Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Dumb things that are posted and reposted until they become true!

THAT VIRAL INFOGRAPHIC ABOUT ‘SURPRISING READING FACTS’ IS TOTAL FICTION

(from Inquisitr.com)

An infographic meme of “surprising reading facts” refuses to die even years after its own author admitted the statistics were bogus, and after polls have shown that reading is 
actually thriving in America.

The infographic, which was created by Robb Brewer in 2011, shares some shocking statistics about how much reading Americans are supposedly doing these days. It claims that 33 percent of high school graduates never read another book in their lives, that 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy a single book last year, and that 70 percent of U.S. adults have not read a book in the past five years, among other figures.

The infographic continues to be shared wildly on Facebook and other social media sites, but there’s only one problem — it’s completely untrue.

Even Brewer, the author of the infographic, publicly admitted in 2012 that he couldn’t back up any of the statistics and asked people to stop sharing it.

“I think it’s safe to say the stats from the original graphic are questionable, and I am therefore recanting any and all connection to them.”

Brewer claims to have used statistics from a survey by an organization called the Jenkins Group, though the group itself says the statistics were incorrectly attributed to them. Brewer has never been able to provide any other source of the numbers he used in the infographic.

The questionable statistics seem to have originally come from a 2011 Mental Floss article, which claimed to have taken them from a Jenkins survey from 2003. Mental Floss has updated the original article saying they have no idea where the statistics came from, either.

http://www.inquisitr.com/3850347/that-viral-infographic-about-surprising-reading-facts-is-total-fiction-debunked/

OK - so I have dealt with this one before and thought I stomped it into the ground, but apparently not. One of the smartest people I know on Facebook just posted this thing with an invisible eye-roll, and all her friends chimed in with their ain't-it-a-shame comments.

NOT ONE PERSON questioned the veracity of these "statistics" or even wondered where they came from. Things that are posted and reposted have a when-you-wish-upon-a-star quality to them: if you say it enough times, then it will be true. Or should I say: if enough intelligent people are willing to swallow it unquestioned, then it will be dangerous.

Or so I believe.

I feel a bit sorry (but not too sorry) for this Brewer character, who says he got his stats from Mental Floss (that towering inferno of intellectual prowess), who in turn got them from The Jenkins Group, who say they've never heard of either one of them and had nothing to do with these highly-questionable "statistics". Now Mental Floss is confessing that the whole thing is a complete sham. It's a made-up chart, people, a thing a guy slapped up because it looked kinda good, kinda shocked a lot of people, and went viral before things were even GOING viral. This thing had to get up on its legs and walk, like a chain letter, but it still fooled millions of people, and what shocks me is that it's still doing so.

Why did the con catch on, and why won't it go away? Because it's telling disgruntled, disgusted people exactly what they want to hear. It's affirming their ain't-it-awful prognostications, their what's-the-world-coming-to lamentations, and their sense that the whole bloody culture is going to hell in a handbasket.

That may be so, but these stats, with their haphazard, grab-a-handful-of figures-and-throw-them quality, must have been invented by someone, somewhere, at some point. Brewer turned out to be less of a donkey than I thought, because he came up with ANOTHER infographic:

Apparently, even these stats aren't entirely accurate or up-to-date. They have done nothing to erase the wild distortions of the original, and in fact, if people find this one, they tend to say, "Hey, look, somebody's ripping off that cool thing about reading! What a pack of lies."

I personally don't believe anything on either infographic. When I first posted about this, about five years ago, when people were already running around like chickens with their heads off over this irrefutable proof of galloping illiteracy, I had the most trouble with that statement at the bottom, which Brewer (now picking the tar and feathers off his clothing) decided to keep. "Reading for one hour per day in your chosen field will make you an international expert in 7 years." Whaaaaaaat?
Is that some kind of joke?

Notice, too, the citations, or whatever they are, at the bottom of this updated infographic. He's actually telling us that these figures COME from somewhere - he didn't just pull them out of his ass. Now that's a refreshing change.

I'm not worried about literacy. Actually I am, terribly, but what worries me even more is that people no longer have that vital piece of equipment Hemingway talked about: a built-in bullshit detector. No, it's all consumed, swallowed whole, lies, truth, info this and graphic that. If it's catchy, if it has bold colours, if it's designed just right, people will not only believe it but keep sending it around to millions of other people, who will accept it without question and immediately hit "share".

