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.