Sorry, but Zero Gravity Day just is an old April Fool’s Day joke

Over on News Hound Sarah Morris posted an extremely silly article titled April 4th 2014 Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity - Float for 5 Minutes! #Zerogday. She absurdly claimed that:

“...if you jump in the air at 9:47 AM local time on April 4th 2014, it should take you about 3 seconds to land back on your feet instead of the usual 0.2 seconds.”

Sarah claimed this had been revealed by the British astronomer Patrick Moore. Well, sort of. Ten seconds of research at Wikipedia will show you that Patrick Moore died back on December 9, 2012. He’s pushing up daisies, and is not revealing anything.

I read about this silly article on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog, in a post he titled: No, April 4, 2014 is NOT “Zero G Day.” No.

When you look on either Snopes or at the Museum of Hoaxes you’ll find the nonsense just was an April Fool’s Day joke done by Patrick Moore way back in 1976! It has been popping up again ever since.

If you stay on the News Hound page for a while you will get a pop-up ad saying to:

“Please Share This Page
We rely on word of mouth. 
Take a moment to share this with your friends (on Facebook).”

Please don’t share it! It's absolute rubbish!

The image of Clayton Anderson floating while on the International Space Station is from Wikimedia Commons.

Survey by Molly Maid found that 44% of U.S. homeowners would rather speak in front of a large group than clean their home

On March 26th a cleaning company based in Ann Arbor Michigan issued a press release titled Molly Maid Survey Reveals Majority of Homeowners Won’t Spring Clean. Their survey of over 2000 people also redundantly reported that rather than clean their home 44% would rather speak in front of a large group, and 30% would rather go on a six-hour car ride with their in-laws.

Why did I say redundantly? Because, as shown above in a bar chart, 93% said they would rather do anything else than clean their home. That’s an impressive level of disdain!  The Molly Maid Anonymous Cleaning Confessions Survey was done on SurveyMonkey from February 5th to 14th. Apparently no one said that they’d rather eat a bowl of dog food than clean, or that there was nothing they’d rather do than clean, since they love cleaning.

The 1870 image of a young housekeeper and her mother dusting the parlor came from the Library of Congress.

Learning to Recognize Fallacies and Bad Arguments

When you write a speech, you should avoid logical fallacies and other bad arguments. Wikipedia has a page with a long List of Fallacies. Also, last January I blogged about An Infographic Showing Rhetorical Fallacies.

Recently online I found An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi, which has amusing cartoons about this serious topic.

Five bad arguments came up before the last presidential election, as was discussed by Scott Neuman in A Guide to Spotting Pretzel Logic on the Campaign Trail. Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney graduated from the Harvard Law School, so their campaigns also should have known better.

In March 2008 Paul Graham posted an essay on How to Disagree that listed a hierarchy which was linked to by the CreateDebate blog and illustrated  with a pyramid, as shown above.

The image of two arguing men was derived from an old Federal Art Project poster about More Courtesy. 

A Turducken Infographic from the Idaho Statesman

The front page of last Sunday’s Idaho Statesman had an article titled Idaho colleges aim for higher tuition, again with a curious infographic. It both tabulated and plotted how tuition at Boise State University increased 79 percent from $3,520 in 2003 to $6,292 in 2013. That data is shown above in a conventional line chart, with the y-axis starting from zero, which is an honest way of plotting.

The Statesman decided white space on their front page was too valuable to waste, so they instead cut off the bottom of their graphic just below $3000. Why did I call it a turducken? A turducken is a 3-in-1 deboned fowl mashup consisting of a chicken stuffed inside a duck, stuffed inside a turkey.    

Their graphic plotted the data as a blue line chart, with the value for each blue-circled  data point labeled beside it. Beneath the values for even-numbered years are orange bars, and beneath the values for odd-numbered years are tan bars.

So, first their graphic is equivalent to a table (the chicken). Second, it’s a tiger-striped bar chart (the duck). Third, it’s a line chart (the turkey). It’s clever, but somewhat misleading.

The Misleading Graph page at Wikipedia says that one with a Y-axis that doesn’t start at zero is a truncated or torn graph.

On page 56 of Edward Tufte’s book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd edition, 2001) he states two principles of graphical integrity:

“The representation of numbers, as physically measured on the surface of the graphic itself, should be directly proportional to the numerical quantities represented.

Clear, detailed, and thorough labeling should be used to defeat graphical distortions  and ambiguity. Write out explanations of the data on the graphic itself. Label important events in the data.”

On the next page Tufte defines a Lie Factor:

“Lie Factor = (size of effect shown in graphic)/(size of effect in data)”

and says if the Lie Factor is less than 0.95 or greater than 1.05 the graphic isn’t accurately representing the underlying numbers. The Stateman’s truncated graphic has a Lie Factor of about 0.57, which is pretty misleading.

Crimeria? Really?

On his early-morning 580 KIDO AM talk show today I heard Kevin Miller repeatedly refer to Vladimir Putin and the Russian Army having taken over Crimeria. I was both amused and appalled by his lack of preparation.

Crimeria might exist somewhere in a Batman comic book. Perhaps it’s where they lost the War on Crime. But, Crimea is real. From 1853 to 1856 there was a Crimean War that included the Battle of Balaclava and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Getting the name wrong is a credibility destroyer.