About a million years ago I took a communications course which claimed you could "read yourself stupid". I do believe it's true. How does that come about? By being literate as all ding-dong and reading a book every three days, but never THINKING about what you read, never evaluating it, critiquing it or even digesting it. Over time, you will slowly, inexorably lose the ability to think for yourself.

Even worse, you will stop getting out of your chair, stop living and experiencing and writing your own book of life. . . because you will be too busy reading. And if your shit-detector is as eroded and corrupted as most people's have become, you might just be reading yourself into a strange new world of literate  illiteracy.

Awestruck: night sky over PEI

Scratch me where I itch

Another lovely Nancy Tapley video, two horses scratching where it itches. Horses are herd animals and need each other in multiple ways. One horse is no horse. I wish I had someone to scratch me where I itch.

Umbrella Carries Away Weatherman

A Dalai Lama moment

Dancing cellphones from 1953

                            Note. They looked different then. But they danced.

Enos in LA

  

 

 

 

  

 

Avocado bravado

                  I may never make these, but I love to watch.

Assorted meaningless nonsense with a Canada 150 logo slapped on it

Assorted meaningless nonsense with a Canada 150 logo slapped on it

— Canada 150 shoe lights


— Canada 150 certified jive power bank


— World’s most inconvenient cutting board







“I love the feeling of grass on my feet, but I live in a parking lot.” The Great Canadian Gift Company

— Canada 150 dog bag dispenser


— Canada 150 anti-slip car mat


— Red-and-white tulips that are actually orange—


--- World’s tiniest phone cleaner

— Canada 150 tactical flashlight with multiple features


— Canada 150 novelty grass flip flops


— Terrifying sock monkey


— “Yes, I’m gonna be this guy” air hammock


— And many more!

Goose dance: an animation

The Canadian Flag: a few rejected designs

These are just a few of the thousands of proposed designs for the Canadian flag. They actually had a contest, folks, and the winner (one of those "why didn't I think of that?" designs) was made official in February of 1965. 

Only in Canada.

"I AM CANADIAN!": Log Driver's Waltz

                      Happy birthday, Canada!

I love my country: Canada turns 150!

Today Canada turns 150, and though I couldn't get into it at all for the longest time, today I suddenly feel myself almost overcome with emotion. I trawled YouTube to find a decent version of O Canada, and unexpectedly (though why was it so unexpected, at this time in our history?) found ZILLIONS of versions, most of them not very good. A very well-known animated one that used to be shown when TV stations signed off for the night seemed like the obvious choice, but it just didn't work for me. There were some very abstract ones that misfired, very sentimental ones, and many that just weren't sentimental enough. When I began to watch this one, I realized I was crying. I wasn't expecting this at all. Something to do with the images that are so bang-on, and the choir that does not sing in words, but only sings "Ahhhhhhhhhh. . ."

Some say the Canadian identity formed as a sort of allergic reaction to the U. S., and there may be some truth in that. It's hard to love our neighbor right now, and I have to say I hate the things that they're doing, which cannot help but affect us. We feel crushed by that great elephant the first Trudeau talked about. But the fact that we're on our second Trudeau seems strange and miraculous to me. I remember when Justin Trudeau was born on Christmas day (which seemed significant for some reason), and everyone in my family went around snidely singing, "For unto us a child is born. . . " from Handel's Messiah. The next line of it, which no one sang, is, "And the government shall be upon his shoulders." It did cross my mind, back then, that some day it might be true.

More weird things are happening now. I compared notes with my husband the other day: "Are you having flashbacks from Expo '67?" To my surprise, he said yes. All sorts of stuff from the Centennial year is coming back to me now, most of it pretty cheesy, even hideous, but we thought it was wonderful then. Man and His World. The Geodesic Dome. The Monorail. The Canadian Pavilion. The Musical Ride.

And La Ronde, with rides that would probably seem pretty tame today. Going down the Flume ride and getting soaked, and going down the Flume ride again and getting more soaked. And again, until the sky opened up in a huge thunderstorm and made "soaked" seem redundant. I remember I was wearing a white cowboy hat that literally melted under the rain.

But it was all so exhilarating. Hell! A world's fair, for US! Canada was an incredible 100 years old, and for once we were going to fling down our usual reserve and CELEBRATE! I cannot post the Bobby Gimby song "Ca-na-da" (one little, two little, three Canadians) because when I listened to it again I felt nauseated, but back then we couldn't get enough of it. It quickly became the theme song of the Centennial.

Then there were all the patriotic songs we sang in school, pulled out of somewhere, then put away and never sung again. (I could not find good versions of Land of the Silver Birch or Something to Sing About, or I would have posted them.) 

