Don't believe everything you hear

Political falsehood of the day: "The government is going to confiscate your retirement savings." This was done in Argentina, but there is no proposal to do it in the United States, and in fact our Constitution does not allow it. Yet it's one of the many falsehoods constantly being dished out by so-called "conservative" talk radio. For some reason, this particular rumor, which first popped up in November 2008, is all of a sudden getting passed along again.

Another example: The other day Rush Limbaugh said, or at lest gave the impression, that Obama was trying to do away with the tax deduction for charitable contributions. The Washington Post told me he was just wanting to cap it at 28%.

Also to be distrusted are advertisements that mention Obama, saying that he says you can get "bailed out" of your credit card debts, or the like. There's no reason the president's picture should be in any commercial advertisement.

Future generations will laugh at a lot of what's in the mass media this year.

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Latest addition to the web site

Whenever I gather information about anything, I give it back to the public. So this had to happen, and did. More material will be added.

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Intelligence test

I've seen people express puzzlement about this or declare that the data must be fake. No...

How can it be that job losses are up but unemployment is down?

Click here if you can't figure it out.

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Anatomy of an incendiary blog post

Click here for an amusing (and very classical) piece of classical rhetorical analysis.

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And...

And today there was something worse than a scandal: a stabbing at Georgia Tech (75 miles from us and under the same Board of Regents). Academic life may not be as safe as we thought.

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Two scandals

Today I had to tell my research group about two scandals: an international one about falsified medical research that supposedly indicated that the MMR vaccine causes autism, and a local one about one of our computer security people who got arrested for extortion.

Concerning the first one: England's strict libel laws are keeping The Lancet from saying anything very clear about why they retracted the paper. Other media report that the data were actually falsified.

The whole episode is sad for several reasons: children died because they weren't protected from measles, and for years to come, plenty of people will not be smart enough to stop believing in a hazard for which there was never any scientific evidence, and will continue exposing their children to the real hazard of measles to avoid the imagined risk of autism.

Concerning the second one: Computer security is law enforcement and needs the same kind of safeguards against employee misconduct. And we need to put out the word, very loudly, that the University does not automatically swallow every accusation against a student that it receives from the outside world. Students have a right to due process, and in fact a right not to be bothered at all if there is no credible probable cause. No individual University official will swoop down on an individual student and impose punishment. Ever. That's not how it's done.

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Health insurance reform?

CNN reports: "Democratic efforts to pass a health care bill have stalled a bit, and the immediate focus may be shifting toward health insurance reform instead of quickly trying to pass a comprehensive bill, White House officials signaled Sunday."

I hope so. Here's what I think we need:

(1) To decouple health insurance from employment so people don't lose their insurance when they change jobs.

(2) To give people a wider selection of insurance plans, including the ability to buy across state lines.

(3) Some kind of tort reform. In dealing with malpractice, compensation of the victim needs to be separated from punishment of the doctor; the latter is largely a matter of licensing. Because of liability insurance, the costs of malpractice judgments are spread across all doctors, not just the bad ones, and do not actually punish the guilty.

(4) A must-have, must-carry system health insurance system, so that everyone can get insurance, and everyone has to do so. This would be totally private but heavily regulated. As I said earlier, this is the only way to get around the "pre-existing condition" problem, and the only way to make it affordable is to require everyone to have insurance, even when they're completely healthy.

Of these, (1), (2), and (3) are "conservative" and (4) is "liberal." But notice that I didn't say the government should go into the insurance or health care business. Not at all. What I advocate is a system like that of Switzerland or the Netherlands, where, in fact, even Medicare is not needed because everybody has private insurance.

Some people argue that the government has no right to require you to buy insurance. Yet it surely has the right to tax you and give you insurance — nobody claims Medicare is unconstitutional. Surely you have more freedom when you're making a required purchase (from a provider of your own choice) than when you pay a tax for a government service.

What isn't possible is what some unsophisticates want: "I'm not paying a penny for insurance until I get sick, and then I have to be able to get it regardless of pre-existing condition." That, folks, is not insurance. You don't shop for car insurance after the wreck. You don't shop for life insurance after you're dead.

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Short notes

How it works: Remember my account of a hat that attracts women? The other day I got a small indication of how it works. I was putting on a somewhat similar hat after lunch in a restaurant, and a 3-year-old girl looked up, pointed at me, and said, with delight, "Oooo! Cow-boy!" Hmmm... Now I know how to impress 3-year-old girls.

The oddest thing I've read about lately: How to hypnotize chickens.

Is it even possible to hypnotize humans? Look at all the skepticism in recent accounts such as the one I just linked to, and especially the now-widespread consensus that stage hypnotism is mostly fake. Apparently, hypnosis is a state of heightened concentration (not unconsciousness or enslavement) into which some people can be put. But it doesn't work reliably. If it did, we'd be seeing it used therapeutically for all kinds of purposes, including anesthesia.

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From the typographical zoo

A couple of unusual Selectric type elements that have recently come my way:

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Short notes

This blog got over 13,000 hits in January. Those are split across all existing material, so I don't know how many people are reading it regularly. But I am again experimenting with Google Ads.

If you like software but don't like programming, consider getting a job as a software tester.

Apparently, last month I stumbled into a cultural phenomenon called typecasting namely creating blog entries on a typewriter and scanning them. I didn't mean to be taking a position in a modern literary movement. I just wanted to show you some typefaces.

(I wonder if they realized that typecasting already meant something else, and also that the contents of a scanned typewritten blog entry are invisible to Google. Hmmm... maybe they're shy about search engines.)

Speaking of typefaces, I recently bought (on eBay, where else?) some curiosities from the liquidation of GP Technologies, an early-1980s third-party maker of custom Selectric type elements. In the next few days I'm going to show you a typographical zoo, including "Olde English" in Spanish, and a typeface that can type smiley faces. And does anybody out there need an OCR type element with a Belgian (Dutch/French) character set?

A ghost in the history of typewriters: Was there ever any such thing as a "Smith-Corona Selectric"? I saw an ad for one, but the advertiser thought he might have mixed up the names. Googling, I find the phrase "Smith-Corona Selectric" scattered here and there, but never with a clear indication of what machine it denotes (or occasional definite misunderstandings). Selectrics were made by IBM; portable typewriters were made by Smith-Corona; and as far as I know, the two never crossbred. But I know that a close imitation of the Selectric typewriter was built (right after the patents ran out) by Remington Rand, and that "Selectric" was a trade name for other things (electric shavers, boat motors) made by various companies.

The weight of the Google evidence, scant though it is, seems to be that some people though "Selectric" was a generic term for "electric typewriter" or something of the sort. If so, we have a clear case of metonymic meaning change as described by Rulon Wells in 1975 paper, "Metonymy and Misunderstanding." Sometimes a word changes meaning when people misunderstand it and get away with it.

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