Balaclava later became a common term referring to a type of headgear. I hope Kevin just calls that a ski mask, rather than a bataclava.

The balaclava image came from Per Erik Strandberg at Wikimedia Commons.

YouGov survey of British adults found they most commonly were very afraid of heights, snakes, public speaking, spiders, and being closed in a small space

On March 20, 2014 YouGov plc posted an article by William Jordan titled Afraid of Heights? You’re Not Alone with the results of their fears survey just done in Britain on a sample of 2088 adults (1075 women and 1013 men). Those people were asked about the following 13 different fearful situations:

Being in a closed space
Blood
Clowns,
Crowds
Darkness
Dogs 
Flying in an airplane
Heights
Mice
Needles and getting shots
Public speaking
Snakes
Spiders

They were asked if they were:

A) Not afraid at all
B) Not really afraid
C) A little afraid
D) Very afraid

Results for Very Afraid are shown above in a bar chart. (Click on it for a larger, clearer view). The top five fears are:

Heights (23%)
Snakes (21%)
Public speaking (20%)
Spiders (18%)
Being closed in a small space (14%)

For Very Afraid, women and men have rather different fears, as shown above in a second bar chart. For women the top five fears are:

Snakes (28%)
Public speaking (27%)
Heights (26%)
Spiders (25%)
Being closed in a small space (19%)

For men the top five fears [and difference re women] are:

Heights (21%) [-5]
Snakes (14%) [ -14]
Public speaking (13%) [-14]
Spiders (12%) [-13]
Being closed in a small space (10%) [-9 ]

Heights came in first, followed by snakes. Note that public speaking came in third overall, and second for both women and men, contradicting the often seen claim that it always ranks first. At least twice as many women as men were scared of snakes, public speaking, spiders, mice, and darkness.    

Results for A Little Afraid are shown above in a third bar chart. The top five fears are:

Public speaking (36%)
Heights (35%)
Snakes (31%)
Being closed in a small space (29%)
Spiders (24%)

For A Little Afraid, women and men also have rather different fears, as shown above in a fourth bar chart. For women the top five fears are:

Heights and Public speaking, tied (37%)
Being closed in a small space (33%)
Snakes (28%)
Spiders (27%)
Crowds and Mice, tied (22%)

For men the top five fears [and difference re women] are:

Public speaking (35%) [-2]
Snakes (34%) [6]
Heights (33%) [-4]
Being closed in a small space (24%) [-9 ]
Spiders (21%) [-6]

At least twice as many women as men were scared of crowds, mice, and darkness.

We also can add the percentages for A Little Afraid to those for Very Afraid to produce impressively large percentages for Total Afraid, as shown above in a fifth bar chart. Now the top five fears are:

Heights (58%)
Public speaking (56%)
Snakes (52%)
Being closed in a small space (43%)
Spiders (42%)

For Total Afraid, women and men also have rather different fears, as shown above in a sixth bar chart. For women the top five fears are:

Public speaking (64%)
Heights (63%)
Snakes (56%)
Being closed in a small space and Spiders, a tie (52%)
Mice (34%)

For men the top five fears [and difference re women] are:

Heights (54%) [-9]
Public speaking and Snakes, a tie (48%) [-16 and -8]
Being closed in a small space (34%) [-18 ]
Spiders (33%) [-19]
Needles and getting shots (26%) [2]

At least twice as many women as men were scared of mice, and darkness. As the article noted, the largest gender difference [19%] was for Spiders, a third (33%) for men versus more than half (52%) for women.

The article presented just one stacked bar chart with overall percentages, but provided a link to tables with detailed results. I’ve just discussed gender, but also could have shown age and geographical region. 

The image of a high London Eye Ferris wheel cabin is from Wikimedia Commons.

Microwave telescope down at the South Pole finds gravitational waves from the Big Bang

On Monday March 17th something spectacular in science was announced. A readable description appears in a New York Times article titled Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun. A web page on the Nature magazine web site said that Telescope Captures View of Gravitational Waves.

A large team led by John M. Kovacs announced that their little BICEP2 microwave telescope at the South Pole had found a signal consistent with inflationary gravitational waves. (BICEP is an acronym for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization). You can read the draft of their magazine article here. They concluded:

 “....The power spectrum results are perfectly consistent with lensed-ΛCDM with one striking exception: the detection of a large excess in the BB spectrum in exactly the l range where an inflationary gravitational wave signal is expected to peak. This excess represents a 5.2σ excursion from the base lensed- ΛCDM model.

....The long search for tensor B-modes is apparently over, and a new era of B-mode cosmology has begun.”
  
This is a cool experiment, both figuratively and literally. National Geographic has a web page about why The South Pole is a Great Place to View Space. The air temperature at the pole averages -72 degrees Fahrenheit, or 215 Kelvin (where zero Kelvin is absolute zero, as cold as you can get). The telescope is cooled by liquid helium down to 4 Kelvin, but at the focal plane the detector is refrigerated even further to only 0.27 Kelvin.

There are lots of people and stories behind this discovery. (The magazine article lists 47 authors). One Caltech web page is titled Building BICEP2: A Conversation with Jamie Bock. He mentions the late Andrew E. Lange. The last sentence in the magazine article draft is:

“We dedicate this paper to the memory of Andrew Lange, whom we sorely miss.”  

The image of ripples is from Roger McLassus at Wikimedia Commons.