It's a junk drawer, like most events you haven't even looked at in, oh, 50 years or so. My brother Arthur is all caught up in it. We were close then, he was 18 and I was 13, and I had no way of knowing he wouldn't live a normal life, or a normal span. He was funny and weird and he didn't last long, sort of like Expo.

There was a song called A Place to Stand which could get to me, all about "Ontari-ari-ario" where I grew up. Mostly it was sung in the usual cheesy way, but sometimes it was used on CBC as a sort of animated filler, and it had no singing, just a couple of violins. It used to knock me right over.

I want to make something, to DO something about the 150th, not just sit here posting videos and rambling. I want to make something move, but not in the ridiculous way that I make a goose or a moose or a ham loaf move. It's really too bad I have no artistic ability, can't draw or paint to save my life, for it might be a comfort to me now that I seem to have reached the end of my creativity.

I was trying to figure out what that horrific Habitat structure reminded me of (and unless I am mistaken, it's still standing and people still live in it in Montreal). It's that godawful UFO pod village in Taiwain:

I had one more thought in this ramble. This isn't done much any more - it's an old-school Canadian kind of thing, to wonder who the "greatest Canadian" is - I mean of all time, and invariably it's some stodgy old white guy with lots of money. Perhaps a Prime Minister from the early 1900s.

I have a candidate, for the simple reason that his influence echoes on in the most potent, living-and-breathing way, and will go on that way for untold generations.

Northern Dancer wins the Queen's Plate by 7 1/2 lengths, 1964.

A car with kaleidoscope eyes

Newspaper taxis appear on the shore,
Waiting to take you away.

Our miracle duck has found a mate!

Bosley, the magpie duck/mallard hybrid of Como Lake, has had an interesting summer. We almost always see this handsome, friendly guy dabbling along the shore or waddling around, fat as a goose. But then he disappeared for weeks, and we were very worried. Finally we saw him frantically running towards the lake, a mallard drake in hot pursuit. We were a bit shocked, but thought, well, maybe Bosley is a Boslina. Another time, we saw him chilling in the reeds with what looked like the same drake. What was going on?

Then the other day, an amazing development: Bosley appears with a completely different duck, which also looks like a hybrid. She (for it must be a she) is white with creamy-tan markings, a cocoa-brown head and neck, and a white ring where a mallard's neck-ring would be. She has the ruffly wing-feathers and tail-curlicue of a magpie duck, and her long bill, very strangely, is green.

Trust Bosley to pick a true exotic. I don't know if these two will produce young, but I hope so. Oddly enough, a lone male mallard is still hanging around with them, and I can't tell if it's the same one as before.

A threesome? What can it mean?

Irish eyes, Spanish heart

Stone, when warm, will hold the heat. As will it hold the cold. When musicians such as these play in a hall with stone walls, the result is incredible resonance and warmth, along with a certain brio. The sound waves bounce off the walls at different lengths, colliding with each other in all sorts of interesting ways. The sound is both robust and tender.

The story of this piece - there isn't one, really, except that every once in a while I think of a prancing Arabian horse (every day of my life, in fact, since I am a frustrated horsewoman who never sees horses up close), and this piece comes into my head. What piece? I wasn't even sure of the composer, let alone the name of the piece. But today I had to find out.

I sat there saying to myself, listen, you will never find it, because the only search term you have is "Spanish flute music". That covers several zillion pieces, probably. But then I began to dip into YouTube, and almost immediately found a flute compilation album of French and Spanish pieces. The video only featured a tiny snippet of each piece, but - by God, there it was!

Then I had to find the web site with information on the album, and then - . Anyway, it turned out to be a very, very familiar piece by Jacques Ibert (who was called by one waggish English musicologist "Jackie Bear"). And I listened to quite a few versions before lighting up when I heard this. 

These guys, they get right inside the music, they understand it. It isn't just those gorgeous walls. The dynamics on the flute are so subtle, so passionate, it makes other versions fall flat. And he has that very rare plush, fat tone, like Rampal.

I still see a crazily prancing horse like I did in my girlhood. The Black Stallion of my dreams. This piece is his theme song.

BLOGGER'S ADDEN-DUMB. It's late at night, and I shouldn't be doing this. There was a rumor in our family, one of those things that likely has no veracity to it at all, that we had Spanish blood which went back many generations. Maybe even as far back as the Spanish Armada. That was approximately six zillion years ago, so one molecule of blood would have to stretch pretty far. The Spanish line came through my father, a blue-eyed blonde who had a weird brown fleck in one eye. My green-eyed mother produced two sons with black hair and brown eyes. That never made sense to me.

