo­gised and com­pensated her, the tool in the photo looks like the sort of thing that would be used for cut­ting can­vas in a bag fact­ory; so why the scare quotes around ‘finds blade in bag’ in the head­line? Why say she ‘claims she pulled out a cut­ting device’ rather than just report­ing that she did?

It’s a weird art­icle; I can’t decide if it’s just slop­pily writ­ten, or if the author is try­ing to play on the public’s fear of teen­agers with knives. In either case, it’s below the BBC — they should know better.

This really is the last thing we need.

I’m not talk­ing about the bug itself (although obvi­ously MRSA is a prob­lem and needs to be taken very ser­i­ously,) but about the fact that it seems to have estab­lished itself in the gay com­munity. I haven’t googled to find out, but I’m sure the Reli­gious Right has already got hold of this and stared beat­ing it’s “dangers of an immoral life­style” drum. And if they haven’t, it’s only a mat­ter of time. Mark my words.

For an example, take a look at the Metro’s cov­er­age. Their head­line alone is shock­ingly mis­lead­ing; “Strain of Super­bug ‘may be new HIV’”. I don’t know where they got that quote from (they don’t bother to attrib­ute it any­where in the art­icle,) but I’d love to hear it jus­ti­fied. Is MRSA a virus? Does it attack the immune sys­tem? No. So in what way exactly might it be the new Human Immun­ode­fi­ciency Virus? Oh yes, because it’s a “gay dis­ease.” Just like AIDS. The ignor­ance stag­gers me.

And it gets worse. Fur­ther down the art­icle they write:

MRSA expert Prof Mark Enright, from Imper­ial Col­lege and St Mary’s Hos­pital, Lon­don, said gay com­munit­ies and drug users were par­tic­u­larly at risk. But it could also be spread by those involved in sports, such as wrest­ling, with skin-​​to-​​skin contact.

‘Hav­ing a num­ber of sexual part­ners and mak­ing skin con­tact with a large num­ber of dif­fer­ent people is how these infec­tions are picked up,’ he added.

I really hope they’ve ‘mas­saged’ Prof. Enright’s quote, because if not, he should not be called an expert. Gay com­munit­ies and drug users are not “par­tic­u­larly at risk,” and Enright knows it; he says as much in the next para­graph. The people par­tic­u­larly at risk are people who make a lot of dir­ect skin con­tact with a lot of dif­fer­ent people. Now, it might be true that there’s a strong cor­rel­a­tion, that gay people tend to have more dir­ect con­tact with oth­ers than non-​​gay people, but that is utterly irrel­ev­ant; it’s still the con­tact, not being gay that puts those people at risk and to sug­gest oth­er­wise is down­right irresponsible.

Obvi­ously health pro­fes­sion­als have a respons­ib­il­ity to identify trends in dis­ease trans­mis­sion and infec­tion rates, and to try to high­light high-​​risk activ­it­ies and to keep the pub­lic informed; that’s their job and it’s immensely valu­able in pre­vent­ing and treat­ing ill­ness. The prob­lem arises when some rag takes what they’re say­ing and twists it into an art­icle which effect­ively says “Oh noes! Teh Gay! It’s mak­ing us ill! Again!”

Shame on you Metro, for pub­lish­ing this: It’s bad sci­ence, it’s bad journ­al­ism and it’s mor­ally reprehensible.

Merriam-​​Webster have announced ‘w00t’ as their word of the year this year. I first saw this on the Metro this morn­ing, but when I got to work and Googled it, I found it repor­ted pretty much every­where. Unfor­tu­nately on their web-​​site the Metro cov­er­age has taken on a some­what tounge-​​in-​​cheek tone and been placed in their “weird” sec­tion. The paper pub­lic­a­tion had a much more endear­ingly earn­est and bewildered tone about it.

I’m really not sure I entirely approve of the choice. I mean w00t is not a word, it’s a mis­spelling of an exclam­a­tion of joy. It’s really not that dis­tinct from mak­ing “booya” your word of the year. The whole thing smacks of an attempt by Miriam Web­ster to show that they’re ‘down’ with the way ‘the kids’ are mak­ing use of lan­guage today, and prove that they’re still rel­ev­ant in a world where kids take pride in not being able to write a real Eng­lish sen­tence. Obvi­ously, as a gamer (and an online wit!) I’ve been known to use 1337-​​speak on occa­sion, but I’m not under the impres­sion that I’m part of some avant-​​garde lin­guistic revolu­tion; the whole thing is a con­vo­luted online joke born out of the nor­mal teen­agers’ desire to com­mu­nic­ate without their par­ents know­ing what they’re say­ing. It’s not a “new way of using lan­guage,” it’s a mod­ern take on that ridicu­lous pig-​​latin thing that most kids learn to talk in at the age of six, and we, as adults, should not be dig­ni­fy­ing it with a place in the dic­tion­ary; ixnay on the eetlay-​​peaksay.

Any­way, who says ‘w00t’ any­more? Surely they should have gone for ‘FTW!’

By now you’ll have all noticed the stor­ies about a newly dis­covered breed of giant sea scor­pion, which ter­ror­ised aquatic envir­on­ments 300 mil­lion years ago. The BBC and CNN have both repor­ted on it. Sloppily.

Quite aside from Kevin Z’s valid cri­ti­cisms of the CNN cov­er­age, the thing both sites have utterly failed to men­tion is that this isn’t that remark­able. I mean, it’s good, inter­est­ing sci­ence, and the team involved have done a great job, but two-​​and-​​a-​​half metre sea scor­pi­ons are not a new dis­cov­ery. In fact it’s only because this recent work has lowered the estim­ated size of a pre­vi­ous find by 40cm that this new dis­cov­ery is con­sidered the largest yet found. I know it makes for bet­ter news if you can make out this is some sort of amaz­ing dis­cov­ery of hitherto unknown giant bugs, but that doesn’t jus­tify neg­lect­ing to men­tion the back­ground to the work.