My father's father was the deuce, the domino, the artless dodger of the family, the rogue, the renegade, and likely just a raving drunk. When I read Angela's Ashes, I thought of him, appearing and disappearing, joining the army, bringing home lavish presents only to disappear again. My Dad told me his job was to hold up the wall of the pub, and for many years, I literally believed this.

My Dad passed on a white-blonde gene that couldn't have come from anywhere else, since I have two Scandinavian-looking grandkids (whose mother is dark brunette - isn't nature grand?). And yet, and yet. My Dad's father was dark, swarthy, brown-eyed, reportedly violent. 

Every once in a while it comes into my head to get one of those DNA tests, to see once and for all if I have any Spanish blood. Meantime, my other two grandkids, dark-haired and brown-eyed, DO have Spanish blood. Their great-grandmother was born in Spain. How can they be Spanish, if I am not?

Duckling challenge!

I think this is one of the best videos I've taken. Seven ducklings were faced with an impossible challenge, but somehow managed to brave it and win. 

This has been a tremendous year for ducklings and goslings, and new batches/hatches are still appearing. Many of the goslings are now plug-ugly, in that awkward middling stage, looking like plucked chickens on stilts. You can see where the Ugly Duckling story came from, for swan cygnets are probably much the same, with a lumpy, ungainly, protracted adolescence. 

Swans may look pretty, but their temperaments are quite ugly, worse than the Canada goose with its haughty stares, stiff necks and hisses. Give me the humble duck any time. Ducks always seem to be smiling, and it's rare to find a mean one anywhere. Mother ducks will drive off threats fiercely, but their constant maternal murmuring keeps the babies within their radar. Had I been raised by a duck (or a cat, for that matter - cats make tender and attentive mothers), things might have turned out very differently for me.

The original black stallion

Adopted chicks: Hen Solo broods a batch

Hen Solo, the broody hen of Bondi, had no fertilized eggs; her neighbor did. Thus a broodless hen warmed an adopted batch, and they hatched! We've been following the saga in installments on Facebook. These videos were taken by my childhood friend Nancy Tapley, who is blessed enough to live among the horses and the wildlife in beautiful Bondi Village, paradise of my youth.

Flying egg: the car from space

Schlörwagen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Schlörwagen in 1939

Schlörwagen from the front

The Schlörwagen (nicknamed "Egg" or "Pillbug") was a prototype aerodynamic rear-engine passenger vehicle developed by Karl Schlör (1911–1997) and presented to the public in 1939.

Schlör, an engineer for Krauss Maffei of Munich, proposed an ultra-low drag coefficient body as early as 1936. Under Schlör's supervision at the AVA (an Aerodynamic testing institute in Göttingen) a model was built. Subsequent wind tunnel tests yielded a drag coefficient of only 0.113, incredible then and still extremely impressive today. For a functioning model, a Mercedes-Benz 170H chassis, one of their few rear-engine designs, was used. The aluminum body was built by the Ludewig Brothers of Essen. Subsequent tests of the motorized model showed a slightly higher but still impressive drag coefficient of 0.186.  A year later it was unveiled to the public at the 1939 Berlin Auto Show. The project was shelved with the onset of World War II and mass production was never realized. In 1942, the prototype was fitted with a captured soviet propeller engine. The whereabouts of the sole functioning model remain unknown.

BLOGGER'S LAMENT. Would that they had found this thing! I have no idea how they would ever fit this little pillbug, which looks as if you could pick it up with one hand, with a "captured Soviet propeller engine", or what happened to it after that. Did they end up with a flying egg/pillbug/two-door Schlor, or just one big splat?

This was the only photo I found which presumably illustrates the hybrid, but as usual there is no information with it.

I also found a couple of photos of grey men in grey hats looking at the (mostly-grey) car. Things were pretty grey, back then.

Human slingshot

Don't chew the tinfoil

This is kind of a crap animation, but I thought I'd put it up here anyway. Hey, it's better than anything YOU can do, isn't it? Have you ever animated a ham and pineapple loaf late at night? I thought not. But if you have, please send it to me and I will post it for full credit.

It's unclear whether or not the ham loaf is eating the tin foil, or throwing it up, or both. It's hard to animate tin foil.

And hey - I have just one more question to ask. WHERE'S THE GARLIC BREAD???