A little while ago, I indul­gently fisked an idiot com­menter at the Guard­ian, and in doing so out­lined my reluct­ance to resort to such tactics:

I try to avoid fisk­ing because it makes me feel nit-​​picky; I’d rather address the sub­stance of someone’s argu­ment or pos­i­tion, than hope that knock­ing enough little holes in it will have the same effect.

The other thing I should have said, of course, is that it’s basic­ally an argu­ment of the gaps. That is, shred­ding someone else’s pos­i­tion doesn’t neces­sar­ily make me right; why waste time show­ing the flaws in someone else’s argu­ment, when I could be explain­ing and pro­mot­ing my own position?

Aside from the obvi­ous reas­ons above, Deni­al­ism has repor­ted on some new research that intro­duces an inter­est­ing angle. The research isn’t dir­ectly about the prac­tice of fisk­ing, but it applies, I think:

When Uni­ver­sity of Michigan social psy­cho­lo­gist Norbert Schwarz had volun­teers read the CDC flier, how­ever, he found that within 30 minutes, older people mis­re­membered 28 per­cent of the false state­ments as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 per­cent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did bet­ter at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troub­ling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respec­ted CDC.

So, all those rational blogs out there, whenever they quote old crank canards, in order to shred them in the next para­graph, might actu­ally be re-​​enforcing belief in those lies in their tar­get audi­ence? That’s a pretty big deal if it’s true, and it might force a lot of blog­gers to change the whole way they present their arguments.

Of course, the research is not widely applic­able; it deals spe­cific­ally with widely held, and often repeated myths, rather than the sort of totally out-​​there crankery that occa­sion­ally sur­faces on the inter­net. So, I’d guess we’re still fine to quote some crank claim­ing that we all go through a bal­loon animal phase dur­ing early devel­op­ment, but we might want to think twice when we’re oppos­ing some other crank arguing that Dar­win­ism leads to Nazism, or that the Amer­ican found­ing fath­ers were all prac­tising, main­stream Christians.

It’s worth bear­ing in mind, at any rate.

Carl Zim­mer pos­ted an inter­est­ing art­icle last night about his­tor­ical biogeo­graphy, and the clues we can get about con­tin­ental drift (amongst other things,) from the dis­tri­bu­tion of fauna. Gen­er­ally smal­ler, less mobile, and more envir­on­ment­ally picky creatures are the most use, since they don’t tend to get around by other means, and this piece writes about one that fits the bill; it’s a tiny har­vest­man (an ancient order of arach­nids). Unfor­tu­nately, because Carl’s used a col­lo­quial name to refer to it, a lot of con­fu­sion has ensued; look at the com­ments if you want a taste.

The prob­lem is that the term he used — “daddy longlegs” — is used col­lo­qui­ally to refer to three dif­fer­ent types of creatures in vari­ous parts of the world, and if the com­ments are any­thing to go by he has a lot of read­ers from places that use it dif­fer­ently to him. Speak­ing as a Brit, a daddy longlegs is a crane-​​fly, which (until I remembered that it can also refer to a har­vest­man,) was a little con­fus­ing; since crane-​​flies are not par­tic­u­larly small, or par­tic­u­larly choosy about their envir­on­ment, and they can fly so the point about them not not mov­ing around much under their own power is some­what lost, as well. It could have been worse, though; if I was someone who’d imme­di­ately thought of the daddy-​​longlegs spider, I might not have even real­ised some­thing was amiss, and just gone away from the art­icle with the wrong idea entirely; not a desir­able outcome.

Now, I’m not hav­ing a go at Carl here, he’s an excel­lent writer, and he does an awful lot to present com­plex sci­ence in a way the lay­man (includ­ing me) can under­stand — and be enthused by. And, in fact, he does give the taxo­nomic clas­si­fic­a­tion of the har­vest­man he’s talk­ing about, so the sci­en­tific­ally lit­er­ate won’t be misled. My point (inso­far as I can be said to have one) is that while using a col­lo­quial name like this might make the writ­ing, and there­fore the sci­ence, more access­ible, we should be extremely care­ful to bear in mind that while they might seem friendly, col­lo­qui­al­isms are also notori­ously ill-​​defined and prone to mis­in­ter­pret­a­tion. It would be a real shame if, in order to make sci­ence access­ible to the gen­eral pub­lic, we also had to make it use­less to them by sac­ri­fi­cing the very pre­ci­sion and clar­ity that makes it so powerful.

Edit: Zooil­lo­gix reports the same research, and also neg­lects to cla­rify what type of daddy longlegs the mite har­vest­man is related to.

Edit 2: Richard Dawkins and Bug Girl have also linked to Zimmer’s ori­ginal, restat­ing the ambigu­ous term without cla­ri­fic­a­tion. This is par­tic­u­larly care­less from Dawkins, who’s Brit­ish, and so, pre­sum­ably, thinks of daddy longlegs as crane-​​flies himself.

Edit 3: This is the last one, I swear. The com­ments on Zooil­lo­gix post have sort of made my point for me; the images in the New York Times ver­sion of Zimmer’s art­icle that Zooil­lo­gix link are not, in fact, of the Har­vest­man at all, they’re of the Daddy Longlegs Spider, which is a closer rel­at­ive than the crane fly, but still not close enough. When your lan­guage is ambigu­ous enough that the photo research­ers of your own pub­lic­a­tion are con­fused, there must be some­thing wrong.

Next Page »